1) Democracy with a population that is at least minimally engaged and angrily stays that
way (including removing powerful special interests from premises with pitchforks)
2) Being "managed" on behalf of various power centers. This can be liveable or can turn into
strip mining of your "resources".
Sadly, there is no algorithm that allows you to detect whether your are engaged or are
being engaged on behalf of others. That would be easy. But one should start with a minimal
state, hard money and the sons of the upper crust on the front lines and forbidden from
taking office in government.
That being said, this article is a bit meandering. Came for Bellingcat but was
confused.
Who presented the Emmy Award to the film makers, but none other than the rebel
journalist Chris Hedges.
@El Dato "1) Democracy with a population that is at least minimally engaged and angrily
stays that way (including removing powerful special interests from premises with pitchforks)"
There are no revolutions by means of pitchforks in a democracy, everything is weakened by
compromise, false promises, infiltration, manipulation, etc. You cannot stay angry all the
time too, it is very bad for your health, it needs to be short and intense to be effective,
which is exactly what democracy prevents.
Democracy turns you into a petted animal.
It is reasonably cheap to buy a journalist and turn him into the attack dog on particular, inconvenient or dangerious for the
financial oligarchy candidate.
New article about Tulsi Gabbard being viciously attacked over religion during Christmas.
Angry Bernie Sanders supporters whom I guess forgot to take their meds over the holidaze
are viciously attacking Tulsi because of Jesus? LOL. This new article is specifically about
Mike Figueroa from The Humanist Report, a semi-popular vlogger, and also a fanatic atheist
type.
He used to be a Tulsi supporter, but since he is connected to the TYT network which is
funded by Hollywood Billionaire and major DNC Clinton funder Katzenberg, he must have
recently been told to toe the party line on smearing Tulsi if he wanted to reap the funding
benefits of TYT who are hardcore Tulsi haters, following the DNC line.
I guess Tulsi showing the Christmas spirit gave him a reason to look hardcore to his
fellow fanatics and appease TYT money folks. Anyways, here is the new article Like, In The
Year 2024
@earthling1
I honestly do believe that she thinks long term and, for whatever reason, her decision not to
run for her own congressional seat is a part of her long term plans. Despite her being
smeared over and over by the media, Tulsi has the unique ability to effectively expand the
electorate by appealing to rational people, regardless of party affiliation.
The establishment is terrified of her message. Otherwise, why would they be attacking her
so viciously despite her reported low polling numbers?
While Tulsi is a practicing Hindu, she was raised in a multi faith family with her father
being a still practicing Catholic. And she mentioned that they had attended a Baptist church
in South Carolina on Christmas Eve. I noticed that her parents were in attendance at the
dinner that her brother in law and his mother prepared.
is detonating.
Someone is gonna have to clean up the debri and make some kind of use of what is left
over. Recycle the trash. Make it green. Bernie is past his best by date.
This is what I have suspected all along. To save the Party, we must completely destroy
it.
Even if it means four more years of Trump. By then, climate change will be obvious to
even the dullest among us.
Tulsi is angling to be there to clean up the mess.
IMHO
@gulfgal98
She will not be campaigning as a Dem this cycle, unless perhaps Bernie gets the nomination.
The severance from Congress means de facto severance from the Democrat Party. The stink of
said party becomes more and more apparent daily as Shiftless, No-Nads, Nervous Nancy et. al.
continue their demeaning and angering stupidity. More Dems are getting turned off by the
House sham impeachment daily.
#2 I honestly do
believe that she thinks long term and, for whatever reason, her decision not to run for
her own congressional seat is a part of her long term plans. Despite her being smeared
over and over by the media, Tulsi has the unique ability to effectively expand the
electorate by appealing to rational people, regardless of party affiliation.
The establishment is terrified of her message. Otherwise, why would they be attacking
her so viciously despite her reported low polling numbers?
While Tulsi is a practicing Hindu, she was raised in a multi faith family with her
father being a still practicing Catholic. And she mentioned that they had attended a
Baptist church in South Carolina on Christmas Eve. I noticed that her parents were in
attendance at the dinner that her brother in law and his mother prepared.
@earthling1
that suggest that the Democratic Party is "detonating"?
It looks to me that the Democrats are settling in for a long period of existence as
America's Vichy party. The Democrats are that party that exists so that those Americans who
are afraid of Republican policymakers can vote for them so that, when elected, they can find
clever ways of giving away power to the Republicans.
As for destroying the Democratic Party, we are on the same page.
is detonating.
Someone is gonna have to clean up the debri and make some kind of use of what is left
over. Recycle the trash. Make it green. Bernie is past his best by date.
This is what I have suspected all along. To save the Party, we must completely destroy
it.
Even if it means four more years of Trump. By then, climate change will be obvious to
even the dullest among us.
Tulsi is angling to be there to clean up the mess.
IMHO
@Cassiodorus
friends and family demexiting even today. Many of my union buddies are still pissed that the
union bosses supported Her in 2016.
The teacher strikes last year and before showed the leadership out of step with the rack and
file.
Now, in France the union leadership is being ignored entirely by the membership and see them
as sell-outs to the labor movment.
Ditto in Chile, Peru, Ecuador, and numerous other countries around the globe.
It's the same all over the world. Working people are seeing their representation being
deminished by union leaders.
IMHO
#2 that suggest that
the Democratic Party is "detonating"?
It looks to me that the Democrats are settling in for a long period of existence as
America's Vichy party. The Democrats are that party that exists so that those Americans
who are afraid of Republican policymakers can vote for them so that, when elected, they
can find clever ways of giving away power to the Republicans.
As for destroying the Democratic Party, we are on the same page.
@earthling1
Those French union bosses, btw, really like that lockstep marching. One of the primary
reasons for the current general strike is that the union bosses in France finally gave their
okay to the whole thing. Or at least this is what my source, who hails from Montpellier,
tells me.
As for your friends and family, Demexiting has one really big advantage -- they will no
longer be persecuted for not voting for Democrats. Can they still vote for Bernie
Sanders?
#2.5
friends and family demexiting even today. Many of my union buddies are still pissed that
the union bosses supported Her in 2016.
The teacher strikes last year and before showed the leadership out of step with the rack
and file.
Now, in France the union leadership is being ignored entirely by the membership and see
them as sell-outs to the labor movment.
Ditto in Chile, Peru, Ecuador, and numerous other countries around the globe.
It's the same all over the world. Working people are seeing their representation being
deminished by union leaders.
IMHO
her chances will be much better in 2024 if Bernie wins in 2020. She will have a base to
lead in place rather than in the wilderness. In short, there will still be an America.
@doh1304
So maybe not should he win and hangs on for all four. (Two big hypotheticals). And unless he
picks her for VP, she will still be in the wilderness in 2024.
her chances will be much better in 2024 if Bernie wins in 2020. She will have a base
to lead in place rather than in the wilderness. In short, there will still be an
America.
Alligator Ed
on Wed, 12/25/2019 - 11:02pm After bravely contesting a nomination she knows she cannot
win, Tulsi Gabbard has and continues to exhibit a tenacious adherence to achievement of
purpose. What is that purpose? I believe it is evident if you only let your eyes see and your
ears hear. Listen to what she says. Looks at what she does.
What this does is obvious. However, please forgive me if I proceed to explain the meaning.
People see what apparently is her home milieu. I've been to Filipino homes for dinner as many
of my nurse friends were Filipino. Tulsi is so human. Despite Hindu belief, she is respectful
to the presence and perhaps the essence of Jesus, and does not sound pandering or
hypocritical.
Getting to know Tulsi at the beginning of her hoped-for (by me) political ascendancy. Get in
on almost the ground floor of what will become an extremely powerful force in future American
life.
Why? What's the hurry?
The more support and the earlier Tulsi receives it propel the campaign. That's what momentum
means: a self-generating growing strength.
One doesn't have to be a Tulsi supporter to hopefully receive some ideas which may not have
occurred to you. This essay does not concern any specific Gabbard policy. What I write here is
what I perceive of her character and thus her selected path. Mind-reading, perhaps. Arm-chair
speculation, possibly.
Tulsi has completed phase 2A in her career. The little that I know of her early life,
especially politically (such as how she voted in HI state legislature) limits a deep
understanding which such knowledge would provide. As the tree is bent, etc.
Phase 1A: youth, formative years, military
Phase 1B: state legislature
Phase 1C: Congress
Phase 2B and possibly subsequent: interim between Congress and Presidential campaigning with
realistic chance of victory.
We are in Phase 2B. Tulsi, as I wrote in another essay, is letting the tainted shroud of
Democrat corruption fall off her shoulders without any effort of her own. The Democrat party is
eating itself alive. It is all things to all people at once. That is a philosophy incapable of
satisfaction.
Omni Democraticorundum in tres partes est (pardon the reference to the opening of Caesar's
Gallic Wars, with liberal substitution by me).
The Dems trifurcate and the division will be neither pleasant nor reconcilable. Tribalism
will be reborn after Trump crushes whomever in 2020.
Tribe one: urban/techno/überkinden.
Tribe two: leftward bound to a place where no politician has ever ventured. Not socialism.
Not Communism. We could call it Fantasy Land, although I fear Disney owns that name.
Tribe three: progressive realists. By using such positive wording, you will correctly
suspect my bias as to which Tribe I belong to.
Once again, policy will not be discussed. Only strategy and reality. Can't have good
strategy without a good grasp of reality. This is why Establidems are bereft of thematic
variability. For the past 3.3 years, they have been singing from a hymn book containing but one
song. You know the title. Orange Man Bad. Yeah, that's it. If they don't like that
title, we establidems have another song for ya. It's called Orange Man Bad. Like that
one, huh? Wazzat, ya didn't like the song the first time. Hey, we thought the song would grown
on you.
Them Dems, noses up, can't see the sidewalk. Oops. Stepped in something there, huh? Oh, yeah
like the Impeachment.
But I digress: The latter part of Phase 2B is not clear. Tulsi will continue to accept small
donor contributions, even after not obtaining the nomination next year. Public appearances will
be important but should be low key with little press attention. Press attention is something
however that won't be available when most desirable. What else Tulsi will do may be to form a
nucleus of like-minded activists, thinkers, and other supporters to promote an agenda for a
more liberal, tolerant society.
If Sanders' candidacy continues to be taken seriously, he will eventually be subjected to
the scrutiny that Warren and Biden have faced for prolonged stretches. That includes an
examination of his electability. "That conversation has never worked well for anyone,"
Pfeiffer said.
What a bunch of hypocritical horseshit. Bernie not getting scrutiny? In 2016, when not
being derided for this, that or the other, Bernie was always scrutinized. There are only two
things voters have learned since the DNC 2016 convention:
1. Bernie had a heart attack
2. Bernie supported H. Rodent Clinton in the general election.
. . . and to the much noted "Bernie blackout" up until now this time around.
It's gotten to the point given the polls and the first primary in being held in about a
month where TPTB in conjunction with the MSM can no longer afford to turn a blind eye towards
Bernie. It's gonna get really nasty.
The most recent tropes on the twitters, probably in response to Brock talking point memos,
have been pushing Bernie as an anti-Semite and him purportedly triggering rape survivors. Of
course it's horsehit but it's the propagandistic method of the Big Lie.
I'm genuinely curious. How will you react if Tulsi endorses the Dem nominee and it ain't
Bernie? Bernie's endorsement of she-who-shall-not-be-named in 2016 seems to have pretty much
completely soured him to you. Endorsing Biden better? Or at least acceptable? Not for me.
Bernie doing so in 2016 I could understand and forgive. But this is my last go round absent a
Bernie miracle.
If Sanders' candidacy continues to be taken seriously, he will eventually be
subjected to the scrutiny that Warren and Biden have faced for prolonged stretches.
That includes an examination of his electability. "That conversation has never worked
well for anyone," Pfeiffer said.
What a bunch of hypocritical horseshit. Bernie not getting scrutiny? In 2016, when not
being derided for this, that or the other, Bernie was always scrutinized. There are only
two things voters have learned since the DNC 2016 convention:
1. Bernie had a heart attack
2. Bernie supported H. Rodent Clinton in the general election.
@Wally
She might back Yang--who won't get nominated. But I hope she doesn't do anything more than a
neutral statement, somewhat to the effect that "We must defeat Donald Trump", then not
campaign otherwise.
. . . and to the much noted "Bernie blackout" up until now this time around.
It's gotten to the point given the polls and the first primary in being held in about
a month where TPTB in conjunction with the MSM can no longer afford to turn a blind eye
towards Bernie. It's gonna get really nasty.
The most recent tropes on the twitters, probably in response to Brock talking point
memos, have been pushing Bernie as an anti-Semite and him purportedly triggering rape
survivors. Of course it's horsehit but it's the propagandistic method of the Big Lie.
I'm genuinely curious. How will you react if Tulsi endorses the Dem nominee and it
ain't Bernie? Bernie's endorsement of she-who-shall-not-be-named in 2016 seems to have
pretty much completely soured him to you. Endorsing Biden better? Or at least acceptable?
Not for me. Bernie doing so in 2016 I could understand and forgive. But this is my last
go round absent a Bernie miracle.
. . . to campaign in support of their candidacies.
Maybe Biden will accept her support. I've still never been able to figure why she never
and probably still won't take any shots at his warmongering and otherwise cruddy record
regarding domestic affairs.
#2.1.1.1.1 She might
back Yang--who won't get nominated. But I hope she doesn't do anything more than a
neutral statement, somewhat to the effect that "We must defeat Donald Trump", then not
campaign otherwise.
. . . to campaign in support of their candidacies.
Maybe Biden will accept her support. I've still never been able to figure why she
never and probably still won't take any shots at his warmongering and otherwise cruddy
record regarding domestic affairs.
@Alligator
Ed@Alligator
Ed be unfamiliar with the neutral position. Though I wonder if she would feel
comfortable dipping into that well again given how much grief she got the last time.
Of course, if she again puts it in Neutral, and doesn't support the D nominee (anyone but
Bloomberg), she will be finished as a Dem pol. She might as well go off and start a Neutral
Party.
#2.1.1.1.1 She might
back Yang--who won't get nominated. But I hope she doesn't do anything more than a
neutral statement, somewhat to the effect that "We must defeat Donald Trump", then not
campaign otherwise.
@wokkamile
Her dismissal papers will be submitted to her after she is barred entry into the DNC
convention, regardless of how many delegates she may have won.
#2.1.1.1.1.1
#2.1.1.1.1.1 be unfamiliar with the neutral position. Though I wonder if she would
feel comfortable dipping into that well again given how much grief she got the last
time.
Of course, if she again puts it in Neutral, and doesn't support the D nominee (anyone
but Bloomberg), she will be finished as a Dem pol. She might as well go off and start a
Neutral Party.
Don't forget that 15% state threshold for eligibility to be awarded delegates.
#2.1.1.1.1.1.2 Her
dismissal papers will be submitted to her after she is barred entry into the DNC
convention, regardless of how many delegates she may have won.
I will be surprised if Tulsi gets so much as one delegate.
More than a few knowledgeable people think he has a very good shot of winning California.
I am less optimistic about NYS but I think he will do well enough to get a good number of
delegates especially if he does well in the earlier primaries (NYS comes April 28).
I don't feel solidly about making any kind of predictions at this point but given the
nature of the Democratic Party, I don't see it as falling into oblivion anytime soon or in
our lifetimes.
As far as Bernie goes, I am not optimistic but I still have some hope. I still fervantly
believe that his candidacy is the best chance we will have in our lifetimes of bringing about
any substantial change -- and if he and his critical mass of supporters can't pull it off
this time around, we're all phluckled big time, even alligators, in terms of combating
climate change and putting a kabosh on endless wars. I wish you good future luck with Tulsi
though. I just don't see it. But I've been wrong on more than one occasion in my life.
As the New Cold War gathers up speed and escalates, we are entering a "fact free world" as
allegations are made that are proved not to be true are promoted; for example, the allegation
that the DNC was hacked by Russia has been officially debunked -- no one could name the
seventeen intelligence agencies, the Coast Guard was one. The notion of the hacking was cooked
up by two agencies: by the DNI's head James Clapper and Brennan at the CIA. Nevertheless,
recently News Anchor Chuck Todd of NBC (the most pro-Russiagate network, the ones who
shamelessly accused presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard of being a Russian asset) took it one
step further: ignoring the facts, Todd again stated that seventeen intelligence agencies agreed
that the Russians not only interfered in the election but that they swung the election to
Trump. While interference is one thing, no one has previously made that allegation.
Consequently, we are now in a fact free discourse in America: no evidence is necessary to prove
anything, falsehoods are taken up by the legacy media, what Professor Cohen would call a world
of tabloid gossip media, except in their favor the tabloids, fearing lawsuits, will do some
fact checking, which is conspicuous in its absence in the legacy media. And Professor Cohen
noted that it's hard to get traction and you can't have a conversation with someone when you
don't agree upon the facts.
In conversation on a cruise with fellow liberals, Professor Cohen noted most take the view
that where there is smoke there is fire and there is something to these allegations of
Russiagate and Putin's control over Trump; they state the media wouldn't continue to promote
these conspiracy theories, these allegations about Trump's nefarious relations with the
Kremlin, without reason and so there must be something to them. Yet while facts have become
absolutely critical Cohen notes you can't get people to focus on the facts; for that reason, he
feels despair and observes that for the first time in his life in his public discussions of
Russia there are no basic premises that people accept any more, for if you say "If there's
smoke, there's fire," that is just not a logical way of thinking: you either have the facts or
you don't.
Batchelor also points out in the impeachment charges there is a great deal of presumption;
there are no facts regarding the president as well, and he cites Trump's letter to Nancy Pelosi
and poses this question: what does the Kremlin think about the impeachment?
Cohen answers that the Russian high policy class in the 1990s -- the America worship period
-- they and not just the youth, strongly believed that Russia's future was with the West and
America in particular, and now what strikes Russians most is the role of Russian intelligence
services in the Western allegations. Pro-America Russians thought that American intelligence
services didn't play the role that the Soviet ones did. In Russian history classes and as a
staple of popular culture, the sinister role of the "secret police" goes back to the Czarist
era but what distinguished America was that it didn't have anything comparable in abuses by its
intelligence services -- or so it was believed. Consequently, for those who looked up to
America, it's a source of disillusion and shock to learn that the American special services
"went off the reservation" for quite a long time, not unlike Russia's, and so they have become
disillusioned while for those who tried to get Russians to be more nationalistic, their
perspective is to say with gratification, "We told you so. Now will you please grow up!"
Russians call the American agencies "the organs" perhaps not being clear on the difference
between the CIA and the FBI and conflating them. For Russians, the role of such agencies is
baked into the culture and this has resulted in rethinking not only about America but about
their own special services. An Op-Ed piece in a Russian liberal newspaper the Russian liberal
author wrote, after watching what's unfolding in America, we used to beat up on our
intelligence services for decades but now maybe we need them. Contrary to a "cult of the
intelligence services," Cohen thinks what must be determined is the role of the American
intelligence services in creating Russiagate from the very beginning.
Yet what is critical is to know how Russiagate began in America, with the Barr-Durham probe
into the origins of Russia and Russiagate will continue to be a major issue in the 2020
election. What struck Cohen about the letter from Trump to Pelosi -- which was so eloquent he
doubts Trump wrote it -- was that he understands it will be an issue in the 2020 elections, and
it was a campaign document. That aside, Trump is aware that Democrats are campaigning still on
Russiagate; nothing has turned up that it factual. Therefore, despite the absence of facts,
this will be a major issue. Ukraine has turned into a stand-in for Russia.
Jennifer Rubin of the Washington Post, once a quintessential conservative, published an
article titled "Time to Call out and Remove Putin's Propagandist in America." While the article
is slightly cagier than that headline, essentially she wants to shutdown and deprive access to
media who aren't espousing and promoting the Russiagate/Russophobic narratives. Cohen condemns
that kind of behavior is that. On opposite side of Rubin, Cohen stated he himself has never
advocated the silencing and removal of those who promote among other falsehoods the provably
false Russiagate narrative. He asks where are things drifting and he answers discourse and
relations are becoming ugly and awful.
Returning to the past, he notes there was an assumption that Russia under Yeltsin would
emerge as a replica and junior partner of America; Cohen believes those who promote the
Russiagate narrative and demonize Trump because their "impossible dream" failed -- Russia is
too old, too vast to ever be a replica of America. What took Professor Cohen aback in the
testimony from Fiona Hill and others was how deep and wide the Russophobia runs in the
Washington think tanks. Until she spoke and testified he had no idea how much she -- and the
other Russia experts -- hate Russia.
Batchelor noted this is the language of civil war in Trump's letter; Trump uses the term
"Star Chamber of partisan persecution" and "coup" which are the language of a country torn in
half and he asked the question whether the weakening of the civil contract to be an advantage
to Putin and Russia. Cohen notes every newspaper and media source in America say Putin is
delighted since it is his goal is to foment disarray in America.
The fact is, however, this chaos and dysfunction and enmity is one of the last things Putin
wants. Putin's purpose is to rebuild Russia from the economic and political catastrophes of the
1990s; Putin's role is to reverse the demographic trend -- men died in their fifties in the
1990s -- and spend funds on modernization; that would be his legacy. Four hundred billion
dollars has been saved to implement the modernization program. That attempt would be taken with
modernizing partnerships with the West. Therefore, the last thing he wants is a new Cold War;
the last thing he wants is political turmoil in America or in any Western nation. Cohen points
out President Macron of France appears to understand that; he called for a rethinking of
relations and said there could be no European security without Russia. Macron has broken with
Washington and there will be a hell of fight because Washington is against it. But the notion
that Putin wants to disrupt American society is wrong; Putin wants stability and partners.
Cohen still thinks that leadership -- the new President of Ukraine, Trump and Putin --
I always listen to the Prof's podcast shows at Batchelor. What bothers me is that so many
Trump supporters and public commentators BELIEVE, or at least parrot the idea that Russia
INVADED both western Ukraine and Crimea.
As the Prof has pointed out and seconded by many others, Crimea has been a part of Russia
since late 18th century. Because Khrushchev "gave' it to Ukraine in 50s when it was all one
country does not obviate the fact that Crimeans consider themselves Russians as proved by all
polling and a plebiscite. They had permanent bases there and the alleged invasion was nothing
more than politely escorting the Ukrainian military off from the peninsula without any
injuries to either side. Some invasion.
Surely some Russians (whether incognito military/intelligence forces or private citizens)
were part of the Donbass forces that rebelled against Kiev. And they had good reasons to
rebel witness the horrors of Odessa when 40 something citizens of Russian ancestry were
burned alive trapped in a building by Ultra-Ukrainian nazi-like forces.
Now Senate Foreign Relations committee, chaired by Senator from my state, has called for
designating Russia as a "terror supporting state." I emailed him and asked if he was insane.
He returned a long letter that is full of obfuscations and lies, and I will compose a
detailed response soon. But the question presents: is the Deep State and their globalists'
master deliberately trying to force Russia into a military alliance with China? Could we
prevail against that combination? Haunting resemblance to conditions that created
Ribbentrop/Molotov pact in late 30s. And what that foretell?
Well, I guess when you have such luminaries as members of the Council on Foreign Relations
spieling the same level of ignorance, blindness, prejudice, propaganda and plain
perverseness, you have to expect it from all levels of "Governance"
For anyone who knows even a small amount about Russia and her leader, go listen to a recent
YouTube convention headed Russia's Resurgence: Prospects for stability in Russia-US
relationship.
One thing is for sure – as long as these supposed "think tank leaders" can deliberately
blind themselves to reality as this trio did, and spout the utterly brain dead stupidity they
used to instigate a Q & A, there is no hope whatsoever of any stability in Russia –
US relationship.
The people of the media lie because they are for sale and are paid to lie. Rather uninspiring
but understandable: they do it for the money and to stay in front of the cameras. But what's
everyone else's excuse? Putin is a Svengali who mind-controls Trump? I thought people like
that wore turbans and robes. How stupid are Americans, anyway? Who'd have thought something
like this would have any traction whatsoever? It's simply incredible.
I was born into the Cold War in 1944. I got my draft notice in 1965. I had been expecting it
all my young life. The Berlin wall did not fall until 1989.
This new Cold War will be over soon. It will turn hot and we will all die or the "West"
will collapse and will repatriate it's legions. The Anglo/Zio Empire is in steep decline
while Russia and her allies are ascendant.
I agree that the truth is no defense against the "left". Their long march is completed and
they occupy the high ground whether it's politics or culture. They have taken over the
country just in time to preside over its demise.
Russians who thought their future was with the West were not completely wrong. If the U.S.
has a future it is probably with Russia.
There is a couple of points I would like to add on a changing European perspective on the
dynamics between the USA and Russia, with Europe caught in-between.
1.) After the Second World War the choice between Bolshevism and US liberal democracy
seemed blatantly obvious; for Germany especially it was a question of national survival,
since Stalin was viewed as a serious threat by the Adenauer government. Germany had actually
enjoyed more internal independence from leading US doctrines in this period. US rule of law,
the character of its elites and the general morality of the society had not completely
degraded yet either. Today institutional erosion of American democracy, the rule of law and a
cynical Neocon approach towards "promoting democracy abroad" turned the USA into a
non-appealing leader of 'the West'. The increasing "Sovietization" of its state apparatus
emphasizes this point: the expansion of the surveillance state, selective access to real
political and economic access to a select few of the privileged; often hereditary dynasties
of oligarchs, a political-media complex of agitation and propaganda. Thus, the accusations
against Russia (or China for that matter) about a lack of transparency, pluralism and the
rule of law sound entirely hollow.
2.) Thus secondly NATO has turned from a credible alliance of defense against the Soviet
Union into a tool of US imperialism; especially after the USA has declared victory in the
Cold War. Wars surrounding Europe and even inside of it – The Federal Republic of
Yugoslavia and in Ukraine – were the result. Nations were destroyed, heads of state
publicly executed or tortured to death like Muammar Gaddafi and millions of people were
killed; many more were made homeless and a refugee crisis was created. And concealing wars of
aggression as "human rights promotion" opened a can of worms for cynical nihilism as the new
norm of US foreign policy – WMD lies, Abu-Ghuraib and NSA scandals included. Just as
the established political-media apparatus is guilty of everything populism is accused of:
post factual parallel realities, fake news and fake realities, systematic disinformation,
social engineering and conditioning into hysteria and the frenzy of the mob. The pathology of
the new US ruling class personified by Hillary Clinton and Madeleine Albright
3.) There is indeed no lasting European stability imaginable without a permanent peaceful
agreement between Western- and Eastern-Europe and Russia. Russia's role as the Eurasian land
bridge to China is also essential this century. Mutual agreement has to be found to settle
old grievances and fears regarding Napoleon and Hitler on the Russian side and Stalinism and
the Soviet Union on the European side. A situation which the USA also currently exploits for
political destabilization – especially in Poland.
4.) Germany, currently the central country in the EU, owes its unification largely to
Russia. Unfortunately it was a mistake on the Russian side when they had unilaterally
withdrawn all their troops from German territory, that they did not demand the same from
US/NATO forces. In that moment the transformation of NATO was sealed and the New Cold War had
begun. Yet while the attitudes of the older generations are shaped by the US-Soviet Union
Cold War, for new generations it's a different story. Increasingly the USA is seen as a more
credible threat and/or bully with its war policy, real political meddling and especially in
my country the fact that Germany was both forced to sanction Russia, which went against its
own vital interests, and then be sanctioned as well.
5.) I am leaving out the value and identity politics debate. Fundamentally the general
public on both sides of the Atlantic agrees on the theory on foundations of functioning
democracy. Although I do think that since the end of the last Cold War the influence of the
USA has been more harmful and corrosive than helpful and stabilizing.
Conclusion: In this new Cold War which was, I think, initiated by the US establishment, we
could see a future in which Germany and Russia begin to view themselves more in the light of
the Prussian-Russian coalition against the new "Napoleon", the United States. Although this
arising conflict could rightly be dubbed: The Unnecessary Cold War.
that the truth is no defense against the "left". Their long march is completed and they
occupy the high ground whether it's politics or culture.'
'
Left ? Do you believe that the establishment crowd of Democrats (Liberals,) and the
managed news (Liberals,) and others Liberals, neoliberals, neocons, or anything else
comprising the Russiagate hoax can be describes as Leftist?
It's been determined that the Democrats intentionally jettisoned the Working Class decades
ago. It shouldn't be news to working people that they don't have a party!
It was a rational decision to unload the workers, and substitute special interest and
identity politics, because of trends of the decline of union membership in age of technology,
automation, and YUPPIES! The Democrats are now slick pretenders of social justice, but not
left.
@RJJCDA " is the Deep State and their globalists' master deliberately trying to force
Russia into a military alliance with China? "
Hard to say what their intentions are. (The old ploy of unity at home by means of an
external enemy ?) Whatever they are -- US foreign policy (FO) re Russia should go down with
Iraq (II) as among the US's greatest FO blunders.
As the Saker has pointed out– Russia & China are in symbiosis, which runs deeper
than an alliance.
Russiagate is a kind of "two birds with one stone" deal: you get to bash Trump & Russia
using each as a club to beat the other. That this whole base concoction of lies seems to
still have legs speaks volumes as to the deep of Trump derangement syndrome & the
universality of msm propaganda.
Mr Cohen is so far ahead of Washington , when it comes to Russia and other foreign matters,
it just boggles the mind of us normies. The Ukraine Gate is all about the Kyivian Jew
Oligarchs, trying to oust the thief Democrats from all the IMF looting , that those Kyivians
, had their eyes/hands on. It's like – thanks for doing the Coup but all the money we
get is – Ours for the looting. And there are hundreds of millions – missing.
Russia Gate will go on, until the American public – " Grows Up " as Mr. Cohen says.
What damns the US media, both anti-Trump and Fox News, is that America has been massively
meddling in elections all over the globe since Day One, including Russia, and this is known
or should be known to anyone with a basic knowledge of international relations, yet it is
almost NEVER mentioned when the subject of Russian meddling comes up.
There is a feeling that it would be unpatriotic (treasonous?) to admit it. This is
something new for America. In the old days American foreign policy was sharply debated and
America's sins were much discussed by the left. But now, the left is on the CIA's side. This
probably has to do with the Jewishness of the left. Jews tend to hate Russia as much as they
tended to like the Soviet Union. They see post-Communist Russia as politically incorrect
(e.g. anti-gay) and Christian, a potentially nationalistic society that could turn
anti-Semitic.
Because of Russia's nuclear capability it is not possible for the US to invade it, so we
are relying on internal subversion and economic tactics to bring down Putin, leading to the
installation of a US lackey with neocon approval. Even as we speak of Russian meddling the
CIA is busy organizing and funding anti-Putin elements in Russia.
"We're just trying to spread democracy. What's wrong with that!?"
@Back1 Stupidity does not produce the invention and promotion of lie after lie,
Nor is stupidity consistent with the selection of the best lies from those total of lies
generated.
Only lies that work on the minds targeted are repeated.
Repeat the lie but hide it, camouflage the lie with some truth, and embedded the lie into
the propaganda that establishes the narrative, and then mass produce the lie embedded
propaganda that establishes the false or misleading narrative is a complicated process.
Repeat and repeat the false narrative is a hat trick that often deceives innocent minds into
adopting, embedding and acting on beliefs established in innocent minds by mind control
technology. These process are not consistent with stupidity, but instead suggest diabolical
genius at work.
When only the lies that work; that is, that control, deceive or influence innocent minds
are repeated you are looking process which took intelligence to make work. Inventing lies
takes imagination, producing them into propaganda takes skill, and promoting the produced
invented lie takes money, power and access.
Selection (of the best or most suitable lie) is an process that requires identification
and sufficient intelligence to sort; while repetition requires the selected object be either
committed to memory, or to be continuously and precisely regenerated for each
promotion(campaign). Promotion is a delicate process; its success so dependant on so many
things, that many people have obtained Phds from the subject matter that surround the
technology of deceit.
The point is that promoting false narratives is an invented developing technology that
takes professionally trained persons to make work. Someone is paying the mind control
professionals (MCPs) that are working to embed false narrative into the memory of the minds
of the governed masses. MCPs are not stupid people. Not only are they highly trained
professionals but also they don't work for free. So who is paying them.
Why is Steven Cohen credited with this article when obviously it is written by another? What
gives, Unz? It is an example of the same facts twisting it rails against.
@Antiwar7 "If there's smoke, there's fire" is not so much stupid as devious. You have to
understand that many political leaders nowadays have realised that they don't need hard facts
and figures or logic to sway opinion.
Increasingly, political divisions are tribal; and the worst condemnation is "you are not
one of us". Disagreeing with the party line shows that a person is "not one of us".
That is especially the case when the party line is obviously untrue. Then sticking to it
is an absolute proof of devoted, unthinking loyalty. It's more like a pledge of allegiance
than a rational statement of fact.
I agree that the truth is no defense against the "left". Their long march is completed
and they occupy the high ground whether it's politics or culture. They have taken over the
country just in time to preside over its demise.
It is the right as well on important issue to the Deep State there is no right and
left.
Does it really matter? America is already a Jewish/Bolshevik occupied nation?
To achieve absolute power, Lenin focused on fomenting a class war, while Hitler set his
sights on a race war. Either way, the divide-and-conquer modus operandi of fascist and
communist demagogues is pretty much the same, no matter what each side might claim about
the other. Their propaganda content may differ, but not so much their divide-and-conquer
methods. Attitudes of supremacy come in a virtual rainbow of flavors and colors.
theamericanconservative.com : "Forget Trump : The
Military-Industrial-Complex is still running the show " By Bruce Fein , July 18, 2018 theintercept.com " Defense
contractors say Russian threat is great for business "
Did Russian believe that any assurances could prevent Nato being drawn right up to the
borders of Russia? Did Ukrainians believe the UK and US's security assurances 'against the
threat or use of force against Ukraine's territory or political independence' could replace
Ukraine's possession of nuclear weapons? Zbigniew Brzezinski did speak of Russia
"increasingly passing into de facto western receivership" .
They say the Russians only heard what that wanted to hear, but the record suggests the
Americans misrepresented their intentions, and gave assurances that the Russians took at face
value. Russia permitted an American campaign to spent vast sums and organise Yeltsin's
reelection, which would not have happened without them. The Russian foreign minister at that
time, Andrei Kozyrev, now lives in Miami.
https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/russia-programs/2018-03-16/nato-expansion-what-yeltsin-heardD.C
., March 16, 2018 – Declassified documents from U.S. and Russian archives show that
U.S. officials led Russian President Boris Yeltsin to believe in 1993 that the Partnership
for Peace was the alternative to NATO expansion, rather than a precursor to it, while
simultaneously planning for expansion after Yeltsin's re-election bid in 1996 and telling
the Russians repeatedly that the future European security system would include, not
exclude, Russia.
The declassified U.S. account of one key conversation on October 22, 1993, (Document 8)
shows Secretary of State Warren Christopher assuring Yeltsin in Moscow that the Partnership
for Peace was about including Russia together with all European countries, not creating a
new membership list of just some European countries for NATO; and Yeltsin responding, "this
is genius!"
Christopher later claimed in his memoir that Yeltsin misunderstood – perhaps from
being drunk – the real message that the Partnership for Peace would in fact "lead to
gradual expansion of NATO";[1] but the actual American-written cable reporting the
conversation supports subsequent Russian complaints about being misled.[2]
After obtaining a succession of huge US-backed IMF loans, being found on Pennsylvania
Avenue, drunk, in his underwear and trying to hail a taxi cab in order to find pizza in 1995,
Yeltsin chose Putin the teetotal former counterintelligence specialist to succeed him. What a
sense of humour Yeltsin must have had.
@jack daniels I agree that the paraphraser should not go anonymous. But more important is
to bring to the reader's attention that a broadcast podcast is available at the article's
end.
@Vaterland The American elutes might be forgiven theirvicious follies by Americans if
they had not impoverished so many Americans and,at best leaving them struggling.
@9/11 Inside job We do not call it "the Military-Industrial-Complex".
We do not call it "the Banks".
We do not call it "the FED"
We do not call it "the Wall Street"
We do not call it "the Media"
@Realist Agreed. Truth is no defense against the Deep State which is neither left nor
right.. Still, it is the ideological left that denies the existence of objective reality. For
them there are no facts. Only subjective experience. Useful idiots and propagandists for the
Deep State, they "know" Trump is a Russian agent because they can feel it. They don't
need no steenking evidence.
The (left) media promote hatred. Orange Man Bad. The ideological left understands and
enjoys hatred. They can feel it. When you hate somebody you are ready and eager to
believe the worst about them.
@EdNels Thank you. Well said, and not nearly enough.
It's my opinion that the relentless use of "left" to describe the neoliberal half of the
Republicrat/Wall Street/war industry party is no accident.
Describing the "Democrats" of the Clinton DNC as "left" is useful to discredit and
marginalize any political stance that, fairly and realistically, could be considered "left."
It produces chaos and confusion, which is the objective of the neocon/neoliberal grifters who
control both halves of the war party.
@Realist I suspect that the paraphraser is our own Ron Unz since he strikes me as a
hands-on operator. Secondary suspect is Phil Giraldi, UR's National Security Editor.
In any event it's important to dissimulate Cohen's views since he's literally A
Geopolitical Voice Crying Out in the Wilderness! For this both Batchelor and Unz are to be
commended!!
@Realist There's a left alright; there's just no right. Since the 1960's the conservative
movement and Republican Party have conserved exactly nothing while the left has completely
transformed America, successfully implementing much of the 1930's communist agenda and
turning the government into the enemy of the society at large.
In his Myth of Religious Violence William T Cavanaugh points out that before the
arrival of Frankfurter on the Supreme Court, religion, meaning chiefly Christianity, was held
by the court to be the fundamental source of social cohesion and peace in America, while
since the late 1940s and post-Frankfurter, religion, now meaning only Christianity,
has been consistently held to be not only divisive, but the fundamental source of violence.
The point is, this upending of society was accomplished by legislating from the bench, while
the Republicans and Conservatism Inc, as we now learn, were funded to neutralize opposition,
blowing smoke in Americans' eyes about legalisms at a time when at least 90% of this country
was conservative.
Sites like The American Conservative and American Thinker, for example, are apparently
funded to publish fawning material about the Jews and Israel that the latter would be too
ashamed to write themselves, which also pretty much sums up the Republican's m.o. in
Congress.
It's about time the American electorate saw candidates for national and state office as
figureheads for their largest donors, who're presently portrayed as almost incidental by the
msm. Instead of saying that Mitch McConnell or Lindsey Graham said this or that, accuracy
requires we say Paul Singer and Sheldon Adelson's spokesman in the Senate, some so-and-so
stooge, said this or that. It's the same on both sides of the aisle, obviously, and it turns
out that the owners of both parties are kin when it comes to destroying the social fabric of
this country for their own hateful reasons.
@Patrikios Stetsonis You forgot , an aspect. "We do not call it Z.O.G."
Which commands and guides the US government in both domestic and foreign policy.
On similar note to your closing statement ,
To quote Treitschke 1879 "The Jews are our misfortune"
The zionists hate Christians and since Russia is becoming more Christian the zionists hate
towards Russia has reached a hysteria that is only matched by their demonic hate of
Christians and one of the ways to strike at Russia is through lies and false flags blamed on
Russia.
The ZUS is winning the war against Christians here in America with abortions and
pedophilia in high places and the worship of satan in Hellywood and elsewhere and the
penetration of the Christian churches by zionist elements.
The zionists will not stop until America is destroyed, zionism is the most dangerous
element in America.
Read the Protocols of Zion, it is all right there.
*All* mainstream media is propaganda from clown world. This defines our era in US. Mass
psychosis is the new reality.
The Russia nonsense tells me that US establishment people are stupid and self deluded,
truly sad sack dummies.
Several commenters around here have claimed the Apollo moon landing hoax "does not
matter".
[MORE]
It is old news, not relevant to today, too controversial, etc.
The problem is that once the elites get away with lying, it encourages them to do more of
it. This hoax _is_ going to be exposed, and fairly soon–and it may unravel the whole
ball of string of intelligence agency and mass media lies.
It is _not_ a left/right issue, so folks of any and all political persuasions will be able
to accept it without crushing their ideological dreams.
@Desert Fox Judaic identity is essentially about hating Christians, as the Talmud makes
clear, and as most anyone who's worked with Jews on Wall Street will attest. Michael Hoffman
proves this in his books on Judaism, pointing out that modern Talmudic Judaism came into
being nearly two centuries after the rise of Christianity and in opposition to it.
" is the Deep State and their globalists' master deliberately trying to force Russia
into a military alliance with China? "
Hard to say what their intentions are. (The old ploy of unity at home by means of an
external enemy ?) Whatever they are -- US foreign policy (FO) re Russia should go down with
Iraq (II) as among the US's greatest FO blunders.
Agreed that it's a mistake, but when they've successfully pulled off the WMD lies, the
9/11 fakery, the destruction of Iraq, Libya etc., control the US media, and can dictate to
Congress, then it's understandable that they get rather arrogant.
They simply want to kick Russia and Putin because he was the one that spoiled their
Yeltsin looting party – and worst of all arrested and imprisoned their top guy
Khodorkovsky. That it drives Germany and the EU towards Russia and strengthens Russian ties
with China is secondary. After all, Hitler (after great military success), likened invading
Russia to kicking down a rotten barn door, and he didn't work out the implications of
declaring war on the US.
@Anonymous I agreed with you, except there is a Deep State and it is not made up of just
Jews. But I do concede that Jews are disproportionately represented, as both sponsors and
minions, for their demographics.
I believe the Deep State consists of the very wealthy who are greedy for more wealth and
power. There are 607 billionaires in the US. There is no reason for the Deep State members to
formally collude they all know what needs to be done and how to do it. They use a relatively
small amount of their money to place their minions in positions of power heads of the movie
industry, the media, the federal government, academia. From then on if the lessers in these
groups want to keep their jobs/lives they will toe the line. It becomes self sustaining from
tax money and the Deep State glories in more wealth and power. Here is an excellent example
of the Deep State in action: The SCOTUS has passed down egregious decisions that abridge the
First Amendment and show contempt for the concept of a representative democracy. Buckley v.
Valeo, 424 U.S. 1976 and exacerbated by continuing stupid SCOTUS decisions First National
Bank of Boston v. Bellotti, Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission and McCutcheon v.
Federal Election Commission.
These decisions have codified that money is free speech thereby giving entities of wealth and
power almost total influence in elections. By gaining control of the SCOTUS the Deep State is
able to further their goals.
The Democrats are now slick pretenders of social justice, but not left.
Excellent summary. What goes under "left" moniker (Cultural Marxist, "communists",
socialists etc.) in the West nowadays is not left. Agree. it is just another iteration of
Neo-liberal politics serving as a substitution for dealing with actual problems of Labor.
"Their respective ambitions led the two men[Trump and Putin] – along with Trump's
future son-in-law, Jared Kushner -to build a set of close, over-lapping relationships in a
small world that overlaps on Chabad , an international Hasidic movement most people have
never heard of ."
@gotmituns @ gotmituns <=Why then did you read the article?
At the heart of the impeachment process (Article II, Section 2, paragraph 3 and 4) are two
questions that should interest most folks: @ paragraph 3 lays out a big part of Trump's
defense in my view "Section 3 requires ..that the President shall take Care that the Laws be
faithfully executed, <=execution requires action so which law did the President not
execute faithfully? <= I do not see such a question in the Articles of Impeachment.. @ Sec
II, Art. II, paragraph 4 "The President shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and
Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.. " < the house
found evidence it says, strong enough to indite the president on charges that .. he violated
which of these 4 things?
Some think Trump should have been impeached for failure to deliver his tax Return.. but I
do not see failure to deliver a tax return as failure to execute a law, or as a high crime,
or as treason, or as an act of Bribery, or as a misdemeanor.. so the current impeachment
indictment by the House against Trump reveals that the constitution is inadequate. The
constitution does not express a government that can protect the Americans such a government
governs; from the possibility, or the reality, that a deceitful president will be empowered
to that job?
The best governed Americans can hope for from the USA is that the Congress of the USA
rather than impeaching will decide to amend the constitution, so that the constitution denies
any one that can be shown to be deceitful, to be the President. This one amendment could
eliminate making campaign promises and do just the opposite once in office.
Of course such an amendment would mean few in politics today could be the President.
Most likely no matter the outcome of the impeachment, Trump will probably be reappointed
President by the electoral college.. (recall that persons who animate the functions allowed
to the USA to governed Americans are not elected by those who the USA governs. (Americans c/n
vote for their president or their vice president because President and VP are article II
persons; and article II persons are appointed to office by processes conducted at the state
level, that appoint persons to the electoral college, and it is the electoral college that
elects the President and the Vice President). Who has written a book on the electoral
college? I have requested information from the government on the electoral college activities
since the beginning and to date have received nothing but referrals to others.
@EdNels Left ? Do you believe that the establishment crowd of Democrats (Liberals,) and
the managed news (Liberals,) and others Liberals, neoliberals, neocons, or anything else
comprising the Russiagate hoax can be describes as Leftist?
No. I do not believe that. I agree with you entirely. But common usage has the people you
are talking about as LEFT and I am tired of bitching about it.
@RJJCDA Russia no more "invaded" Ukraine than the United States "invaded" Texas, Ohio or
Florida. Ukraine has been a Russian fiefdom for centuries longer than it has ever been
"independent," and its fate is no more the business of the United States or Western Europe
than the fate of Hong Kong or Syria should be.
Please just let me ask americans some opinions about
if pastor John Hagee and his followers are jews or christians ? , if the thousands of
pastors in the USA like Hagee and their millions of followers are jews or christians ? if the
US puritan founding fathers were jews of christians ? , if the british angloisraelites are
jews or christians ? , if the yankees are jews or christians ? if the wasps are jews or
christians ? if the US " deep state " is jew or chistian ? , if the US masses are jew or
christian ?
. because blaming the jews all the time of every problem and pretending that that the
anglo-yankees are so pure and naive does not seem to be very realistic
@Antiwar7 Americans should have believed into the existence
of thousands Mayan gods when they first saw the smoke billowing out of the sacrificial pit in
front of the menacing idols.
Some things never change. Russiagate is no aberration. Establishment Authority, police state
apparatuses and religious catechisms, are NOT based on reasoning and evidence, but rather
fact-free Narratives handed down from above and grounded by Fear of the Other, the bogeymen
(be it Russians, White Supremacists, Black men, Assad, Trump, the Devil, etc), without which
authority will collapse. As the historian Will Durant noted, Strabo said it best 2000 years
ago:
"For in dealing with a crowd of women a philosopher cannot influence them by reason or
exhort them to reverence, piety or faith; nay, there is need of religious fear also, and this
cannot be aroused without myths and marvels the founders of states gave their sanctions to
these things as bugbears wherewith to scare the simple-minded."
@Anon John Hagee, his followers and other Christian Zionists are morons. Happily, they
are not nearly as common as you imply. Being a Christian Zionist takes a special kind of
stupid
I cannot see Haggee without immediately recalling Christ's warning to beware of obese
wolves in sheep's clothing, who take jiggly church secretaries and XXXL Italian silk suits as
proof of God's blessing.
Cohen is another Jewish voice in the Jewish Mafia War between factions. I don't consider him
that insightful or honest, as he never mentions the glaringly obvious: the attempt to oust
Trump is a Jew Coup.
Start telling the truth about the Hostile Elite destroying America Cohen. Until then you are
just another lying Jew destroying the country that welcomed your ancestors.
When will the Traitors be routed out and hung?
No country can withstand Treason from Within going unpunished for any length of time. We
either destroy these scum or they will destroy America.
I gotta hand it to Larry King, even with one foot in the grave he's still doing these
interviews and with Professor Cohen no less. Kudos to the old coot. (Grin)
Steven Cohen should be a special advisor to the POTUS. It would be a demotion for Cohen but
good for Trump and for America.
At the end of the nineteenth century, Lord Palmerston stated what he thought was obvious,
that "England has no eternal friends, England has no perpetual enemies, England has only
eternal and perpetual interests." Palmerston was saying that national interests should drive
the relationships with foreigners. A nation will have amicable relations most of the time with
some countries and difficult relations with some others, but the bottom line should always be
what is beneficial for one's own country and people.
If Palmerston were alive today and observing the relationship of the United States of
America with the rest of the world, he might well find Washington to be an exception to his
rule. The U.S., to be sure, has been adept at turning adversaries into enemies and
disappointing friends, and it is all done with a glib assurance that doing so will somehow
bring democracy and freedom to all. Indeed, either neoliberal democracy promotion or the
neoconservative version of the same have been seen as an overriding and compelling interest
during the past twenty years even though the policies themselves have been disastrous and have
only damaged the real interests of the American people.
The U.S. relationship with Israel is, for example, driven by a powerful and wealthy domestic
lobby rather than by any common interests at all yet it is regularly falsely touted as being
between two "close allies" and "best friends." It has cost Americans hundreds of billions of
dollars in subsidies for the Jewish state and Israeli influence over U.S. policy in the Middle
East region has led to catastrophic military interventions in Afghanistan, Lebanon, Iraq,
Syria, Mogadishu and Libya. Currently, Israel is agitating for U.S. action against the
nonexistent Iranian "threat" while also unleashing its lobby in the United States to make
illegal criticism of any of its war crimes, effectively curtailing freedom of speech and
association for all Americans.
Far more dangerous is the continued excoriation of the Kremlin over the largely mythical
Russiagate narrative. Congress has
recently approved a bill that would give to Ukraine $300 million in supplementary military
assistance to use against Russia. The money and authorization appear in the House of
Representatives version of the national defense authorization act (NDAA) that passed last
week.
The bill is a renewal of the controversial Ukraine
Security Assistance Initiative that Donald Trump allegedly manipulated to bring about an
investigation of Joe Biden's son Hunter. The new version expands on the former assistance
package to include coastal defense cruise missiles and anti-ship missiles as offensive weapons
that are acceptable for export to Kiev. It also authorizes an additional $50 million in
military assistance on top of the $250 million congress had granted in last year's bill, "of
which $100 million would be available only for lethal assistance."
Ukraine sought the money and arms to counter Russian naval dominance in the Black Sea
through its base at Sevastopol in the Crimea. One year ago the Russian navy
captured three Ukrainian warships and Kiev was unable to push back against Moscow because
it lacked weapons designed to attack ships. Now it will have them and presumably it will use
them. How Russia will react is unknowable.
Dmytro Kuleba, Ukraine's Deputy Prime Minister for European and Euro-Atlantic Integration,
has been in Washington lobbying for the additional military assistance. He has had considerable
success, particularly as there is bipartisan support in Congress for aid to Kiev and also
because the Trump Departments of Defense and State as well as the National Security Council are
all on board in countering the "Russian threat" in the Black Sea. President Trump signed the
NDAA last week, which completed the process.
Far more ominously, Kuleba and his interlocutors in the administration and congress have
been revisiting a proposal first surfaced under Bill Clinton, that Ukraine and Georgia should
be admitted to the NATO alliance. Like the $300 million in military aid, there appears to be
considerable bipartisan support for such a move. NATO already has a major presence on the Black
Sea with Bulgaria, Romania and Turkey all members. Adding Ukraine and Georgia would completely
isolate the Russian presence and Moscow would undoubtedly see it as an existential threat.
The NDAA also provides seed money to initiate the so-called Space Force ,
which President Trump inaugurated by describing it as "the world's newest war-fighting domain.
Amid grave threats to our national security, American superiority in space is absolutely vital.
We're leading, but we're not leading by enough, but very shortly we'll be leading by a lot. The
Space Force will help us deter aggression and control the ultimate high ground."
If that isn't bad enough, the new defense budget ominously also requires the Trump
administration to impose sanctions "with respect to provision of certain vessels for the
construction of certain Russian energy export pipelines." Last week the House of
Representatives and Senate
approved specific sanctions relating to the companies and governments that are
collaborating on the construction of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline that will cross the Baltic Sea
from Vyborg to Greifswald to connect Germany with Russian natural gas. President Trump has
signed off on the legislation.
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The United States has opposed the project ever since it was first mooted, claiming that it
will make Europe "hostage" to Russian energy, will enrich the Russian government, and will also
empower Russian President Vladimir Putin to be more aggressive. Engineering companies that will
be providing services such as pipe-laying will be targeted by Washington as the Trump
administration tries to halt the completion of the $10.5 billion project.
Now that the NDAA has been signed, the Trump administration has 60 days to identify
companies, individuals and even foreign governments that have in some way provided services or
assistance to the pipeline project. Sanctions would block individuals from travel to the United
States and would freeze bank accounts and other tangible property that would be identified by
the U.S. Treasury. One company that will definitely be targeted for sanctions is the
Switzerland-based Allseas, which has been contracted with by Russia's Gazprom to build the
offshore section of pipeline. It has suspended work on the project while it examines the
implications of the sanctions.
Bear in mind that Nord Stream 2 is a peaceful commercial project between two countries that
have friendly relations, making the threats implicit in the U.S. reaction more than somewhat
inappropriate. Increased U.S. sanctions against Russia itself are also believed to be a
possibility and there has even been some suggestion that the German government and its energy
ministry might be sanctioned. This has predictably resulted in pushback from Germany, normally
a country that is inclined to go along with any and all American initiatives. Last week German
Foreign Minister Heiko Maas asked Congress not to meddle in European energy policy, saying "We
think this is unacceptable, because it is ultimately a move to influence autonomous decisions
that are made in Europe. European energy policy is decided in Europe, not in the U.S."
German Bundestag member Andreas Nick warned that "It's an issue of national sovereignty,
and it is potentially a liability for trans-Atlantic relations." That Trump is needlessly
alienating important countries like Germany that are genuine allies, unlike Israel and Saudi
Arabia, over an issue that is not an actual American interest is unfortunate. It makes one
think that the wheels have definitely come off the cart in Washington.
The point is that Donald Trump, Mike Pompeo, Mike Pence and Mike Esper (admittedly too
many Mikes) wouldn't know a national interest if it hit them in the face. Their
politicization of policy to "win in 2020" promoting apocalyptic nonsense like war in space has
also reinforced an existing tunnel vision on what Russia under Vladimir Putin is all about that
is extremely dangerous. Admittedly, Team Trump throws out sanctions in all directions with
reckless abandon, mostly aimed at Russia, Iran, North Korea and, the current favorite,
Venezuela. No one is immune. But the escalation going from sanctions to arming the Kremlin's
enemies is both reckless and pointless. Russia will definitely strike back if it is attacked,
make no mistake about that, and war could easily escalate with tragic consequences for all of
us. That war is perhaps becoming thinkable is in itself deplorable, with Business
Insiderrunning a recent
piece on surviving a nuclear attack. New homes in target America will likely soon come
equipped with bomb shelters, just like in the 1950s. Tags Politics
"... Some, such as General David Petraeus , seem to sincerely believe that the U.S. was on the right track and could have made progress if only those pesky civilians in the Beltway hadn't pulled the rug out from under them by announcing a premature withdrawal. ..."
When Will the Afghan War Architects Be Held Accountable?
Even after the release of the Afghanistan Papers, our elites are still determined to escape
without blame. CERNOBBIO, ITALY - SEPTEMBER 06: Chairman of the KKR Global Institute David
Howell Petraeus attends the Ambrosetti International Economic Forum 2019 "Lo scenario
dell'Economia e della Finanza" on September 6, 2019 in Cernobbio, Italy. (Photo by Pier Marco
Tacca/Getty Images)
Almost two weeks after the Washington Post 's Craig Whitlock published his six-part
series on the trials, tribulations, and blunders of Washington's 19-year-long social science
experiment in Afghanistan, those involved in the war effort are desperately pointing fingers as
to who is to blame. An alternative narrative has emerged among this crop of elite policymakers,
military officers, and advisers that while American policy in Afghanistan has been horrible,
the people responsible for it really did believe it would all work out in the end. Call it the
"we were stupid" defense.
There were no lies or myths propagated by senior U.S. officials, we are told, just honest
assessments that later proved to be wrong. Michael O'Hanlon of the Brookings Institution, who
has advised U.S. commanders on Afghanistan war policy, wrote that "no, there has not been a
campaign of disinformation, intentional or subliminal." Former defense secretary Jim Mattis,
who led CENTCOM during part of the war effort, called the Post 's reporting "not really
news" and was mystified that the unpublished interviews from the U.S. special inspector general
were generating such shock. Others have faulted the Post for publishing the material to
begin with, claiming that public disclosure would scare future witnesses from cooperating and
threaten other fact-finding inquiries (the fact that the newspaper was legally permitted to
publish the transcripts after winning a court case against the government is apparently
irrelevant in the minds of those making this argument).
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.
All of these claims and counter-claims should be seen for what they truly are: the flailings
of a policymaking class so arrogant and unaccountable that it can't see straight. That they're
blaming the outrage engendered by the Afghanistan Papers on anything other than themselves is
Exhibit A that our narcissistic policy elite is cocooned in their own reality.
Analysts have been pouring over the Afghanistan interview transcripts for over a week in
order to determine how the war went wrong. Some of the main lessons learned have long been
evident. The decision to impose a top-down democratic political order on a country that
operated on a system of patronage and tribal systems from the bottom-up was bound to be
problematic. Throwing tens of billions of dollars of reconstruction assistance into a nation
that had no experience managing that kind of money -- or spending it properly -- helped fuel
the very nationwide corruption Washington would come to regret. Paying off warlords to fight
the Taliban and keep order while pressuring those very same warlords into following the rules
was contradictory. The mistakes go on and on and on: as Lieutenant General Douglas Lute said,
"We didn't have the foggiest notion of what we were undertaking."
One of the most salient findings about this ghastly two-decade-long misadventure surfaced
after the Afghanistan Papers were released: the commentariat will stop at nothing to absolve
themselves of the slightest responsibility for the disaster they supported. The outright
refusal of the pundit class to own up to its errors is as disturbing as it is infuriating. And
even when they do acknowledge that errors were committed, they tend to minimize their own role
in those mistakes, explaining them away as unfortunate consequences of fixed withdrawal
deadlines, inter-agency tussling, Afghanistan's poor foundational state, or the inability of
the Afghans to capitalize on the opportunities Washington provided them. Some,
such as General David Petraeus , seem to sincerely believe that the U.S. was on the right
track and could have made progress if only those pesky civilians in the Beltway hadn't pulled
the rug out from under them by announcing a premature withdrawal.
It's always somebody else's fault.
Whether out of arrogance, ego, or fear of not being taken seriously in Washington's foreign
policy discussions, the architects of the war refuse to admit even the most obvious mistakes.
Instead they duck and weave like a quarterback escaping a full-on defensive rush, attempting
yet again to fool the American public.
But the public has nothing to apologize for. It is those who are making excuses who have
exercised disastrous judgment on Afghanistan. And they owe the country an apology.
Daniel R. DePetris is a columnist for the Washington Examiner and a contributor
to The American Conservative.
French far left leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon responded to Labour's general election
defeat by accusing his country's main Jewish federation Crif of being a group of arrogant
sectarians who send out orders to politicians.
Mr Mélenchon wrote that Britain's Chief Rabbi and "pro-Likud networks" had
orchestrated a campaign against Jeremy Corbyn, adding that "unlike Corbyn", he would never
give in to Jewish groups.
His comments, which were backed by some of MPs in his France Unbowed party, were
criticised by government officials.
"He (Corbyn) faced unsubstantiated, churlish antisemitism claims from England's chief
rabbi and pro-Likud networks," Mr Mélenchon wrote, saying their accusations were one
of the major reasons for Labour's defeat. "Instead of firing back, he spent his time
apologising and making pledges. In both cases, he showed weakness."
He continued by saying "Labour and Corbyn's terrible defeat did not surprise me" and
vowing to adopt an apparently opposite strategy.
"I will never give in. The pension reform, a liberal and German Europe, Green
capitalism, bowing to the arrogant and sectarian dictates of the Crif: No! No means
No!"
What if France is next? That would be the death of the EU right there!
anti-semites who speak of bolshevikism and bolsheviks are cowards who are afraid to tackle
judaism(jewish supremacism) which originates from the old testament, with the talmid as
appendices. why are the afraid to call out the old testament? because they are low IQ cowards
who cannot leave the loathsome religion of the moses and its derivatives. the other reason
they use vocabulary such as bolshevism is because they were brainwashed into mindless cold
war anticommunism or they wish to rid the elites of jewishness, but not of the elitist
supremacy system based on financial hucksterism which is the jewishness of the worldly jew(as
expounded by karl marx) therefore they are not enemies of jewishness but only of jewish
domination of the jewish system, or they are frauds, pied pipers preventing and overthrow of
the jewish system by focusing on race instead of the jewish nature of all elite systems. they
are also ignorant of history. The Catholic church and royalty were the protectors of Jews.
They were the tax farmers of the nobility.
The least Jewish controlled countries today have communist pasts. And the most Jewish
controlled countries are those that were at the forefront of fighting communism. makes you
think doesn't it.
Any system that places labour above capital is inherently anti-Jewish. Capitalism is
Judaism. especially when combined with the ass backwards idea that money is virtue or value
of an individual. the elites believe their ability to jew society out of money is proof that
they should rule and decide for the rest of us.
A good article. Jewish power in UK politics should be openly discussed.
The reason that it isn't, is that it's excessive and undemocratic (same as the US). It's
exercised through private threats/deals with people on power rather than the ballot box.
How many British voters are aware of the pro-Jewish orientation of Johnson, Patel, Javid
and Raab? Or that CFI is Britain's most powerful lobbying group? Or that this lobby
prioritizes the interests of a foreign country (Israel)? From this POV, the British public
could easily be dragged (against their wishes) into a disastrous Iran war.
It is really shameful how the UK has changed. In 1962-68, I went to private schools in
England. Jewish kids were treated abominably. English kids treated them like rubbish. I was
born in Egypt and lived there my first 12 years. I was shocked. I never took part in this
bullying. And no one bullied me because I was not easy for them. They always pick on the
morally weak.
At the first private school I went to, where I spent almost 2 years, there was a boy
called Levi who was bullied mercilessly by an English boy and a Canadian boy. I was younger
than all of them. It was a school for dimwits who needed to catch up so as to enter a "Public
School" or kids like me who had a foreign background. They did not hit or punch Levi or
anything like that. They merely had to threaten and Levi, who was not small, would cringe and
beg them to be merciful to him. It was sickening to watch. On at least one occasion he tried
to divert the attention of his tormentors towards me.
At night, the English boy – his name was Henderson – would tell Levi that he
had a fart and that Levi should come to smell it. We were in a dormitory with maybe 12 kids.
Levi would beg and whine but Henderson would insist. Eventually, Levi would put his face near
the orifice of Henderson and receive his blessing. This sort of thing went on continuously. I
am sure that if they asked him to taste their shit, he would have done so.
The last time we left school, they were all laughing on the bus taking us to the railway
station. Apparently, they tied Levi to the overhead pipes. They trussed him up properly so
that he was aligned with the pipe with his feet not touching the ground. I have no idea when
he was found and how he got home. I guess the cleaners found him or his parents called the
school when he did not arrive at Victoria station.
At the second school, it was much more civilised as there were no dimwits. But there were
plenty of insults thrown at Jewish kids. We had compulsory sport (rugby, cricket and hockey)
4 days of the week and one day when we dressed as soldiers and marched about. There was an
armoury on the school grounds with hundreds of ex-WW2 Lee Enfield rifles and a few bazookas.
I was in "signals" and responsible for a huge ex-WW2 Canadian set C52 wireless transmitter
.
I was the best shot the school had up to that time. I became a member of the "School's
Hundred" at Bisley. The school had been participating since the 1920's. Of course, because of
my Egyptian background, they did not give me a sporting tie or anything of the sort. The
headmaster never mentioned my success and it never entered the school newspaper. But I still
have the badge.
The most noticeable thing about the Jewish kids at this school was the efforts they made
to avoid sports and to avoid military training. The lengths that they would go to –
fake medical symptoms, letters from doctors, maternal phone calls to the headmaster and so
on.
It has come to my notice that the school has joined in the grovelling. How things have
changed in England!
Stowe is delighted to have become a Holocaust Beacon School which is a status given by
University College, London's Centre for Holocaust Education. This exciting backing from UCL
is only awarded to a handful of schools each year and reflects the School's commitment to
developing our pupils' understanding of the Holocaust.
The least Jewish controlled countries today have communist pasts.
In the case of the Soviet Union and the E. European countries, we owe this fact to Stalin
and nothing else. Before he was firmly in control of the USSR, it was almost totally (I know
the term offends you, but it fits) a Jew-Bolshevik enterprise. It was Stalin who
gradually transformed it into something a bit more national-socialism. (See: Francis Parker
Yockey.)
As far as China, Vietnam, etc. are concerned–well, they'd never had any Jews to
begin with. Communism, for them, was just a way to modernize their civilizations without
having to mortgage their countries to Anglo-American (i.e., Jewish) capital. So these
countries were basically NS right from the start.
@Urban Moving breakingisraelnews.com : "New UK Prime Minister descended from Rabbi 'feels
Jewish'" :
"Johnson refers to himself as a 'passionate Zionist' who 'loves the great country of
Israel '"
@Miro23 Jews in the US and UK control the msm, movies, and publishing, completely, and so
the public forum or de facto propaganda machine that forms men's attitudes and
determines the outcomes of elections.
In an angry reply on camera to a question about Jewish power, Richard Perle said Jews
control all but about 5 out of 535 seats in Congress, which was borne out just a few years
ago when every member but one gave Netanyahu 29 standing ovations, on cue from Schumer,
despite Netanyahu's insulting end run around the President of this country -- just in case
the President wondered where Congress' true loyalty laid. As Cynthia McKinney revealed, every
member must sign a written pledge to support Israel before all else and has an AIPAC handler
either on staff or assigned to staff.
And as it's coming out all over now, the Republican Party is as much owned by Jewish
billionaires like Adelson and Singer as the Democratic, who it turns out are all Jews united
in subverting the social fabric of this nation. No wonder, as Kevin MacDonald points out,
Conservatism Inc and the Republican Party have conserved nothing, literally nothing at all,
in over sixty years of cultural warfare!
Gathering up the whole sordid picture in one volume, E Michael Jones's Jewish
Revolutionary Spirit uses the most prominent of Jewish sources, in their own words, in
scrupulous context, to make it clear that the West has no greater enemy than organized Jewry
and never has. The fact that Jews own Parliament and Congress and all the determinants of pop
culture still cannot create the Second Reality, and so nothing but brutal totalitarianism can
achieve their goals. If this is considered an extreme conclusion, maybe the voices of 60+
million Russians and Ukrainians who got in the way of Jewish supremacism during the last
century may serve as a warning.
@Wizard of Oz Gee Wiz -- - over 9,000 comments – most of them defending Jews
– and you are still Not-a-Jew.
Here is the "blinding " truth about the those poor Jews, you endlessly defend.
'Blinding the truth': Israeli snipers target Gaza protesters in the eyes
https://www.alaraby.co.uk/english/file/getimagecustom/3862df2f-7729-4f5e-8b5e-068946a695fd/850/479
"Some of these protesters and journalists were hit in the eye with teargas canisters, but
most were targeted directly with what is commonly called a 'rubber bullet,' giving the
impression they are somehow benign," says Ashraf Alqedra, MD, a treating physician at Gaza
City's al-Shifa Hospital and spokesperson for the Ministry of Health.
"But there is still steel at the core, and although these bullets don't usually kill,
they do grave damage. It is impossible
While the state of Arkansas became a hub for CIA activity during the Reagan years and the
Iran-Contra scandal, another state appeared to take its place in the 1990s -- Ohio. Just as
Arkansas oligarch Jackson Stephens helped attract the CIA to his home state during Iran-Contra,
it was also an Ohio oligarch and his close associate that helped attract the CIA to the Buckeye
State. Those men were Leslie Wexner and Jeffrey Epstein, respectively.
In
Part III of this series, MintPress detailed Wexner's alleged ties to organized crime
and his links to the still unsolved homicide of Columbus, Ohio lawyer Arthur Shapiro. Shapiro,
who was representing Wexner's company "The Limited" at the time of his death, was set to
testify before a grand jury about tax evasion and his involvement with "questionable tax
shelters." Columbus police described the Shapiro murder as "a Mafia 'hit'" and a suppressed
police report implicated Wexner and his business associates as being involved in or benefiting
from Shapiro's death, and as having links to prominent New York-based crime syndicates.
However, Wexner and The Limited also appear to have had a relationship with the CIA. In
1995, Southern Air Transport (SAT) -- a well-known front company for the CIA --
relocated from Miami, Florida to Columbus, Ohio. First founded in the late 1940s, SAT from
1960 until 1973 was
directly owned by the CIA, which sought to use the company as a cover for covert
operations. After 1973, the company was placed in private hands, although all of its subsequent
owners would have CIA ties, including James Bastian, a former lawyer for the CIA, who owned SAT
at the time of its relocation to Ohio.
SAT was intimately involved in the Iran-Contra affair, having been used to funnel
weapons and drugs to and from the Nicaraguan Contras under the guise of delivering
"humanitarian aid," while also sending American weapons to Israel that were then sold to Iran
in violation of the U.S. arms embargo. In 1986 alone, SAT
transported from Texas to Israel 90 tons of TOW anti-tank missiles, which were then sold to
Iran by Israel and Mossad-linked intermediaries like Saudi arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi.
Even though the airline's CIA links were well known, Leslie Wexner's company, The Limited,
sought to coax SAT to relocate its headquarters from Miami, Florida to Columbus, Ohio, a move
that was realized in 1995. When Edmund James, president of James and Donohew Development
Services,
told the Columbus Dispatch in March 1995 that SAT was relocating to Columbus'
Rickenbacker airfield, he stated that "Southern Air's new presence at Rickenbacker begins in
April with two regularly scheduled 747 cargo flights a week from Hong Kong," citing SAT
President William Langton. "By fall, that could increase to four a week. Negotiations are
underway for flights out of Rickenbacker to the Far East Much of the Hong Kong-to-Rickenbacker
cargo will be for The Limited," Wexner's clothing company. "This is a big story for central
Ohio. It's huge, actually," James said at the time.
The day following the press conference, Brian Clancy, working as a cargo analyst with
MergeGlobal Inc.,
told the Journal of Commerce that the reason for SAT's relocation to Ohio was
largely the result of the lucrative Hong Kong-to-Columbus route that SAT would run for Wexner's
company. Clancy specifically stated that the fact that "[The] Limited Inc., the nation's
largest retailer, is based in Columbus undoubtedly contributed in large part to Southern Air's
decision."
According to documents obtained by journalist Bob Fitrakis from the
Rickenbacker Port Authority, Ohio's government also tried to sweeten the deal to bring SAT to
Columbus in order to please powerful Ohio businessmen like Wexner. Orchestrated by Governor
George Voinovich's then-Chief of Staff Paul Mifsud, the Rickenbacker Port Authority and the
Ohio Department of Development created a package of several financial incentives, funded by
Ohio taxpayers, to lure the airline to relocate to Ohio. The Journal of Commercedescribed the
"generous package of incentives from the state of Ohio" as "including a 75 percent credit
against its corporate tax liability for the next 10 years, a $5 million low-interest loan, and
a $400,000 job-training grant."In 1996, then-SAT spokesman David Sweet had told Fitrakis that the CIA-linked airline had
only moved to Columbus because "the deal [put together by the development department] was too
good to turn down."
Though SAT had promised Ohio's government that it would create 300 jobs in three years, it
quickly laid off numerous workers and failed to construct the maintenance facility it had
promised, even though it had already accepted $3.5 million in taxpayer funds for that and other
projects. As the company's financial problems mounted, Ohio's government declined to recoup the
millions in dollars it loaned the company, even after it was alleged that $32 million in the
bank account of Mary Bastian, the wife of SAT's owner and former CIA lawyer James Bastian,
were actually company funds . On October 1, 1998, SAT filed for bankruptcy. It was the very
same day that the CIA's Inspector General had published a comprehensive report on the airline's
illicit involvement in drug trafficking.
Furthermore, Fitrakis noted that in addition to Wexner the other main figures who were key in securing
SAT's relocation to Ohio were Alan D. Fiers Jr., a former chief of the CIA Central American
Task Force, and retired Air Force Major General Richard Secord, head of air logistics for SAT's
covert action in Laos between 1966 and 1968, while the company was still known as Air America.
Secord was also the air logistics coordinator in the illegal Contra resupply network for Oliver
North during Iran-Contra. Fiers was one of the key individuals involved in Iran-Contra who was
later pardoned by George H.W. Bush with the assistance of then-Attorney General Bill Barr. Barr
-- currently serving as attorney general in the Trump administration, and top of the chain of
DOJ command in the investigation of Epstein's death in prison -- has refused to recuse himself
from the investigation into Epstein's network and his recent death.
Despite the involvement of these CIA-linked men, as well as the organized crime-linked
Leslie Wexner, the then-president of SAT
told the Columbus Dispatch that the airline was "no longer connected to the
CIA."
Notably, It was during this same time that Epstein exerted substantial control over Wexner's
finances; and, according to Fitrakis and his extensive reporting on Wexner from this period, it
was Epstein who orchestrated logistics for Wexner's business operations, including The Limited.
As was revealed in the Arthur Shapiro murder file and in ties between SAT and The Limited, much
of The Limited's logistics involved figures and companies connected to organized crime and U.S.
intelligence. It is also important to note that SAT was well-known for being a CIA front
company prior to the efforts of Wexner et al. to bring the airline to Columbus, and that, a few
years prior, Epstein himself had previously worked for intelligence-linked figures also
involved in Iran-Contra, such as Adnan Khashoggi.
In addition, during this time period, Epstein had already begun to live in the now infamous
New York penthouse that had first been purchased by Wexner in 1989. Wexner had apparently
installed CCTV and recording equipment in an odd bathroom in the home after his purchase, and
never lived in the home, as was noted in
Part III of this series.
In an exclusive interview, Bob Fitrakis told MintPress that Epstein and Wexner's
involvement with SAT's relocation to Ohio had caused suspicion among some prominent state and
local officials that the two were working with U.S. intelligence. Fitrakis specifically stated
that then-Ohio Inspector General David Strutz and then-Sheriff of Franklin County Earl Smith
had personally told him that they believed that both Epstein and Wexner had ties to the CIA.
These claims further corroborate what was first reported by Nigel Rosser in the Evening
Standard that Epstein had claimed to have worked for the CIA in the past.
Fitrakis also told MintPress that Strutz had referred to SAT's route between Hong
Kong and Columbus on behalf of Wexner's company The Limited as "the Meyer Lansky run," as he
believed that Wexner's association with SAT was related to his ties to elements of organized
crime that were connected to the Lansky-created National Crime Syndicate. In addition,
Catherine Austin Fitts -- the former investment banker and government official, who has
extensively investigated the intersection of organized crime, black markets, Wall Street and
the government in the U.S. economy -- was told by an ex-CIA employee that Wexner was one of
five key managers of organized crime cash flows in the United States.
As this series has noted in previous reports, Meyer Lansky was a pioneer of sexual
blackmail operations and was deeply connected to both U.S. intelligence and Israel's Mossad.
Furthermore, many members of the so-called Mega Group, which Wexner co-founded, had direct ties
to the Lansky crime syndicate.
Another shadowy figure with connections to the Mega Group, Mossad, U.S. intelligence and
organized crime is the "fugitive financier" Marc Rich, whose pardon during the last days of the
Clinton White House is both well-known and still mired in controversy years after the fact.
Marc Rich was a commodities trader and hedge fund manager best known for founding the
commodity trading and mining giant Glencore and for doing business with numerous dictatorships,
often in violation of sanctions. He worked particularly closely with Israel and, according to
Haaretz :
In the years after the 1973 Yom Kippur War and the ensuing global Arab oil embargo, a
period when nobody wanted to sell oil to Israel, for almost 20 years Rich was the main source
of the country's oil and energy needs."
It was that trading on Israel's behalf that would ultimately lead to Rich being charged in
1983 for violating the U.S. oil embargo on Iran by selling Iranian oil to Israel. Rich was also
charged with tax evasion, wire fraud, racketeering and several other crimes.
Haaretz
also noted that Rich's businesses were "a source of funding for secret financial
arrangements" and that "his worldwide offices, according to several reliable sources,
frequently served Mossad agents, with his consent." Rich had more direct ties to the Mossad as
well. For instance, his foundation -- the Rich Foundation -- was run by the former Mossad agent
Avner Azulay. Rich was also friendly with prominent Israel politicians, including former Prime
Ministers Menachem Begin and Ehud Barak, and was
a frequent provider of "services" for Israeli intelligence, services he freely
volunteered.
Marc Rich, right, is pictured with Israel's Shimon Peres in a photo from Mark
Daneil Ammann's "The King of Oil."
According to Rich's biographer, Daniel Ammann, Rich also fed information to U.S.
intelligence but declined to give specifics. "He did not want to tell with whom he cooperated
within the U.S. authorities or which branch of the U.S. government he supplied with
intelligence," Ammann said in an interview with the Daily
Beast .
One clue as to the nature of Rich's relationship to U.S. intelligence is his apparent ties
to BCCI. "The BCCI Affair" report mentions Rich as a person to investigate in relation to the
bank and states :
BCCI lending to Rich in the 1980s amounted to tens of millions of dollars. Moreover,
Rich's commodities firms were used by BCCI in connection with BCCI's involv[ement] in U.S.
guarantee programs through the Department of Agriculture. The nature and extent of Rich's
relationship with BCCI requires further investigation."
Rich was also deeply tied to the Mega Group, as he was one of the main donors to the
Birthright Israel charity along with Mega Group co-founder Charles Bronfman and Mega Group
member Michael Steinhardt. Steinhardt was particularly close to Rich, first meeting the
commodities trader in the 1970s and
then managing $3 million for Rich, Rich's then-wife Denise, and Rich's father-in-law from
the early 1980s to the mid-1990s through his hedge fund. In the late 1990s, Steinhardt would
enlist other Mega Group members, such as Edgar Bronfman, in the effort to settle the criminal
charges against Rich, which eventually came to pass with Clinton's controversial pardon in
2001. Steinhardt claimed to have
come up with the idea of a presidential pardon for Rich in late 2000.
Rich's pardon was controversial for several reasons, and many mainstream outlets asserted
that it "reeked of payoff." As
the New York Post noted in 2016, in the run-up to the presidential pardon the
financier's ex-wife Denise had donated $450,000 to the fledgling Clinton Library and "over $1
million to Democratic campaigns in the Clinton era." In addition, Rich had hired high-powered
lawyers with links to powerful individuals in both the Democratic and Republican parties as
well as the Clinton White House, including Jack Quinn, who has previously served as general
counsel to the Clinton administration and as former chief of staff to Vice President Al
Gore.
However, per
Clinton's own words and other supporting evidence, the main reason behind the Rich pardon
was the heavy lobbying from Israeli intelligence, Israeli politicians and members of the Mega
Group like Steinhardt, with the donations from Denise Rich and Quinn's access to the president
likely sweetening the deal.
Among the most ardent
lobbyists for Rich's pardon were then-Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, former Prime
Minister Shimon Peres, then-Mayor of Jerusalem Ehud Olmert, then-former Foreign Minister Shlomo
Ben-Ami and former Director of the Mossad Shabtai Shavit. According to Haaretz , Barak was so adamant that Clinton pardon Marc Rich that he was heard
shouting at the president on at least one occasion. Former adviser to Barak, Eldad Yaniv,
claimed that Barak had shouted that the pardon was "important Not only from the financial
aspect, but also because he helped the Mossad in more than one instance."
The Israel lobbying effort had considerable help from Mega Group member Michael Steinhardt
as well as Abe Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), which was at the time heavily funded
by Mega Group members, including Ronald Lauder and Edgar Bronfman.
There has been speculation for years that Clinton's decision to pardon Rich may have been
the result of "leverage" or blackmail that Israel had acquired on the then-president's
activities. As was noted in
Part III of this report, the Mossad-linked "Mega" spy scandal broke in 1997, whereby
Israeli intelligence had been targeting Clinton's effort to broker a peace agreement between
Israel and Palestine and had sought to go to "Mega," likely a reference to the Mega Group, to
obtain a sensitive document.
In addition, Israel is known to have acquired phone conversations between Clinton and Monica
Lewinsky before their affair was made public. Author Daniel Halper -- relying on on-the-record
interviews with former officials and hundreds of pages of documents compiled in the event that
Lewinsky took legal action against Clinton -- determined
that Benjamin Netanyahu told Clinton that he had obtained recordings of the sexually-tinged
phone conversations during the Wye Plantation talks between Israel and Palestine in 1998.
Netanyahu attempted to use this information to get Clinton to pardon convicted Israeli spy
Jonathan Pollard. Clinton considered pardoning Pollard but decided against it after CIA
Director George Tenet threatened to resign if the pardon was given.
Investigative journalist and author Gordon Thomas had
made similar claims years prior and asserted that the Mossad had obtained some 30 hours of
phone-sex conversations between Lewinsky and Clinton and used them as leverage. In addition,
a
report in Insight magazine in May 2000 claimed that Israeli intelligence had
"penetrated four White House telephone lines and was able to relay real-time conversations on
those lines from a remote site outside the White House directly to Israel for listening and
recording."
Those phone taps apparently went well beyond the White House, as revealed by a December 2001
investigative report by Carl Cameron for FOX News . According to
Cameron's report :
[Israeli telecommunications company Amdocs] helped Bell Atlantic install new telephone
lines in the White House in 1997 [and] a senior-level employee of Amdocs had a separate T1
data phone line installed from his base outside of St. Louis that was connected directly to
Israel
[I]nvestigators are looking into whether the owner of the T1 line had a 'real time'
capacity to intercept phone calls from both the White House and other government offices
around Washington, and sustained the line for some time, sources said. Sources familiar with
the investigation say FBI agents on the case sought an arrest warrant for the St. Louis
employee but [Clinton] Justice Department officials quashed it."
[Both Amdocs and Verint Inc. (formerly Comverse Infosys)] are based in Israel -- having
arisen to prominence from that country's cornering of the information technology market --
and are heavily funded by the Israeli government, with connections to the Israeli military
and Israeli intelligence
The companies' operations, sources suggest, have been infiltrated by freelance spies
exploiting encrypted trapdoors in Verint/Amdocs technology and gathering data on Americans
for transfer to Israeli intelligence and other willing customers (particularly organized
crime)."
Given the extent of phone tapping of the U.S. government by Israeli intelligence-linked
companies and Netanyahu's previous use of intercepted phone calls to pressure Clinton to pardon
Jonathan Pollard, it is entirely reasonable to speculate that some other trove of intercepted
communications could have been used to push Clinton to pardon Rich in the final hours of his
presidency.
Also notable is the fact that several figures who heavily lobbied Clinton over the Rich
pardon had ties to Epstein, who also had ties to Israeli intelligence and Israeli
intelligence-linked tech companies, as discussed in
Part III of this series. For example, Ehud Barak, a close friend and business associate of
Epstein, and Shimon Peres, who introduced Barak to Epstein, were the major players in convincing Clinton to
pardon Marc Rich.
Furthermore, as will be shown in a subsequent section of this report, Jeffrey Epstein had
developed ties with the Clinton administration beginning in 1993 and those ties expanded,
particularly in 1996, when Epstein's intelligence-linked sexual blackmail operation was
underway. Clinton would later fly on Epstein's infamous private jet, nicknamed the "Lolita
Express," and Epstein would later donate to the Clinton Foundation and claim to have played
a key role in the creation of the Clinton Global Initiative.
In addition to the role of figures close to Epstein in securing Rich's pardon, Epstein
himself appeared to share some level of connection with Rich's former business partners. For
instance, Felix Posen -- who ran Rich's London operations for years and
whom Forbes described as "the architect of Rich's immensely profitable but suddenly
very controversial business with the Soviet Union" -- appears in
Epstein's book of contacts . In addition, Epstein's offshore structured investment vehicle
(SIV), Liquid Funding, has the same attorney and director as several Glencore entities :
Alex Erskine of the law firm
Appleby.
The significance of that connection, however, is unclear, given that Erskine was connected to a total of
274 offshore entities at the time of the "Paradise Papers" leak in 2014. Catherine Austin Fitts
told MintPress that it could suggest that Epstein's Liquid Funding -- 40 percent of
which
had been owned by Bear Stearns , and which may have received
a "secret" bail-out from the Federal Reserve -- is part of the same shadow economy
"syndicate" as Glencore.
This possibility merits further investigation, given that Glencore is partially
owned by British financier Nathaniel Rothschild, whose father, Jacob Rothschild, is on the
board of advisers of Genie Energy, which includes Michael Steinhardt as well as several alleged
associates of Epstein, such as Bill Richardson and Larry Summers. In addition, Nathaniel
Rothschild's cousin by marriage, Lynn Forester de Rothschild, is a long-time associate of
Jeffrey Epstein with considerable ties to the New York City "Roy Cohn machine." Marc Rich had
long-standing ties to the Rothschild family, going back to
the early 1970s when he began commodity trading at Philipp Brothers.
After Epstein's arrests first in 2007 and then again last month, numerous media reports
emerged detailing the links between Epstein and Clinton, with most asserting that they had met
not long after Clinton left office in 2001 and, as recently mentioned, issued the controversial
pardon of Marc Rich.
Those reports claimed that the Epstein-Clinton relationship had been facilitated by
Epstein's long-time girlfriend and alleged madam Ghislaine Maxwell. However, documents obtained
from the Clinton presidential library have revealed that the ties between Epstein and Clinton
date back years earlier and were facilitated by powerful individuals who have largely evaded
scrutiny in connection with the Epstein case.
One major player who has been largely overlooked in bringing Epstein and the Clintons
together is Lynn Forester de Rothschild. Notably, Forester de Rothschild has long been
connected to neoconservative Reagan era officials -- the Lewis Rosenstiel/Roy Cohn network
described in Parts 1 and 2 of this series, as well as the Mega Group, which was detailed in
Part 3 of this series.
Lynn Forester de Rothschild became involved in the world of Democratic Party politics in the
late 1970s when she
worked on the 1976 campaign of hawkish Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-NY) alongside
now-notorious neoconservatives like
Elliott Abrams , who would go on to play an important role in the Iran-Contra affair during
the Reagan era and later serve in the State Department under Trump. She was also introduced to
her second husband, Evelyn de Rothschild, by Henry Kissinger at a Bilderberg conference.
Several of the individuals connected to the Mega Group and the Mossad-linked media mogul Robert
Maxwell -- including Mark Palmer, Max Fisher and John Lehman -- were one-time aides or advisers
to Henry Kissinger.
Before marrying into the Rothschild family in 2000, Lynn
had previously been married to Andrew Stein, a major figure in New York Democratic
politics, with whom she had two sons. Andrew's brother, James Finkelstein, married Cathy Frank,
the granddaughter of Lewis Rosenstiel, the mob-linked businessman who ran a sexual blackmail
operation exploiting underage boys, as was discussed in Part 1 of this series. Rosenstiel's
protege Roy Cohn
was the lawyer for Cathy Frank and James Finkelstein and it was at their behest that Cohn
attempted to trick a nearly comatose Rosenstiel to into naming Cohn, Frank and Finkelstein the
executors and trustees of his estate, valued at $75 million (more than $334 million in today's
dollars).
According to the
New Yorker , Lynn Forester de Rothschild requested "financial help" from none other
than Jeffrey Epstein in 1993 during her divorce from Andrew Stein.
As far as Forester de Rothschild's ties to the Mega Group go, she is currently on the
board of directors of Estee Lauder companies, which was founded and is still owned by the
family of Ronald Lauder -- a member of the Mega Group, a former Reagan official, a family
friend of Roy Cohn, and the alleged source of Jeffrey Epstein's now-infamous Austrian passport.
In addition, Forester de Rothschild also partnered with Matthew
Bronfman -- son of Mega Group member Edgar Bronfman and grandson of Samuel Bronfman, who had
close ties to Meyer Lansky -- in creating the investment advisory firm Bronfman E.L. Rothschild
LP.
It is unclear when Lynn Forester de Rothschild first met Jeffrey Epstein, but she was one of
his leading advocates and had the ear of then-President Bill Clinton in the early 1990s,
speaking to Clinton specifically about Epstein during her "fifteen seconds of access" with the
president and also introducing Epstein to lawyer Alan Dershowitz in 1996.
Living History by
Hilary Clinton Book Party Hosted Lynn Forester and Evelyn De Rothschild pose with Bill and
Hilary Clinton at the Kensington Palace in London. Photo | Alan Davidson
Forester de Rothschild is a long-time associate of the Clintons and has been a major donor
to both Bill and Hillary Clinton since 1992. Their ties were so close that Forester de
Rothschild spent the first night of her honeymoon at the Lincoln Bedroom in the White House
while Clinton was president. Furthermore, a leaked email between Forester de Rothschild and
Hillary Clinton saw Clinton
request "penance" from Forester de Rothschild for asking Tony Blair to accompany Clinton on
official business while she was secretary of state, preventing Blair from making a planned
social visit to Forester de Rothschild's home in Aspen, Colorado. Humbly requesting forgiveness
is not something Hillary Clinton is known for, given that her former bodyguard once said she
could "make Richard Nixon look like Mahatma Gandhi."
In 1995, Forester de Rothschild, then a member of Clinton's National Information
Infrastructure Advisory Council, wrote the following to then-President Clinton:
Dear Mr. President: It was a pleasure to see you recently at Senator Kennedy's house.
There was too much to discuss and too little time. Using my fifteen seconds of access to
discuss Jeffrey Epstein and currency stabilization, I neglected to talk to you about a topic
near and dear to my heart. Namely, affirmative action and the future."
Forester de Rothschild then states that she had been asked to prepare a memo on behalf of
George Stephanopoulos, former Clinton communications director and currently a broadcast
journalist with ABC News . Stephanopoulos attended a
dinner party hosted by Epstein at his now infamous Manhattan townhouse in 2010 after
Epstein's release from prison for soliciting sex from a minor.
While it is unknown what Forester de Rothschild discussed with Clinton regarding Epstein and
currency stabilization, a potential lead may lie in the links of both Forester de Rothschild
and Epstein to Deutsche Bank. Journalist Vicky Ward reported in 2003 that
Epstein boasted of "skill at playing the currency markets 'with very large sums of money'" and
he appears to have done much of this through his long-standing relationship with Deutsche
Bank.
[Epstein] appears to have been doing business and trading currencies through Deutsche Bank
until just a few months ago, according to two people familiar with his business activities.
But as the possibility of federal charges loomed, the bank ended its client relationship with
Mr. Epstein. It is not clear what the value of those accounts was at the time they were
closed."
In the case of Forester de Rothschild, she served as an advisor
to the Deutsche Bank Microfinance Consortium for several years and is currently a board member
of the Alfred Herrhausen Society of International Dialogue of Deutsche Bank.
The same year that Forester de Rothschild made the above-noted comments to Bill Clinton
about Jeffrey Epstein, Epstein attended
another Clinton fundraiser , hosted by Ron Perelman at his personal home, that was very
exclusive, as the guest list included only 14 people.
Even before Forester de Rothschild's 1995 meeting with Clinton, Epstein was already an
established Clinton donor. Records obtained
by the Daily Beast revealed that Epstein had donated $10,000 to the White House
Historical Association and attended a Clinton donor reception alongside Ghislaine Maxwell as
early as 1993.
The Daily Beast suggests that Bill Clinton's long-time friend from his college days,
A. Paul Prosperi, was the facilitator of that early relationship, as Prosperi had a
decades-long relationship with Epstein and even visited Epstein at least 20 times while he was
in jail in 2008. Prosperi was intimately involved with the 1993 fundraiser for the White House
Historical Association noted above.
The relationship between Epstein and Clinton would continue well after Clinton left office
in 2001, a fact well-documented by Bill Clinton's now-infamous flights on Epstein's (recently
sold) private jet -- often referred to as the "Lolita Express." Clinton flew on the Lolita
Express no less than
26 times in the early 2000s according to flight logs. On some of those flights, Clinton was
accompanied by his Secret Service detail but he was unaccompanied on other flights.
Arguably the most infamous flight taken by Clinton on Epstein's jet was
a lengthy trip to Africa, where actor Kevin Spacey, who has also been accused of
raping minors ; Ghislaine Maxwell; and Ron Burkle, a billionaire friend of Clinton's who
has
been accused of soliciting the services of "super-high-end call girls," were also present.
Clinton specifically requested that Epstein make his jet available for the trip well in
advance, with Doug Band as the intermediary. President Donald Trump, also a friend of Epstein,
is said to have flown on the plane but appears
only once on flight logs.
In addition to flights, an Epstein-run foundation
gave $25,000 to the Clinton Foundation according to the 2006 filing tax return of Epstein's
former charity, the C.O.U.Q. Foundation. Notably, Epstein's lawyers, Alan Dershowitz among
them,
claimed in 2007 that Epstein had been "part of the original group that conceived the
Clinton Global Initiative, which is described as a project 'bringing together a community of
global leaders to devise and implement innovative solutions to some of the world's most
pressing challenges.'"
Before the associations between Epstein and the Clinton White House in the early 1990s were
made public, Ghislaine Maxwell was thought to
have been the bridge between Epstein and the Clinton family because of her close
relationship to the family. However, the close relationship between Maxwell and the Clintons
appears to have developed in the 2000s, with Politico
reporting that it began after Bill Clinton left office. Clinton associate Doug Band was
also reportedly friendly to Maxwell, appearing at an exclusive dinner party she hosted at her
residence in New York in 2005. Maxwell later became particularly close to Chelsea Clinton,
vacationing with Chelsea in 2009 and attending her wedding a year later. Maxwell was also
associated with the Clinton Global Initiative at least up until 2013.
Other close Clinton associates and officials in the early 1990s also had notable
relationships with Jeffrey Epstein, including Mark Middleton, who was a special assistant to
Clinton Chief of Staff Mack McClarty beginning in 1993, and met with Epstein on
at least three occasions in the White House during the early Clinton years. In addition,
White House social secretary under Clinton, Ann Stock,
appears in Epstein's "little black book" as does Doug
Band , once referred to by New
York Magazine as "Bill Clinton's bag carrier, body man, fixer, and all-purpose
gatekeeper." Band also appears several times in the flight logs of Epstein's private jet.
Epstein was also
associated with both Bill Richardson, former ambassador to the UN and former secretary of
energy under Clinton, and Larry Summers, secretary of the treasury under Clinton. Both
Richardson and Summers sit on the advisory board of controversial energy company Genie Energy,
alongside CIA director under Clinton, James Woolsey; Roy Cohn associate and media mogul, Rupert
Murdoch; Mega Group member Michael Steinhardt; and Lord Jacob Rothschild. Genie Energy is
controversial primarily for its exclusive rights to drill in the Israeli-occupied Golan
Heights. Bill Richardson also has ties to Lynn Forester de Rothschild as she was on the
Secretary of Energy's Advisory Board while
Richardson was secretary of energy.
Bill Richardson appears to be among the Clinton era officials closest to Jeffrey Epstein,
having
personally visited Epstein's New Mexico ranch and been the recipient of Epstein donations
of $50,000 to his 2002 and 2006 gubernatorial campaigns. Richardson gave Epstein's donation in
2006 to charity after allegations against Epstein were made public. Richardson was also accused
in recently released court documents of engaging in sex with Epstein's underage victims, an
allegation that he has denied.
In 1990, Danny Casolaro began his fateful one-year investigation of "the Octopus," an
investigation that played no small role in his untimely death. Shortly after he was found
lifeless in a hotel bathtub, Casolaro's friend Lynn Knowles was threatened and told the following : "What
Danny Casolaro was investigating is a business Anyone who asks too many questions will end up
dead."
Nearly thirty years later, that same "Octopus" and its "business" remains with us and has
become ever more wrapped around the levers of power -- particularly in the worlds of
government, finance and intelligence.
This MintPress investigative series has endeavored to show the nature of this network
and how the world of "the Octopus" is the same world in which Jeffrey Epstein and his
predecessors -- Craig Spence, Edwin Wilson and Roy Cohn among them -- operated and profited. It
is a world where all that matters is the constant drive to accumulate ever more wealth and ever
more power and to keep the racket going at all costs.
While this network has long been able to ensure its success through the use of sexual
blackmail, often acquired by the unconscionable exploitation of children, it has also been a
driving force behind many other ills that plague our world and it goes far beyond human and
child trafficking. Indeed, many of the figures in this same sordid web have played a major role
in the illicit drug and weapons trades, the expansion of for-profit prisons, and the endless
wars that have claimed an untold number of lives across the world, all the while enriching many
of these same individuals.
Earlier this week, the Observer reported on a spat that had broken out between a
division of the giant Samsung empire and the American hedge fund Elliott Management. The
most newsworthy feature of the dispute involved a series of articles on Korean business
sites that pointedly criticized Elliott's CEO Paul Singer and directly attacked him for
being Jewish, noting that "Jewish money has long been known to be ruthless and merciless"
and claiming "It is a well-known fact that the US government is swayed by Jewish
capital."
"Do the Jews Really Control America?" asked one Chinese newsweekly headline in 2009. The
factoids doled out in such articles and in books about Jews in China -- for example: "The
world's wealth is in Americans' pockets; Americans are in Jews' pockets" -- would rightly
be seen to be alarming in other contexts. But in China, where Jews are widely perceived as
clever and accomplished, they are meant as compliments. Scan the shelves in any bookstore
in China and you are likely to find best-selling self-help books based on Jewish knowledge.
Most focus on how to make cash. Titles range from 101 Money Earning Secrets From Jews'
Notebooks to Learn To Make Money With the Jews.
It turns out that the US military hires more shills and clowns and runs more "news"
worldwide than all the real news agencies, combined.
For Soetoro to turn this $hit loose on us exposes his truly sinister intent. Here you all
are, thinking the bull$hit on TV is remotely relevant other than exposing the gangsters who
direct it and rob us to pay for it against our will.
All these High Crimes on Pelosi and Schumer's watch.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_Information_Awareness
was shut down in 2003 by Congress after dinosaur exposed mass surveillance abuses
establishing "Total Information Awareness" over all US citizens. The program was continued in
overt defiance of Congress through Trillions in black funding.
Or you could just point to the massive expansion of debt and reduction of freedoms signed
by Trump last night while the whole government was telling you "nothing up my sleeve!"
"... oligarchic greed; a military dedicated to protecting the wealth of oligarchs; and, wars over resources. Granted Bill Clinton began the current charade about 'humanitarian wars' but it was Bush II and Obama who turned our focus into resource wars and the hegemons (Malignant Overlords) who decided it was time to take it all. ..."
Long ago (1968) after returning from Vietnam with a bullet hole in my leg (my 90 wonder, post-ROTC officer shot me when he
panicked) I wondered off to a down-at-the-heel cow college. There I took a class and C Wright Mills 'The Power Elite' was required
reading.
I had just finished 'War is a fraud' and read an article by Paul Ehrlich an then 'The Population Bomb' shortly thereafter.
The three books created an interesting fusion in my mind:
More or less after the year 2000 the world would be plagued by resource wars;
The primary role of the military is to enforce what capitalists want; and
Behind the alleged scenes of our form of government hovered oligarchs who would demand more and more.
I recently found a paper I had written long ago. It wasn't very well written, but even then the handwriting was on the wall:
oligarchic greed; a military dedicated to protecting the wealth of oligarchs; and, wars over resources. Granted Bill Clinton
began the current charade about 'humanitarian wars' but it was Bush II and Obama who turned our focus into resource wars and the
hegemons (Malignant Overlords) who decided it was time to take it all.
I guess the point of all of this is (except for the details) Ehrlich, Mills and Butler warned us. As did Huxley and Orwell
... we were just too damned dumb (or distracted) to see it.
Maybe with the Queen of Chaos, the above will result in either annihilation or in a severe reduction in the numbers of people
... (hopefully including all of the oligarchic class) and the chance to start over?
Nah ... we'll just fuck it up again ... as a species we refuse to learn. Sigh ...
"... Every US military action and ultimatum to a foreign state has been aggressively pushed by the losing Democrats and particularly 'liberal' mainstream media, any dissent met with smears, censorship or worse. I would argue that today similarities with events leading up to previous global conflicts are too striking and numerous to ignore. ..."
"... Israel and its US relationship – I think Syria is where global conflict is still likely to start. As Syria has been winning, the involvement of Turkey and Saudi Arabia appears to receding. More recently Israel have taken their place and is relentless and unyielding and has its own wider, destructive plans for the Middle East. Israeli influence in the US is now so great that the US has more or less ceded its foreign policy in the Middle East to Israel. In 1914 Austro-Hungary pursued a series of impossible demands against Serbia managing to drag its close and more powerful ally Germany (led by someone equally as obstinate and militaristic as the US leadership) into World War I. Incidentally, some readers may have noticed the similarity between the 1914 diktats and modern-day US bullying towards Venezuala and other states – and perhaps most striking, by Saudi Arabia in its dispute with Qatar not long ago ..."
"... Ideology, paranoia and unstable leaders – history tells us that ideology, paranoia and power are not a good mix and this is in abundance in western elites and media. These establishments are rabidly hostile to Iran and Russia. ..."
"... Media deception and propaganda – The media have been responsible for getting us to where we are today. Without them, the public would have woken up long ago. Much of the deception has been about the presentation of the narrative and the leaders. And it's been a campaign of distraction on our news where the daily genocide in Yemen gives way to sensationalised non-events and celebrity trivia. ..."
"... Appeasement – because of its relative weakness and not wanting a war, Russia has to some extent appeased Western and Israeli aggression in Syria and beyond. To be fair, given the aggression it faces I don't think Russia has had much choice than playing for time. However at some point soon, with the West pushing more and more, something will have to give. Likewise, in the 1930s a militarily unprepared UK and France appeased Germany's expansion. The more they backed off the more Germany pushed until war was the only way. ..."
"... False flags – for those watching events in Syria know that the majority of the 'chemical attacks' have been carried out by Western supported opposition. The timing and nature of these suggest co-ordination at the highest levels. Intelligence Services of the UK and other agencies are believed to co-ordinate these fabrications to provoke a western response aimed at the Syrian Army. On more than one occasion these incidents have nearly escalated to a direct conflict with Russia showing the dangerous game being played by those involved and those pushing the false narrative in the media ..."
As a history student years ago I remember our teacher explaining how past events are linked to what happens in the future. He
told us human behaviour always dictates that events will repeat in a similar way as before. I remember we studied 20th century history
and discussed World War I and the links to World War II. At this time, we were in the middle of the Cold War and in unchartered waters
and I couldn't really link past events to what was likely to happen next. Back then I guess like many I considered US presidents
more as statesman. They talked tough on the Soviet Union but they talked peace too. So, the threat to humanity was very different
then to now. Dangerous but perhaps a stable kind of dangerous. After the break up of the Soviet Union we then went through a phase
of disorderly change in the world. In the early 1990s the war in the Former Yugoslavia erupted and spread from republic to republic.
Up until the mid-to-late nineties I didn't necessarily sense that NATO and the West were the new threat to humanity. While there
was a clear bias to events in Yugoslavia there was still some even-handedness or fairness. Or so I thought. This all changed in 1999
with the war in Kosovo. For the first time I witnessed shocking images of civilian targets being bombed, TV stations, trains, bridges
and so on. But my wake-up call was the daily NATO briefings on the war. The NATO spokesman boasted of hundreds of Serbian tanks being
destroyed. There was something new and disturbing about his manner, language and tone, something I'd not encountered from coverage
of previous conflicts. For the first time I found myself not believing one word of the narrative.
When the peace agreement was reached, out of 300 Serbian tanks which had entered Kosovo at the start of the conflict, over 285
were counted going back into Serbia proper which was
confirmation he had been
lying .
From this conflict onwards I started to see clear parallels with events of the past and some striking similarities with the lead
up to previous world wars. This all hit home when observing events in Syria and more recently Venezuala. But looking around seeing
people absorbed in their phones you wouldn't think the world is on the brink of war. For most of us with little time to watch world
events there are distractions which have obscured the picture historians and geopolitical experts see more clearly.
Recent and current
western leaders haven't been short people in military uniform shouting. That would be far too obvious. It's still military conflict
and mass murder but in smart suits with liberal sound-bites and high-fives. Then the uncool, uncouth conservative Trump came along
and muddied the waters.
Briefly it seemed there might be hope that these wars would stop. But there can be little doubt he's been
put under pressure to comply with the regime change culture embedded in the Deep State. Today, through their incendiary language
we see US leaders morphing into the open style dictators of the past. The only thing missing are the military uniforms and hats.
Every US military action and ultimatum to a foreign state has been aggressively pushed by the losing Democrats and particularly 'liberal'
mainstream media, any dissent met with smears, censorship or worse. I would argue that today similarities with events leading up
to previous global conflicts are too striking and numerous to ignore.
Let's look at some of these:
1) Military build up, alliances and proxy wars – for all the chaos and mass murder pursued by the Obama Administration he did
achieve limited successes in signing agreements with Iran and Cuba. But rather than reverse the endless wars as promised Trump cancels
the agreements leaving the grand sum of zilch foreign policy achievements. NATO has been around for 70 years, but in the last 20
or so has become obsessed with military build up. Nowadays it has hundreds of bases around the world but keeps destablising non-aligned
states, partly to isolate Russia and China. And Syria sums up the dangers of the regime change model used today. With over a dozen
states involved in the proxy war there is a still high risk of conflict breaking out between US and Russia. The motives for military
build up are many. First there are powerful people in the arms industry and media who benefit financially from perpetual war. The
US while powerful in military terms are a declining power which will continue, new powers emerging. The only return on their money
they can see is through military build up. Also there are many in government, intelligence services and media who can see that if
the current order continues to crumble they are likely to be prosecuted for various crimes. All this explains the threatening language
and the doubling-down on those who challenge them. In 1914, Europe had two backward thinking military alliance blocks and Sarajevo
showed how one event could trigger an unstoppable escalation dragging in many states. And empires such as Austro-Hungary were crumbling
from within as they are now. So a similar mentality prevails today where the powerful in these empires under threat favour conflict
to peace. For these individuals it's a last throw of the dice and a gamble with all our lives.
2) Israel and its US relationship – I think Syria is where global conflict is still likely to start. As Syria has been winning,
the involvement of Turkey and Saudi Arabia appears to receding. More recently Israel have taken their place and is relentless and
unyielding and has its own wider, destructive plans for the Middle East. Israeli influence in the US is now so great that the US
has more or less ceded its foreign policy in the Middle East to Israel. In 1914 Austro-Hungary pursued a
series of impossible
demands against Serbia managing to drag its close and more powerful ally Germany (led by someone equally as obstinate and militaristic
as the US leadership) into World War I. Incidentally, some readers may have noticed the similarity between the 1914 diktats and modern-day
US bullying towards Venezuala and other states – and perhaps most striking, by Saudi Arabia in its dispute with
Qatar not long ago.
3) Ideology, paranoia and unstable leaders – history tells us that ideology, paranoia and power are not a good mix and this is
in abundance in western elites and media. These establishments are rabidly hostile to Iran and Russia. In addition we face a situation
of highly unpredictable, ideological regional leaders in Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Israel. Most worrying of all, the language, threats
and actions of Trump, Pompeo and Bolton suggests there are psychopathic tendencies in play. Behind this is a Deep State and Democrat
Party pushing even harder for conflict. The level of paranoia is discouraging any notion of peace. 30 years ago Russia and US would
sit down at a summit and reach a consensus. Today a US leader or diplomat seen talking to a Russian official is accused of collusion.
When there are limited channels to talk in a crisis, you know we are in trouble. In Germany in the 1930s, ideology, propaganda and
creating enemies were key in getting the population on side for war. The leaders within the Nazi clique, Hitler, Goring and Himmler
look disturbingly similar to the Trump, Pompeo, Bolton line up.
4) Media deception and propaganda – The media have been responsible for getting us to where we are today. Without them, the public
would have woken up long ago. Much of the deception has been about the presentation of the narrative and the leaders. And it's been
a campaign of distraction on our news where the daily genocide in Yemen gives way to sensationalised non-events and celebrity trivia.
The terms and words; regime change, mass murder and terrorist have all been substituted by the media with 'humanitarian intervention',
'limited airstrikes' and 'moderate rebels' to fool a distracted public that the victims of the aggression are the bad guys. Western
funded 'fact checking' sites such as Bellingcat have appeared pushing the misdirections to a surreal new level. Obama was portayed
in the media as a cool guy and a little 'soft' on foreign policy. This despite the carnage in Libya, Syria and his drones. Sentiments
of equal rights and diversity fill the home affairs sections in the liberal press, while callous indifference and ethno-centrism
towards the Middle East and Russia dominate foreign affairs pages. In the press generally, BREXIT, non-existent anti-Semitism and
nonsense about the 'ISIS bride' continues unabated. This media circus seeks to distract from important matters, using these topics
to create pointless divisions, causing hostility towards Muslims and Jews in the process. The majority of a distracted public have
still not twigged largely because the propaganda is more subtle nowadays and presented under a false humanitarian cloak. A small
but vocal group of experts and journalists challenging these narratives are regularly smeared as
Putin
or Assad "apologists" . UK journalists are regularly caught out lying and some long standing hoaxes such as Russiagate exposed.
Following this and Iraq WMDs more people are starting to see a pattern here. Yet each time the media in the belief they've bamboozled
enough move on to the next big lie. This a sign of a controlled media which has reached the point of being unaccountable and untouchable,
deeply embedded within the establishment apparatus. In the lead up to World War II the Nazis ran an effective media propaganda campaign
which indoctrinated the population. The media in Germany also reached the point their blindingly obvious lies were rarely questioned.
The classic tactic was to blame others for the problems in Germany and the world and project their crimes on to their victims. There
are some differences as things have evolved. The Nazis created the media and state apparatus to pursue war. Nowadays this is the
opposite way around. Instead the state apparatus is already in place so whoever is leader whether they describe themself as liberal
or conservative, is merely a figurehead required to continue the same pro-war policies. Put a fresh-looking president in a shiny
suit and intoduce him to the Queen and you wouldn't think he's the biggest mass murderer since Hitler. Although there are some differences
in the propaganda techniques, all the signs are that today's media are on a similar war-footing as Germany's was just prior to the
outbreak of World War II.
5) Appeasement – because of its relative weakness and not wanting a war, Russia has to some extent appeased Western and Israeli
aggression in Syria and beyond. To be fair, given the aggression it faces I don't think Russia has had much choice than playing for
time. However at some point soon, with the West pushing more and more, something will have to give. Likewise, in the 1930s a militarily
unprepared UK and France appeased Germany's expansion. The more they backed off the more Germany pushed until war was the only way.
6) False flags – for those watching events in Syria know that the majority of the 'chemical attacks' have been carried out by
Western supported opposition. The timing and nature of these suggest co-ordination at the highest levels. Intelligence Services of
the UK and other agencies are believed to co-ordinate these fabrications to provoke a western response aimed at the Syrian Army.
On more than one occasion these incidents have nearly escalated to a direct conflict with Russia showing the dangerous game being
played by those involved and those pushing the false narrative in the media. The next flashpoint in Syria is Idlib, where it's highly
likely a new chemical fabrication will be attempted this Spring. In the 1930s the Nazis were believed to use false flags with increasing
frequency to discredit and close down internal opposition. Summary – We now live in a society where exposing warmongering is a more
serious crime than committing it. Prisons hold many people who have bravely exposed war crimes – yet most criminals continue to walk
free and hold positions of power. And when the media is pushing for Julian Assange to be extradicted you know this is beyond simple
envy of a man who has almost single-handedly done the job they've collectively failed to do. They are equally complicit in warmongering
hence why they see Assange and others as a threat. For those not fooled by the smart suits, liberal platitudes and media distraction
techniques, the parallels with Germany in the 1930s in particular are now fairly obvious. The blundering military alliances of 1914
and the pure evil of 1939 – with the ignorance, indifference and narcissism described above make for a destructive mix. Unless something
changes soon our days on this planet are likely be numbered. Depressing but one encouraging thing is that the indisputable truth
is now in plain sight for anyone with internet access to see and false narratives have collapsed before. It's still conceivable that
something may create a whole chain of events which sweep these dangerous parasites from power. So anything can happen. In the meantime
we should keep positive and continue to spread the message.
Kevin Smith is a British citizen living and working in London. He researches and writes down his thoughts on the foreign wars
promoted by Western governments and media. In the highly controlled and dumbed down UK media environment, he's keen on exploring
ways of discouraging ideology and tribalism in favour of free thinking.
2- 'Israel and its US relationship'. The 'hands off' policy of the Western powers, guarantees that Syria cannot even be a trigger
to any 'global conflict', supposing that a 'global conflict' was on the cards, especially when Russia is just a crumbling shadow
of the USSR and China a giant with feet of clay, heavily dependent on Western oligarchic goodwill, to maintain its economy and
its technological progress.
In 1914, the Serbian crisis was just trigger of WWI and not a true cause. It is not even clear if it was Germany that dragged
Austria-Hungary into the war or Russia. Although there was a possibility (only a possibility), that a swift and 'illegal' attack
by Austria-Hungary (without an ultimatum), would have localised and contained the conflict.
There is no similarity whatsoever between the 1914 'diktats' and modern US policy, as the US is the sole Superpower and its
acts are not opposed by a balancing and corresponding alliance. Save in the Chinese colony of North Korea, where the US is restrained
by a tacit alliance of the North Eastern Asiatic powers: China, Russia, Japan and South Korea, that oppose any military action
and so promote and protect North Korean bullying. Qatar, on the other hand, is one of the most radical supporters of the Syrian
opposition and terrorist groups around the muslim world, even more than Saudi Arabia and there are powerful reasons for the confrontation
of the Gulf rivals.
You should go back in Time and STUDY what really happened .. that means going back to the Creation of the socalled British Empire
..the Bank of England , the British East Indian Company , the Opium Wars and the Opium Trafficing , the Boer Wars for Gold and
Diamonds , the US Civil War and its aftermath , the manipulations of Gold and Silver by socalled british Financial Interests ,
The US Spanish Wars , the Japanese Russian War , the failed Coup against Czar Russia 1905 , the Young Turk Coup against the Ottoman
Empire 1908, the Armenian Genocide , the Creation of the Federal Reserve 1913 , the Multitude of Assinations and other Terror
Attacks in the period from 1900 and upwards , WHO were the perpetraders ? , , WW 1 and its originators , the Bolshevik Coup 1917
, the Treaty of Versailles and the Actors in that Treaty ,the Plunder of Germany , the dissolution of Austria Hungary , the Bolshevik
Coup attempts all over Europe , and then the run up to WW 2 , the Actions of Poland agianst Germans and Czechs .. Hitler , Musolini
and finally WW 2 .the post war period , the Nuernberg Trials , the Holocaust Mythology , the Creation of Israel , Gladio , the
Fall of the Sovjet Empire and the Warshav Pact , the Wars in the Middle East , the endless Terror Actions , the murder of Kennedy
and a mass of False Flag Terrorist Attacks since then , the destruction of the Balkans and the Middle east THERE IS PLENTY of
EXCELLENT LITERATURE and ANALYSIS on all subjects .
It was your Obama that 'persecuted' Mr Assange !!!
Syria demonstrates that there has NOT been a Western strategy for regime change (specially after the 'defeats' in Iraq and
Afghanistan), let alone a proxy war, but, on the contrary, an effort to keep the tyranny of Assad in power, in a weaker state,
to avoid any strong, 'revolutionary' rival near Israel. Russia has been given a free hand in Syria, otherwise, if the West had
properly armed the resistance groups, it would have been a catastrophe for the Russian forces, like it was in Afghanistan during
the Soviet intervention.
Trump's policy of 'equal' (proportional) contributions for all members of NATO and other allies, gives the lie to the US military
return 'argument' and should be understood as part of his war on unfair competition by other powers.
The 'military' and diplomatic alliances of 1914 were FORWARD thinking, so much so that they 'repeated' themselves during WWII,
with slight changes. But it is very doubtful that the Empires, like the Austro-Hungarian o the Russian ones, would have 'crumbled'
without the outbreak of WWI. They were never under threat, as their military power during the war showed. Only a World War of
cataclysmic character could destroy them. A war, triggered, but not created, by the 'conflict seeking mentality' of the powerful
in the small countries of the Balkans.
Generally attributed to Senator Hiram Warren Johnson in 1918 that 'when war comes the first casualty is truth' is as much a truism
now as it was then.
I'm more inclined to support hauptmanngurski's proposition that the members of the armed forces, from both sides, who return
from conflicts with life-changing injuries or even in flag-draped caskets defended only the freedom of multinational enterprises
and conglomerates to make and continue to make vast profits for the privileged few at the population's expense.
As Kevin Smith makes abundantly clear we are all subject to the downright lies and truth-stretching from our government aided
and abetted by a compliant main stream media as exemplified in the Skripal poisoning affair, which goes far beyond the counting
of Serbian tanks supposedly destroyed during the Balkans conflict. The Skripals' are now God knows where either as willing participants
or as detainees and our government shows no signs of clarifying the matter, so who would believe what it put out anyway in view
of its track record of misinformation ? The nation doesn't know what to believe.
Sadly, I believe this has always been the way of things and I cannot even speculate on how long it will be before this nation
will realise it is being deliberately mis-led.
In any case withdrawal from Syria was a surprising and bold move on the Part of the Trump. You can criticizes Trump for not doing
more but before that he bahvaves as a typical neocon, or a typical Republican presidents (which are the same things). And he started
on this path just two month after inauguration bombing Syria under false pretences. So this is something
I think the reason of change is that Trump intuitively realized the voters are abandoning him in droves and the sizable faction
of his voters who voted for him because of his promises to end foreign wars iether already defected or is ready to defect. So this is
a move designed to keep them.
Notable quotes:
"... "America shouldn't be doing the fighting for every nation on earth, not being reimbursed in many cases at all. If they want us to do the fighting, they also have to pay a price," Trump said. ..."
President Trump's big announcement to pull US troops out of Syria and Afghanistan is now emerging less as a peace move, and more
a rationalization of American military power in the Middle East. In a surprise visit to US forces in Iraq this week, Trump
said he had no intention of withdrawing the troops in that country, who have been there for nearly 15 years since GW Bush invaded
back in 2003.
Hinting at private discussions with commanders in Iraq, Trump boasted that US forces would in the future launch attacks from there
into Syria if and when needed. Presumably that rapid force deployment would apply to other countries in the region, including Afghanistan.
In other words, in typical business-style transactional thinking, Trump sees the pullout from Syria and Afghanistan as a cost-cutting
exercise for US imperialism. Regarding Syria, he has bragged about Turkey being assigned, purportedly, to "finish off" terror
groups. That's Trump subcontracting out US interests.
Critics and supporters of Trump are confounded. After his Syria and Afghanistan pullout call, domestic critics and NATO allies
have accused him of walking from the alleged "fight against terrorism" and of ceding strategic ground to US adversaries Russia
and Iran.
Meanwhile, Trump's supporters have viewed his decision in more benign light, cheering the president for "sticking it to"
the deep state and military establishment, assuming he's delivering on electoral promises to end overseas wars.
However, neither view gets what is going on. Trump is not scaling back US military power; he is rationalizing it like a cost-benefit
analysis, as perhaps only a real-estate-wheeler-dealer-turned president would appreciate. Trump is not snubbing US militarism or
NATO allies, nor is he letting loose an inner peace spirit. He is as committed to projecting American military as ruthlessly and
as recklessly as any other past occupant of the White House. The difference is Trump wants to do it on the cheap.
Here's what he said to reporters on Air Force One before touching down in Iraq:
"The United States cannot continue to be the policeman of the world. It's not fair when the burden is all on us, the United
States We are spread out all over the world. We are in countries most people haven't even heard about. Frankly, it's ridiculous."
He added: "We're no longer the suckers, folks."
Laughably, Trump's griping about US forces "spread all over the world" unwittingly demonstrates the insatiable, monstrous
nature of American militarism. But Trump paints this vice as a virtue, which, he complains, Washington gets no thanks for from the
150-plus countries around the globe that its forces are present in.
As US troops greeted him in Iraq, the president made explicit how the new American militarism would henceforth operate.
"America shouldn't be doing the fighting for every nation on earth, not being reimbursed in many cases at all. If they want
us to do the fighting, they also have to pay a price," Trump said.
This reiterates a big bugbear for this president in which he views US allies and client regimes as "not pulling their weight"
in terms of military deployment. Trump has been browbeating European NATO members to cough up more on military budgets, and he has
berated the Saudis
and other Gulf Arab regimes to pay more for American interventions.
Notably, however, Trump has never questioned the largesse that US taxpayers fork out every year to Israel in the form of nearly
$4 billion in military aid. To be sure, that money is not a gift because much of it goes back to the Pentagon from sales of fighter
jets and missile systems.
The long-held notion that the US has served as the "world's policeman" is, of course, a travesty.
Since WWII, all presidents and the Washington establishment have constantly harped on, with self-righteousness, about America's
mythical role as guarantor of global security.
Dozens of illegal wars on almost every continent and millions of civilian deaths attest to the real, heinous conduct of American
militarism as a weapon to secure US corporate capitalism.
But with US economic power in historic decline amid a national debt now over $22 trillion, Washington can no longer afford its
imperialist conduct in the traditional mode of direct US military invasions and occupations.
Perhaps, it takes a cost-cutting, raw-toothed capitalist like Trump to best understand the historic predicament, even if only
superficially.
This gives away the real calculation behind his troop pullout from Syria and Afghanistan. Iraq is going to serve as a new regional
hub for force projection on a demand-and-supply basis. In addition, more of the dirty work can be contracted out to Washington's
clients like Turkey, Israel and Saudi Arabia, who will be buying even more US weaponry to prop the military-industrial complex.
This would explain why Trump made his hurried, unexpected visit to Iraq this week. Significantly, he
said
: "A lot of people are going to come around to my way of thinking", regarding his decision on withdrawing forces from Syria
and Afghanistan.
Since his troop pullout plan announced on December 19, there has been serious pushback from senior Pentagon figures, hawkish Republicans
and Democrats, and the anti-Trump media. The atmosphere is almost seditious against the president. Trump flying off to Iraq on Christmas
night was
reportedly his first visit to troops in an overseas combat zone since becoming president two years ago.
What Trump seemed to be doing was reassuring the Pentagon and corporate America that he is not going all soft and dovish. Not
at all. He is letting them know that he is aiming for a leaner, meaner US military power, which can save money on the number of foreign
bases by using rapid reaction forces out of places like Iraq, as well as by subcontracting operations out to regional clients.
Thus, Trump is not coming clean out of any supposed principle when he cuts back US forces overseas. He is merely applying his
knack for screwing down costs and doing things on the cheap as a capitalist tycoon overseeing US militarism.
During past decades when American capitalism was relatively robust, US politicians and media could indulge in the fantasy of their
military forces going around the world in large-scale formations to selflessly "defend freedom and democracy."
Today, US capitalism is broke. It simply can't sustain its global military empire. Enter Donald Trump with his "business solutions."
But in doing so, this president, with his cheap utilitarianism and transactional exploitative mindset, lets the cat out of the
bag. As he says, the US cannot be the world's policeman. Countries are henceforth going to have to pay for "our protection."
Inadvertently, Trump is showing up US power for what it really is: a global thug running a protection racket.
It's always been the case. Except now it's in your face. Trump is no Smedley Butler, the former Marine general who in the 1930s
condemned US militarism as a Mafia operation. This president is stupidly revealing the racket, while still thinking it is something
virtuous.
Finian Cunningham (born 1963) has written extensively on international affairs, with articles published in several languages.
Originally from Belfast, Northern Ireland, he is a Master's graduate in Agricultural Chemistry and worked as a scientific editor
for the Royal Society of Chemistry, Cambridge, England, before pursuing a career in newspaper journalism. For over 20 years he worked
as an editor and writer in major news media organizations, including The Mirror, Irish Times and Independent. Now a freelance journalist
based in East Africa, his columns appear on RT, Sputnik, Strategic Culture Foundation and Press TV.
dnm1136
Once again, Cunningham has hit the nail on the head. Trump mistakenly conflates fear with respect. In reality, around the world,
the US is feared but generally not respected.
My guess is that the same was true about Trump as a businessman, i.e., he was not respected, only feared due to his willingness
to pursue his "deals" by any means that "worked" for him, legal or illegal, moral or immoral, seemingly gracious or mean-spirited.
William Smith
Complaining how the US gets no thanks for its foreign intervention. Kind of like a rapist claiming he should be thanked for
"pleasuring" his victim. Precisely the same sentiment expressed by those who believe the American Indians should thank the Whites
for "civilising" them.
Phoebe S,
"Washington gets no thanks for from the 150-plus countries around the globe that its forces are present in."
That might mean they don't want you there. Just saying.
ProRussiaPole
None of these wars are working out for the US strategically. All they do is sow chaos. They seem to not be gaining anything,
and are just preventing others from gaining anything as well.
Ernie For -> ProRussiaPole
i am a huge Putin fan, so is big Don. Please change your source of info Jerome, Trump is one man against Billions of people
and dollars in corruption. He has achieved more in the USA in 2 years than all 5 previous parasites together.
Truthbetold69
It could be a change for a better direction. Time will tell. 'If you do what you've always been doing, you'll get what you've
always been getting.'
"... While I admire America's democratic society, I hate how America brought wars and chaos to the world in guise of "freedom and liberation". ..."
"... Was it necessary to bomb civilians of Ossetia for Georgia to get rid of Russia? Was it necessary to provoke a coup d'état against fully legitimate and democratically elected government in Ukraine? Life isn't fair indeed : not only they will never enter in NATO (even less EU) and no one will protect them, but they can say farewell to the land they lost. People in Georgia and Ukraine are less and less gullible and Pro Russians sentiment is gaining ground btw. Ask yourself why ? ..."
"... Sphere of influence, the same reason why Cuba and Venezuela will pay for their insolence against the hegemon. The world is never a fair place. ..."
While I admire America's democratic society, I hate how America brought wars and chaos to the world in guise of "freedom and
liberation".
I hate how America exploit the weak. president moon should offer an olive branch to fatty Kim by sending back the
thaad to America and pulling out American base and troops. he should convince fatty Kim that should he really like to proliferate
his nuclear missile development as deterrence, aim it only to America and America only. there is no need for Koreans to kill fellow
Koreans.
Very good idea, after having pushed Ukraine and Georgia to a war lost in advance, lets hope US will abandon South Korea and
Japan because they were helpless in demilitarizing one of the poorest countries in the world....
Was it necessary to bomb civilians of Ossetia for Georgia to get rid of Russia?
Was it necessary to provoke a coup d'état against fully legitimate and democratically elected government in Ukraine? Life
isn't fair indeed : not only they will never enter in NATO (even less EU) and no one will protect them, but they can say
farewell to the land they lost. People in Georgia and Ukraine are less and less gullible and Pro Russians sentiment is gaining
ground btw. Ask yourself why ?
In this person's opinion, the article raises a good point with regards to US defense subsidies. However, its examples are dissimilar.
Japan spends approximately 1% of its GDP on defense; South Korea spends roughly 2.5% of its GDP defense.
In fact, it seems to this person that a better example of US Defense Welfare would be direct subsidies granted to the state
of Israel.
"... Barnett's main thesis in "The Pentagon's New Map" is that the world is composed of two types of states: those that are part of an integrated and connected "Core," which embrace globalization; and states of the "Gap," which are disconnected from the effects of globalization. Barnett proclaims that globalization will move the world into an era of peace and prosperity, but can only do so with the help of an indispensable United States. He writes that America is the lynchpin to the entire process and he believes that the United States should be midwife to a new world that will one day consist of peaceful democratic states and integrated economies. Barnett is proposing no less than a new grand strategy - the historical successor to the Cold War's strategy of containment. His approach to a future world defined by America's "exportation of security" is almost religious in its fervor and messianic in its language. ..."
"... At this point in his book, Barnett also makes bold statements that America is never leaving the Gap and that we are therefore never "bringing our boys home." He believes that there is no exiting the Gap, only shrinking it. These statements have incited some of Barnett's critics to accuse him of fostering and advocating a state of perpetual war. Barnett rebuts these attacks by claiming that, "America's task is not perpetual war, nor the extension of empire. It is merely to serve as globalization's bodyguard wherever and whenever needed throughout the Gap." Barnett claims that the strategy of preemptive war is a "boundable problem," yet his earlier claim that we are never leaving the Gap and that our boys are never coming home does not square with his assertion that there will not be perpetual war. He cannot have it both ways. ..."
"... Barnett therefore undermines his own globalization-based grand strategy by pointing out in detail at least ten things that can go wrong with globalization - the foundation upon which his theory is built. ..."
"... Globalization is likely here to stay, though it may be slowed down or even stopped in some regions of the planet. ..."
"... I would strongly recommend "The Pentagon's New Map" to students who are studying U.S. foreign policy. I would also recommend it to those who are studying the Bush administration as well as the Pentagon. The ideas in the book seem to be popular with the military and many of its ideas can be seen in the current thinking and policy of the Pentagon and State Department. ..."
"... I would only caution the reader that Barnett's theories are heavily dependent upon the continued advancement of globalization, which in turn is dependent upon the continued economic ability of the U.S. to sustain military operations around the world indefinitely. Neither is guaranteed. ..."
"... "Globalization" has turned out to be nothing but the polite PR term to disguise and avoid the truth of using the more accurate name, "Global Empire" --- and there is no doubt that Barnett is more than smart enough to see that this has inexorably happened. ..."
"... Liberty, democracy, justice, and equality Over Violent/'Vichy' Rel 2.0 Empire, ..."
"... We don't MERELY have; a gun/fear problem, or a 'Fiscal Cliff', 'Sequestration', and 'Debt Limit' problem, or an expanding wars problem, or a 'drone assassinations' problem, or a vast income & wealth inequality problem, or a Wall Street 'looting' problem, or a Global Warming and environmental death-spiral problem, or a domestic tyranny NDAA FISA spying problem, or, or, or, or .... ad nauseam --- we have a hidden EMPIRE cancerous tumor which is the prime CAUSE of all these 'symptom problems'. ..."
"... "If your country is treating you like ****, and bombing abroad, look carefully --- because it may not be your country, but a Global Empire only posing as your former country." ..."
Barnett's main thesis in "The Pentagon's New Map" is that the world is composed of two types of states: those that are
part of an integrated and connected "Core," which embrace globalization; and states of the "Gap," which are disconnected from
the effects of globalization. Barnett proclaims that globalization will move the world into an era of peace and prosperity, but
can only do so with the help of an indispensable United States. He writes that America is the lynchpin to the entire process and
he believes that the United States should be midwife to a new world that will one day consist of peaceful democratic states and
integrated economies. Barnett is proposing no less than a new grand strategy - the historical successor to the Cold War's strategy
of containment. His approach to a future world defined by America's "exportation of security" is almost religious in its fervor
and messianic in its language.
The foundation upon which Barnett builds his binary view of the world is heavily dependant upon the continued advancement of
globalization - almost exclusively so. However, advancing globalization is not pre-ordained. Barnett himself makes the case that
globalization is a fragile undertaking similar to an interconnected chain in which any broken link destroys the whole. Globalization
could indeed be like the biblical statue whose feet are made of clay. Globalization, and therefore the integration of the Gap,
may even stop or recede - just as the globalization of the early 20th century ended abruptly with the onset of WW I and a global
depression. Moreover, Barnett's contention that the United States has an exceptional duty and moral responsibility for "remaking
the world in America's image" might be seen by many as misguided and perhaps even dangerous.
The divide between the `Functioning Core' and the `Non-Integrating Gap' differs from the gulf between rich and poor in a subtle
yet direct way. State governments make a conscious decision to become connected vs. disconnected to advancing globalization. States
and their leaders can provide the infrastructure and the opening of large global markets to their citizens in ways that individuals
cannot. An example can serve to illustrate the point: You can be rich and disconnected in Nigeria or poor and disconnected in
North Korea. In each case the country you live in has decided to be disconnected. Citizens in this case have a limited likelihood
of staying rich and unlimited prospects of staying poor. But by becoming part of the functioning Core, the enlightened state allows
all citizens a running start at becoming part of a worldwide economic system and thus provide prospects for a better future because
global jobs and markets are opened up to them. A connected economy such as India's, for example, enables citizens who once had
no prospects for a better life to find well-paying jobs, such as computer-related employment. Prospects for a better Indian life
are directly the result of the Indian government's conscious decision to become connected to the world economy, a.k.a. embracing
globalization.
After placing his theory of the Core/Gap and preemptive war strategy firmly into the church of globalization, Barnett next
places his theory squarely upon the alter of rule sets. Few would argue that the world is an anarchic place and Barnett tells
us that rule sets are needed to define `good' and `evil' behavior of actors in this chaotic international system. An example of
such a rule set is the desire of the Core to keep WMDs out of the hands of terrorist organizations. Other examples are the promulgation
of human rights and the need to stop genocide. Barnett also uses rule sets to define `system' rules that govern and shape the
actions, and even the psychology, of international actors. An example that Barnett gives of a system-wide rule set is the creation
of the `rule' defined by the United States during the Cold War called Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD). Barnett claims that this
rule set effectively ended the possibility of war for all time amongst nuclear-capable great powers. Barnett states that the U.S.
now should export a brand new rule set called `preemptive war,' which aims to fight actors in the lawless Gap in order to end
international terrorism for all time. Barnett makes it clear that the Core's enemy is neither a religion (Islam) nor a place (Middle
East), but a condition (disconnectedness).
Next, Barnett points out that system-wide competition has moved into the economic arena and that military conflict, when it
occurs, has moved away from the system-wide (Cold War), to inter-state war, ending up today with primarily state conflict vs.
individuals (Core vs. bin Laden, Core vs. Kim, etc.). In other words, "we are moving progressively away from warfare against states
or even blocs of states and toward a new era of warfare against individuals." Rephrased, we've moved from confrontations with
evil empires, to evil states, to evil leaders. An example of this phenomenon is the fact that China dropped off the radar of many
government hawks after 9/11 only to be replaced by terrorist groups and other dangerous NGOs "with global reach."
Barnett also points out that the idea of `connectivity' is central to the success of globalization. Without it, everything
else fails. Connectivity is the glue that holds states together and helps prevent war between states. For example, the US is not
likely to start a war with `connected' France, but America could more likely instigate a war with `disconnected' North Korea,
Syria or Iran.
Barnett then examines the dangers associated with his definition of `disconnectedness.' He cleverly describes globalization
as a condition defined by mutually assured dependence (MAD) and advises us that `Big Men', royal families, raw materials, theocracies
and just bad luck can conspire to impede connectedness in the world. This is one of few places in his book that Barnett briefly
discusses impediments to globalization - however, this short list looks at existing roadblocks to connectedness but not to future,
system-wide dangers to globalization.
At this point in his book, Barnett also makes bold statements that America is never leaving the Gap and that we are therefore
never "bringing our boys home." He believes that there is no exiting the Gap, only shrinking it. These statements have incited
some of Barnett's critics to accuse him of fostering and advocating a state of perpetual war. Barnett rebuts these attacks by
claiming that, "America's task is not perpetual war, nor the extension of empire. It is merely to serve as globalization's bodyguard
wherever and whenever needed throughout the Gap." Barnett claims that the strategy of preemptive war is a "boundable problem,"
yet his earlier claim that we are never leaving the Gap and that our boys are never coming home does not square with his assertion
that there will not be perpetual war. He cannot have it both ways.
Barnett then takes us on a pilgrimage to the Ten Commandments of globalization. Tellingly, this list is set up to be more like
links in a chain than commandments. Each item in the list is connected to the next - meaning that each step is dependent upon
its predecessor. If any of the links are broken or incomplete, the whole is destroyed. For example, Barnett warns us that if there
is no security in the Gap, there can be no rules in the Gap. Barnett therefore undermines his own globalization-based grand
strategy by pointing out in detail at least ten things that can go wrong with globalization - the foundation upon which his theory
is built.
What else could kill globalization? Barnett himself tells us: "Labor, energy, money and security all need to flow as freely
as possible from those places in the world where they are plentiful to those regions where they are scarce." Here he is implying
that an interruption of any or all of these basic necessities can doom globalization. Barnett states clearly: "...(these are)
the four massive flows I believe are essential to protect if Globalization III is going to advance." Simply put, any combination
of American isolationism or closing of borders to immigration, a global energy crisis, a global financial crisis or rampant global
insecurity could adversely affect "connectedness," a.k.a. globalization. These plausible future events, unnerving as they are,
leave the inexorable advancement of globalization in doubt and we haven't yet explored other problems with Barnett's reliance
on globalization to make the world peaceful, free and safe for democracy.
Barnett goes on to tell us that Operation Iraqi Freedom was an "overt attempt to create a "System Perturbation" centered in
the Persian Gulf to trigger a Big Bang." His definition of a Big Bang in the Middle East is the democratization of the many totalitarian
states in the region. He also claims that the Big Bang has targeted Iran's "sullen majority."
Barnett claims that our problem with shrinking the Gap is not our "motive or our means, but our inability to describe the enemies
worth killing, the battles worth winning, and the future worth creating." Managing the global campaign to democratize the world
is no easy task. Barnett admits that in a worst-case scenario we may be stuck in the "mother of all intifadas" in Iraq. Critics
claim this is something that we should have planned for - that the insurgency should not have been a surprise, and that it should
have been part of the "peacemaking" planning. Barnett blithely states that things will get better "...when America internationalizes
the occupation." Barnett should not engage in wishful thinking here, as he also does when he predicted that Iraqis would be put
in charge of their own country 18 months after the fall of Baghdad. It would be more accurate if he claimed this would happen
18 months after the cessation of hostilities. Some critics claim that Iraq is an example that we are an "empire in a hurry" (Michael
Ignatieff), which then results in: 1) allocating insufficient resources to non-military aspects of the project and 2) attempting
economic and political transformation in an unrealistically short time frame.
The final basic premise of Barnett's theory of the Core and the Gap is the concept of what he calls the "global transaction
strategy." Barnett explains it best: "America's essential transaction with the outside world is one of our exporting security
in return for the world's financing a lifestyle we could far more readily afford without all that defense spending." Barnett claims
that America pays the most for global stability because we enjoy it the most. But what about the other 80 countries in the Core?
Why is America, like Atlas, bearing the weight of the world's security and stabilization on its shoulders?
Barnett claims that historical analogies are useless today and point us in the wrong direction. I disagree. James Madison cautioned
us not to go abroad to seek monsters to destroy. We can learn from his simple and profound statement that there are simply too
many state (and individual) monsters in today's world for the U.S. to destroy unilaterally or preemptively. We must also avoid
overstretching our resources and power. Thucydides reminds us that the great democracy of Athens was brought to its knees by the
ill-advised Sicilian expedition - which resulted in the destruction of everything the Athenians held dear. Do not ignore history
as Barnett councils; heed it.
Globalization is likely here to stay, though it may be slowed down or even stopped in some regions of the planet.
Therefore, America needs to stay engaged in the affairs of the world, but Barnett has not offered conclusive evidence that the
U.S. needs to become the world's single Leviathan that must extinguish all global hot wars. Barnett also has not proved that America
needs to be, as he writes, "the one willing to rush in when everyone else is running away." People like Barnett in academia and
leaders in government may proclaim and ordain the U.S. to be a global Leviathan, but it is a conscious choice that should be thoroughly
debated by the American people. After all, it is upon the backs of the American people that such a global Leviathan must ride.
Where is the debate? The American people, upon reflection, may decide upon other courses of action.
I would strongly recommend "The Pentagon's New Map" to students who are studying U.S. foreign policy. I would also recommend
it to those who are studying the Bush administration as well as the Pentagon. The ideas in the book seem to be popular with the
military and many of its ideas can be seen in the current thinking and policy of the Pentagon and State Department.
It seems to be well researched - having 35 pages of notes. Many of Barnett's citations come from the Washington Post and the
New York Times, which some may see as a liberal bias, but I see the sources as simply newspapers of record.
I would only caution the reader that Barnett's theories are heavily dependent upon the continued advancement of globalization,
which in turn is dependent upon the continued economic ability of the U.S. to sustain military operations around the world indefinitely.
Neither is guaranteed.
I don't think poorly of Thomas Barnett himself. He's very bright and, I think, good hearted, BUT his well thought-out, well
argued pride and joy (and positive intellectual pursuit) is being badly distorted ---- which happens to all 'tools' that Empire
gets its hands on.
For those who like predictions, I would predict that Barnett will wind up going through an epiphany much like Francis Fukuyama
(but a decade later) and for much the same reason, that his life's work gets misused and abused so greatly that he works to reverse
and correct its misuse. Fukuyama, also brilliant, wrote "The End of History" in 1992 (which was misused by the neocons to engender
war), and now he's working just as hard to reverse a misuse that he may feel some guilt of his work supporting, and is writing
"The Future of History" as a force for good --- and I suspect (and hope) that Barnett will, in even less time, be counter-thinking
and developing the strategy and book to reverse the misuse of his 2004 book before the Global Empire pulls down the curtain.
"Globalization" has turned out to be nothing but the polite PR term to disguise and avoid the truth of using the more accurate
name, "Global Empire" --- and there is no doubt that Barnett is more than smart enough to see that this has inexorably happened.
Best luck and love to the fast expanding 'Occupy the Empire' educational and revolutionary movement against this deceitful,
guileful, disguised EMPIRE, which can't so easily be identified as wearing Red Coats, Red Stars, nor funny looking Nazi helmets
---- quite yet!
Liberty, democracy, justice, and equality Over Violent/'Vichy' Rel 2.0 Empire,
Alan MacDonald
Sanford, Maine
We don't MERELY have; a gun/fear problem, or a 'Fiscal Cliff', 'Sequestration', and 'Debt Limit' problem, or an expanding
wars problem, or a 'drone assassinations' problem, or a vast income & wealth inequality problem, or a Wall Street 'looting' problem,
or a Global Warming and environmental death-spiral problem, or a domestic tyranny NDAA FISA spying problem, or, or, or, or ....
ad nauseam --- we have a hidden EMPIRE cancerous tumor which is the prime CAUSE of all these 'symptom problems'.
"If your country is treating you like ****, and bombing abroad, look carefully --- because it may not be your country, but
a Global Empire only posing as your former country."
"... Lt. Col. Karen U. Kwiatkowski has written extensively about the purges of the patriots in the Defense Department that happened in Washington during the lead up and after the commencement of the Iraq war in 2003. ..."
"... If anybody thinks what I have written is an exaggeration, research what the late Admiral Thomas Moorer had to say years ago about the total infiltration of the Defense Department by Israeli agents. ..."
People who seem to think that Trump's generals will somehow go along and support his original vision are sadly mistaken.
Since 2003, Israel has had an increasingly strong hand in the vetting who gets promoted to upper positions in the American
armed forces. All of the generals Trump has at his side went through a vetting procedure which definitely involved a very close
look at their opinions about Israel.
Lt. Col. Karen U. Kwiatkowski has written extensively about the purges of the patriots in the Defense Department that happened
in Washington during the lead up and after the commencement of the Iraq war in 2003.
Officers who openly oppose the dictates of the Israel Lobby will see their prospects for advancement simply vanish like a whiff
of smoke.. Those who support Israel's machinations are rewarded with promotions, the more fervent the support the more rapid the
promotion especially if this knowledge is made known to their congressman or senator..
Generals who support Israel already know that this support will be heavily rewarded after their retirements by being given
lucrative six figure positions on company boards of directors or positions in equally lucrative think tanks like the American
Enterprise Institution or the Hoover Institute. They will receive hefty speaking fees. as well. They learned early that their
retirements could be truly glorious if they only "went" along with The Lobby. They will be able to then live the good life in
expensive places like Washington, New York or San Francisco, often invited to glitzy parties with unlimited amount of free prawns
"the size of your hand".
On the other hand, upper officers who somehow get then get "bad" reputations for their negative views about Israel ( like Karen
U. Kwiatkowski for instance) will end up, once retired, having to depend on just their often scanty pensions This requires getting
an often demeaning second jobs to get by in some place where "their dollar goes further". No bright lights in big cities for them.
No speaking fees, no college jobs. Once their fate becomes known, their still active duty contemporaries suddenly decide to "go
along".
If anybody thinks what I have written is an exaggeration, research what the late Admiral Thomas Moorer had to say years
ago about the total infiltration of the Defense Department by Israeli agents.
Face it, we live in a country under occupation by a hostile power that we willingly pay large amounts monetary tribute to.
Our government does whatever benefits Israel regardless of how negatively this effects the USA. We are increasing troop strength
in Afghanistan because, somehow, this benefits Israel. If our presence in Afghanistan (or the Mideast in general) didn't benefit
Israel, our troops would simply not be there.
"... The destruction of Syria and Libya created massive refugee flows which have proved that the European Union was totally unprepared to deal with such a major issue. On top of that, the latest years, we have witnessed a rapid rise of various terrorist attacks in Western soil, also as a result of the devastating wars in Syria and Libya. ..."
"... Whenever they wanted to blame someone for some serious terrorist attacks, they had a scapegoat ready for them, even if they had evidence that Libya was not behind these attacks. When Gaddafi falsely admitted that he had weapons of mass destruction in order to gain some relief from the Western sanctions, they presented him as a responsible leader who, was ready to cooperate. Of course, his last role was to play again the 'bad guy' who had to be removed. ..."
"... Despite the rise of Donald Trump in power, the neoliberal forces will push further for the expansion of the neoliberal doctrine in the rival field of the Sino-Russian alliance. ..."
"... We see, however, that the Western alliances are entering a period of severe crisis. The US has failed to control the situation in Middle East and Libya. The ruthless neo-colonialists will not hesitate to confront Russia and China directly, if they see that they continue to lose control in the global geopolitical arena. The accumulation of military presence of NATO next to the Russian borders, as well as, the accumulation of military presence of the US in Asia-Pacific, show that this is an undeniable fact. ..."
The start of current decade revealed the most ruthless face of a global neo-colonialism. From Syria and Libya to Europe and Latin
America, the old colonial powers of the West tried to rebound against an oncoming rival bloc led by Russia and China, which starts
to threaten their global domination.
Inside a multi-polar, complex terrain of geopolitical games, the big players start to abandon the old-fashioned, inefficient direct
wars. They use today other, various methods like
brutal proxy
wars , economic wars, financial and constitutional coups, provocative operations, 'color revolutions', etc. In this highly
complex and unstable situation, when even traditional allies turn against each other as the global balances change rapidly, the forces
unleashed are absolutely destructive. Inevitably, the results are more than evident.
Proxy Wars - Syria/Libya
After the US invasion in Iraq, the gates of hell had opened in the Middle East. Obama continued the Bush legacy of US endless
interventions, but he had to change tactics because a direct war would be inefficient, costly and extremely unpopular to the American
people and the rest of the world.
The result, however, appeared to be equally (if not more) devastating with the failed US invasions in Iraq and Afghanistan. The US
had lost total control of the armed groups directly linked with the ISIS terrorists, failed to topple Assad, and, moreover, instead
of eliminating the Russian and Iranian influence in the region, actually managed to increase it. As a result, the US and its allies
failed to secure their geopolitical interests around the various pipeline games.
In addition, the US sees Turkey, one of its most important ally, changing direction dangerously, away from the Western bloc. Probably
the strongest indication for this, is that Turkey, Iran and Russia decided very recently to proceed in an agreement on Syria without
the presence of the US.
Yet, the list of US failures does not end here. The destruction of Syria and Libya created massive refugee flows which have
proved that the European Union was totally unprepared to deal with such a major issue. On top of that, the latest years, we have
witnessed a rapid rise of various terrorist attacks in Western soil, also as a result of the devastating wars in Syria and Libya.
Evidence from
WikiLeaks has shown that the old colonial powers have started a new round of ruthless competition on Libya's resources.
The usual story propagated by the Western media, about another tyrant who had to be removed, has now completely collapsed. They don't
care neither to topple an 'authoritarian' regime, nor to spread Democracy. All they care about is to secure each country's resources
for their big companies.
The Gaddafi case is quite interesting because it shows that
the Western
hypocrites were using him according to their interests .
Whenever they wanted to blame someone for some serious terrorist attacks, they had a scapegoat ready for them, even if they
had evidence that Libya was not behind these attacks. When Gaddafi falsely admitted that he had weapons of mass destruction in order
to gain some relief from the Western sanctions, they presented him as a responsible leader who, was ready to cooperate. Of course,
his last role was to play again the 'bad guy' who had to be removed.
Economic Wars, Financial Coups – Greece/Eurozone
It would be unthinkable for the neo-colonialists to conduct proxy wars inside European soil, especially against countries which
belong to Western institutions like NATO, EU, eurozone, etc. The wave of the US-made major economic crisis hit Greece and Europe
at the start of the decade, almost simultaneously with the eruption of the Arab Spring revolutionary wave and the subsequent disaster
in Middle East and Libya.
Greece was the easy victim for the global neoliberal dictatorship to impose catastrophic measures in favor of the plutocracy.
The Greek experiment enters its seventh year and the plan is to be used as a model for the whole eurozone. Greece has become also
the model for the looting of public property, as happened in the past with the East Germany and the
Treuhand Operation
after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
While Greece was the major victim of an economic war, Germany used its economic power and control of the European Central Bank
to impose unprecedented austerity, sado-monetarism and neoliberal destruction through silent financial coups in
Ireland ,
Italy and
Cyprus . The Greek political establishment collapsed with the rise of SYRIZA in power, and the ECB was forced to proceed
in an open financial coup against
Greece when the current PM, Alexis Tsipras, decided to conduct a referendum on the catastrophic measures imposed by the ECB, IMF
and the European Commission, through which the Greek people clearly rejected these measures, despite the propaganda of terror inside
and outside Greece. Due to the direct threat from Mario Draghi and the ECB, who actually threatened to cut liquidity sinking Greece
into a financial chaos, Tsipras finally forced to retreat, signing another catastrophic memorandum.
Through similar financial and political pressure, the Brussels bureaufascists and the German sado-monetarists along with the IMF
economic hitmen, imposed neoliberal disaster to other eurozone countries like Portugal, Spain etc. It is remarkable that even the
second eurozone economy, France,
rushed to
impose anti-labor measures midst terrorist attacks, succumbing to a - pre-designed by the elites - neo-Feudalism, under
the 'Socialist' François Hollande, despite the intense protests in many French cities.
Germany would never let the United States to lead the neo-colonization in Europe, as it tries (again) to become a major power
with its own sphere of influence, expanding throughout eurozone and beyond. As the situation in Europe becomes more and more critical
with the ongoing economic and refugee crisis and the rise of the Far-Right and the nationalists, the economic war mostly between
the US and the German big capital, creates an even more complicated situation.
The decline of the US-German relations has been exposed initially with the
NSA interceptions
scandal , yet, progressively, the big picture came on surface, revealing a
transatlantic
economic war between banking and corporate giants. In times of huge multilevel crises, the big capital always intensifies
its efforts to eliminate competitors too. As a consequence, the US has seen another key ally, Germany, trying to gain a certain degree
of independence in order to form its own agenda, separate from the US interests.
Note that, both Germany and Turkey are medium powers that, historically, always trying to expand and create their own spheres
of influence, seeking independence from the traditional big powers.
A wave of neoliberal onslaught shakes currently Latin America. While in Argentina, Mauricio Macri allegedly took the power normally,
the constitutional
coup against Dilma Rousseff in Brazil, as well as, the
usual actions
of the Right opposition in Venezuela against Nicolás Maduro with the help of the US finger, are far more obvious.
The special weight of these three countries in Latin America is extremely important for the US imperialism to regain ground in the
global geopolitical arena. Especially the last ten to fifteen years, each of them developed increasingly autonomous policies away
from the US close custody, under Leftist governments, and this was something that alarmed the US imperialism components.
Brazil appears to be the most important among the three, not only due to its size, but also as a member of the BRICS, the team
of fast growing economies who threaten the US and generally the Western global dominance. The constitutional coup against Rousseff
was rather a sloppy action and reveals the anxiety of the US establishment to regain control through puppet regimes. This is a well-known
situation from the past through which the establishment attempts to secure absolute dominance in the US backyard.
The importance of Venezuela due to its oil reserves is also significant. When Maduro tried to approach Russia in order to strengthen
the economic cooperation between the two countries, he must had set the alarm for the neocons in the US. Venezuela could find an
alternative in Russia and BRICS, in order to breathe from the multiple economic war that was set off by the US. It is characteristic
that the economic war against Russia by the US and the Saudis, by keeping the oil prices in historically low levels, had significant
impact on the Venezuelan economy too. It is also known that the US organizations are funding the opposition since Chávez era, in
order to proceed in provocative operations that could overthrow the Leftist governments.
The case of Venezuela is really interesting. The US imperialists were fiercely trying to overthrow the Leftist governments since
Chávez administration. They found now a weaker president, Nicolás Maduro - who certainly does not have the strength and personality
of Hugo Chávez - to achieve their goal.
The Western media mouthpieces are doing their job, which is propaganda as usual. The recipe is known. You present the half truth,
with a big overdose of exaggeration.
The establishment
parrots are demonizing Socialism , but they won't ever tell you about the money that the US is spending, feeding the
Right-Wing groups and opposition to proceed in provocative operations, in order to create instability. They won't tell you about
the financial war conducted through the oil prices, manipulated by the Saudis, the close US ally.
Regarding Argentina, former president, Cristina Kirchner, had also made some important moves towards the stronger cooperation
with Russia, which was something unacceptable for Washington's hawks. Not only for geopolitical reasons, but also because Argentina
could escape from the vulture funds that sucking its blood since its default. This would give the country an alternative to the neoliberal
monopoly of destruction. The US big banks and corporations would never accept such a perspective because the debt-enslaved Argentina
is a golden opportunity for a new round of huge profits. It's
happening right
now in eurozone's debt colony, Greece.
'Color Revolutions' - Ukraine
The events in Ukraine have shown that, the big capital has no hesitation to ally even with the neo-nazis, in order to impose the
new world order. This is not something new of course. The connection of Hitler with the German economic oligarchs, but also with
other major Western companies, before and during the WWII, is well known.
The most terrifying of all however, is not that the West has silenced in front of the decrees of the new Ukrainian leadership,
through which is targeting the minorities, but the fact that the West allied with the neo-nazis, while according to some information
has also funded their actions as well as other extreme nationalist groups during the riots in Kiev.
Plenty of indications show that US organizations have 'put their finger' on Ukraine. A
video , for
example, concerning the situation in Ukraine has been directed by Ben Moses (creator of the movie "Good Morning, Vietnam"), who is
connected with American government executives and organizations like National Endowment for Democracy, funded by the US Congress.
This video shows a beautiful young female Ukrainian who characterizes the government of the country as "dictatorship" and praise
some protesters with the neo-nazi symbols of the fascist Ukranian party Svoboda on them.
The same organizations are behind 'color revolutions' elsewhere, as well as, provocative operations against Leftist governments
in Venezuela and other countries.
Ukraine is the perfect place to provoke Putin and tight the noose around Russia. Of course the huge hypocrisy of the West can
also be identified in the case of Crimea. While in other cases, the Western officials were 'screaming' for the right of self-determination
(like Kosovo, for example), after they destroyed Yugoslavia in a bloodbath, they can't recognize the will of the majority of Crimeans
to join Russia.
The war will become wilder
The Western neo-colonial powers are trying to counterattack against the geopolitical upgrade of Russia and the Chinese economic
expansionism.
Despite the rise of Donald Trump in power, the neoliberal forces will push further for the expansion of the neoliberal doctrine
in the rival field of the Sino-Russian alliance. Besides, Trump has already shown his hostile feelings against China, despite
his friendly approach to Russia and Putin.
We see, however, that the Western alliances are entering a period of severe crisis. The US has failed to control the situation
in Middle East and Libya. The ruthless neo-colonialists will not hesitate to confront Russia and China directly, if they see that
they continue to lose control in the global geopolitical arena. The accumulation of military presence of NATO next to the Russian
borders, as well as, the accumulation of military presence of the US in Asia-Pacific, show that this is an undeniable fact.
The USA state of continuous war has been a bipartisan phenomenon starting with Truman in Korea and proceeding with Vietnam, Lebanon,Somalia,
Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Libya and now Syria. It doesn't take a genius to realize that these limited, never ending wars are expensive
was to enrich MIC and Wall Street banksters
The one thing your accurate analysis leaves out is that the goal of US wars is never what the media spouts for its Wall Street
masters. The goal of any war is the redistribution of taxpayer money into the bank accounts of MIC shareholders and executives,
create more enemies to be fought in future wars, and to provide a rationalization for the continued primacy of the military class
in US politics and culture.
Occasionally a country may be sitting on a bunch of oil, and also be threatening to move away from the petrodollar or talking
about allowing an "adversary" to build a pipeline across their land.
Otherwise war is a racket unto itself. "Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable,
and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. "
― George Orwell
Also we've always been at war with Oceania .or whatever that quote said.
There have been numerous smears of Tulsi Gabbard that have been repeated over and over the
last few years after she went to Syria. She started to give the foreign policy blob a lot of
grief for their support of the overthrow of Syria to install a theocratic jihadi government
controlled by the usual suspects.
One smear they like to use is to call Tulsi an Islamophobe. That began years ago when she
criticized Our Savior Obama (pbaj) for claiming ISIS was not a religious extremist
organization, that it was a criminal group and the US needed to give Iraqi men more to do and
then they wouldn't join those criminal gangs like...ISIS.
Anyways, this article goes into a deeper state (yup, deeper than usual) conspiracy by
various actors to smear Tulsi for a variety of reasons subservient to foreign interests, with
a surprise intro to another often unspoken of interest with a lot of hidden power in
Washington.
"... Yes. "War is a force that gives us meaning," as Chris Hedges wrote. It provides (false) meaning and purpose. It's an amazingly powerful force, which is one reason why only Congress should declare war. And the last time that happened in the USA was December of 1941. ..."
I just read your article in TD. In my opinion you buried the reason for never ending wars.
You mention exceptionalism. I call that concept preeminence. With it is one of the few ways
we try to fill the void, or as you said in fewer words, try to give meaning to life. There
can be no doubt our lives are becoming increasingly meaningless so we double down and double
down again with what we know despite the self-destruction. https://thelastwhy.ca/poems/2015/6/25/life-a-reaction-to-the-void
Yes. "War is a force that gives us meaning," as Chris Hedges wrote. It provides (false)
meaning and purpose. It's an amazingly powerful force, which is one reason why only Congress
should declare war.
And the last time that happened in the USA was December of 1941.
Doug Barr–It appears to me you are trying to blur some lines, or perhaps you are
confused about, what one might call general human psychology and the official policies of a
specific government, that of the USA. [As a student of Anthropology, I point out that though
our primate ancestors are prone to outbursts of violence, there is no evidence that making
war, especially in the contemporary phase of human society, fulfills an innate "need."] Yes,
the US seeks to be "pre-eminent"–or to be blunter, DOMINANT–over the rest of the
globe. Where "exceptionalism"–which I have designated the American Disease–enters
the picture is the attempt to justify military aggression by suggesting (some are less subtle
and openly assert) that the US somehow has been granted a "right" to do this by "a higher
power." (Apparently God Himself revealed to George W. Bush that he was born to be "a war
president" and the genius Rick Perry asserted recently that Donald Trump was put in the
presidency by direct Divine action.) A "right" to send assassin drones anywhere, anytime, to
target anyone who's been designated a Bad Guy. This is absurd, if not insane, on the face of
it. (In olden times, Rudyard Kipling called it "the white man's burden" to bring civilization
to less "enlightened" peoples.) If there was an international court that had some teeth, the
US would be vigorously swatted down, ordered to cease and desist. But one of the greatest
tragedies of our time is that there is no power on Earth that could stand up to this Monster
(as John Kay and his band Steppenwolf rightly identified the US 50 years ago) even if it
could find the backbone to make the attempt.
After more than 17 years of the United States pouring blood and treasure into the effort
to build an Afghan army and government, why is it that the Kabul government continues to lose
ground against the Taliban? Further, why were we unsuccessful creating an Iraqi army that
could stand on its own against the Islamic State?
Before that, of course, came Vietnam.
Nor was that the start of the failure of American-backed armies. I was a teenager in 1949
when Chiang Kai-shek's American-backed Nationalist army lost to the Communist forces of Mao
Zedong in China. The American secretary of state, Dean Acheson, having conducted a study on
why our side lost, declared: "The Nationalist armies did not have to be defeated; they
disintegrated. History has proved again and again that a regime without faith in itself, and
an army without morale, cannot survive the test of battle."
Forty-four years ago, the American-trained and American-supplied army of South Vietnam
simply melted away before the less-well-equipped but better-motivated army of North Vietnam.
In 1975, I watched South Vietnamese soldiers taking off their uniforms and running away in
their underwear as the North Vietnamese closed in on Saigon.
Five years ago, the world watched another American-trained and American-equipped Iraqi
army bolt and run when the better motivated Islamic State forces overran Mosul in Northern
Iraq.
Why, over and over again, does the side America has backed in these civil wars end up
defeated? Four threads connect these lost wars of the last 70 years: corruption, patriotic
nationalism, a misplaced belief in American exceptionalism, and self-deception.
I saw corruption on a grand scale in Saigon. Generals and government officials were
funneling America's tax dollars into bank accounts abroad, fielding ghost armies in which
there were fewer soldiers on the ground than on the official payrolls. In Baghdad during the
American occupation, I learned that billions of American taxpayer dollars were bleeding out
to the Persian Gulf and Jordan, causing a laundered money real estate boom in the Jordanian
capital. In Afghanistan I learned that Afghan officers and soldiers routinely robbed the
villages they were sent to protect. Corruption sapped the people's belief in their US-backed
government in all four wars. Soldiers saw no reason to die for corrupt officials.
A second thread is that our side always appeared to be fighting on the side of foreigners,
while the Communists in China and Vietnam, as well as the insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan,
always had a better grip on patriotic nationalism and resistance to foreigners. The
anti-colonial struggle was more important than the threat of Communism in most of the
post-World War II world, and the Islamist insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan knew how to
exploit the traditional resistance to foreign rule. The Taliban could appeal to patriotism
while trying to expel the infidel forces of the United States, just as their fathers,
grandfathers, and great grandfathers had resisted the Russians and the British before that in
the name of jihad.
A third thread is a curiously American trait of willfully ignoring other people's history
and cultures. I remember asking an American officer in Vietnam if he had read anything of the
French experience in Vietnam. His answer: "No, why should I? They lost, didn't they?" Robert
McNamara, defense secretary and an architect of our Vietnam War, said in later life that
Americans had never understood the Vietnamese. There were plenty of people who could have
helped him understand, but he wasn't interested. We were Americans -- exceptional, and
therefore not susceptible to the same forces that thwarted other efforts.
I met Americans in the Green Zone in Baghdad who knew nothing about the great schism
between Sunnis and Shia Muslims that was tearing the country apart. American-style democracy
was the answer to all ills, they felt. In Afghanistan I met Americans who thought purple ink
on the fingers of Afghans who had voted was the answer to a thousand years of tribal and
ethnic rivalries.
The fourth thread is self-deception. In Saigon, in Baghdad, and in Kabul I attended
briefings in which progress was always being made, the trend lines were always favorable, and
we were always winning wars we were actually losing. Wishful thinking is no substitute for
reality. Americans can train and assist the armies of those whom we want to support in the
civil wars of others, but we cannot supply the motivation and morale that is necessary to
survive the test of battle.
As we observe another anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, attack that shattered American
life 18 years ago, its full impact is still unfolding. Those who planned it succeeded beyond
their wildest dreams. The airborne assaults that took nearly 3,000 lives on that day may now
be seen as the most diabolically successful terror attack in history. That attack not only
wreaked carnage at the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and a field in rural Pennsylvania.
It wound up dragging the United States into an endless state of war that has drained our
treasury, poisoned our politics, created waves of new terrorism, and made us the enemy of
millions around the world.
The apparent chief perpetrator of the 9/11 attack, Osama bin Laden, presumably cackled
with joy when he heard news of his success on that stunning day. He lived for another 10
years, long enough to cackle with even greater glee at Washington's self-defeating response
to the attack. Using the 9/11 attack as a pretext, the United States invaded Iraq in 2003.
Bin Laden died knowing that he had lured us into the greatest foreign policy disaster in
American history.
It is a truism that our lives are shaped not by what happens to us, but by how we react to
what happens to us. The same applies to nations. Devastating as the death toll was on Sept.
11, 2001, it turned out to be only a taste of what was to come. The United States has been at
war ever since. Thousands of Americans have died. So have hundreds of thousands of civilians
in the Middle East and beyond. This nearly two-decade-long spasm of attacking, bombing, and
occupying countries has decisively shaped the United States and its image in the world. Every
day that our "forever war" continues is a triumph for bin Laden. So is every wounded veteran
who returns home, every newly minted terrorist infuriated by an American attack, every
citizen of the world who recoils at what US forces are being sent to do. We did not simply
fall into bin Laden's trap, we raced in at full speed. Even now, we show little will to
extricate ourselves.
America's determination to strike back with devastating force after 9/11 was
understandable given our shared sense of ravaged innocence. We might have launched a
concentrated strike against the gang of several hundred criminals whose leaders attacked the
United States, and then come home. Instead we have used the 9/11 attack to justify wars and
military deployments around the world.
On Sept. 14, 2001, Congress passed an "authorization for the use of military force"
against the perpetrators of that week's attack and against their "associated forces." Three
presidents have used that authorization to deploy troops across the Middle East and in
countries from Kenya to Georgia to the Philippines. Every call for US withdrawal from
Afghanistan or Iraq or Syria is met by warnings that ending wars could produce "another
9/11." This has become the paralyzing mantra that prevents us from halting the hydra-headed
military campaign we have been waging for 18 years. We also use it to justify atrocities at
prisons like Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. Bin Laden has succeeded even in colonizing our
minds.
Soon after passing its highly elastic authorization for military action against
"associated forces," Congress approved another, even more sweeping law: the Patriot Act. It
gave the government broad new power to monitor people and businesses, and has become a
foundation stone of our emerging "surveillance state." The 9/11 attack led us to distort not
only our approach to the world, but also the balance between freedom and security at
home.
Another pernicious aftereffect of the terror attack has been the deepening of our national
us-against-them narrative. This began with President George W. Bush's assertion that every
country in the world had to be "either with us or against us." Crusader rhetoric posits the
United States as the indispensable guardian of civilization, entitled to act as it chooses in
order to fend off a threatening tide of barbarism. Now this approach has leaked back into the
United States. Racist attacks that tear at our social fabric are the domestic reflection of
foreign policies that see the rest of the world as a hostile "other" bent on destroying our
way of life.
Last month it was announced that the five surviving alleged plotters of the 9/11 attack
will finally be brought to trial in 2021. If they are aware of what is happening in the
world, they will arrive in court with a deep sense of satisfaction. Their great triumph was
not the attack. It was the damage the United States has since inflicted upon itself.
Acheson is parroting Napoleon: "In war the moral is to the material as 3 is to 1."
He is wrong in the matter of "faith", unless the Chiang's army lost faith in Chiang's
moral poverty, what he stood for.
A better quote about Chiang losing is written by George C. Marshall, who went over and
came back sure Chiang was done for.
He said: "The US would not be dragged through the mud by those reactionaries". Meaning
Chiang was not the moral power in China.
Same for Vietnam US puppets were not and had no moral power/authority.
In Afghanistan same!
Iraq is split in moral authority, the areas populated by Shi'a are okay as long as the
central government does not pander to the Sunni 1/3 (Baathists were suppressing Shi'a).
I do not agree with quoting Acheson when there is plenty of professional soldier writings
that say it more clearly.
After Korea the professional soldiers were no longer expressive when it cme to propping
thugs, with no moral power in their own borders (granted many of the borders surround
fictional counties).
US has stood with thugs for most of its quagmire experience.......
This week US is looking for a way to start a new quagmire with Iran for royal murderers'
sharing their oil company!
Regarding your last sentence: this is the great truth that Washington's world hegemonists would have you forget. Taking into
account the untapped vast resources of Canada and Alaska and its expansive offshore economic zones extending deep into the Atlantic,
the Pacific, the Gulf of Mexico and the Arctic Ocean, the North American anglosphere could be entirely self-sufficient and do
quite nicely on its own for hundreds of years to come, it just wouldn't be the sole tyrannical state presumably ruling the entire
planet.
Why, it might even entertain the idea of actually cooperating with other regional powers like Russia, China, the EU, India,
Iran, Turkey, the Middle East, greater central Asia, Latin America and even Africa to everyone's benefit, rather than bullying
them all because god ordained us to be the boss of all humans.
America's major malfunction is its lack of historical roots compared to the other societies mentioned. All those places had
thousands of years to refine their sundry cultures and international relationships, certainly through trial and error and many
horrible setbacks, most notably wars, famines, pestilence, genocide and human bondage which people did not have the foresight
to nip in the bud. They learned by their mistakes and some, like the great world wars, were doozies.
The United States, and some of its closest homologues like Canada, Australia, Brazil and Argentina, were thrown together very
rapidly as part of developing colonial empires. It was created through the brute actions of a handful of megalomaniacal oligarchs
of their day. What worked to suppress vast tracts of aboriginal homelands, often through genocide and virtual extinction of the
native populations, was so effective that it was institutionalized in the form of slavery and reckless exploitation of the local
environment. These "great leaders," "pioneers" and "founding fathers" were not about to give up a set of principles -- no matter
how sick and immoral -- which they knew to "work" and accrued to them great power and riches. They preferred to label it "American
exceptionalism" and force it upon the whole rest of the world, including long established regional powers -- cultures going back
to antiquity -- and not just conveniently sketched "burdens of the white man."
No, ancient cultures like China, India, Persia and so forth could obviously be improved for all concerned merely by allowing
a handful of Western Europeans to own all their property and run all their affairs. That grand plan fell apart for most of the
European powers in the aftermath of World War Two, but Washington has held tough and never given up its designs of micromanaging
and exploiting the whole planet. It too is soon to learn its lesson and lose its empire. Either that or it will take the world
down in flames as it tries to cling to all that it never really owned or deserved. The most tragic (or maybe just amusing) part
is that Washington still had most of the world believing its bullshit about exceptionalism and indispensability until it decided
it had to emulate every tyrannical empire that ever collapsed before it.
Realist , April 30, 2019 at 02:08
"ex·tor·tion /ik?stôrSH(?)n/ noun The practice of obtaining something, especially money, through force or threats."
"Racketeering refers to crimes committed through extortion or coercion. A racketeer attempts to obtain money or property from
another person, usually through intimidation or force. The term is typically associated with organized crime."
I see. So, American foreign policy, as applied to both its alleged enemies and presumed allies, essentially amounts to an exercise
in organised crime. So much for due process, free trade, peaceful co-existence, magical rainbows and other such hypocritical platitudes
dispensed for domestic consumption in place of the heavy-handed threats routinely delivered to Washington's targets.
That's quite in keeping with the employment of war crimes as standard "tactics, techniques and procedures" on the battlefield
which was recently admitted to us by Senator Jim Molan on the "60 Minutes" news show facsimile and discussed in one of yesterday's
forums on this blog.
Afghanistan was promised a carpet of gold or a carpet of bombs as incentive to bend to our will (and that of Unocal which,
unlike Nordstream, was a pipeline Washington wanted built). Iraq was promised and delivered "shock and awe" after a secretary
of state had declared the mass starvation of that country's children as well worth the effort. They still can't find all the pieces
left of the Libyan state. Syria was told it would be stiffed on any American contribution to its rebuilding for the effrontery
of actually beating back the American-recruited, trained and financed ISIS terrorist brigades. Now it's being deliberately starved
of both its energy and food requirements by American embargoes on its own resources! North Korea was promised utter annihilation
by Yankee nukes before Kim's summit with our great leader unless it submitted totally to his will, or more likely that of Pompous
Pompeo, the man who pulls his strings. Venezuela is treated to cyber-hacked power outages and shortages of food, medicines, its
own gold bullion, income from its own international petroleum sales and, probably because someone in Washington thinks it's funny,
even toilet paper. All they have to do to get relief is kick out the president they elected and replace him with Washington's
chosen puppet! Yep, freedom and democracy blah, blah, blah. And don't even ask what the kids in Yemen got for Christmas from Uncle
Sam this year. (He probably stole their socks.) A real American patriot will laughingly take Iran to task for ever believing in
the first place that Washington could be negotiated with in good faith. All they had to do was ask the Native Americans (or the
Russians) how the Yanks keep their word and honor their treaties. It was their own fault they were taken for suckers.
"... Why have we supported Nguema, Karimov, and Kagame but not the ones who are thorns in our sides? The reasons are obvious. It's not the lives of their citizens - it's power for the elite class. We intervene abroad because we want to further the interest of the wealthy. ..."
"... America will always pick and choose the leaders it props up and tears down. It never was and never will be for humanitarian reasons -- that is a clever veil. We denounce ethnic cleansing and then fund it. We call for free elections and then support Pinochet, Stroessner, and Videla. ..."
"... Opposing war is a noble and courageous act, and there will always be smears. Opposing war isn't supporting dictators; it's opposing death and destruction in the service of the wealthy. Never believe what they tell you about why they're sending your kids to die. Never. ..."
Idealistic Realist , Apr 27, 2019 1:24:45 PM |
link
Best analysis by a candidate for POTUS ever:
American foreign policy is not a failure. To comfort themselves, observers often say that our leaders -- presidents, advisors,
generals -- don't know what they're doing. They do know. Their agenda just isn't what we like to imagine it is.
To quote Michael Parenti: "US policy is not filled with contradictions and inconsistencies. It has performed brilliantly
and steadily in the service of those who own most of the world and who want to own all of it."
The vision of our leaders as bunglers, while more accurate than the image of them as valiant public servants, is less accurate
and more rose-tinted than the closest approximation of the truth, which is that they are servants of their class interest.
That is why we go to war.
Those who buy the elite class's foreign policy BS, about the Emmanuel Goldsteins they conjure up every three years, are
fools. Obviously Hussein and Milošević were bad; but "government bad" does not mean we must invade. Wars occur for economic,
not humanitarian, reasons.
Teodoro Obiang Nguema, the president of Equatorial Guinea, is a kleptocrat, murderer, and alleged cannibal. This is
him and his wife with Barack and Michelle Obama.
Islam Karimov, the president of Uzbekistan, was said to have boiled political prisoners to death, massacred hundreds
of prisoners, and made torture an institution. This is him with John Kerry.
Paul Kagame, the president of Rwanda, has been involved in the assassination of political opponents, perpetrated obvious
election fraud, and had his term extended until 2034. This is him with Barack and Michelle Obama.
Why have we supported Nguema, Karimov, and Kagame but not the ones who are thorns in our sides? The reasons are obvious.
It's not the lives of their citizens - it's power for the elite class. We intervene abroad because we want to further the interest
of the wealthy.
America will always pick and choose the leaders it props up and tears down. It never was and never will be for humanitarian
reasons -- that is a clever veil. We denounce ethnic cleansing and then fund it. We call for free elections and then support
Pinochet, Stroessner, and Videla.
Opposing war is a noble and courageous act, and there will always be smears. Opposing war isn't supporting dictators;
it's opposing death and destruction in the service of the wealthy. Never believe what they tell you about why they're sending
your kids to die. Never.
New book by David NorthA Quarter Century of War: The US Drive for Global Hegemony 1990–2016
Notable quotes:
"... "Landler informs his readers that Obama "went for a walk among the tombstones at Arlington National Cemetery before giving the order to send 30,000 additional troops into Afghanistan." He recalls a passage from Obama's 2009 speech accepting the Nobel Prize, in which the president wearily lamented that humanity needed to reconcile "two seemingly irreconcilable truths -- that war is sometimes necessary, and war at some level is an expression of human folly." ..."
"... Typical American philosophy... "War is peace!"... ..."
We publish here the preface to A Quarter Century of War: The US Drive for Global Hegemony, 1990-2016 by David North.
The book will be published on August 10, and is available for preorder today at Mehring Books in both
softcover
and hardcover
.
***
"In the period of crisis the hegemony of the United States will operate more completely, more openly, and more ruthlessly than
in the period of boom."
-- Leon Trotsky, 1928
"U.S. capitalism is up against the same problems that pushed Germany in 1914 on the path of war. The world is divided? It must
be redivided. For Germany it was a question of 'organizing Europe.' The United States must 'organize' the world. History is bringing
mankind face to face with the volcanic eruption of American imperialism."
-- Leon Trotsky, 1934
This volume consists of political reports, public lectures, party statements, essays, and polemics that document the response
of the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) to the quarter century of US-led wars that began in 1990–91. The
analyses of events presented here, although written as they were unfolding, stand the test of time. The International Committee does
not possess a crystal ball. But its work is informed by a Marxist understanding of the contradictions of American and world imperialism.
Moreover, the Marxist method of analysis examines events not as a sequence of isolated episodes, but as moments in the unfolding
of a broader historical process. This historically oriented approach serves as a safeguard against an impressionistic response to
the latest political developments. It recognizes that the essential cause of an event is rarely apparent at the moment of
its occurrence.
Much of what passes for analysis in the bourgeois press consists of nothing more than equating an impressionistic description
of a given event with its deeper cause. This sort of political analysis legitimizes US wars as necessary responses to one or another
personification of evil, such as Saddam Hussein in Iraq, the "warlord" Farah Aideed in Somalia, Slobodan Milosevic in Serbia, Osama
bin Laden of Al Qaeda, the Mullah Omar in Afghanistan, Muammar Gaddafi in Libya; and, most recently, Bashar al Assad in Syria, Kim
Jong Un in Korea, and Vladimir Putin in Russia. New names are continually added to the United States' infinitely expandable list
of monsters requiring destruction.
The material in this volume is the record of a very different and far more substantial approach to the examination of the foreign
policy of the United States.
First, and most important, the International Committee interpreted the collapse of the Stalinist regimes in Eastern Europe in
1989–90, and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, as an existential crisis of the entire global nation-state system, as it
emerged from the ashes of World War II. Second, the ICFI anticipated that the breakdown of the established postwar equilibrium would
lead rapidly to a resurgence of imperialist militarism. As far back as August 1990 -- twenty-six years ago -- it was able to foresee
the long-term implications of the Bush administration's war against Iraq:
It marks the beginning of a new imperialist redivision of the world. The end of the postwar era means the end of the
postcolonial era. As it proclaims the "failure of socialism," the imperialist bourgeoisie, in deeds if not yet in words, proclaims
the failure of independence. The deepening crisis confronting all the major imperialist powers compels them to secure control
over strategic resources and markets. Former colonies, which had achieved a degree of political independence, must be resubjugated.
In its brutal assault against Iraq, imperialism is giving notice that it intends to restore the type of unrestrained domination
of the backward countries that existed prior to World War II. [
1 ]
This historically grounded analysis provided the essential framework for an understanding, not only of the 1990–91 Gulf War, but
also of the wars that were launched later in the decade, as well as the post-9/11 "War on Terror."
In a recently published front-page article, the New York Times called attention to a significant milestone in the presidency
of Barack Obama: "He has now been at war longer than Mr. Bush, or any other American president." But with several months remaining
in his term in office, he is on target to set yet another record. The Times wrote:
If the United States remains in combat in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria until the end of Mr. Obama's term -- a near-certainty
given the president's recent announcement that he will send 250 additional Special Operations forces to Syria -- he will leave
behind an improbable legacy as the only president in American history to serve two complete terms with the nation at war. [
2 ]
On the way to setting his record, Mr. Obama has overseen lethal military actions in a total of seven countries: Iraq, Afghanistan,
Syria, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen. The number of countries is growing, as the United States escalates its military operations
in Africa. The efforts to suppress the Boko Haram insurgency involve a buildup of US forces in Nigeria, Cameroon, Niger, and Chad.
Without any sense of irony, Mark Landler, author of the Times article, notes Obama's status as a Nobel Peace Prize winner
in 2009. He portrays the president as "trying to fulfill the promises he made as an antiwar candidate. . . ." Obama "has wrestled
with this immutable reality [of war] from his first year in the White House . . ."
Landler informs his readers that Obama "went for a walk among the tombstones at Arlington National Cemetery before giving the
order to send 30,000 additional troops into Afghanistan." He recalls a passage from Obama's 2009 speech accepting the Nobel Prize,
in which the president wearily lamented that humanity needed to reconcile "two seemingly irreconcilable truths -- that war is sometimes
necessary, and war at some level is an expression of human folly."
During the Obama years, folly has clearly held the upper hand. But there is nothing that Landler's hero can do. Obama has found
his wars "maddeningly hard to end."
The Times ' portrayal of Obama lacks the essential element required by genuine tragedy: the identification of objective
forces, beyond his control, that frustrated and overwhelmed the lofty ideals and humanitarian aspirations of the president. If Mr.
Landler wants his readers to shed a tear for this peace-loving man who, upon becoming president, made drone killings his personal
specialty, and turned into something akin to a moral monster, the Times correspondent should have attempted to identify the
historical circumstances that determined Obama's "tragic" fate.
But this is a challenge the Times avoids. It fails to relate Obama's war-making record to the entire course of American
foreign policy over the past quarter century. Even before Obama entered office in 2009, the United States had been at war on an almost
continuous basis since the first US-Iraq War of 1990–91.
The pretext for the Gulf War was Iraq's annexation of Kuwait in August 1990. But the violent US reaction to Iraqi President Saddam
Hussein's dispute with the emir of Kuwait was determined by broader global conditions and considerations. The historical context
of the US military operation was the imminent dissolution of the Soviet Union, which was finally carried out in December 1991. The
first President Bush declared the beginning of a "New World Order." [
3 ] What Bush meant by this phrase was
that the United States was now free to restructure the world in the interests of the American capitalist class, unencumbered by either
the reality of the countervailing military power of the Soviet Union or the specter of socialist revolution. The dissolution of the
USSR, hailed by Francis Fukuyama as the "End of History," signified for the strategists of American imperialism the end of military
restraint.
It is one of the great ironies of history that the definitive emergence of the United States as the dominant imperialist power,
amid the catastrophe of World War I, coincided with the outbreak of the 1917 Russian Revolution, which culminated in the establishment
of the first socialist workers state in history, under the leadership of the Bolshevik Party. On April 3, 1917, President Woodrow
Wilson delivered his war message to the US Congress and led the United States into the global imperialist conflict. Two weeks later,
V.I. Lenin returned to Russia, which was in the throes of revolution, and reoriented the Bolshevik Party toward the fight to overthrow
the bourgeois Provisional Government.
Lenin and his principal political ally, Leon Trotsky, insisted that the struggle for socialism was indissolubly linked to the
struggle against war. As the historian R. Craig Nation has argued:
For Lenin there was no doubt that the revolution was the result of a crisis of imperialism and that the dilemmas which it posed
could only be resolved on the international level. The campaign for proletarian hegemony in Russia, the fight against the war,
and the international struggle against imperialism were now one and the same. [
4 ]
Just as the United States was striving to establish its position as the arbiter of the world's destiny, it faced a challenge,
in the form of the Bolshevik Revolution, not only to the authority of American imperialism, but also to the economic, political,
and even moral legitimacy of the entire capitalist world order. "The rhetoric and actions of the Bolsheviks," historian Melvyn P.
Leffler has written, "ignited fear, revulsion and uncertainty in Washington." [
5 ]
Another perceptive historian of US foreign policy explained:
The great majority of American leaders were so deeply concerned with the Bolshevik Revolution because they were so uneasy about
what President Wilson called the "general feeling of revolt" against the existing order, and about the increasing intensity of
that dissatisfaction. The Bolshevik Revolution became in their minds the symbol of all the revolutions that grew out of that discontent.
And that is perhaps the crucial insight into the tragedy of American diplomacy. [
6 ]
In a desperate effort to destroy the new revolutionary regime, Wilson sent an expeditionary force to Russia in 1918, in support
of counterrevolutionary forces in the brutal civil war. The intervention was an ignominious failure.
It was not until 1933 that the United States finally granted diplomatic recognition to the Soviet Union. The diplomatic rapprochement
was facilitated in part by the fact that the Soviet regime, now under Stalin's bureaucratic dictatorship, was in the process of repudiating
the revolutionary internationalism that had inspired the Bolsheviks in 1917. It was abandoning the perspective of world revolution
in favor of alliances with imperialist states on the basis of "collective security." Unable to secure such an alliance with Britain
and France, Stalin signed the notorious Non-Aggression Pact with Hitler in August 1939. Following Hitler's invasion of the Soviet
Union in June 1941, and the entry of the United States into World War II in December 1941, the exigencies of the struggle against
Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan required that the administration of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt forge a military alliance
with the Soviet Union. But once Germany and Japan were defeated, relations between the United States and the Soviet Union rapidly
deteriorated. The Truman administration, opposing the extension of Soviet influence into Eastern Europe, and frightened by the growth
of Communist parties in Western Europe, launched the Marshall Plan in 1948 and triggered the onset of the Cold War.
The Kremlin regime pursued nationalistic policies, based on the Stalinist program of "socialism in one country," and betrayed
working class and anti-imperialist movements all over the world. But the very existence of a regime that arose out of a socialist
revolution had a politically radicalizing impact throughout the world. William Appleman Williams was certainly correct in his view
that "American leaders were for many, many years more afraid of the implicit and indirect challenge of the revolution than they were
of the actual power of the Soviet Union." [
7 ]
In the decades that followed World War II, the United States was unable to ignore the existence of the Soviet Union. To the extent
that the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China, which was established in 1949, provided limited political and material
support to anti-imperialist movements in the "Third World," they denied the US ruling class a free hand in the pursuit of its own
interests. These limitations were demonstrated -- to cite the most notable examples -- by the US defeats in Korea and Vietnam, the
compromise settlement of the Cuban missile crisis, and the acceptance of Soviet domination of the Baltic region and Eastern Europe.
The existence of the Soviet Union and an anticapitalist regime in China deprived the United States of the possibility of unrestricted
access to and exploitation of the human labor, raw materials, and potential markets of a large portion of the globe, especially the
Eurasian land mass. It compelled the United States to compromise, to a greater degree than it would have preferred, in negotiations
over economic and strategic issues with its major allies in Europe and Asia, as well as with smaller countries that exploited the
tactical opportunities provided by the US-Soviet Cold War.
The dissolution of the Soviet Union in December 1991, combined with the restoration of capitalism in China following the Tiananmen
Square massacre of June 1989, was seen by the American ruling class as an opportunity to repudiate the compromises of the post-World
War II era, and to carry out a restructuring of global geopolitics, with the aim of establishing the hegemony of the United States.
There was no small element of self-delusion in the grandiose American response to the breakup of the Soviet Union. The bombastic
claims that the United States had won the Cold War were based far more on myth than reality. In fact, the sudden dissolution of the
Soviet Union took the entire Washington foreign policy establishment by surprise. In February 1987, the Council on Foreign Relations
published an assessment of US-Soviet relations, authored by two of its most eminent Sovietologists, Strobe Talbott and Michael Mandelbaum.
Analyzing the discussions between Reagan and Gorbachev at meetings in Geneva and Reykjavik in 1986, the two experts concluded:
No matter how Gorbachev comes to define perestroika in practice and no matter how he modifies the official definition
of security, the Soviet Union will resist pressure for change, whether it comes from without or within, from the top or the bottom.
The fundamental conditions of Soviet-American relations are therefore likely to persist. This, in turn, means that the ritual
of Soviet-American summitry is likely to have a long run. . . . [
8 ]
The "long run," Talbott and Mandelbaum predicted, would continue not only during the reign of "Gorbachev's successor," but also
his "successor's successor." No substantial changes in relations between the United States and the Soviet Union were to be expected.
The two prophets from the Council on Foreign Relations concluded:
Whoever they are, and whatever changes have occurred in the meantime, the American and Soviet leaders of the next century will
be wrestling with the same great issue -- how to manage their rivalry so as to avoid nuclear catastrophe -- that has engaged the
energies, in the latter half of the 1980s, of Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev. [
9 ]
In contrast to the Washington experts, who foresaw nothing, the International Committee recognized that the Gorbachev regime marked
a climactic stage in the crisis of Stalinism. "The crisis of Gorbachev," it declared in a statement dated March 23, 1987, "has emerged
as every section of world Stalinism confronts economic convulsions and upheavals by the masses. In every case -- from Beijing to
Belgrade -- the response of the Stalinist bureaucrats has been to turn ever more openly toward capitalist restorationism." [
10 ]
The Cold War victory narrative encouraged, within the ruling elite, a disastrous overestimation of the power and potential of
American capitalism. The drive for hegemony assumed the ability of the US to contain the economic and political centrifugal forces
unleashed by the operation of global capitalism. Even at the height of its power, such an immense project was well beyond the capacities
of the United States. But amid the euphoria generated by the end of the Soviet Union, the ruling class chose to ignore the deep-rooted
and protracted crisis of American society. An objective observer, examining the conditions of both the United States and the Soviet
Union between 1960 and 1990, might well have wondered which regime was in greater crisis. During the three decades that preceded
the dissolution of the USSR, the United States exhibited high levels of political, social, and economic instability.
Consider the fate of the presidential administrations in power during those three decades: (1) The Kennedy administration ended
tragically in November 1963 with a political assassination, in the midst of escalating social tensions and international crises;
(2) Lyndon B. Johnson, Kennedy's successor, was unable to seek reelection in 1968, as a result of urban riots and mass opposition
to the US invasion of Vietnam; (3) Richard Nixon was compelled to resign from office in August 1974, after the House of Representatives'
Judiciary Committee voted for his impeachment on charges related to his criminal subversion of the Constitution; (4) Gerald Ford,
who became president upon Nixon's resignation, was defeated in the November 1976 election amid popular revulsion over Nixon's crimes
and the US military debacle in Vietnam; (5) Jimmy Carter's one term in office was dominated by an inflationary crisis that sent the
federal prime interest rate to 20 percent, a bitter three month national coal miners strike, and the aftershocks generated by the
Iranian Revolution; and (6) Ronald Reagan's years in office, despite all the ballyhoo about "morning in America," were characterized
by recession, bitter social tension, and a series of foreign policy disasters in the Middle East and Central America. The exposure
of an illegal scheme to finance paramilitary operations in Nicaragua (the Iran-Contra crisis) brought Reagan to the very brink of
impeachment. His administration was saved by the leadership of the Democratic Party, which had no desire to remove from office a
president who was politically weakened and already exhibiting signs of dementia.
The one persistent factor that confronted all these administrations, from Kennedy to Reagan, was the erosion in the global economic
position of the United States. The unquestioned dominance of American finance and industry at the end of World War II provided the
economic underpinnings of the Bretton Woods system of dollar-gold convertibility that formed the basis of global capitalist growth
and stability. By the late 1950s, the system was coming under increasing strain. It was during the Kennedy administration that unfavorable
tendencies in the US balance of trade first began to arouse significant concern. On August 15, 1971, Nixon suddenly ended the Bretton
Woods system of fixed international exchange rates, pegged to a US dollar convertible at the rate of $35 per ounce of gold. During
the 1970s and 1980s, the decline in the exchange rate of the dollar mirrored the deterioration of the American economy.
The belligerent response of the United States to the 1991 dissolution of the Soviet Union reflected the weakness, not the strength,
of American capitalism. The overwhelming support within the ruling elite for a highly aggressive foreign policy arose from the delusion
that the United States could reverse the protracted erosion of its global economic position through the deployment of its immense
military power.
The Defense Planning Guidance, drafted by the Department of Defense in February 1992, unambiguously asserted the hegemonic ambitions
of US imperialism:
There are other potential nations or coalitions that could, in the further future, develop strategic aims and a defense posture
of region-wide or global domination. Our strategy must now refocus on precluding the emergence of any potential future global
competitor. [ 11 ]
The 1990s saw a persistent use of US military power, most notably in the first Gulf War, followed by its campaign to break up
Yugoslavia. The brutal restructuring of the Balkan states, which provoked a fratricidal civil war, culminated in the US-led 1999
bombing campaign to compel Serbia to accept the secession of the province of Kosovo. Other major military operations during that
decade included the intervention in Somalia, which ended in disaster, the military occupation of Haiti, the bombing of Sudan and
Afghanistan, and repeated bombing attacks on Iraq.
The events of September 11, 2001 provided the opportunity to launch the "War on Terror," a propaganda slogan that provided an
all-purpose justification for military operations throughout the Middle East, Central Asia and, with increasing frequency, Africa.
They furnished the Bush administration with a pretext to institutionalize war as a legitimate and normal instrument of American foreign
policy.
The administration of the second President Bush ordered the invasion of Afghanistan in the autumn of 2001. In speeches that followed
9/11, Bush used the phrase "wars of the twenty-first century." In this case, the normally inarticulate president spoke with precision.
The "War on Terror" was, from the beginning, conceived as an unending series of military operations all over the globe. One war would
necessarily lead to another. Afghanistan proved to be a dress rehearsal for the invasion of Iraq.
The military strategy of the United States was revised in line with the new doctrine of "preventive warfare," adopted by the US
in 2002. This doctrine, which violated existing international law, decreed that the United States could attack any country in the
world judged to pose a potential threat -- not only of a military, but also of an economic character -- to American interests.
In a verbal sleight of hand, the Bush administration justified the invasion of Iraq as a preemptive war, undertaken in
response to the imminent threat posed by the country's "weapons of mass destruction" to the national security of the United States.
Of course, the threat was as non-existent as were Saddam Hussein's WMDs. In any event, the Bush administration rendered the distinction
between preemptive and preventive war meaningless, by asserting the right of the United States to attack any country, regardless
of the existence or non-existence of an imminent threat to American national security. Whatever the terminology employed for propaganda
purposes by American presidents, the United States adheres to the illegal doctrine of preventive war.
The scope of military operations continuously widened. New wars were started while the old ones continued. The cynical invocation
of human rights was used to wage war against Libya and overthrow the regime of Muammar Gaddafi in 2011. The same hypocritical pretext
was employed to organize a proxy war in Syria. The consequences of these crimes, in terms of human lives and suffering, are incalculable.
The last quarter century of US-instigated wars must be studied as a chain of interconnected events. The strategic logic of the
US drive for global hegemony extends beyond the neocolonial operations in the Middle East and Africa. The ongoing regional wars are
component elements of the rapidly escalating confrontation of the United States with Russia and China.
It is through the prism of America's efforts to assert control of the strategically critical Eurasian landmass, that the essential
significance of the events of 1990–91 is being revealed. But this latest stage in the ongoing struggle for world hegemony, which
lies at the heart of the conflict with Russia and China, is bringing to the forefront latent and potentially explosive tensions between
the United States and its present-day imperialist allies, including -- to name the most significant potential adversary -- Germany.
The two world wars of the twentieth century were not the product of misunderstandings. The past is prologue. As the International
Committee foresaw in 1990–91, the American bid for global hegemony has rekindled interimperialist rivalries simmering beneath the
surface of world politics. Within Europe, dissatisfaction with the US role as the final arbiter of world affairs is being openly
voiced. In a provocative essay, published in Foreign Affairs , the journal of the authoritative US Council on Foreign Relations,
German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier has bluntly challenged Washington's presumption of US global dominance:
As the United States reeled from the effects of the Iraq war and the EU struggled through a series of crises, Germany held
its ground. . . .
Today both the United States and Europe are struggling to provide global leadership. The 2003 invasion of Iraq damaged the
United States' standing in the world. After the ouster of Saddam Hussein, sectarian violence ripped Iraq apart, and U.S. power
in the region began to weaken. Not only did the George W. Bush administration fail to reorder the region through force, but the
political, economic, and soft-power costs of this adventure undermined the United States' overall position. The illusion of a
unipolar world faded. [ 12 ]
In a rebuke to the United States, Steinmeier writes: "Our historical experience has destroyed any belief in national exceptionalism
-- for any nation." [ 13 ]
The journalists and academics, who work within the framework of the official narrative of the defense of human rights and the
"War on Terror," cannot explain the progression of conflicts, from the 1990–91 Gulf War, to the current expansion of NATO eight hundred
miles eastward, and the American "pivot to Asia." On a regular basis, the United States and its allies stage war games in Eastern
Europe, in close proximity to the borders of Russia, and in strategically critical waters off the coast of China. It is not difficult
to conceive of a situation in which events -- either as a result of deliberate calculation or of reckless miscalculation -- erupt
into a clash between nuclear-armed powers. In 2014, as the centenary of World War I approached, a growing number of scholarly papers
called attention to the similarities between the conditions that precipitated the disaster of August 1914 and present-day tensions.
One parallel between today and 1914 is the growing sense among political and military strategists that war between the United
States and China and/or Russia may be inevitable. As this fatalistic premise increasingly informs the judgments and actions of the
key decision makers at the highest level of the state, it becomes a dynamic factor that makes the actual outbreak of war more likely.
A specialist in international geopolitics has recently written:
Once war is assumed to be unavoidable, the calculations of leaders and militaries change. The question is no longer whether
there will or should be a war, but when the war can be fought most advantageously. Even those neither eager for nor optimistic
about war may opt to fight when operating in the framework of inevitability. [
14 ]
Not since the end of World War II has there existed so great a danger of world war. The danger is heightened by the fact that
the level of popular awareness of the threat remains very limited. What percentage of the American population, one must ask, realizes
that President Barack Obama has formally committed the United States to go to war in defense of Estonia, in the event of a conflict
between the small Baltic country and Russia? The media has politely refrained from asking the president to state how many human beings
would die in the event of a nuclear war between the United States and either Russia or China, or both at the same time.
On the eve of World War II, Leon Trotsky warned that a catastrophe threatened the entire culture of mankind. He was proven correct.
Within less than a decade, the Second World War claimed the lives of more than fifty million people. The alarm must once again be
sounded. The working class and youth within the United States and throughout the world must be told the truth.
The progressive development of a globally integrated world economy is incompatible with capitalism and the nation-state system.
If war is to be stopped and a global catastrophe averted, a new and powerful mass international movement, based on a socialist program,
and strategically guided by the principles of revolutionary class struggle, must be built. In opposition to imperialist geopolitics,
in which national states fight brutally for regional and global dominance, the International Committee counterposes the strategy
of world socialist revolution. As Trotsky advised, we "follow not the war map but the map of the class struggle. . . ." [
15 ]
In the weeks prior to the invasion of Iraq in 2003, there were mass protests against the war policies of the United States and
its allies. Millions took to the streets. But after the war began, public opposition virtually disappeared. The absence of popular
protest did not signify support for the war. Rather, it reflected the repudiation, by the old middle-class protest movement, of its
former Vietnam-era opposition to imperialism.
There are mounting signs of political radicalization among significant sections of the working class and youth. It is only a matter
of time before this radicalization gives rise to conscious opposition to war. It is the aim of this volume to impart to the new antiwar
movement a revolutionary socialist and internationalist perspective and program.
The quotes from Trotsky are glaring. These and others were used to argue against socialism in the post war decades, but all that
was needed was time and the working of the forces of capitalism itself. History never ended, it is right on schedule
"Landler informs his readers that Obama "went for a walk among the tombstones at Arlington National Cemetery before giving
the order to send 30,000 additional troops into Afghanistan." He recalls a passage from Obama's 2009 speech accepting the Nobel
Prize, in which the president wearily lamented that humanity needed to reconcile "two seemingly irreconcilable truths -- that
war is sometimes necessary, and war at some level is an expression of human folly."
VI lenin crushed the Krondstadt rebellion that was the true 'soviet union' model and instituted a hard right revolutionary regime
of ruthless dictatorial control from smolny, not a workers state. The US borgeouis (and french and english) intervened to keep
russia in the war and 160 german divisions from leaving the eastern front. The threat of a workers state was not the concern of
the victors. The failure of revolutionary russia to represent what this article is propping it up to be (some kind of genuine
workers state) leaves me deeply suspect about the other conclusions he's bent history to. Anyone who's read "2 years in russia"
by emma goldman, and "the victors dilemma" - john silverlight and any number of books on the russian civil war, it is clear that
the intervention was for military tactical reasons and that the nascient state was in no ways a workers state but a totalitarian
military dictatorship. Emma Goldman's disillusionment is not her falling out of love with her ideals, but her coming to terms
with the reality vs the PR of Russia. Which is why this website (Wsws) advertised a book repudiating the rejection of socialism
with the faiure of the soviet union as a false narrative a year or few ago.
The historical memoir is clear, diaries, memos, news articles, and the Western soldier revolts, time to smash the revolution.
Kronstadt was a tragedy, but the regime was under threat. history is messy.
I can imagine that
the leadership of imperialist countries was underestimating the bolsheviks in 1917, but once the Russian revolution had given
enough confidence to the German masses to make the war stop one year later, once the French black sea fleet had rebelled in 1919,
etc... they were all very conscious of the risks (potential risks, not immediate threats).
The evidence in favour of what Trotsky wrote about Kronstadt is simply overwhelming. A cmd above gave some basic evidence. Trotsky
was absolutely right and absolutely honest on what he wrote later on ("hue and cry over Kronstadt")
The working class has been the victim of betrayal after betrayal by pseudo-left forces in the 20th century, which led to two catastrophic
world wars and all the other conflicts that have created needless bloodshed around the world. The great task will be, when the
new mass working class anti-war movement arises, to give the working class the political knowledge it needs to not fall for the
traps that dissipated anti-war movements in the past. It must be made clear to the workers of the world that for us, it's do or
die time - literally, as the obscene levels of social inequality and the prospect of nuclear confrontation prove.
I understand this very well, having seen what happened to what I thought at the time was a powerful antiwar movement in the 1960s
against the war in Vietnam. I was quite politically naive at the time and became so disillusioned with politics in general and
what I then thought to be the "left" in particular, that I went off politics completely and started reading Ayn Rand.
After being turned off by Rand's misanthropy and hatred of the working class (even though I admired her atheism), I became
more or less apolitical until 1998, when I first read the World Socialist Web Site and found what I had been looking for.
for this affirming comment. Me too, having all but given up on politics and following a last ditch
search of the web I was rewarded with a political program and party that was more than compatible with my world view and personal
values. Something I had not thought possible, thank you ICFI/SEP.
There are times when even we as Marxists find ourselves scouring the past for a word that befits the character and luminosity
of a moment in human understanding. In this respect David North has given new meaning to the word 'Biblical'.
As a word, its essence is transcendent. For whoever defines an epoch in the clearest and most profoundest way as this, is elevated
to the realms of Greatness.
As the bourgeoisie now scrabbles, in fights, and drowns in the last dregs of its alchemy, a Phoenix arises out of their chaos
lest the bourgeoisie commits all to the Fires of Hell ....
Most excellent words comrade David ...a most excellent call to class struggle .
This is a remarkably panoramic account, grounded in both history and economics, of the unfolding of U.S. militarism and imperialist
warfare over the past 30 or so years. It is without peer in anything else I have seen in terms of showing that events and tendencies
- which we may have been separately aware of - were in fact part of a historical continuum growing out of economic developments
and the perceived interests of the U.S. ruling class.
Always interesting to read cmd. North. ''First, and most important, the International Committee interpreted the collapse of the
Stalinist regimes in Eastern Europe in 1989–90, and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, as an existential crisis of the
entire global nation-state system, as it emerged from the ashes of World War II. Second, the ICFI anticipated that the breakdown
of the established postwar equilibrium would lead rapidly to a resurgence of imperialist militarism''. This is great but we also
have German militarism on the rise and we should not underestimate. The working class must be prepared for economic and even actual
wars in Europe and elsewhere. The redivision of markets and resources is evident with Germany and China on the table.
March 12, 2019 at 5:25
pm GMT • 200 Words @AnonFromTN
Superfluously impossible, AnonfromTN said: "It is simple, really. The US needs a law
prohibiting anyone with dual citizenship to hold public office."
Hi AnonfromTN.
Hard to comprehend how you persist to deny how the "US law" is Zionized. (Zigh) Israeli
"dual citizenship and holding "Homeland" public office is an irretractable endowment lawlessly
given to US Jews by ruling international Jewry.
They barged into our Constitution like a cancer and feast upon The Bill of Rights.
What's worse now is how livin' the "American dream" has reversed, and at present, President
t-Rump demands huge increases in war funding.
No one gets informed that future wars converge with Israel's will.
Please consider looking at the Wikileaks video linked below? It illustrates a barbaric type
of war crime-free & unaccountability to "international law," including a lawless US
military Rules of Engagement modus operandi, which governed the serial killing activity of an
Apache attack chopper crew in the Baghdad sky. Look close at the posed threat!
Tell me AnonfromTN? As you likely know, Bradley Chelsea Manning is, and under "Homeland"
law, in-the-klink for exposing the war crimes to America. Is their one (1) US Congressman
raising objection to the imprisonment? Fyi, you can look at the brave writing of Kathy Kelly on
the Manning case, and which appears at Counterpunch.org.
@ChuckOrloski I
can only agree. The patient (the US political system) is too far gone to hope for recovery.
As comment #69 rightly points out, our political system is based on bribery. Lobbyism and
donations to political campaigns and PACs are perfectly legal in the US, while all of these
should be criminal offenses punished by jail time, like in most countries. Naturally,
desperate Empires losing their dominant position resort to any war crimes imaginable, and
severely punish those who expose these crimes.
I can add only one thing: you are right that greedy Jews are evil, but greedy people of
any nationality are just as evil as greedy Jews. Not all greedy globalists and MIC thieves
are Jews, but they are all scum. I watch with dismay the US Empire heading to its crash.
Lemmings running to the cliff are about as rational as our degenerate elites. Israel
influence is toxic, but that's not the only poison the Empire will die from.
Information from local sources said that US army helicopters have already transported the gold bullions under cover of darkness
on Sunday [February 24th], before transporting them to the United States.
The sources said that tens of tons that Daesh had been keeping in their last hotbed in al-Baghouz area in Deir Ezzor countryside
have been handed to the Americans, adding up to other tons of gold that Americans have found in other hideouts for Daesh, making
the total amount of gold taken by the Americans to the US around 50 tons, leaving only scraps for the SDF [Kurdish] militias that
serve them [the US operation].
Recently, sources said that the area where Daesh leaders and members have barricaded themselves in, contains around 40 tons
of gold and tens of millions of dollars.
Allegedly, "US occupation forces in the Syrian al-Jazeera area made a deal with Daesh terrorists, by which Washington gets tens
of tons of gold that the terror organization had stolen, in exchange for providing safe passage for the terrorists and their leaders
from the areas in Deir Ezzor where they are located."
ISIS was financing its operations largely by the theft of oil from the oil wells in the Deir Ezzor area, Syria's oil-producing
region, and they transported and sold this stolen oil via their allied forces, through Turkey, which was one of those US allies trying
to overthrow Syria's secular Government
and install a Sunni fundamentalist regime that would be ruled from Riyadh (i.e., controlled by the Saud family) . This gold is
the property of the Syrian Government, which owns all that oil and the oil wells, which ISIS had captured (stolen), and then sold.
Thus, this gold is from sale of that stolen black-market oil, which was Syria's property.
The US Government evidently thinks that the public are fools, idiots. America's allies seem to be constantly amazed at how successful
that approach turns out to be.
Jihadists were recruited from throughout the world to fight against Syria's secular Government. Whereas ISIS was funded mainly
by black-market sales of oil from conquered areas, the Al-Qaeda-led groups were mainly funded by the Sauds and other Arab royal families
and their retinues, the rest of their aristocracy. On 13 December 2013, BBC headlined
"Guide to the Syrian rebels" and opened "There are
believed to be as many as 1,000 armed opposition groups in Syria, commanding an estimated 100,000 fighters." Except in the Kurdish
areas in Syria's northeast, almost all of those fighters were being led by Al Qaeda's Syrian Branch, al-Nusra. Britain's Center on
Religion & Politics headlined on 21 December 2015,
"Ideology
and Objectives of the Syrian Rebellion" and reported: "If ISIS is defeated, there are at least 65,000 fighters belonging to other
Salafi-jihadi groups ready to take its place." Almost all of those 65,000 were trained and are led by Syria's Al Qaeda (Nusra), which
was protected by
the US
In September 2016 a UK official
"FINAL REPORT OF THE TASK
FORCE ON COMBATING TERRORIST AND FOREIGN FIGHTER TRAVEL" asserted that, "Over 25,000 foreign fighters have traveled to the battlefield
to enlist with Islamist terrorist groups, including at least 4,500 Westerners. More than 250 individuals from the United States have
also joined." Even just 25,000 (that official lowest estimate) was a sizable US proxy-army of religious fanatics to overthrow Syria's
Government.
On 26 November 2015, the first of Russia's videos of Russia's bombing ISIS oil trucks headed into Turkey was bannered at a US
military website
"Russia Airstrike on ISIS Oil Tankers" , and exactly a month later, on 26 December 2015, Britain's Daily Express headlined
"WATCH: Russian fighter jets smash ISIS oil tankers after spotting 12,000 at Turkish border" . This article, reporting around
twelve thousand ISIS oil-tanker trucks heading into Turkey, opened: "The latest video, released by the Russian defence ministry,
shows the tankers bunched together as they make their way along the road. They are then blasted by the fighter jet." The US military
had nothing comparable to offer to its 'news'-media. Britain's Financial Times headlined on 14 October 2015,
"Isis Inc: how oil fuels the jihadi terrorists" . Only America's allies were
involved in this commerce with ISIS -- no nation that supported Syria's Government was participating in this black market of stolen
Syrian goods. So, it's now clear that a lot of that stolen oil was sold for gold as Syria's enemy-nations' means of buying that oil
from ISIS. They'd purchase it from ISIS, but not from Syria's Government, the actual owner.
An estimated 20,000-40,000 barrels of oil are produced daily in ISIS controlled territory generating $1-1.5 million daily profit
for the terrorist organization. The oil is extracted from Dir A-Zur in Syria and two fields in Iraq and transported to the Kurdish
city of Zakhu in a triangle of land near the borders of Syria, Iraq and Turkey. Israeli and Turkish mediators come to the city
and when prices are agreed, the oil is smuggled to the Turkish city of Silop marked as originating from Kurdish regions of Iraq
and sold for $15-18 per barrel (WTI and Brent Crude currently sell for $41 and $45 per barrel) to the Israeli mediator, a man
in his 50s with dual Greek-Israeli citizenship known as Dr. Farid. He transports the oil via several Turkish ports and then onto
other ports, with Israel among the main destinations.
The US had done the same thing when it took over Ukraine by
a brutal coup in February 2014
: It grabbed the gold. Iskra News in Russian
reported, on 7 March 2014 , that "At 2 a.m. this morning ... an unmarked transport plane was on the runway at Borosipol Airport"
near Kiev in the west, and that, "According to airport staff, before the plane came to the airport, four trucks and two Volkswagen
minibuses arrived, all the truck license plates missing." This was as translated by Michel Chossudovsky at Global Research headlining
on 14 March,
"Ukraine's Gold Reserves Secretly Flown Out and Confiscated by the New York Federal Reserve?" in which he noted that, when asked,
"A spokesman for the New York Fed said simply, 'Any inquiry regarding gold accounts should be directed to the account holder.'" The
load was said to be "more than 40 heavy boxes." Chossudovsky noted that, "The National Bank of Ukraine (Central Bank) estimated Ukraine's
gold reserves in February to be worth $1.8 billion dollars." It was allegedly 36 tons. The US, according to Victoria Nuland (
Obama's detail-person
overseeing the coup ) had invested around $5 billion in the coup. Was her installed Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk
cleaning out the nation's gold reserves in order to strip the nation so that the nation's steep indebtedness for Russian gas would
never be repaid to Russia's oligarchs? Or was he doing it as a payoff for Nuland's having installed him? Or both? In any case: Russia
was being squeezed by this fascist
Ukrainian-American ploy.
The Syria operation was about oil, gold, and guns. However, most of America's support was to Al-Qaeda-led jihadists, not to ISIS-jihadists.
As the great independent investigative journalist Dilyana
Gaytandzhieva reported on 2 July 2017 :
"In December of last year while reporting on the battle of Aleppo as a correspondent for Bulgarian media I found and filmed
9 underground warehouses full of heavy weapons with Bulgaria as their country of origin. They were used by Al Nusra Front (Al
Qaeda affiliate in Syria designated as a terrorist organization by the UN)."
Furthermore, On
8 March 2013, Richard Spenser of Britain's Telegraph reported that Croatia's Jutarnji List newspaper had reported that "3,000
tons of weapons dating back to the former Yugoslavia have been sent in 75 planeloads from Zagreb airport to the rebels, largely via
Jordan since November. The airlift of dated but effective Yugoslav-made weapons meets key concerns of the West, and especially Turkey
and the United States, who want the rebels to be better armed to drive out the Assad regime."
Also, a September 2014 study by Conflict Armaments Research (CAR), titled
"Islamic State Weapons
in Iraq and Syria" , reported that not only east-European, but even US-made, weapons were being "captured from Islamic State
forces" by Kurds who were working for the Americans, and that this was very puzzling and disturbing to those Kurds, who were risking
their lives to fight against those jihadists.
In December 2017, CAR headlined
"Weapons of the Islamic State"
and reported that "this materiel was rapidly captured by IS forces, only to be deployed by the group against international coalition
forces." The assumption made there was that the transfer of weapons to ISIS was all unintentional.
That report ignored contrary evidence, which I summed up on 2 September 2017 headlining
"Russian TV
Reports US Secretly Backing ISIS in Syria" , and reporting there also from the Turkish Government an admission that the US was
working with Turkey to funnel surviving members of Iraq's ISIS into the Deir Ezzor part of Syria to help defeat Syria's Government
in that crucial oil-producing region. Moreover, at least one member of the 'rebels' that the US was training at Al Tanf on Syria's
Jordanian border had quit because his American trainers were secretly diverting some of their weapons to ISIS. Furthermore: why hadn't
the US bombed Syrian ISIS before Russia entered the Syrian war on 30 September 2015? America talked lots about its supposed effort
against ISIS, but why did US wait till 16 November 2015 before taking action,
"'Get Out Of Your Trucks And Run Away': US Gives ISIS 45 Minute Warning On Oil Tanker Strikes" ?
So, regardless of whether the US Government uses jihadists as its proxy-forces, or uses fascists as its proxy-forces, it grabs
the gold -- and grabs the oil, and takes whatever else it can.
This is today's form of imperialism.
Grab what you can, and run. And call it 'fighting for freedom and democracy and human rights and against corruption'. And the
imperial regime's allies watch in amazement, as they take their respective cuts of the loot. That's the deal, and they call it 'fighting
for freedom and democracy and human rights and against corruption around the world'. That's the way it works. International gangland.
That's the reality, while most of the public think it's instead really "fighting for freedom and democracy and human rights and against
corruption around the world." For example, as
RT reported on Sunday , March 3rd,
about John Bolton's effort at regime-change in Venezuela, Bolton said: "I'd like to see as broad a coalition as we can put together
to replace Maduro, to replace the whole corrupt regime,' Bolton told CNN's Jake Tapper." Trump's regime wants to bring clean and
democratic government to the poor Venezuelans, just like Bush's did to the Iraqis, and Obama's did to the Libyans and to the Syrians
and to the Ukrainians. And Trump, who pretends to oppose Obama's regime-change policies, alternately expands them and shrinks them.
Though he's slightly different from Obama on domestic policies, he never, as the US President, condemns any of his predecessors'
many coups and invasions, all of which were disasters for everybody except America's and allies' billionaires. They're all in on
the take.
The American public were suckered into destroying Iraq in 2003, Libya in 2011, Syria in 2011-now, and so many other countries,
and still haven't learned anything, other than to keep trusting the allegations of this lying and psychopathically vicious and super-aggressive
Government and of its stenographic 'news'-media. When is enough finally enough ? Never? If not never, then when ? Or do most people
never learn? Or maybe they don't really care. Perhaps that's the problem.
Back on 21 December 2018, one of the US regime's top 'news'-media, the Washington Post, had headlined
"Retreating ISIS army smuggled a fortune in cash and gold out of Iraq and Syria" and reported that "the Islamic State is sitting
on a mountain of stolen cash and gold that its leaders stashed away to finance terrorist operations." So, it's not as if there hadn't
been prior reason to believe that some day some of the gold would be found after America's defeat in Syria. Maybe they just hadn't
expected this to happen quite so soon. But the regime will find ways to hoodwink its public, in the future, just as it has in the
past. Unless the public wises-up (if that's even possible).
The USA 'lost' in Syria, the opposing coalition incl. Iran and Russia couldn't be faced off successfully.
Destroying Afgh., Iraq, Lybia, - all 'failures' in the sense of not garnering 'advantage' for the USA as a territory, a Federated
Nation, its citizens, its trade, boosting hopeful expansion, etc. One aim rarely mentioned is keeping allies on board, e.g. Sarkozy's
France, to invade Lybia. In France many say it was Sark I who did DE-ss-troy! Lybia.
The word *failure* is based on the acceptance of a stated aim reminiscent of old-style-colonialism: grab resources, exploit
super-cheap labor, control the natives, mine, exploit, shunt the goods / profits to home base.
If the aim is to stop rivals breathing, blast them back to the Stone Age, the success is good but relative. (see Iraq.) Private
GloboCorps (e.g. Glencore.. ) are in charge behind the curtain, many Gvmts are just stooges for them in the sense of unawoved
partnerships, the one feeding into the other, in a kind of desperado death spiral.
I have always been struck by the fact that Oil Projects / Management in Iraq, even wiki gives lists that shows major movers
and profiteers are not USA oil cos. / interests, but China, Malaysia, many others.
"... The US strategy is based on two core principles: (1) Maintain – extend hegemony over whole world. (Resources, military etc etc) (2) Act as Israel's Golom. ..."
"... Of course this (very abbreviated) view of US "strategy" is open to the criticisms that it's both dumb & evil. As if US establishment cares. Compared to cost of traditional "war" it's pretty cheap ..."
In truth, infinite war is a strategic abomination, an admission of professional military
bankruptcy. Erster General-Quartiermeister Ludendorff might have endorsed the term,
but Ludendorff was a military fanatic.
Check that. Infinite war is a strategic abomination except for arms merchants, so-called
defense contractors, and the " emergency
men " (and women) devoted to climbing the greasy pole of what we choose to call the
national security establishment. In other words, candor obliges us to acknowledge that, in some
quarters, infinite war is a pure positive, carrying with it a promise of yet more profits,
promotions, and opportunities to come. War keeps the gravy train rolling. And, of course,
that's part of the problem.
Who should we hold accountable for this abomination? Not the generals, in my view. If they
come across as a dutiful yet unimaginative lot, remember that a lifetime of military service
rarely nurtures imagination or creativity. And let us at least credit our generals with this:
in their efforts to liberate or democratize or pacify or dominate the Greater Middle East they
have tried every military tactic and technique imaginable. Short of nuclear annihilation,
they've played just about every card in the Pentagon's deck -- without coming up with a winning
hand. So they come and go at regular intervals, each new commander promising success and
departing after a couple years to
make way for someone else to give it a try.
... ... ...
Congressional midterm elections are just months away and another presidential election
already looms. Who will be the political leader with the courage and presence of mind to
declare: "Enough! Stop this madness!" Man or woman, straight or gay, black, brown, or white,
that person will deserve the nation's gratitude and the support of the electorate.
Until that occurs, however, the American penchant for war will stretch on toward infinity.
No doubt Saudi and Israeli leaders will cheer, Europeans who remember their Great War will
scratch their heads in wonder, and the Chinese will laugh themselves silly. Meanwhile, issues
of genuinely strategic importance -- climate change offers one obvious example -- will continue
to be treated like an afterthought. As for the gravy train, it will roll on.
1. WW1 had total casualties (civilian and military) of around 40M. WW2 had total
casualties of 60M. So yes WW2 was more deadly but "pales in comparison" is hardly justified,
especially relative to population.
2. Marshal Foch, 28 June, 1919: "This is not a peace. It is an armistice for 20
years."
WW1 inevitably led to WW2.
The only politician with a modest national stage to have said that (and meant it) in the
last 50 years was Ron Paul, who was booed and mocked as crazy. Trump made noises in that
direction, but almost as soon as the last words of his oath echoed off into the brisk January
afternoon, he seemed to change his tune. Whether he never meant it, or decided to avoid the
JFK treatment, who knows.
No, as I believe Will Rogers said, democracy is that form of government where the people
get what they want, good and hard.
I supported Ron Paul in 2012. But after his candidacy was crookedly subverted by the
Establishment (cf., Trump's) I vowed never to vote again for anyone that I believe unworthy
of the power wielded through the public office. I haven't voted since, and don't expect to
until the Empire collapses.
Kirk Douglas starred in a great film about fighting in World War I: "Paths of Glory." I
highly recommend the film for its accuracy, best described in Wiki by the reaction of
governments:
Controversy
On its release, the film's anti-military tone was subject to criticism and censorship.
In France, both active and retired personnel from the French military vehemently
criticized the film -- and its portrayal of the French Army -- after it was released in
Belgium. The French government placed enormous pressure on United Artists, (the European
distributor) to not release the film in France. The film was eventually shown in France in
1975 when social attitudes had changed.[17]
In Germany, the film was withdrawn from the Berlin Film Festival to avoid straining
relations with France;[18] it was not shown for two years until after its release.
In Spain, Spain's right-wing government of Francisco Franco objected to the film. It was
first shown in 1986, 11 years after Franco's death.
In Switzerland, the film was censored, at the request of the Swiss Army, until
1970.[18]
At American bases in Europe, the American military banned it from being shown.[18]
No, it's not the generals who have let us down, but the politicians to whom they
supposedly report and from whom they nominally take their orders.
I'd say both. The generals have greatly assisted in stringing along the trusting public,
always promising that victory is just around the corner, provided the public supports this or
that final effort. Petraeus in particular willingly played his part in misleading the public
about both Iraq and Afghanistan. His career would be a great case study for illuminating what
is wrong with the U.S. today.
As to the apparent failure of the Afghanistan war – one must be careful to separate
stated goals from real ones. What kind of "lasting success" can the U.S. possibly hope for
there? If they managed to defeat the Taliban, pacify the country, install a puppet regime to
govern it, and then leave, what would that achieve? The puppet regime would find itself
surrounded by powers antagonistic to the U.S., and the puppets would either cooperate with
them or be overthrown in no time. The U.S. are not interested in winning and leaving –
they want to continue disrupting the peaceful integration of East, West, and South Asia.
Afghanistan is ideally placed for this purpose, and so the U.S. are quite content with
dragging out that war, as a pretext for their continued presence in the region.
I would disagree on one point though: "Today, Washington need not even bother to
propagandize the public into supporting its war. By and large, members of the public are
indifferent to its very existence."
This is an error. A majority of the American public think that wasting trillions of
dollars on endless pointless foreign wars is a stupid idea, and they think that we would be
better off spending that money on ourselves. It's just that we don't live in a democracy, and
the corporate press constantly ignores the issue. But just because the press doesn't mention
something, doesn't mean that it does not exist.
So during the last presidential election Donald Trump echoed this view, why are we
throwing away all this money on stupid wars when we need that money at home? For this he was
attacked as a fascist and "literally Hitler" (really! It's jaw-dropping when you think about
it). Despite massive propaganda attacking Trump, and a personal style that could charitably
be called a jackass, Trump won the election in large part because indeed most American don't
like the status quo.
After the election, Trump started to deliver on his promises – and he was quickly
beaten down, his pragmatist nationalist advisors purged and replaced with defense-industry
chickenhawks, and now we are back to the old status quo. The public be damned.
No, the American people are not being propagandized into supporting these wars. They are
simply being ignored.
When are you going to stop insulting our intelligence with this Boy's State civics crap?
You're calling on political leaders to stop war, like they don't remember what CIA did to
JFK, RFK, Daschle, or Leahy. Or Paul Wellstone.
Your national command structure, CIA, has impunity for universal jurisdiction crime. They
can kill or torture anyone they want and get away with it. That is what put them in charge.
CIA kills anybody who gets in their way. You fail to comprehend Lenin's lesson: first destroy
the regime, then you can refrain from use of force. Until you're ready to take on CIA, your
bold phrases are silent and odorless farts of feckless self-absorption. Sack up and imprison
CIA SIS or GTFO.
Since Spain was smart enough to stay out of both World Wars (as was Switzerland, of
course), I wonder what Franco was thinking when he banned the film. Anyway, the final scene
may be the best final scene in the history of movies.
This writer, a retired military officer whose son died in service to the yankee imperium
seems to have as good a grasp as any if not a better grasp than any about the nature of the
yankee system of permanent war.
While I agree the slave-American is ignored, I think the elected, salaried members of the
elected government are also ignored.. The persons in charge are Pharaohs and massively
powerful global in scope corporations.
Abe Lincoln, McKinnley, Kennedy discovered that fact in their fate.
Organized Zionism was copted by the London bankers and their corporations 1897, since then
a string of events have emerged.. that like a Submarine, seeking a far off target, it must
divert to avoid being discovered, but soon, Red October returns to its intended path. here
the path is to take the oil from the Arabs.. and the people driving that submarine are
extremely wealthy Pharaohs and very well known major corporations.
I suggest to quit talking about the nation states and their leaders as if either could
beat their way out of a wet paper sack. instead starting talking about the corporations and
Pharaohs because they are global.
The yawning silence accompanying the centennial of the Great War is baffling to me. It was
the pivotal event of the 20th century. It was the beginning of the unmanning, the
demoralization of Western Civilization. It was the calamity that created the World we inhabit
today.
I've heard nary a peep about it in the U.S. over the last four years. It's as if it were
as remote in people's consciousness as the Punic Wars.
The World Wars (I and II) can be seen as an increasingly desperate attempt of a fading
British Empire to hold on to and maintain its power and hegemony, with the material, human,
and moral cost of the wars actually accelerating the empire's demise.
Likewise, the current endless "War on Terra" can be seen as an increasingly desperate
attempt of a fading American Empire to hold on to and maintain its power and hegemony, again
with the material, human, and moral cost of this war actually accelerating its demise.
But in the meantime, in both examples, the Bankers and the MIC just keep reaping their
profits, even at the expense of the empires they purportedly support and defend.
In a traditional sense the author is right. Strategy is the attainment of political goals,
within existing constraints. (diplomatic, political, resources etc)
"Goals" traditionally means "victories". (WWI is a great example of the sometimes dubious
idea of victory)
Has the US ceased to have a strategy ? No. (Their strategy is myopic & self destructive
– ie it's not a "good" strategy)
The US strategy is based on two core principles: (1) Maintain – extend hegemony
over whole world. (Resources, military etc etc) (2) Act as Israel's Golom. Afghanistan,
at (relatively) minimal cost, US controls key land mass (& with possible future access to
fantastic resources). Threaten, mess up Russian – Chinese ambitions in this area. Iraq:
Israeli enemy, strategic location, resource extraction. Syria: Israeli enemy, strategic
location, key location for resource transfer to markets (EU esp). Deny Russia an ally. Libya:
who cares ? Gaddafi was a pain in the arse. Iran: Israeli enemy, fantastic resources, hate
them regardless.
Of course this (very abbreviated) view of US "strategy" is open to the criticisms that
it's both dumb & evil. As if US establishment cares. Compared to cost of traditional
"war" it's pretty cheap ( which is funny, because it's such a yummy gravy train for the
1% sorry, actually, forgot the FIRST core principle of US strategy: enrich all the "right"
people)
'There has never been a just [war], never an honorable one–on the part of the
instigator of the war. I can see a million years ahead, and this rule will never change in so
many as half a dozen instances. The loud little handful–as usual–will shout for
the war. The pulpit will– warily and cautiously–object–at first; the great,
big, dull bulk of the nation will rub its sleepy eyes and try to make out why there should be
a war, and will say, earnestly and indignantly, "It is unjust and dishonorable, and there is
no necessity for it." Then the handful will shout louder. A few fair men on the other side
will argue and reason against the war with speech and pen, and at first will have a hearing
and be applauded; but it will not last long; those others will outshout them, and presently
the anti-war audiences will thin out and lose popularity.
Before long you will see this
curious thing: the speakers stoned from the platform, and free speech strangled by hordes of
furious men who in their secret hearts are still at one with those stoned speakers–as
earlier– but do not dare to say so. And now the whole nation–pulpit and
all– will take up the war-cry, and shout itself hoarse, and mob any honest man who
ventures to open his mouth; and presently such mouths will cease to open. Next the statesmen
will invent cheap lies, putting the blame upon the nation that is attacked, and every man
will be glad of those conscience-soothing falsities, and will diligently study them, and
refuse to examine any refutations of them; and thus he will by and by convince himself that
the war is just, and will thank God for the better sleep he enjoys after this process of
grotesque self-deception'.
- Satan, in Mark Twain's "The Mysterious Stranger" (1908)
European politicians, the war on terror, and the triumph of Bankers United: https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2018/06/12/europe-brainwashed-normalize-relations-russia/
"Europe has not had an independent existence for 75 years. European countries do not know
what it means to be a sovereign state. Without Washington European politicians feel lost, so
they are likely to stick with Washington .
Russian hopes to unite with the West in a war against terrorism overlook that terrorism is
the West's weapon for destabilizing independent countries that do not accept a unipolar
world."
The world is ripe for barter exchange. Screw the money changers.
On January 8, 2018, former government advisor Edward Luttwak wrote an opinion piece for
Foreign Policy titled "It's Time to Bomb North Korea."
Luttwak's thesis is relatively straightforward. There is a government out there that may
very soon acquire nuclear-weapons capabilities, and this country cannot be trusted to
responsibly handle such a stockpile. The responsibility to protect the world from a rogue
nation cannot be argued with, and we understandably have a duty to ensure the future of
humanity.
However, there is one rogue nation that continues to hold the world ransom with its nuclear
weapons supply. It is decimating non-compliant states left, right, and center. This country
must be stopped dead in its tracks before anyone turns to the issue of North Korea.
In August of 1945, this rogue nation dropped two atomic bombs on civilian targets, not
military targets, completely obliterating between 135,000 and
300,000 Japanese civilians in just these two acts alone. Prior to this event, this country
killed even more civilians in the infamous
firebombing of Tokyo and other areas of Japan, dropping close to 500,000 cylinders of
napalm and petroleum jelly on some of Japan's most densely populated areas.
Recently, historians have become more open to the possibility that dropping the atomic bombs
in Hiroshima and Nagasaki was not actually necessary to end World War II. This has also been
confirmed by those who actually took part in it. As the Nation
explained:
Fleet Adm. Chester Nimitz, Commander in Chief of the Pacific Fleet, stated in a public
address at the Washington Monument two months after the bombings that 'the atomic bomb played
no decisive part, from a purely military standpoint, in the defeat of Japan ' Adm. William
"Bull" Halsey Jr., Commander of the US Third Fleet, stated publicly in 1946 that 'the first
atomic bomb was an unnecessary experiment . It was a mistake to ever drop it . [the
scientists] had this toy and they wanted to try it out, so they dropped it
A few months' prior, this rogue country's
invasion of the Japanese island of Okinawa also claimed at least one quarter of Okinawa's
population. The Okinawan people have been protesting this country's military presence ever
since. The most recent ongoing protest
has lasted well over 5,000 days in a row.
This nation's bloodlust continued well after the end of World War II. Barely half a decade
later, this country bombed North Korea into complete oblivion, destroying over 8,700 factories,
5,000 schools, 1,000 hospitals, 600,000 homes, and
eventually killing off as much as 20 percent of the country's population. As the Asia
Pacific Journal has noted, the assaulting country dropped so many bombs that they eventually
ran out of targets to hit, turning to bomb the irrigation systems, instead:
By the fall of 1952, there were no effective targets left for US planes to hit. Every
significant town, city and industrial area in North Korea had already been bombed. In the
spring of 1953, the Air Force targeted irrigation dams on the Yalu River, both to destroy the
North Korean rice crop and to pressure the Chinese, who would have to supply more food aid to
the North. Five reservoirs were hit, flooding thousands of acres of farmland, inundating
whole towns and laying waste to the essential food source for millions of North Koreans."
This was just the beginning. Having successfully destroyed the future North Korean
state, this country moved on to the rest of East Asia and Indo-China, too. As Rolling Stone's
Matt Taibbi
has explained :
We [this loose cannon of a nation] dumped 20 million gallons of toxic herbicide on Vietnam
from the air, just to make the shooting easier without all those trees, an insane plan to win
'hearts and minds' that has left about a million still disabled from defects and disease
– including about 100,000 children, even decades later, little kids with misshapen
heads, webbed hands and fused eyelids writhing on cots, our real American legacy, well out of
view, of course.
This mass murder led to the deaths of between 1.5 million and 3.8 million people,
according to the Washington Post. More bombs were dropped on Vietnam than were unleashed
during the entire
conflict in World War II . While this was going on, this same country was also
secretly bombing Laos and Cambodia, too, where there are over 80 million
unexploded bombs still killing people to this day.
This country also decided to bomb Yugoslavia ,
Panama
, and
Grenada before invading Iraq in the early 1990s. Having successfully bombed Iraqi
infrastructure, this country then punished Iraq's entire civilian population with brutal
sanctions. At the time, the U.N.
estimated that approximately 1.7 million Iraqis had died as a result, including
500,000 to 600,000 children . Some years later, a prominent medical journal attempted
to absolve the cause of this infamous history by refuting the statistics involved despite
the fact that, when interviewed during the sanctions-era, Bill Clinton's secretary of state,
Madeleine Albright, intimated that to this rogue government, the
deaths of half a million children were "worth it" as the "price" Iraq needed to pay. In other
words, whether half a million children died or not was irrelevant to this bloodthirsty nation,
which barely blinked while carrying out this murderous policy.
This almighty superpower then invaded Iraq again in 2003 and plunged the entire region
into chaos . At the end of May 2017, the Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR)
released a study
concluding that the death toll from this violent nation's 2003 invasion of Iraq had led to over
one million deaths and that at least one-third of them were caused directly by the invading
force.
Not to mention this country also invaded Afghanistan prior to the invasion of Iraq (even
though the militants plaguing Afghanistan were
originally trained and financed by this warmongering nation). It then
went on to bomb Yemen, Syria, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, and the
Philippines .
Libya famously
had one of the highest standards of living in the region. It had state-assisted healthcare,
education, transport, and affordable housing. It is now a lawless war-zone
rife with extremism where slaves are openly traded like commodities
amid the power vacuum created as a direct result of the 2011 invasion.
In 2017, the commander-in-chief of this violent nation took the monumental death and
destruction to a new a level by removing
the restrictions on delivering airstrikes, which resulted in thousands upon
thousands of civilian deaths. Before that, in the first six months of 2017, this country
dropped
over 20,650 bombs , a monumental increase from the year that preceded it.
Despite these statistics, all of the above conquests are mere child's play to this nation.
The real prize lies in some of the more defiant and more powerful states, which this country
has already unleashed a containment strategy upon. This country has deployed its own troops all
across the border
with Russia even though it promised in the early 1990s it
would do no such thing. It also has a specific policy of
containing Russia's close ally, China, all the while threatening China's borders with talks
of direct strikes on North Korea (again, remember it already did so in the 1950s).
This country also elected a president who not only believes it is okay to embrace this rampantly violent
militarism but who openly calls other
countries "shitholes" – the very same term that aptly describes the way this country
has treated the rest of the world for decades on end. This same president also reportedly once
asked three times in a meeting
, "If we have nuclear weapons, why don't we use them?" and shortly after proposed a policy to
remove the constraints protecting the world from his dangerous supply of advanced nuclear
weaponry.
If we have any empathy for humanity, it is clear that this country must be stopped. It
cannot continue to act like this to the detriment of the rest of the planet and the safety and
security of the rest of us. This country
openly talks about using its nuclear weapons, has used them before, and has continued to
use all manner of weapons unabated in the years since while threatening to expand the use of
these weapons to other countries.
Seriously, if North Korea seems like a threat, imagine how the rest of the world feels while
watching one country violently take on the rest of the planet single-handedly, leaving nothing
but destruction in its wake and promising nothing less than a nuclear holocaust in the years to
come.
There is only one country that has done and that continues to do the very things North Korea
is being accused of doing.
Take as much time as you need for that to resonate.
1 The Korean War ends (1953
2 President Kennedy invades South Vietnam (1962)
3 The US overthrows Allende in Chile (1973)
4 The West installs Iranian dictator the Shah (1953)
5 The US-led Iraq invasion (2003)
Many honorable mentions including:
– NATO bombing of Serbia
– Libya
– Afghanistan
– Syria (support of ISIS and its predecessors and spinoffs)
The US body count is simply staggering – many millions killed, millions more wounded
or poisoned (Vietnam – agent orange and other chemical agents) and tens of millions of
lives forever damaged.
USA! USA! USA! (its elites that rule us of course!)
"... In a society often bereft of historical memory and in thrall to the propaganda of its "exceptionalism", Burns' "entirely new" Vietnam war is presented as "epic, historic work". Its lavish advertising campaign promotes its biggest backer, Bank of America, which in 1971 was burned down by students in Santa Barbara, California, as a symbol of the hated war in Vietnam. ..."
"... The cynical fabrication of "false flags" that led to the invasion of Vietnam is a matter of record – the Gulf of Tonkin "incident" in 1964, which Burns promotes as true, was just one. The lies litter a multitude of official documents, notably the Pentagon Papers ..."
"... Today, according to secret Nato documents obtained by the German newspaper, Suddeutsche Zetung, this vital treaty is likely to be abandoned as "nuclear targeting planning is increased". The German Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel has warned against "repeating the worst mistakes of the Cold War All the good treaties on disarmament and arms control from Gorbachev and Reagan are in acute peril. Europe is threatened again with becoming a military training ground for nuclear weapons. We must raise our voice against this." ..."
"... Barack Obama provided the apotheosis, with seven simultaneous wars, a presidential record, including the destruction of Libya as a modern state. Obama's overthrow of Ukraine's elected government has had the desired effect: the massing of American-led Nato forces on Russia's western borderland through which the Nazis invaded in 1941. ..."
In a society often bereft of historical memory and in thrall to the propaganda of its
"exceptionalism", Burns' "entirely new" Vietnam war is presented as "epic, historic work". Its
lavish advertising campaign promotes its biggest backer, Bank of America, which in 1971 was
burned down by students in Santa Barbara, California, as a symbol of the hated war in
Vietnam.
Burns says he is grateful to "the entire Bank of America family" which "has long supported
our country's veterans". Bank of America was a corporate prop to an invasion that killed
perhaps as many as four million Vietnamese and ravaged and poisoned a once bountiful land. More
than 58,000 American soldiers were killed, and around the same number are estimated to have
taken their own lives.
I watched the first episode in New York. It leaves you in no doubt of its intentions right
from the start. The narrator says the war "was begun in good faith by decent people out of
fateful misunderstandings, American overconfidence and Cold War misunderstandings".
The dishonesty of this statement is not surprising. The cynical fabrication of "false flags"
that led to the invasion of Vietnam is a matter of record – the Gulf of Tonkin "incident"
in 1964, which Burns promotes as true, was just one. The lies litter a multitude of official
documents, notably the Pentagon Papers , which the great whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg
released in 1971.
There was no good faith. The faith was rotten and cancerous. For me – as it must be
for many Americans ! it is difficult to watch the film's jumble of "red peril" maps,
unexplained interviewees, ineptly cut archive and maudlin American battlefield sequences.
... ... ...
The sheer energy and moral persistence of these great movements largely succeeded; by 1987
Reagan had negotiated with Mikhail Gorbachev an Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF)
that effectively ended the Cold War.
Today, according to secret Nato documents obtained by the German newspaper, Suddeutsche
Zetung, this vital treaty is likely to be abandoned as "nuclear targeting planning is
increased". The German Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel has warned against "repeating the worst
mistakes of the Cold War All the good treaties on disarmament and arms control from Gorbachev
and Reagan are in acute peril. Europe is threatened again with becoming a military training
ground for nuclear weapons. We must raise our voice against this."
But not in America. The thousands who turned out for Senator Bernie Sanders' "revolution" in
last year's presidential campaign are collectively mute on these dangers. That most of
America's violence across the world has been perpetrated not by Republicans, or mutants like
Trump, but by liberal Democrats, remains a taboo.
Barack Obama provided the apotheosis, with seven simultaneous wars, a presidential record,
including the destruction of Libya as a modern state. Obama's overthrow of Ukraine's elected
government has had the desired effect: the massing of American-led Nato forces on Russia's
western borderland through which the Nazis invaded in 1941.
"... Using data compiled by a Geography and Native Studies professor from Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, the indy100 team created an interactive map of U.S. military incursions outside its own borders from Argentina in 1890 to Syria in 2014. ..."
"... " Deployment of the military to evacuate American citizens, covert military actions by US intelligence, providing military support to an internal opposition group, providing military support in one side of a conflict, use of the army in drug enforcement actions. ..."
Tyler Durden
Aug 26, 2017 9:15 PM 0
SHARES
US has had a military presence across the world
, from almost day one of its independence.
For those who have ever wanted a clearer picture of the true reach of the United States
military - both historically and currently - but shied away due to the sheer volume of research
required to find an answer,
The Anti Media points out
that
a crew at the
Independent
just made things a whole lot simpler.
Using data compiled by a Geography and Native Studies
professor
from Evergreen State College in
Olympia, Washington, the indy100 team
created
an interactive map of U.S. military incursions outside its own borders from
Argentina in 1890 to Syria in 2014.
To avoid confusion, indy100 laid out its prerequisites for what constitutes an invasion:
" Deployment of the military to evacuate American citizens, covert military actions by US
intelligence, providing military support to an internal opposition group, providing military
support in one side of a conflict, use of the army in drug enforcement actions.
But indy100 didn't stop there.
To put all that history into context, using
data
from the Department
of Defense (DOD), the team also put together a map to display all the countries in which nearly
200,000 active members of the U.S. military are now stationed.
"... As for Washington and the proverbially bombastic, failed futurists across the Beltway, do they even know what is the end game of "investing" in two never-ending wars with no visible benefits? ..."
As for Washington and the proverbially bombastic, failed futurists across the Beltway, do they even know what is the
end game of "investing" in two never-ending wars with no visible benefits?
You start by assuming that the absence of war is the ultimate good, but none can say what a world without war would be like,
or how long it would last.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/mar/20/wars-john-gray-conflict-peace
Has the world seen moral progress? The answer should not depend on whether one has a sunny or a morose temperament. Everyone
agrees that life is better than death, health better than sickness, prosperity better than privation, freedom better than tyranny,
peace better than war. All of these can be measured, and the results plotted over time. If they go up, that's progress.
For John Gray, this is a big problem. As a part of his campaign against reason, science and Enlightenment humanism, he insists
that the strivings of humanity over the centuries have left us no better off. This dyspepsia was hard enough to sustain when
Gray first expressed it in the teeth of obvious counterexamples such as the abolition of human sacrifice, chattel slavery and
public torture-executions. But as scholars have increasingly measured human flourishing, they have found that Gray is not just
wrong but howlingly, flat-earth, couldn't-be-more-wrong wrong. The numbers show that after millennia of near-universal poverty
and despotism, a steadily growing proportion of humankind is surviving infancy and childbirth, going to school, voting in democracies,
living free of disease, enjoying the necessities of modern life and surviving to old age.
And more people are living in peace. In the 1980s several military scholars noticed to their astonishment that the most
destructive form of armed conflict – wars among great powers and developed states – had effectively ceased to exist. At the
time this "long peace" could have been dismissed as a random lull, but it has held firm for an additional three decades.
In my opinion Gray, though wrong that violence is not decreasing, is onto something about the future being bleak because of
the rise of meliorist assumptions, because perpetual peace will be humanity's tomb.
While many suggest a danger for our world along the lines of
Brian Cox's explanation for the Fermi Paradox (ie intelligent life forms cross grainedly bring on self-annihilation through
unlimited war) I take a different view.
Given that Pinker appears substantially correct that serious war (ie wars among great powers and developed states) have effectively
ceased to exist, the trend is for peace and cooperation. Martin Nowak in his book The Supercoperators shows cooperation, not fighting,
to be the defining human trait (and indeed the most cooperative groups won their wars in history, whereby nation states
such the US are the result of not just individuals but familial tribal regional , and virtually continental groupings coming together
for mutual advantage and defence .
The future is going to be global integration pursuit of economic objectives, and I think this exponential moral progress bill
begat technological advances beyond imagining.. An escape from the war trap is almost complete and the Singularity becomes. The
most likely culprit in the paradox is a technological black hole event horizon created by unlimited peace and progress.
Cross-grained though it may be to say that the good war hallows every cause, I think it not so bad in comparison with the alternative.
Well put. These people are like the "nobles" of medieval times. They care not a whit about the "peasants" they trample. They
are wealth bigots, compounded by some ethnic bigotry or other, in this case Jewish supremacism. America has an oligarchy problem.
At the center of that oligarchy is a Jewish mafia controlling the banks, and thereby the big corporations, and thereby the media
and the government. This oligarchy sees America as a big, dumb military machine that it can manipulate to generate war profits.
"... There has been a gradual decline in the rationality of UK forces thinking. They insisted on UN legal cover cover the invasion of Iraq but were totally on board with pre-emptive action in Libya, happily training effectively ISIS forces before Gaddafi was removed. They are now training Ukrainian Neo-Nazis and training ISIS/whatever in Syria, effectively invading the country. I guess this may reflect the increasing direct Zionist control of Perfidious Albion with attendant levels of hubris. ..."
The Russians were there in Yugoslavia but they were not following NATO's script. There was an incident where Russian forces
took control of a key airport to the total surprise of NATO. The US overall commander ordered the UK to go in and kick the Russians
out. The UK ground commander wisely said he was not prepared to start WW III over Russian control of an airfield.
There has been a gradual decline in the rationality of UK forces thinking. They insisted on UN legal cover cover the invasion
of Iraq but were totally on board with pre-emptive action in Libya, happily training effectively ISIS forces before Gaddafi was
removed. They are now training Ukrainian Neo-Nazis and training ISIS/whatever in Syria, effectively invading the country. I guess
this may reflect the increasing direct Zionist control of Perfidious Albion with attendant levels of hubris.
According to some commenters at MoA the US neocons can be viewed as a flavor of political psychopaths: "Linear thinking is precisely
how Washington psychopaths think and execute once they have identified a targeted population for subservience and eventual exploitation.
It's a laser-like focus on control using the tools psychopaths understand: money, guns and butter. U.S. leaders use linear thinking
because, as psychopaths, they do not have the ability to think otherwise. Linear thinking give leaders control over how their subordinates
think and execute. A culture of psychopathy means subordinates and supporters will offer slavish devotion to such a linear path. Anyone
straying from the path is not insightful or innovative, they are rebels that sow confusion and weaken leaders. They must be silenced
and banished from the Washington tribe."
and " the Neocons seem to suffer from something almost worse - a misguided belief in their own propaganda. Even the psychopath
manages to fake plausibility - although he has no empathy for the victim and takes a thrill out of hurting them, he can still know enough
about them to predict how they will react and to fake empathy himself. This ability seems to be missing in the folk who send the troops
in. Here there seems to be the genuine but unquestioning belief in one's own infallibility - that there is one right way of doing things
to which all others must and will yield if enough pressure is applied. The line by one of GWB's staff was, supposedly, that "we create
our own reality". It is this creation of a reality utterly divorced from the real world that seems to lead to disaster every single
time. "
Notable quotes:
"... Provided the gross flaws of the intelligence, one has to wonder about the quality of the education in politics provided by Harvard and other expensive universities.. What they seem to learn very well there is lying. ..."
"... Barack CIA 0bama. ..."
"... It seems the, "Mission Possible" of the alphabet agencies is not intelligence, but chaos. ..."
"... Did the U.S. enter the First World War to save the world and democracy, or was it a game of waiting until the sides were exhausted enough that victory would be a walkover, the prize a seat at the center of power and the result that the U.S. could now take advantage of a superior position over the now exhausted former superpowers, having sat out the worst of the fighting and sold to both sides at a healthy profit? ..."
"... Invading Afghanistan and Iraq gives the U.S. a dominant role in the center of the Asian continent, the position coveted by Britain, Russia, France and the Ottoman Empire during the Great Power rivalry leading up to the Great War. It can be seen as partial success in a policy of encirclement of Russia and China. Redefining the Afghanistan and Iraq wars along these lines make them look more successful, not less, however odious we may thing these objectives might be from moral and international law perspectives. ..."
"... you mean non-conforming realities like the rule of law, and possible future contingencies like war crimes tribunals? ..."
"... it seems to me that trying to write some kind of rational analysis of a US foreign policy without mentioning the glaring fact that it's all absolutely illegal strikes me as an exercise in confusion. ..."
"... the author's focus on successful implementation of policy is misguided. That the Iraq War was based on a lie, the Libyan bombing Campaign was illegal, and the Syrian conflict was an illegal proxy war does not trouble him. And the strategic reasons for US long-term occupation of Afghanistan escapes him. ..."
"... Although he laments the failure to plan for contingencies, the words "accountable" and "accountability" never appear in this essay. Nor does the word "neocon" - despite their being the malignant driving force in US FP. ..."
"... There have been many lessons for the Russians since Afghanistan, two that Russia was directly involved with were the 90's break-up of Yugoslavia in the 90's (and the diplomatic invention of R2P) and the Chechen turmoil of the last decade. ..."
"... My only gripe with his work is that he always describes multiple aspects of psychopathy in his observations of U.S. foreign policy and the Washington ruling elite, but never goes as far as to conclude the root of all our problems are psychopathic individuals and institutions, or a culture of psychopathy infesting larger groups of the same, e.g., Washington elite, "The Borg", etc. ..."
"... Linear thinking is precisely how Washington psychopaths think and execute once they have identified a targeted population for subservience and eventual exploitation. It's a laser-like focus on control using the tools psychopaths understand: money, guns and butter. U.S. leaders use linear thinking because, as psychopaths, they do not have the ability to think otherwise. Linear thinking give leaders control over how their subordinates think and execute. A culture of psychopathy means subordinates and supporters will offer slavish devotion to such a linear path. Anyone straying from the path is not insightful or innovative, they are rebels that sow confusion and weaken leaders. They must be silenced and banished from the Washington tribe. ..."
"... the military was told "Go to Iraq, overthrow Saddam, everything will work out once we get our contractors and corporations in after you." Paul Bremer's CPA and his "100 Orders" were supposed to fix everything. But the Iraqis objected strenuously to the oil privatization selloff (and the rest of it) and the insurgency was launched. Okay, the military was told, break the insurgency. In comes the CIA, Special Forces, mass surveillance - what comes out? Abu Ghraib torture photos. The insurgency gets even stronger. Iran ends up winning the strategic game, hands down, and has far more influence in Iraq than it could ever dream of during the Saddam era. The whole objective, turning Iraq into a client state of the U.S. neoliberal order, utterly failed. ..."
"... Here's the point I think you're missing: the Washington strategists behind all this are batshit crazy and divorced from reality. Their objectives have to be rewritten every few years, because they're hopeless pipe dreams. They live and work and breathe in these Washington military-industrial think tanks, neocons and neoliberals both, that are largely financed by arms manufacturers and associated private equity firms. As far as the defense contractors go, one war is as good as another, they can keep selling arms to all regardless. Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Libya, Syria - cash cows is all they are. So, they finance the PR monkeys to keep pushing "strategic geopolitical initiatives" that are really nonsensical and have no hope of working in the long run - but who cares, the cash keeps flowing. ..."
"... It's all nonsense, there's no FSA just Al Qaeda and ISIS affiliates, plus the Kurdish proxy force is a long-term dead end - but it keeps the war going. A more rational approach - work with Russia to defeat ISIS, don't worry about economic cooperation between Syria and Iran, tell the Saudis and Israelis that Iran won't invade them (it won't), pull back militarily and focus instead on domestic problems in the USA - the think tanks, defense contractors, Saudi and Israeli lobbyists, they don't like that. ..."
"... Brenner is trying to mislead us with bombastic terminology like "The Linear Mindset". The root cause of America's problems is what Michael Scheuer calls Imperial Hubris: The idea that they are Masters of the Universe and so they have omnipotent power to turn every country into a vassal. But when this hubris meets reality, they get confused and don't know what to do. In such a case, they resort to three standard actions: sanctions, regime change or chaos. If these three don't work, they repeat them! ..."
"... Politicians are mere puppets. Their real owners are the 1% who use the Deep State to direct policy. Among this 1% there are zionists who have enormous influence on US Middle Eastern policy and they use the neocons as their attack dogs to direct such policy. This hubris has caused so much pain, destruction and death all over the world and it has also caused America so much economic damage. ..."
"... America is waning as a global power but instead of self-introspection and returning to realism, they are doubling down on neocon policy stupidity. Putin, China and Iran are trying to save them from their stupidity but they seem to be hell-bent on committing suicide. But I hope the policy sophistication of Russia, China and Iran, as well as their military capabilities that raise the stakes high for US military intervention will force the Masters of the Universe to see sense and reverse their road to destruction. ..."
"... the Neocons seem to suffer from something almost worse - a misguided belief in their own propaganda. Even the psychopath manages to fake plausibility - although he has no empathy for the victim and takes a thrill out of hurting them, he can still know enough about them to predict how they will react and to fake empathy himself. This ability seems to be missing in the folk who send the troops in. Here there seems to be the genuine but unquestioning belief in one's own infallibility - that there is one right way of doing things to which all others must and will yield if enough pressure is applied. The line by one of GWB's staff was, supposedly, that "we create our own reality". It is this creation of a reality utterly divorced from the real world that seems to lead to disaster every single time. ..."
"... The propaganda part is inventing, manufacturing and embellishing some embodiment of evil that must be defeated to liberate their victims and save humanity. That's the cover story, not the underlying purpose of U.S. aggression. ..."
"... Neocons do not believe that exclusively as a goal in itself - it merely dovetails rather nicely with their ultimate obsession with control, and it's and easy sell against any less-than-perfect targeted foreign leader or government. Irrational demonization is the embodiment of that propaganda. ..."
"... The methods of ultimately controlling the liberated people and their nation's resources are cloaked in the guise of 'bringing Western democracy'. Methods for corrupting the resulting government and usurping their laws and voting are hidden or ignored. The propaganda then turns to either praising the resulting utopia or identifying/creating a new evil that now must also be eliminated. The utopia thing hasn't worked out so well in Libya, Iraq or Ukraine, so they stuck with the 'defeat evil' story. ..."
"... Apart from psychopathy in US leadership, the US has no understanding, nor respect of, other cultures. This is not just in US leadership, but in the exceptional people in general. It shows up from time to time in comments at blogs like this, and is often quite noticeable in comments at SST. ..."
"... The essence of imperial hubris is the belief that one's country is omnipotent; that the country can shape and create reality. The country's main aspiration is to create clients, dependencies and as the Godfather Zbigniew Bzrezinski candidly put it, "vassals".Such a mindset does not just appreciate the reality of contingency; it also does not appreciate the nature of complex systems. The country's elites believe that both soft and hard power should be able to ensure the desired outcomes. But resistance to imperial designs and blowback from the imperial power's activities induce cognitive dissonance. Instead of such cognitive crises leading to a return to reality, they lead to denial amongst this elite. This elite lives in a bubble. Their discourse is intellectually incestuous and anybody that threatens this bubble is ostracized. Limits are set to what can be debated. That is why realists like John Mearsheimer, Steve Walt, Michael Scheuer and Stephen Cohen are ignored by this elite even though their ideas are very germane. If other countries don't bow down to their dictates, they have only a combination of the following responses: sanctions, regime change and chaos. The paradox is that the more they double down with their delusions the more the country's power continues to decline. My only hope is that this doubling down will not take the world down with it. ..."
"linear"?, I would say amateurish and often stupid! It seems that the USA cannot see far enough as it's submitted to regime changes
every 5 years and decisions are finally left to powerful lobbies that have a better continuity.
Provided the gross flaws
of the intelligence, one has to wonder about the quality of the education in politics provided by Harvard and other expensive
universities.. What they seem to learn very well there is lying.
"Linear" and all that is the mushy feel-good stuff on top of your arrogance. Kleptocracy only NOW putting down its roots? Come
on. Let's get back to the 90's where it started. Vengeance for 9/11? Cover?
It seems the, "Mission Possible" of the alphabet agencies is not intelligence, but chaos. All's well in the world with
them as long as the USSA is grinding away on some near helpless ME country. Drugs and other natural resources flow from and death
and destruction flow to the unsuspecting Muslim targets.
With America, you're our friend, (or at least we tolerate you) until you're not (or we don't), then God help you and your innocent
hoards.
The organized and well scripted chaos has been just one act in the larger play of destroying western civilization with throngs
of Muslims now flooding western Europe and to a lesser degree, USA. Of course, the Deep State had felt confident in allowing Latinos
to destroy America...Trump has put a large crimp in the pipeline--one of the reasons he is hated so badly by the destructive PTB.
Your analysis of linearity is interesting. However, you make what I believe is a critical error. You assume you know the objective
and the path to follow and base your critique accordingly.
It is entirely possible that the underlying objective of, for instance, invading Iraq was to win a war and bring democracy.
Subsequent behaviour in Iraq (and Afghanistan) indicates that there might be (likely is) a hidden but central other objective.
I do not want to state that I know what that is because I am not "in the know". However, much that you attribute to failure from
linear thinking just as easily can be explained by the complexity of realizing a "hidden agenda".
Perhaps we can learn from history. Did the U.S. enter the First World War to save the world and democracy, or was it a
game of waiting until the sides were exhausted enough that victory would be a walkover, the prize a seat at the center of power
and the result that the U.S. could now take advantage of a superior position over the now exhausted former superpowers, having
sat out the worst of the fighting and sold to both sides at a healthy profit?
Invading Afghanistan and Iraq gives the U.S. a dominant role in the center of the Asian continent, the position coveted
by Britain, Russia, France and the Ottoman Empire during the Great Power rivalry leading up to the Great War. It can be seen as
partial success in a policy of encirclement of Russia and China. Redefining the Afghanistan and Iraq wars along these lines make
them look more successful, not less, however odious we may thing these objectives might be from moral and international law perspectives.
Russia learnt a huge lesson from their experience in Afghanistan. There they retreated in the face of a violent Wahabist insurgency
and paid the price. The Soviet union collapsed and became vulnerable to western free-market gangsterism as well as suffering the
blowback of terrorism in Chechnya, where they decided to play it very differently. A bit more like how Assad senior dealt with
the Muslim Brotherhood in the 1980's.
Russia knew that if ISIS and friends were allowed to destroy Syria like the Mujahadeen
had done in Afghanistan, then it would only be a matter of time before blowback would come again to Russia.
Russia's involvement is entirely rational and in their national interest. It should never have come as a surprise to the US,
and the US should shake off their cold war propaganda and be grateful that people are willing to put their lives on the line to
defeat Wahabist terrorism. Russia has played a focused line with integrity. Many Syrians love them for this, and many more in
the Middle East will likewise adopt a similar line.
In other words, the linear mindset blocks out all non-conforming realities in the present and those contingent elements
which might arise in the future
you mean non-conforming realities like the rule of law, and possible future contingencies like war crimes tribunals?
i kinda skimmed this piece, but it seems to me that trying to write some kind of rational analysis of a US foreign policy
without mentioning the glaring fact that it's all absolutely illegal strikes me as an exercise in confusion.
Brenner: Washington never really had a plan in Syria.
Really? Firstly, the author's focus on successful implementation of policy is misguided. That the Iraq War was based on
a lie, the Libyan bombing Campaign was illegal, and the Syrian conflict was an illegal proxy war does not trouble him. And the
strategic reasons for US long-term occupation of Afghanistan escapes him.
Although he laments the failure to plan for contingencies, the words "accountable" and "accountability" never appear in
this essay. Nor does the word "neocon" - despite their being the malignant driving force in US FP.
The U.S. has also taken part in clandestine operations aimed at Iran and its ally Syria. A by-product of these activities
has been the bolstering of Sunni extremist groups that espouse a militant vision of Islam and are hostile to America and sympathetic
to Al Qaeda.
In testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in January [2007], Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said
that there is "a new strategic alignment in the Middle East," separating "reformers" and "extremists"; she pointed to the Sunni
states as centers of moderation, and said that Iran, Syria, and Hezbollah were "on the other side of that divide."
Lastly, Brenner's complaint that Obama has been "scape-goated" as having created ISIS conveniently ignores Obama's allowing ISIS
to grow by down-playing the threat that it represented. Obama's called ISIS al Queda's "JV team" and senior intelligence analysts
dutifully distorted intelligence to down-play the threat (see below). This was one of many deceptions that Obama took part in
- if not orchestrated (others: "moderate rebels", Benghazi, the "Fiscal Cliff", bank bailouts).
After months of investigation, this much is very clear: from the middle of 2014 to the middle of 2015, the United States
Central Command's most senior intelligence leaders manipulated the command's intelligence products to downplay the threat from
ISIS in Iraq" . . .
The Joint Task Force can find no justifiable reason why operational reporting was repeatedly used as a rationale to change
the analytic product, particularly when the changes only appeared to be made in a more optimistic direction . . .
There have been many lessons for the Russians since Afghanistan, two that Russia was directly involved with were the 90's
break-up of Yugoslavia in the 90's (and the diplomatic invention of R2P) and the Chechen turmoil of the last decade.
Russia has also benefited through the non-linear analysis of US diplomacy failures of the last two decades. Russia has created
a coalition backing up their military entry into the Middle East that allows achievement of tangible objectives at a sustainable
cost.
But b's article is about the US's dismal diplomacy that is exacerbating its rapid empire decline and it does very well to help
explain the rigid lack of thought that hastens the deterioration of US influence.
This article makes a lot of good points, but I didn't really grasp exactly what "linear" thinking is. OK. Venezuela very well
may be turning into a situation. What is the "linear" approach? What, instead, would be the "non-linear" approach? This article
cites many "linear" failures. It would be helpful also to learn of some non-linear successes. If not by the United States then
by somebody else.
Let me clarify my prior posting. This article seems to be asserting that the United States has attempted to pound the square peg
of its policy objectives into the round hole of the Middle East. I pretty much agree with that idea. But how is this "linear,"
as opposed to "bull-headed"? How does being "non-linear" help with the pounding? Would not adapting our policies to pound a round
peg instead be just as "linear" but more clever?
Thanks for posting these great observations by Michael Brenner, b.
The link to his bio on University of Pitsburg site is broken and the page is gone, but it still exists for now in Google's
cache from Aug. 1st
here . His bio can also be found under this ">https://www.theglobalist.com/united-states-common-man-forgotten-by-elites/">this
article from The Globalist
Everything I've read of Dr. Brenner that I've stumbled across is brilliant. My only gripe with his work is that he always
describes multiple aspects of psychopathy in his observations of U.S. foreign policy and the Washington ruling elite, but never
goes as far as to conclude the root of all our problems are psychopathic individuals and institutions, or a culture of psychopathy
infesting larger groups of the same, e.g., Washington elite, "The Borg", etc.
While he is quite accurate in describing the symptoms, one is left with the impression that they are the things to be
fixed. Linear thinking in a U.S. foreign policy of aggression? Absolutely, but it's pointless to 'fix' that without understanding
the cause.
Linear thinking is precisely how Washington psychopaths think and execute once they have identified a targeted population
for subservience and eventual exploitation. It's a laser-like focus on control using the tools psychopaths understand: money,
guns and butter. U.S. leaders use linear thinking because, as psychopaths, they do not have the ability to think otherwise. Linear
thinking give leaders control over how their subordinates think and execute. A culture of psychopathy means subordinates and supporters
will offer slavish devotion to such a linear path. Anyone straying from the path is not insightful or innovative, they are rebels
that sow confusion and weaken leaders. They must be silenced and banished from the Washington tribe.
Does anyone in Washington REALLY want to 'save' the Persians and 'rebuild' Iran as they imagine America did post WWII to German
and Japan? Or is the more overriding intent to punish and destroy a leadership that will not submit to the political and commercial
interests in the US? Of course the U.S. fails to deliver any benefits to the 'little people' after destroying their country and
government - they are incapable of understanding what the 'little people' want (same goes for domestic issues in the U.S.).
The U.S. government and leadership do not need lessons to modify their techniques or 'thinking' - they are incapable of doing
so. You can't 'talk a psychopath into having empathy' any more than you can talk them out of having smallpox. 'The law' and voting
were intentionally broken in the U.S. to make them all but useless to fix Washington, yet a zombified American public will continue
to use the religiously (or sit back and watch others use them religiously) with little result. Because we're a democracy and a
nation of laws - the government will fix anything broken with those tools.
In a certain sense, I'm glad Brennan does NOT go on about psychopathy in his articles. He would sound as tedious and nutty
as I do here and would never be allowed near Washington. I'll just be grateful for his thorough illustration of the symptoms for
now.
Your analysis of linearity is interesting. However, you make what I believe is a critical error. You assume you know the objective
and the path to follow and base your critique accordingly.
First, this is more an analysis of military failure to "do the job" that Washington "strategic thinkers" tell them to do, and
the reasons why it's such a futile game. In our system of government, the military does tactics, not strategy. And the above article,
which should be passed out to every politician in this country, isn't really about "the objective".
For example, the military was told "Go to Iraq, overthrow Saddam, everything will work out once we get our contractors
and corporations in after you." Paul Bremer's CPA and his "100 Orders" were supposed to fix everything. But the Iraqis objected
strenuously to the oil privatization selloff (and the rest of it) and the insurgency was launched. Okay, the military was told,
break the insurgency. In comes the CIA, Special Forces, mass surveillance - what comes out? Abu Ghraib torture photos. The insurgency
gets even stronger. Iran ends up winning the strategic game, hands down, and has far more influence in Iraq than it could ever
dream of during the Saddam era. The whole objective, turning Iraq into a client state of the U.S. neoliberal order, utterly failed.
Here's the point I think you're missing: the Washington strategists behind all this are batshit crazy and divorced from
reality. Their objectives have to be rewritten every few years, because they're hopeless pipe dreams. They live and work and
breathe in these Washington military-industrial think tanks, neocons and neoliberals both, that are largely financed by arms manufacturers
and associated private equity firms. As far as the defense contractors go, one war is as good as another, they can keep selling
arms to all regardless. Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Libya, Syria - cash cows is all they are. So, they finance the PR monkeys to
keep pushing "strategic geopolitical initiatives" that are really nonsensical and have no hope of working in the long run - but
who cares, the cash keeps flowing.
And if you want to know why the Borg State got firmly behind Hillary Clinton, it's because they could see her supporting this
agenda wholeheartedly, especially after Libya. Here's a comment she wrote to Podesta on 2014-08-19, a long 'strategy piece' ending
with this note:
Note: It is important to keep in mind that as a result of this policy there probably will be concern in the Sunni regions of
Iraq and the Central Government regarding the possible expansion of KRG controlled territory. With advisors in the Peshmerga
command we can reassure the concerned parties that, in return for increase autonomy, the KRG will not exclude the Iraqi Government
from participation in the management of the oil fields around Kirkuk, and the Mosel Dam hydroelectric facility. At the same
time we will be able to work with the Peshmerga as they pursue ISIL into disputed areas of Eastern Syria, coordinating with
FSA troops who can move against ISIL from the North. This will make certain Basher al Assad does not gain an advantage from
these operations. Finally, as it now appears the U.S. is considering a plan to offer contractors as advisors to the Iraqi Ministry
of Defense, we will be in a position to coordinate more effectively between the Peshmerga and the Iraqi Army.
It's all nonsense, there's no FSA just Al Qaeda and ISIS affiliates, plus the Kurdish proxy force is a long-term dead end
- but it keeps the war going. A more rational approach - work with Russia to defeat ISIS, don't worry about economic cooperation
between Syria and Iran, tell the Saudis and Israelis that Iran won't invade them (it won't), pull back militarily and focus instead
on domestic problems in the USA - the think tanks, defense contractors, Saudi and Israeli lobbyists, they don't like that.
Regardless, it looks like end times for the American empire, very similar to how the Soviet Union collapsed in the 1980s, and
the last days of the French and British empires in the 1950s. And good riddance, it's become a dead weight dragging down the standard
of living for most American citizens who aren't on that gravy train.
Brenner is trying to mislead us with bombastic terminology like "The Linear Mindset". The root cause of America's problems
is what Michael Scheuer calls Imperial Hubris: The idea that they are Masters of the Universe and so they have omnipotent power
to turn every country into a vassal. But when this hubris meets reality, they get confused and don't know what to do. In such
a case, they resort to three standard actions: sanctions, regime change or chaos. If these three don't work, they repeat them!
Politicians are mere puppets. Their real owners are the 1% who use the Deep State to direct policy. Among this 1% there
are zionists who have enormous influence on US Middle Eastern policy and they use the neocons as their attack dogs to direct such
policy. This hubris has caused so much pain, destruction and death all over the world and it has also caused America so much economic
damage.
America is waning as a global power but instead of self-introspection and returning to realism, they are doubling down
on neocon policy stupidity. Putin, China and Iran are trying to save them from their stupidity but they seem to be hell-bent on
committing suicide. But I hope the policy sophistication of Russia, China and Iran, as well as their military capabilities that
raise the stakes high for US military intervention will force the Masters of the Universe to see sense and reverse their road
to destruction.
There's a lot in both this piece and the comments. In a sense, I wonder if the core issue behind the Neocon/Imperial mindset isn't
a complete inability to see the other side's point of view. Psychopathy, short-termism (a common fault in businesspeople), divorce
from reality and hubris are likely a good part of it, as somebody, Paveway IV, Makutwa and nonsense factory put it, but the
Neocons seem to suffer from something almost worse - a misguided belief in their own propaganda. Even the psychopath manages to
fake plausibility - although he has no empathy for the victim and takes a thrill out of hurting them, he can still know enough
about them to predict how they will react and to fake empathy himself. This ability seems to be missing in the folk who send the
troops in. Here there seems to be the genuine but unquestioning belief in one's own infallibility - that there is one right way
of doing things to which all others must and will yield if enough pressure is applied. The line by one of GWB's staff was, supposedly,
that "we create our own reality". It is this creation of a reality utterly divorced from the real world that seems to lead to
disaster every single time.
I would paraphrase critics of b that he (she?) has fallen into linearity trap: one point is the resources spent by USA on wars
of 21-st century (a lot), the second points are positive results (hardly any), and an intellectual charge proceeds from A to B.
However between A and B there can be diversity of problems. We can stock enough gasoline, run out of potable water. And indeed,
you can encounter pesky terrain. I recall a family vacation trip where we visited Natural Bridges National Monument and we proceeded
to Arizona on an extremely straight highway through pretty flat plateau. Then the pavement end, and the acrophobic designated
driver has to negotiate several 180* hairpins to get down on a cliff flanking Monument Valley. After second inspection, the map
had tiny letters "switchbacks" and a tiny fragment of the road not marked with the pavement. Still better than discovering "bridge
out" annotation on your map only when you gaze at the water flowing between two bridge heads. (If I recall, during late 20-th
century Balkan intervention, US military needed a lot of time to cross Danube river that unexpectedly had no functioning bridge
where they wanted to operate. Landscape changes during a war.)
That said, military usually has an appreciation for terrain. But there are also humans. On domestic side, the number of experts
on those distant societies is small, and qualified experts, minuscule. Because the qualified ones were disproportionally naysayers,
the mere whiff if expertise was treated as treason, and we had a purge of "Arabists". And it was of course worse in the lands
to charm and conquer. Effective rule requires local hands to follow our wishes, people who can be trusted. And, preferably, not
intensely hated by the locals they are supposed to administer. And like with gasoline, water, food, etc. on a vacation trip (who
forgot mosquito repellent!), the list of needed traits is surprisingly long. Like viewing collaboration with Israel supporting
infidels as a mortal sin that can be perpetrated to spare the family from starvation (you can recruit them, success!), but it
has to be atoned through backstabbing (local cadres are disappointing).
Great analysis! This is an excellent example for why I read MOA at least once a day and most of the comments! There's something
of a sad irony that Trump has made at least some kind of effort to thwart the neocons and their relentless rush toward armageddon,
seeing as how lacking in any real intellectual capcity they all seem and with Trump at the helm?
Mostly tptb, our political class, and the pundits for the masses, seem all to exhibit an astonishingly dull witted lack of
true concern or humanity for anybody anywhere, and in my years on earth so far, at least in America, they have inculcated in the
population very dubious ethical chioces, which you would think were tragic, and decisions, which you would believe were doomed,
from the wars being waged, to the lifestyles of the citizenry especially toward the top of the economic ladder, and I don't know
about others here but I for one have been confronting and dealing with these problems both in family and aquaintances for my entire
adult life! Like the battle at Kurushetra. At least they say they "have a plan," scoffingly.
Where is chipnik to weigh in on this with his poetic observations, or I think long ago it was "slthrop" who may have been bannned
for foul language as he or she raged on at the absurdities that keep heaping up exponentially? I do miss them!
Oh well, life is relatively short and we will all be gone at some point and our presense here will be one and all less than
an iota. An awareness of this one fact and its implications you would think would pierce the consciousness of every human being
well before drawing their final breath, but I guess every McCain fails to realize until too late that the jig is up?
Justin Glyn@20 "but the Neocons seem to suffer from something almost worse - a misguided belief in their own propaganda."
The propaganda part is inventing, manufacturing and embellishing some embodiment of evil that must be defeated to liberate
their victims and save humanity. That's the cover story, not the underlying purpose of U.S. aggression.
Neocons do not believe that exclusively as a goal in itself - it merely dovetails rather nicely with their ultimate obsession
with control, and it's and easy sell against any less-than-perfect targeted foreign leader or government. Irrational demonization
is the embodiment of that propaganda.
The methods of ultimately controlling the liberated people and their nation's resources are cloaked in the guise of 'bringing
Western democracy'. Methods for corrupting the resulting government and usurping their laws and voting are hidden or ignored.
The propaganda then turns to either praising the resulting utopia or identifying/creating a new evil that now must also be eliminated.
The utopia thing hasn't worked out so well in Libya, Iraq or Ukraine, so they stuck with the 'defeat evil' story.
Apart from psychopathy in US leadership, the US has no understanding, nor respect of, other cultures. This is not just in
US leadership, but in the exceptional people in general. It shows up from time to time in comments at blogs like this, and is
often quite noticeable in comments at SST.
That it why the US in its arrogance has failed in Syria, and Russia with its tiny force has been so successful.
The essence of imperial hubris is the belief that one's country is omnipotent; that the country can shape and create reality.
The country's main aspiration is to create clients, dependencies and as the Godfather Zbigniew Bzrezinski candidly put it, "vassals".Such
a mindset does not just appreciate the reality of contingency; it also does not appreciate the nature of complex systems. The
country's elites believe that both soft and hard power should be able to ensure the desired outcomes. But resistance to imperial
designs and blowback from the imperial power's activities induce cognitive dissonance. Instead of such cognitive crises leading
to a return to reality, they lead to denial amongst this elite. This elite lives in a bubble. Their discourse is intellectually
incestuous and anybody that threatens this bubble is ostracized. Limits are set to what can be debated. That is why realists like
John Mearsheimer, Steve Walt, Michael Scheuer and Stephen Cohen are ignored by this elite even though their ideas are very germane.
If other countries don't bow down to their dictates, they have only a combination of the following responses: sanctions, regime
change and chaos. The paradox is that the more they double down with their delusions the more the country's power continues to
decline. My only hope is that this doubling down will not take the world down with it.
"... A lot of art depicts war scenes, and why not? War is incredibly exciting, dynamic, destructive, and otherwise captivating, if often in a horrific way. But I want to consider war and art in a different manner, in an impressionistic one. War, by its nature, is often spectacle; it is also often chaotic; complex; beyond comprehension. Perhaps art theory, and art styles, have something to teach us about war. Ways of representing it and capturing its meaning as well as its horrors. But also ways of misrepresenting it; of fracturing its meaning. Of manipulating it. ..."
"... My point (and I think I have one) is that America's wars are in some sense elaborate productions and representations, at least in the ways in which the government constructs and sells them to the American people. To understand these representations -- the ways in which they are both more than real war and less than it -- art theory, as well as advertising, may have a lot to teach us. ..."
"... Afghanistan as the unfinished masterpiece....most people forget that the government is yet to complete it except when a Marine dies, they think about it for a day and then forget all over again. ..."
Consider this article a work of speculation; a jumble of ideas thrown at a blank canvas.
A lot of art depicts war scenes, and why not? War is incredibly exciting, dynamic, destructive, and otherwise captivating,
if often in a horrific way. But I want to consider war and art in a different manner, in an impressionistic one. War, by its nature,
is often spectacle; it is also often chaotic; complex; beyond comprehension. Perhaps art theory, and art styles, have something to
teach us about war. Ways of representing it and capturing its meaning as well as its horrors. But also ways of misrepresenting it;
of fracturing its meaning. Of manipulating it.
For example, America's overseas wars today are both abstractions and distractions. They're also somewhat surreal to most Americans,
living as we do in comparative safety and material luxury (when compared to most other peoples of the world). Abstraction and surrealism:
two art styles that may say something vital about America's wars.
If some aspects of America's wars are surreal and others abstract, if reports of those wars are often impressionistic and often
blurred beyond recognition, this points to, I think, the highly stylized representations of war that are submitted for our consideration.
What we don't get very often is realism. Recall how the Bush/Cheney administration forbade photos of flag-draped coffins returning
from Iraq and Afghanistan. Think of all the war reporting you've seen on U.S. TV and Cable networks, and ask how many times you saw
severed American limbs and dead bodies on a battlefield. (On occasion, dead bodies of the enemy are shown, usually briefly and abstractly,
with no human backstory.)
Of course, there's no "real" way to showcase the brutal reality of war, short of bringing a person to the front and having them
face fire in combat -- a level of "participatory" art that sane people would likely seek to avoid. What we get, as spectators (which
is what we're told to remain in America), is an impression of combat. Here and there, a surreal report. An abstract news clip. Blown
up buildings become exercises in neo-Cubism; melted buildings and weapons become Daliesque displays. Severed limbs (of the enemy)
are exercises in the grotesque. For the vast majority of Americans, what's lacking is raw immediacy and gut-wrenching reality.
Again, we are spectators, not participants. And our responses are often as stylized and limited as the representations are. As
Rebecca Gordon put it from a different angle at
TomDispatch.com , when it comes to America's wars, are we participating in reality or merely watching reality TV? And why are
so many so prone to confuse or conflate the two?
Art, of course, isn't the only lens through which we can see and interpret America's wars. Advertising, especially hyperbole,
is also quite revealing. Thus the US military has been sold, whether by George W. Bush or Barack Obama, as "the world's finest military
in history" or WFMH, an acronym I just made up, and which should perhaps come with a copyright or trademark symbol after it. It's
classic advertising hyperbole. It's salesmanship in place of reality.
So, when other peoples beat our WFMH, we should do what Americans do best: sue them for copyright infringement. Our legions of
lawyers will most certainly beat their cadres of counsels. After all, under Bush/Cheney, our lawyers tortured logic and the law to
support torture itself. Talk about surrealism!
My point (and I think I have one) is that America's wars are in some sense elaborate productions and representations, at least
in the ways in which the government constructs and sells them to the American people. To understand these representations -- the
ways in which they are both more than real war and less than it -- art theory, as well as advertising, may have a lot to teach us.
As I said, this is me throwing ideas at the canvas of my computer screen. Do they make any sense to you? Feel free to pick up
your own brush and compose away in the comments section.
P.S. Danger, Will Robinson. I've never taken an art theory class or studied advertising closely.
William J. Astore is a retired lieutenant colonel (USAF). He taught history for fifteen years at military and civilian schools
and blogs at Bracing Views . He can be reached at
[email protected] . Reprinted from Bracing
Views with the author's permission.
Afghanistan as the unfinished masterpiece....most people forget that the government is yet to complete it except when a
Marine dies, they think about it for a day and then forget all over again.
"... It is understandable why so many are angry at the leaders of America's institutions, including businesses, schools and governments," Dimon, 61, summarized. "This can understandably lead to disenchantment with trade, globalization and even our free enterprise system, which for so many people seems not to have worked. ..."
"JPMorgan Chase & Co. Chief Executive Officer Jamie Dimon has two big pronouncements as the Trump administration starts reshaping
the government: "The United States of America is truly an exceptional country," and "it is clear that something is wrong."
Dimon, leader of world's most valuable bank and a counselor to the new president, used his 45-page annual letter to shareholders
on Tuesday to list ways America is stronger than ever -- before jumping into a much longer list of self-inflicted problems that
he said was "upsetting" to write.
Here's the start: Since the turn of the century, the U.S. has dumped trillions of dollars into wars, piled huge debt onto students,
forced legions of foreigners to leave after getting advanced degrees, driven millions of Americans out of the workplace with felonies
for sometimes minor offenses and hobbled the housing market with hastily crafted layers of rules.
Dimon, who sits on Donald Trump's business forum aimed at boosting job growth, is renowned for his optimism and has been voicing
support this year for parts of the president's business agenda. In February, Dimon predicted the U.S. would have a bright economic
future if the new administration carries out plans to overhaul taxes, rein in rules and boost infrastructure investment. In an
interview last month, he credited Trump with boosting consumer and business confidence in growth, and reawakening "animal spirits."
But on Tuesday, reasons for concern kept coming. Labor market participation is low, Dimon wrote. Inner-city schools are failing
poor kids. High schools and vocational schools aren't providing skills to get decent jobs. Infrastructure planning and spending
is so anemic that the U.S. hasn't built a major airport in more than 20 years. Corporate taxes are so onerous it's driving capital
and brains overseas. Regulation is excessive.
" It is understandable why so many are angry at the leaders of America's institutions, including businesses, schools and
governments," Dimon, 61, summarized. "This can understandably lead to disenchantment with trade, globalization and even our free
enterprise system, which for so many people seems not to have worked. "...
"Inner-city schools are failing poor kids. High schools and vocational schools aren't providing skills to get decent jobs. Infrastructure
planning and spending is so anemic that the U.S. hasn't built a major airport in more than 20 years. Corporate taxes are so onerous
it's driving capital and brains overseas. Regulation is excessive."
Let's unpack his list. The 4th (last) sentence is his hope that his bank can back to the unregulated regime that brought us
the Great Recession. His 3rd sentence is a call for more tax cuts for the rich.
We may like his first 2 sentences here but who is going to pay for this? Not Jamie Dimon. See sentence #3.
Why would you object to government creating more demand for labor? Over time, wages will rise and higher wages will fund more
demand for labor produced goods.
"... As the steward-in-chief of the American empire, Obama continued Bush's Afghanistan and Iraq Wars, and extended his "War on Terror" into Libya, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Pakistan, and elsewhere in Africa and the Middle East. He also became a terrorist himself and a serial killer, weaponized drones and special ops assassins being his weapons of choice. ..."
Barack Obama won the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize -- for not being George W. Bush. This seemed unseemly at the time, but not outrageous.
Seven years later, it seems grotesque.
As the steward-in-chief of the American empire, Obama continued Bush's Afghanistan and Iraq Wars, and extended his "War on Terror"
into Libya, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Pakistan, and elsewhere in Africa and the Middle East. He also became a terrorist himself and a serial killer, weaponized drones and special ops assassins being his weapons of choice.
ANDREW LEVINE is a Senior Scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies, the author most recently of THE AMERICAN IDEOLOGY
(Routledge) and POLITICAL KEY WORDS
(Blackwell) as well as of many other books and articles in political philosophy. His most recent book is
In Bad Faith: What's Wrong With the
Opium of the People . He was a Professor (philosophy) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a Research Professor (philosophy)
at the University of Maryland-College Park. He is a contributor to
Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics
of Illusion (AK Press).
Jewish financists are no longer Jewish, much like a socialist who became minister is no
longer a socialist minister. Unregulated finance promotes a set of destructive behaviors which
has nothing to do with nationality or ethnicity.
Of course that Joyce is peddling his own obsessions, but I have to admit that Singer &
comp. are detestable. I know that what they're doing is not illegal, but it should be (in my
opinion), and those who are involved in such affairs are somehow odious. The same goes for Icahn,
Soros etc. Still Ethnic angle is evident, too: how come Singer works exclusively with his
co-ethnics in this multi-ethnic USA? Non-Jewish & most Jewish entrepreneurs don't behave that
way.
It was very gratifying to see Tucker Carlson's
recent attack on the activities of Paul Singer's vulture fund, Elliot Associates, a group I
first
profiled four years ago. In many respects, it is truly remarkable that vulture funds like
Singer's escaped major media attention prior to this, especially when one considers how
extraordinarily harmful and exploitative they are. Many countries are now in very significant
debt to groups like Elliot Associates and, as Tucker's segment very starkly illustrated, their
reach has now extended into the very heart of small-town America. Shining a spotlight on the
spread of this virus is definitely welcome. I strongly believe, however, that the problem
presented by these cabals of exploitative financiers will only be solved if their true nature
is fully discerned. Thus far, the descriptive terminology employed in discussing their
activities has revolved only around the scavenging and parasitic nature of their activities.
Elliot Associates have therefore been described as a quintessential example of a "vulture fund"
practicing "vulture capitalism." But these funds aren't run by carrion birds. They are operated
almost exclusively by Jews. In the following essay, I want us to examine the largest and most
influential "vulture funds," to assess their leadership, ethos, financial practices, and how
they disseminate their dubiously acquired wealth. I want us to set aside colorful metaphors. I
want us to strike through the mask.
It is commonly agreed that the most significant global vulture funds are Elliot Management,
Cerberus, FG Hemisphere, Autonomy Capital, Baupost Group, Canyon Capital Advisors, Monarch
Alternative Capital, GoldenTree Asset Management, Aurelius Capital Management, OakTree Capital,
Fundamental Advisors, and Tilden Park Investment Master Fund LP. The names of these groups are
very interesting, being either blankly nondescript or evoking vague inklings of Anglo-Saxon or
rural/pastoral origins (note the prevalence of oak, trees, parks, canyons, monarchs, or the use
of names like Aurelius and Elliot). This is the same tactic employed by the Jew Jordan Belfort,
the "Wolf of Wall Street," who operated multiple major frauds under the business name Stratton
Oakmont.
These names are masks. They are designed to cultivate trust and obscure the real background
of the various groupings of financiers. None of these groups have Anglo-Saxon or venerable
origins. None are based in rural idylls. All of the vulture funds named above were founded by,
and continue to be operated by, ethnocentric, globalist, urban-dwelling Jews. A quick review of
each of their websites reveals their founders and central figures to be:
Elliot Management
-- Paul Singer, Zion Shohet, Jesse Cohn, Stephen Taub, Elliot Greenberg and Richard Zabel
Cerberus -- Stephen Feinberg, Lee Millstein, Jeffrey Lomasky, Seth Plattus, Joshua Weintraub,
Daniel Wolf, David Teitelbaum FG Hemisphere -- Peter Grossman Autonomy Capital -- Derek Goodman
Baupost Group -- Seth Klarman, Jordan Baruch, Isaac Auerbach Canyon Capital Advisors -- Joshua
Friedman, Mitchell Julis Monarch Alternative Capital -- Andrew Herenstein, Michael Weinstock
GoldenTree Asset Management -- Steven Tananbaum, Steven Shapiro Aurelius Capital Management --
Mark Brodsky, Samuel Rubin, Eleazer Klein, Jason Kaplan OakTree Capital -- Howard Marks, Bruce
Karsh, Jay Wintrob, John Frank, Sheldon Stone Fundamental Advisors -- Laurence Gottlieb,
Jonathan Stern Tilden Park Investment Master Fund LP -- Josh Birnbaum, Sam Alcoff
The fact that all of these vulture funds, widely acknowledged as the most influential and
predatory, are owned and operated by Jews is remarkable in itself, especially in a contemporary
context in which we are constantly bombarded with the suggestion that Jews don't have a special
relationship with money or usury, and that any such idea is an example of ignorant prejudice.
Equally remarkable, however, is the fact that Jewish representation saturates the board level
of these companies also, suggesting that their beginnings and methods of internal promotion and
operation rely heavily on ethnic-communal origins, and religious and social cohesion more
generally. As such, these Jewish funds provide an excellent opportunity to examine their
financial and political activities as expressions of Jewishness, and can thus be placed in the
broader framework of the Jewish group evolutionary strategy and the long historical trajectory
of Jewish-European relations.
How They Feed
In May 2018, Puerto Rico declared a form of municipal bankruptcy after falling into more
than
$74.8 billion in debt, of which more than $34 billion is interest and fees. The debt was
owed to
all of the Jewish capitalists named above, with the exception of Stephen Feinberg's
Cerberus group. In order to commence payments, the government had instituted a policy of fiscal
austerity, closing schools and raising utility bills, but when Hurricane Maria hit the island
in September 2017, Puerto Rico was forced to stop transfers to their Jewish creditors. This
provoked an aggressive attempt by the Jewish funds to seize assets from an island suffering
from an 80% power outage, with the addition of further interest and fees. Protests broke out in
several US cities calling for the debt to be forgiven. After a quick stop in Puerto Rico in
late 2018, Donald Trump pandered to this sentiment when he told Fox News, "They owe a lot of
money to your friends on Wall Street, and we're going to have to wipe that out." But Trump's
statement, like all of Trump's statements, had no substance. The following day, the director of
the White House budget office, Mick Mulvaney, told reporters: "I think what you heard the
president say is that Puerto Rico is going to have to figure out a way to solve its debt
problem." In other words, Puerto Rico is going to have to figure out a way to pay its Jews.
Trump's reversal is hardly surprising, given that the President is considered extremely
friendly to Jewish financial power. When he referred to "your friends on Wall Street" he really
meant his friends on Wall Street. One of his closest allies is Stephen Feinberg, founder
and CEO of Cerberus, a war-profiteering vulture fund that has now accumulated
more than $1.5 billion in Irish debt , leaving the country prone to a "
wave of home repossessions " on a scale not seen since the Jewish mortgage traders behind
Quicken Loans (Daniel Gilbert) and Ameriquest (Roland Arnall)
made thousands of Americans homeless . Feinberg has also been associated with mass
evictions in Spain, causing a collective of Barcelona anarchists to
label him a "Jewish mega parasite" in charge of the "world's vilest vulture fund." In May
2018, Trump made Feinberg
chair of his Intelligence Advisory Board , and one of the reasons for Trump's sluggish
retreat from Afghanistan has been the fact Feinberg's DynCorp has enjoyed years of lucrative government
defense contracts training Afghan police and providing ancillary services to the military.
But Trump's association with Jewish vultures goes far beyond Feinberg. A recent piece
in the New York Post declared "Orthodox Jews are opening up their wallets for Trump in
2020." This is a predictable outcome of the period 2016 to 2020, an era that could be neatly
characterised as How Jews learned to stop worrying and love the Don. Jewish financiers
are opening their wallets for Trump because it is now clear he utterly failed to fulfil
promises on mass immigration to White America, while pledging his commitment to Zionism and to
socially destructive Jewish side projects like the promotion of homosexuality. These actions,
coupled with his commuting
of Hasidic meatpacking boss Sholom Rubashkin 's 27-year-sentence for bank fraud and money
laundering in 2017, have sent a message to Jewish finance that Trump is someone they can do
business with. Since these globalist exploiters are essentially politically amorphous, knowing
no loyalty but that to their own tribe and its interests, there is significant drift of Jewish
mega-money between the Democratic and Republican parties. The New York Post reports, for
example, that when Trump attended a $25,000-per-couple luncheon in November at a Midtown hotel,
where 400 moneyed Jews raised at least $4 million for the America First [!] SuperPAC, the
luncheon organiser Kelly Sadler, told reporters, "We screened all of the people in attendance,
and we were surprised to see how many have given before to Democrats, but never a Republican.
People were standing up on their chairs chanting eight more years." The reality, of course, is
that these people are not Democrats or Republicans, but Jews, willing to push their money in
whatever direction the wind of Jewish interests is blowing.
The collapse of Puerto Rico under Jewish debt and elite courting of Jewish financial
predators is certainly nothing new. Congo , Zambia , Liberia ,
Argentina , Peru ,
Panama , Ecuador ,
Vietnam , Poland , and
Ireland are just some of the countries that have slipped fatefully into the hands of the
Jews listed above, and these same people are now closely watching
Greece and
India . The methodology used to acquire such leverage is as simple as it is ruthless. On
its most basic level, "vulture capitalism" is really just a combination of the
continued intense relationship between Jews and usury and Jewish involvement in medieval
tax farming. On the older practice, Salo Baron writes in Economic History of the Jews
that Jewish speculators would pay a lump sum to the treasury before mercilessly turning on the
peasantry to obtain "considerable surpluses if need be, by ruthless methods." [1] S. Baron
(ed) Economic History of the Jews (New York, 1976), 46-7. The activities of the
Jewish vulture funds are essentially the same speculation in debt, except here the trade in
usury is carried out on a global scale with the feudal peasants of old now replaced with entire
nations. Wealthy Jews pool resources, purchase debts, add astronomical fees and interests, and
when the inevitable default occurs they engage in aggressive legal activity to seize assets,
bringing waves of jobs losses and home repossessions.
This type of predation is so pernicious and morally perverse that both the
Belgian and
UK governments have taken steps to ban these Jewish firms from using their court systems to
sue for distressed debt owed by poor nations. Tucker Carlson, commenting on Paul Singer's
predation and the ruin of the town of Sidney, Nebraska, has said:
It couldn't be uglier or more destructive. So why is it still allowed in the United
States? The short answer: Because people like Paul Singer have tremendous influence over our
political process. Singer himself was the second largest donor to the Republican Party in
2016. He's given millions to a super-PAC that supports Republican senators. You may never
have heard of Paul Singer -- which tells you a lot in itself -- but in Washington, he's
rock-star famous. And that is why he is almost certainly paying a lower effective tax rate
than your average fireman, just in case you were still wondering if our system is rigged. Oh
yeah, it is.
Aside from direct political donations, these Jewish financiers also escape scrutiny by
hiding behind a mask of simplistic anti-socialist rhetoric that is common in the American
Right, especially the older, Christian, and pro-Zionist demographic. Rod Dreher, in a
commentary on Carlson's
piece at the American Conservative , points out that Singer gave a speech in May
2019 attacking the "rising threat of socialism within the Democratic Party." Singer continued,
"They call it socialism, but it is more accurately described as left-wing statism lubricated by
showers of free stuff promised by politicians who believe that money comes from a printing
press rather than the productive efforts of businesspeople and workers." Dreher comments: "The
productive efforts of businesspeople and workers"? The gall of that man, after what he did to
the people of Sidney."
What Singer and the other Jewish vultures engage in is not productive, and isn't even any
recognisable form of work or business. It is greed-motivated parasitism carried out on a
perversely extravagant and highly nepotistic scale. In truth, it is Singer and his co-ethnics
who believe that money can be printed on the backs of productive workers, and who ultimately
believe they have a right to be "showered by free stuff promised by politicians." Singer places
himself in an infantile paradigm meant to entertain the goyim, that of Free Enterprise vs
Socialism, but, as Carlson points out, "this is not the free enterprise that we all learned
about." That's because it's Jewish enterprise -- exploitative, inorganic, and attached to
socio-political goals that have nothing to do with individual freedom and private property.
This might not be the free enterprise Carlson learned about, but it's clearly the free
enterprise Jews learn about -- as illustrated in their extraordinary
over-representation in all forms of financial exploitation and white collar crime. The
Talmud, whether actively studied or culturally absorbed, is their code of ethics and their
curriculum in regards to fraud, fraudulent bankruptcy, embezzlement, usury, and financial
exploitation. Vulture capitalism is Jewish capitalism.
Whom They Feed
Singer's duplicity is a perfect example of the way in which Jewish finance postures as
conservative while conserving nothing. Indeed, Jewish capitalism may be regarded as the root
cause of the rise of Conservative Inc., a form or shadow of right wing politics reduced solely
to fiscal concerns that are ultimately, in themselves, harmful to the interests of the majority
of those who stupidly support them. The spirit of Jewish capitalism, ultimately, can be
discerned not in insincere bleating about socialism and business, intended merely to entertain
semi-educated Zio-patriots, but in the manner in which the Jewish vulture funds disseminate the
proceeds of their parasitism. Real vultures are weak, so will gorge at a carcass and
regurgitate food to feed their young. So then, who sits in the nests of the vulture funds,
awaiting the regurgitated remains of troubled nations?
Boston-based Seth Klarman (net worth $1.5 billion), who like Paul Singer has
declared "free enterprise has been good for me," is a rapacious debt exploiter who was
integral to the financial collapse of Puerto Rico, where he hid much of activities behind a
series of shell companies. Investigative journalists eventually discovered that Klarman's
Baupost group was behind much of the aggressive legal action intended to squeeze the decimated
island for bond payments. It's clear that the Jews involved in these companies are very much
aware that what they are doing is wrong, and they are careful to avoid too much reputational
damage, whether to themselves individually or to their ethnic group. Puerto Rican journalists,
investigating the debt trail to Klarman, recall trying to follow one of the shell companies
(Decagon) to Baupost via a shell company lawyer (and yet another Jew) named Jeffrey Katz:
Returning to the Ropes & Gray thread, we identified several attorneys who had worked
with the Baupost Group, and one, Jeffrey Katz, who -- in addition to having worked directly
with Baupost -- seemed to describe a particularly close and longstanding relationship with a
firm fitting Baupost's profile on his experience page. I called
Katz and he picked up, to my surprise. I identified myself, as well as my affiliation with
the Public Accountability Initiative, and asked if he was the right person to talk to about
Decagon Holdings and Baupost. He paused, started to respond, and then evidently thought
better of it and said that he was actually in a meeting, and that I would need to call back
(apparently, this high-powered lawyer picks up calls from strange numbers when he is in
important meetings). As he was telling me to call back, I asked him again if he was the right
person to talk to about Decagon, and that I wouldn't call back if he wasn't, and he seemed to
get even more flustered. At that point he started talking too much, about how he was a lawyer
and has clients, how I must think I'm onto some kind of big scoop, and how there was a person
standing right in front of him -- literally, standing right in front of him -- while I rudely
insisted on keeping him on the line.
One of the reasons for such secrecy is the intensive Jewish philanthropy engaged in by
Klarman under his Klarman Family
Foundation . While Puerto Rican schools are being closed, and pensions and health
provisions slashed, Klarman is regurgitating the proceeds of massive debt speculation to his "
areas of
focus " which prominently includes " Supporting the global Jewish community
and Israel ." While plundering the treasuries of the crippled nations of the goyim, Klarman
and his co-ethnic associates have committed themselves to "improving the quality of life and
access to opportunities for all Israeli citizens so that they may benefit from the country's
prosperity." Among those in Klarman's nest, their beaks agape for Puerto Rican debt interest,
are the American Jewish Committee, Boston's Combined Jewish Philanthropies, the Holocaust
Memorial Museum, the Honeymoon Israel Foundation, Israel-America Academic Exchange, and the
Israel Project. Klarman, like Singer, has also been an enthusiastic proponent of liberalising
attitudes to homosexuality, donating $1 million to a Republican super PAC aimed at supporting
pro-gay marriage GOP candidates in 2014 (Singer donated $1.75 million). Klarman, who also
contributes to candidates
who support immigration reform, including a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants,
has said "The right to gay marriage is the largest remaining civil rights issue of our time. I
work one-on-one with individual Republicans to try to get them to realize they are being
Neanderthals on this issue."
Steven Tananbaum's GoldenTree Asset Management has also fed well on Puerto Rico, owning $2.5
billion of the island's debt. The Centre for Economic and Policy Research has
commented :
Steven Tananbaum, GoldenTree's chief investment officer, told a business conference in
September (after Hurricane Irma, but before Hurricane Maria) that he continued to view Puerto
Rican bonds as an attractive investment. GoldenTree is spearheading a group of COFINA
bondholders that collectively holds about $3.3 billion in bonds. But with Puerto Rico facing
an unprecedented humanitarian crisis, and lacking enough funds to even begin to pay back its
massive debt load, these vulture funds are relying on their ability to convince politicians
and the courts to make them whole. The COFINA bondholder group has spent
$610,000 to lobby Congress over the last two years, while GoldenTree itself
made $64,000 in political contributions to federal candidates in the 2016 cycle. For
vulture funds like GoldenTree, the destruction of Puerto Rico is yet another opportunity for
exorbitant profits.
Whom does Tananbaum feed with these profits? A brief glance at the spending of the
Lisa and Steven Tananbaum Charitable Trust reveals a relatively short list of beneficiaries
including United Jewish Appeal Foundation, American Friends of Israel Museum, Jewish Community
Center, to be among the most generously funded, with sizeable donations also going to museums
specialising in the display of degenerate and demoralising art.
Following the collapse in Irish asset values in 2008, Jewish vulture funds including OakTree
Capital swooped on mortgagee debt to seize tens of thousands of Irish homes, shopping malls,
and utilities (Steve Feinberg's Cerberus took control of public waste disposal). In 2011,
Ireland emerged as a hotspot for distressed property assets, after its bad banks began selling
loans that had once been held by struggling financial institutions. These loans were quickly
purchased at knockdown prices by Jewish fund managers, who then aggressively sought the
eviction of residents in order to sell them for a fast profit. Michael Byrne, a researcher at
the School of Social Policy at University College Dublin, Ireland's largest university,
comments : "The
aggressive strategies used by vulture funds lead to human tragedies." One homeowner, Anna Flynn
recalls how her mortgage fell into the hands of Mars Capital, an affiliate of Oaktree Capital,
owned and operated by the Los Angeles-based Jews Howard Marks and Bruce Karsh. They were "very,
very difficult to deal with," said Flynn, a mother of four. "All [Mars] wanted was for me to
leave the house; they didn't want a solution [to ensure I could retain my home]."
When Bruce Karsh isn't making Irish people homeless, whom does he feed with his profits? A
brief glance at the spending of the
Karsh Family Foundation reveals millions of dollars of donations to the Jewish Federation,
Jewish Community Center, and the United Jewish Fund.
Paul Singer, his son Gordin, and their Elliot Associates colleagues Zion Shohet, Jesse Cohn,
Stephen Taub, Elliot Greenberg and Richard Zabel, have a foothold in almost every country, and
have a stake in every company you're likely to be familiar with, from book stores to dollar
stores. With the profits of exploitation, they
fund campaigns for homosexuality and mass migration , boost Zionist politics,
invest millions in security for Jews , and promote wars for Israel. Singer is a Republican,
and is on the Board of the Republican Jewish Coalition. He is a former board member of the
Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, has funded neoconservative research groups like
the Middle East Media Research Institute and the Center for Security Policy, and is among the
largest funders of the neoconservative Foundation for Defense of Democracies. He was also
connected to the pro-Iraq War advocacy group Freedom's Watch. Another key Singer project was
the Foreign Policy Initiative (FPI), a Washington D.C.-based advocacy group that was founded in
2009 by several high-profile Jewish neoconservative figures to promote militaristic U.S.
policies in the Middle East on behalf of Israel and which received its seed money from
Singer.
Although Singer was initially anti-Trump, and although Trump once
attacked Singer for his pro-immigration politics ("Paul Singer represents amnesty and he
represents illegal immigration pouring into the country"), Trump is now essentially funded by
three Jews -- Singer, Bernard Marcus, and Sheldon Adelson, together accounting for over $250
million in pro-Trump political money . In return, they want war with Iran. Employees of
Elliott Management were one of the main sources of funding for the 2014 candidacy of the
Senate's most outspoken Iran hawk, Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR), who urged Trump to conduct a
"retaliatory strike" against Iran for purportedly attacking two commercial tankers. These
exploitative Jewish financiers have been clear that they expect a war with Iran, and they are
lobbying hard and preparing to call in their pound of flesh. As one political commentator put
it, "These donors have made their policy preferences on Iran plainly known. They surely expect
a return on their investment in Trump's GOP."
The same pattern is witnessed again and again, illustrating the stark reality that the
prosperity and influence of Zionist globalism rests to an overwhelming degree on the predations
of the most successful and ruthless Jewish financial parasites. This is not conjecture,
exaggeration, or hyperbole. This is simply a matter of striking through the mask, looking at
the heads of the world's most predatory financial funds, and following the direction of
regurgitated profits.
Make no mistake, these cabals are everywhere and growing. They could be ignored when they
preyed on distant small nations, but their intention was always to come for you too. They are
now on your doorstep. The working people of Sidney, Nebraska probably had no idea what a
vulture fund was until their factories closed and their homes were taken. These funds will move
onto the next town. And the next. And another after that. They won't be stopped through blunt
support of "free enterprise," and they won't be stopped by simply calling them "vulture
capitalists."
Strike through the mask!
Notes
[1] S.
Baron (ed) Economic History of the Jews (New York, 1976), 46-7.
To what extent is Jewish success a product of Jewish intellect and industry versus being a
result of a willingness to use low, dirty, honorless and anti-social tactics which, while
maybe not in violation of the word of the law, certainly violate its spirit?
An application of "chutzpah" to business, if you will -- the gall to break social
conventions to get what you want, while making other people feel uncomfortable; to wheedle
your way in at the joints of social norms and conventions -- not illegal, but selfish and
rude.
Krav Maga applies the same concept to the martial arts: You're taught to go after the
things that every other martial art forbids you to target: the eyes, the testicles, etc. In
other sports this is considered "low" and "cheap." In Krav Maga, as perhaps a metaphor for
Jewish behavior in general, nothing is too low because it's all about winning .
There's a rather good article on the New Yorker discussing the Sacklers and the
Oxycontin epidemic. It focusses on the dichotomy between the family's ruthless promotion of
the drug and their lavish philanthropy. 'Leave the world a better place for your presence'
and similar pieties and Oxycontin.
The article lightly touches on the extent of their giving to Hebrew University of
Jerusalem -- but in general, treads lightly when it comes to their Judaism.
understandably. The New Yorker isn't exactly alt-right country, after all. But can
Joyce or anyone else provide a more exact breakdown on the Sacklers' giving? Are they genuine
philanthropists, or is it mostly for the Cause?
@anon'To what extent is Jewish success a product of Jewish intellect and industry versus being
a result of a willingness to use low, dirty, honorless and anti-social tactics which, while
maybe not in violation of the word of the law, certainly violate its spirit? '
It's important not to get carried away with this. Figures such as Andrew Carnegie, while
impeccably gentile, were hardly paragons of scrupulous ethics and disinterested virtue.
I won't defend high finance because I don't like it either. But this is a retarded and highly
uninformed attack on it.
1. The article bounces back and forth between two completely different fields: private
equity and distressed debt funds. The latter is completely defensible. A lot of bondholders,
probably the majority, cannot hold distressed or defaulted debt. Insurance companies often
can't by law. Bond mutual funds set out in their prospectuses they don't invest in anything
rated lower than A, AA, or whatever. Even those allowed to hold distressed debt don't want
the extra costs involved with doing so, such as carefully following bankruptcy proceedings
and dealing with delayed and irregular payments.
As a result, it is natural that normal investors sell off such debt at a discount to funds
that specialize in it.
2. Joyce defends large borrowers that default on their debt. Maybe the laws protecting
bankrupts and insolvents should be stronger. But you do that, and lenders become more
conservative, investment declines, and worthy businesses can't get investments. I think
myself the laws in the US are too favorable to lenders, but there's definitely a tradeoff,
and the question is where the happy middle ground is. In Florida a creditor can't force the
sale of a primary residence, even if it is worth $20 million. That's going too far in the
other direction.
3. " either blankly nondescript or evoking vague inklings of Anglo-Saxon or rural/pastoral
origins "
More retardation. Cerberus is a greek dog monster guarding the gates of hell. Aurelius is
from the Latin word for gold. "Hemisphere" isn't an Anglosaxon word nor does in invoke rural
origins.
Besides being retardedly wrong, the broader point is likewise retarded: when
English-speaking Jews name their businesses they shouldn't use English words. Naming a
company "Oaktree" should be limited to those of purely English blood! Jews must name their
companies "Cosmopolitan Capital" or RosenMoses Chutzpah Advisors."
4. The final and most general point: it's trivially easy to attack particular excesses of
capitalism. Fixing the excesses without creating bigger problem is the hard part. Two ideas I
favor are usury laws and Tobin taxes.
Jewishness aside, maximizing shareholder is the holy grail of all capitalist enterprises. The
capitalist rush to abandon the American working class when tariff barriers evaporated is just
another case of vulturism. Tax corporations based on the domestic content of their products
and ban usury and vulturism will evaporate.
Someone with the username kikz posted a link to this article in the occidental observer. I
read it and thought it was a great article. I'm glad it's featured here.
The article goes straight for the jugular and pulls no punches. It hits hard. I like
that:
1. It shines a light on the some of the scummiest of the scummiest Wall Street
players.
2. It names names. From the actual vulture funds to the rollcall of Jewish actors running
each. It's astounding how ethnically uniform it is.
3. It proves Trump's ties with the most successful Vulture kingpin, Singer.
4. It shows how money flows from the fund owners to Zionist and Jewish causes.
This thing reads like a court indictment. It puts real world examples to many of the
theories that are represents on this site. Excellent article.
Elliott Management is perhaps most notorious for its 15-year battle with the government
of Argentina, whose bonds were owned by the hedge fund. When Argentine president Cristina
Kirchner attempted to restructure the debt, Elliott -- unlike most of the bonds' owners --
refused to accept a large loss on its investment. It successfully sued in US courts, and in
pursuit of Argentine assets, convinced a court in Ghana to detain an Argentine naval
training vessel, then docked outside Accra with a crew of 22o. After a change of its
government, Argentina eventually settled and Singer's fund received $2.4 billion, almost
four times its initial investment. Kirchner, meanwhile, has been indicted for
corruption.
@Lot
You give partial information which seem misleading and use arguments which are also weak and
not enlightening.
1- Even if its natural that unsafe bonds are sold, this doesn't justify the practices and
methods of those vulture fonds which buy those fonds which are socially damaging. I'm not
certain of the details because it's an old case and people should seek more information. Very
broadly, in the case of Argentina most funds accepted to make an agreement with the country
and reduce their demands. Investors have to accept risks and losses. Paul Singer bought some
financial papers for nothing at that time and forced Argentina to pay the whole price. For
years Argentina refused to pay, but with the help of New York courts and the new Argentinian
president they were forced to pay Singer. This was not conservative capitalism but
imperialism. You can only act like Singer if you have the backing of courts, of a government
which you control and of an army like the US army. A fast internet search for titles of
articles: "Hedge fund billionaire Paul Singer's ruthless strategies include bullying CEOs,
suing governments and seizing their navy's ships". "How one hedge fund made $2 billion from
Argentina's economic colapse".
Andrew Sayer, professor in an English university, says in his book "Why we can't afford
the rich" that finances as they are practiced now may cost more than bring any value to a
society. It's a problem if some sectors of finances make outsized profits and use methods
which are more than questionable.
2- You say that if borrowers become more protected "lenders become more conservative,
investment declines, and worthy businesses can't get investments." I doubt this is true. In
the first place, risk investments by vulture fonds probably don't create any social value.
The original lenders who sold their bonds to such vulture fonds have anyway big or near total
losses in some cases and in spite of that they keep doing business. Why should we support
vulture fonds, what for? What positive function they play in society? In Germany, capitalism
was much more social in old days before a neoliberal wave forced Germany to change Rhine
capitalism. Local banks lended money to local business which they knew and which they had an
interest that they prosper. Larger banks lended money to big firms. Speculation like in
neoliberal capitalism wasn't needed.
3- The point which you didn't grasp is that there is a component of those business which
isn't publicly clear, the fact that they funcion along ethnic lines.
4- It would be easy to fix excesses of capitalism. The problem is that the people who
profit the most from the system also have the power to prevent any change.
@Robjil
This is an example of what I was saying. Less Euro whites in the world is not going to be a
good world for Big Js. Non-Euros believe in freedom of speech.
Jewish Bigwigs can't get control of businesses in East Asia. They have been trying. Paul
Singer tried and failed. In Argentina he got lots of "success". Why? Lots of descendants of
Europeans there went along with "decisions" laid out by New York Jews.
Little Paulie tried to get control of Samsung. No such luck for him in Korea. In Korea
there are many family monopolies, chaebols. A Korean chaebol stopped him. Jewish Daniel Loeb
tried to get a board seat on Sony. He was rebuffed.
I was moved to reflect on the universality of this theme recently when surveying media
coverage on Korean and Argentinian responses to the activities of Paul Singer and his
co-ethnic shareholders at Elliott Associates, an arm of Singer's Elliott Management hedge
fund. The Korean story has its origins in the efforts of Samsung's holding company, Cheil
Industries, to buy Samsung C&T, the engineering and construction arm of the wider
Samsung family of businesses. The move can be seen as part of an effort to reinforce
control of the conglomerate by the founding Lee family and its heir apparent, Lee Jae-yong.
Trouble emerged when Singer's company, which holds a 7.12% stake in Samsung C&T and is
itself attempting to expand its influence and control over Far East tech companies,
objected to the move. The story is fairly typical of Jewish difficulties in penetrating
business cultures in the Far East, where impenetrable family monopolies, known in Korea as
chaebols, are common. This new story reminded me very strongly of last year's efforts by
Jewish financier Daniel Loeb to obtain a board seat at Sony. Loeb was repeatedly rebuffed
by COO Kazuo Hirai, eventually selling his stake in Sony Corp. in frustration.
Here is how the Koreans fought off Paul Singer.
The predominantly Jewish-owned and operated Elliott Associates has a wealth of
self-interest in preventing the Lee family from consolidating its control over the Samsung
conglomerate. As racial outsiders, however, Singer's firm were forced into several tactical
measures in their 52-day attempt to thwart the merger. First came lawsuits. When those
failed, Singer and his associates then postured themselves as defending Korean interests,
starting a Korean-language website and arguing that their position was really just in aid
of helping domestic Korean shareholders. This variation on the familiar theme of Jewish
crypsis was quite unsuccessful. The Lee family went on the offensive immediately and,
unlike many Westerners, were not shy in drawing attention to the Jewish nature of Singer's
interference and the sordid and intensely parasitic nature of his fund's other
ventures.
Cartoons were drawn of Singer being a vulture.
Other cartoons appearing at the same time represented Elliott, literally, as humanoid
vultures, with captions referring to the well-known history of the fund. In the above
cartoon, the vulture offers assistance to a needy and destitute figure, but conceals an axe
with which to later bludgeon the unsuspecting pauper.
ADL got all worked about this. The Koreans did not care. It is reality. Freedom of speech
works on these vultures. The west should try some real freedom of speech.
After the cartoons appeared, Singer and other influential Jews, including Abraham
Foxman, cried anti-Semitism. This was despite the fact the cartoons contain no reference
whatsoever to Judaism – unless of course one defines savage economic predation as a
Jewish trait. Samsung denied the cartoons were anti-Semitic and took them off the website,
but the uproar over the cartoons only seemed to spur on even more discussion about Jewish
influence in South Korea than was previously the case. In a piece published a fortnight
ago, Media Pen columnist Kim Ji-ho claimed "Jewish money has long been known to be ruthless
and merciless." Last week, the former South Korean ambassador to Morocco, Park Jae-seon,
expressed his concern about the influence of Jews in finance when he said, "The scary thing
about Jews is they are grabbing the currency markets and financial investment companies.
Their network is tight-knit beyond one's imagination." The next day, cable news channel YTN
aired similar comments by local journalist Park Seong-ho, who stated on air that "it is a
fact that Jews use financial networks and have influence wherever they are born." It goes
without saying that comments like these are unambiguously similar to complaints about
Jewish economic practices in Europe over the course of centuries. The only common
denominator between the context of fourteenth-century France and the context of
twenty-first-century South Korea is, you guessed it, Jewish economic practices.
The Koreans won. Paulie lost. Good win for humanity. The Argentines were not so lucky.
They don't have freedom speech like the Koreans and East Asians have.
In the end, the Lee strategy, based on drawing attention to the alien and exploitative
nature of Elliott Associates, was overwhelmingly effective. Before a crucial shareholder
vote on the Lee's planned merger, Samsung Securities CEO Yoon Yong-am said: "We should
score a victory by a big margin in the first battle, in order to take the upper hand in a
looming war against Elliott, and keep other speculative hedge funds from taking short-term
gains in the domestic market." When the vote finally took place a few days ago, a
conclusive 69.5% of Samsung shareholders voted in favor of the Lee proposal, leaving
Elliott licking its wounds and complaining about the "patriotic marketing" of those behind
the merger.
What our Jewish friends have done to Argentina, through maneuvering the elections, killing
dissidents, and marking territory, is a cautionary tale to anybody woke enough to see with
their own eyes.
Zion had the opportunity to go to Uganda and Ugandans were willing, but NO Zion had to
have Palestine, and they got it through war, deception, and murder. It was funded by usury,
as stolen purchasing power from the Goyim.
The fake country of Israel, is not the biblical Israel, and it came into being by
maneuverings of satanic men determined to get their way no matter what, and is supported by
continuous deception. Even today's Hebrew is resurrected from a dead language, and is fake.
Many fake Jews (who have no blood lineage to Abraham), a fake country, and fake language.
These fakers, usurers, and thieves do indeed have their eyes set on Patagonia, what they call
the practical country.
@Anon
"If debts can simply be repudiated at will, capitalism cannot function."
Is this children's capitalist theory class time? throwing around some simple slogans for a
susceptible congregation of future believers?
Should be quite obvious that people, groups of people, if not whole nations , can be
forced and or seduced into depths by means of certain practices. There are a thousand ways of
such trickery and thievery, these are not in the theory books though. In these books things
all match and work out wonderfully rationally
Then capitalism cannot function? Unfortunately it has become already dysfunctional, if not
a big rotten cancer.
Lobelog ran some articles in Singer, Argentina, Iran Israel and the attorney from Argentina
who died mysteriously . Singer is a loan shark. Argentinian paid dearly .
Google search –
NYT's Argentina Op-Ed Fails to Disclose Authors – LobeLog
https://lobelog.com/tag/paul-singer/
Paul Singer NYT's Argentina Op-Ed Fails to Disclose Authors' Financial Conflict of Interest
by Eli Clifton On Tuesday, Mark Dubowitz and Toby Dershowitz, two executives at the hawkish
Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), took
The Right-Wing Americans Who Made a Doc About Argentina
https://lobelog.com/the-right-wing-americans-who-made-a-doc-about-argentina/
Oct 7, 2015 One might wonder why a movie about Argentina, in Spanish and . of Nisman's and
thought highly of the prosecutor's work, told LobeLog, FDD, for its part, has been an
outspoken critic of Kirchner but has From 2008 to 2011, Paul Singer was the group's
second-largest donor, contributing $3.6 million.
NYT Failed to Note Op-Ed Authors' Funder Has $2 Billion
What our Jewish friends have done to Argentina, through maneuvering the elections,
killing dissidents, and marking territory, is a cautionary tale to anybody woke enough to
see with their own eyes.
"... One of the most revealing and absurd responses to rejections of forever war is the ridiculous dodge that the U.S. isn't really at war when it uses force and kills people in multiple foreign countries: ..."
"... The distinction between "real war" and the constant U.S. involvement in hostilities overseas is a phony one. The war is very real to the civilian bystanders who die in U.S. airstrikes, and it is very real to the soldiers and Marines still getting shot at and blown up in Afghanistan. This is not an "antidote to war," but rather the routinization of warfare. ..."
"... The routinization and normalization of endless, unauthorized war is one of the most harmful legacies of the Obama administration. ..."
"... When the Obama administration wanted political and legal cover for the illegal Libyan war in 2011, they came up with a preposterous claim that U.S. forces weren't engaged in hostilities because there was no real risk to them from the Libyan government's forces. According to Harold Koh, who was the one responsible for promoting this nonsense, U.S. forces weren't engaged in hostilities even when they were carrying out a sustained bombing campaign for months. That lie has served as a basis for redefining what counts as involvement in hostilities so that the president and the Pentagon can pretend that the U.S. military isn't engaged in hostilities even when it clearly is. When the only thing that gets counted as a "real war" is a major deployment of hundreds of thousands of troops, that allows for a lot of unaccountable warmaking that has been conveniently reinvented as something else. ..."
One of the most revealing and absurd responses to
rejections of forever war
is the ridiculous dodge that the U.S. isn't really at war when it uses force and kills people in multiple foreign countries:
Just like @POTUS , who put a limited op of NE
#Syria under heading of "endless
war," this op-ed has "drone strikes & Special Ops raids" in indictment of US-at-war. In fact, those actions are antidote to war.
Their misguided critique is insult to real war. https://t.co/DCLS9IDKSw
War has become so normalized over the last twenty years that the constant use of military force gets discounted as something other
than "real war." We have seen this war denialism on display several times in the last year. As more presidential candidates and analysts
have started rejecting endless war, the war's
defenders have often
chosen to
pretend
that the U.S. isn't at war at all. The distinction between "real war" and the constant U.S. involvement in hostilities overseas is
a phony one. The war is very real to the civilian bystanders who die in U.S. airstrikes, and it is very real to the soldiers and
Marines still getting shot at and blown up in Afghanistan. This is not an "antidote to war," but rather the routinization of warfare.
Because Obama is relatively less aggressive and reckless than his hawkish opponents (a very low bar to clear), he is frequently
given a pass on these issues, and we are treated to misleading stories about his supposed "realism" and "restraint." Insofar as
he has been a president who normalized and routinized open-ended and unnecessary foreign wars, he has shown that neither of those
terms should be used to describe his foreign policy. Even though I know all too well that the president that follows him will
be even worse, the next president will have a freer hand to conduct a more aggressive and dangerous foreign policy in part because
of illegal wars Obama has waged during his time in office.
The attempt to define war so that it never includes what the U.S. military happens to be doing when it uses force abroad has been
going on for quite a while. When the Obama administration wanted political and legal cover for the illegal Libyan war in 2011, they
came up with a preposterous claim that U.S. forces weren't engaged in hostilities because there was no real risk to them from the
Libyan government's forces. According to Harold Koh, who was the one responsible for promoting this nonsense, U.S. forces weren't
engaged in hostilities even when they were carrying out a sustained bombing campaign for months. That lie has served as a basis for
redefining what counts as involvement in hostilities so that the president and the Pentagon can pretend that the U.S. military isn't
engaged in hostilities even when it clearly is. When the only thing that
gets counted as a "real war" is a major deployment
of hundreds of thousands of troops, that allows for a lot of unaccountable warmaking that has been conveniently reinvented as something
else.
It isn't just physical war that results in active service body bags but our aggression has alreay cost lives on the home front
and there is every reason to believe it will do so again.
We were not isolationists prior to 9/11/2001, Al Qaeda had already attacked but we were distracted bombing Serbia, expanding
NATO, and trying to connect Al Qaeda attacks to Iran. We were just attacked by a Saudi officer we were training on our soil to
use the Saudis against Iran.
It remains to be seen what our economic warfare against Iran, Venezuela, Syria, Yemen, and our continued use of Afghanistan
as a bombing platform will cost us. We think we are being clever by using our Treasury Dept and low intensity warfare to minimize
direct immediate casualties but how long can that last.
This article confirms what the last Real Commander-in-Chief, General/President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned about when he retired
58 years ago.
His wise Council based on his Supreme Military-Political experience has been ignored.
The MSM, Propagandists for the Military-Industrial Complex, won't remind the American People.
Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could,
with time and as required, make swords as well.
But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments
industry of vast proportions.
Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on
military security more than the net income of all United States corporations.
This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total
influence -- economic, political, even spiritual -- is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government.
We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the
very structure of our society.
In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought,
by the military industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.
We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for
granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military
machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.
The psychological contortionism required to deny that we are at war amazes me. US military forces are killing people in other
countries – but it's not war? Because we can manufacture comforting euphemisms like "police action" or "preventive action" or
"drone strike," it's not war? Because it's smaller scale than a "real" war like WWII?
Cancer is cancer. A small cancer is still a cancer. Arguing that it's not cancer because it's not metastatic stage IV is, well,
the most polite term is sophistry. More accurate terms aren't printable.
Have any of you read Bill Browder's book Red Notice?
It's a great read.
The grandson of the General Secretary of the United States Communist Party, whose great
auntie worked for the NKVD. His brother, Lev, is a great mathematician.
Browder worked with Robert Maxwell as an intern. That's the father of Ghislaine Maxwell,
Jeffrey Epstein's facilitator.
Browder went on to Salomen Brothers and ended up being one of the largest capitalists in
Eastern Europe.
For some reason the Russians believed that Browder was using front companies to aquire
stakes in Russian strategic assets, then remove billions without paying taxes, apparently
worth in excess of 4 billion. If Russian 'propaganda' is to be believed.
They must have wrong because Browder was able to achieve the Magnitsky Act in
response.
It seemed the Russians unfairly seized shares from Browder he acquired in Gazprom,
Surgutneftegaz, Unified Energy Systems, and Sidanco.
In July 2017, Browder testified to the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee on Russia's alleged
interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
As everyone knows, this claim about Russian collusion by Trump is 100% true, and supports
the veracity of all his other claims. As the number one capitalist in Russia following the
fall of the Soviet Union.
And he was a hero too. Speaking out about how Jewish Oligarchs defenestrated Russia with
Yeltsin in the early 2000s and late 90s. He spoke out against his fellow Jews in what most
regard as conspiracy theories. Putin even praised him for assisting in liberation from the
Oligarchs.
What the Russians did was terrifying. They established a precedent where Jewish
international assets and capital could be seized for interference with affairs of state.
Of course what they apparently did was steal $230m off of Browder's fund shareholders.
Russia is of course very corrupt. And Browder's testimony against Trump for alleged Russia
collusion given what everyone knows speaks for his utmost veracity.
I came out of that book with the utmost admiration for Bill Browder. He did his best in
Poland with depressed assets, and he had a grand adventure. He's clearly amazingly good at
finance.
I came out of that book with the utmost admiration for Bill Browder.
You don't seem to be serious, if I understood what you want to say. Even Der Spiegel has
published a critical article in English about Browder, Browder is the one who pushed for
sanctions against Russia because of the case Magnitsky:
Questions Cloud Story Behind U.S. Sanctions
The story of Sergei Magnitsky has come to symbolize the brutal persecution of
whistleblowers in Russia. Ten years after his death, inconsistencies in Magnitsky's story
suggest he may not have been the hero many people -- and Western governments -- believed him
to be.
@Anon
After reading the book of this MI6 asset (and potential killer) who tried to fleece Russia,
you probably can benefit from watching a movie by Nekrasov about him. See references in:
It looks like it was Browder who killed Magnitsky, so that he can't spill the beans. And
then in an act of ultimate chutzpah played the victim and promoted Magnitsky act.
@Colin
Wright Intelligence and bias for co-operation may lead some groups to far greater
achievements, in scams as well as in everything else.
That aside, I think we daily meet plenty of individuals who'd sell their mothers, and
maybe kill lives, for pennies. They are like machines not even conscious of what they are
doing.
I meet them daily, in whatever activity, and none of them is Jewish. Also their shops,
businesses, and so on are always the ones that prosper more: people love being scammed, and
people love the show of power implicit in making you pay some extra for the service you
requested, and still keeping plenty of customers with you.
So, it's the usual with Joyce (and not only Joyce of course). You take something that is
human, talk of Jews, point to that something in Jews, and pretend, trusting that your readers
will pretend the same, that it's a Jewish-specific something.
Because if you were to say: everyone does this, everywhere, but when Jews do it it's just on
a larger scale, then you'd be shining light on the fact that what changes with Jews is just
skills, and that they are intelligent enough to co-operate more than the others.
Like when Mac Donald speaks of Jewish self-deception.
I feel I am swimming in self-deception everytime I talk with people (more so with women), and
they aren't Jewish. Do people do anything, but self-deceive?
So?
Elliott Management is perhaps most notorious for its 15-year battle with the government
of Argentina, whose bonds were owned by the hedge fund. When Argentine president Cristina
Kirchner attempted to restructure the debt, Elliott -- unlike most of the bonds' owners --
refused to accept a large loss on its investment. It successfully sued in US courts, and in
pursuit of Argentine assets, convinced a court in Ghana to detain an Argentine naval
training vessel, then docked outside Accra with a crew of 22o. After a change of its
government, Argentina eventually settled and Singer's fund received $2.4 billion, almost
four times its initial investment. Kirchner, meanwhile, has been indicted for
corruption.
This massive transfer of the American tech industry has largely been the work of one
leading Republican donor -- billionaire hedge fund manager Paul Singer, who also funds the
neoconservative think tank American Enterprise Institute (AEI), the Islamophobic and
hawkish think tank Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), the Republican Jewish
Coalition (RJC), and also funded the now-defunct Foreign Policy Initiative (FPI).
Singer's project to bolster Israel's tech economy at the U.S.' expense is known as
Start-Up Nation Central, which he founded in response to the global Boycott, Divest and
Sanctions (BDS) movement that seeks to use nonviolent means to pressure Israel to comply
with international law in relation to its treatment of Palestinians.
@Lot
You give partial information which seem misleading and use arguments which are also weak and
not enlightening.
1- Even if its natural that unsafe bonds are sold, this doesn't justify the practices and
methods of those vulture fonds which buy those fonds which are socially damaging. I'm not
certain of the details because it's an old case and people should seek more information. Very
broadly, in the case of Argentina most funds accepted to make an agreement with the country
and reduce their demands. Investors have to accept risks and losses. Paul Singer bought some
financial papers for nothing at that time and forced Argentina to pay the whole price. For
years Argentina refused to pay, but with the help of New York courts and the new Argentinian
president they were forced to pay Singer. This was not conservative capitalism but
imperialism. You can only act like Singer if you have the backing of courts, of a government
which you control and of an army like the US army. A fast internet search for titles of
articles: "Hedge fund billionaire Paul Singer's ruthless strategies include bullying CEOs,
suing governments and seizing their navy's ships". "How one hedge fund made $2 billion from
Argentina's economic colapse".
Andrew Sayer, professor in an English university, says in his book "Why we can't afford
the rich" that finances as they are practiced now may cost more than bring any value to a
society. It's a problem if some sectors of finances make outsized profits and use methods
which are more than questionable.
2- You say that if borrowers become more protected "lenders become more conservative,
investment declines, and worthy businesses can't get investments." I doubt this is true. In
the first place, risk investments by vulture fonds probably don't create any social value.
The original lenders who sold their bonds to such vulture fonds have anyway big or near total
losses in some cases and in spite of that they keep doing business. Why should we support
vulture fonds, what for? What positive function they play in society? In Germany, capitalism
was much more social in old days before a neoliberal wave forced Germany to change Rhine
capitalism. Local banks lended money to local business which they knew and which they had an
interest that they prosper. Larger banks lended money to big firms. Speculation like in
neoliberal capitalism wasn't needed.
3- The point which you didn't grasp is that there is a component of those business which
isn't publicly clear, the fact that they funcion along ethnic lines.
4- It would be easy to fix excesses of capitalism. The problem is that the people who
profit the most from the system also have the power to prevent any change.
The article bounces back and forth between two completely different fields: private
equity and distressed debt funds. The latter is completely defensible. A lot of
bondholders, probably the majority, cannot hold distressed or defaulted debt. Insurance
companies often can't by law. Bond mutual funds set out in their prospectuses they don't
invest in anything rated lower than A, AA, or whatever. Even those allowed to hold
distressed debt don't want the extra costs involved with doing so, such as carefully
following bankruptcy proceedings and dealing with delayed and irregular payments.
The author is not a finance expert but he correctly spotlights flaws of so-called
'predatory capitalism' which is disproportionately Jewish.
Private equity is rife with vices like asset-stripping and looting e.g Eddie Lampert
('Jewishness' member) plus El Trumpo appointee Steven Mnuchin at Sears.
Vulture funds often load all sorts of costs, even frivolous ones, and extra interest
charges on the original debt to maximize profit.
Some countries have the Duplum rule which limits the amount you are liable to a creditor
when you default on a debt.
I generally like Tucker but thought his piece on Singer was way off base and a silly hit job.
As others above have commented, if you think it's wrong to buy or try to collect on defaulted
debt, what is the alternative set of laws and behavior you are recommending? If debts can
simply be repudiated at will, capitalism cannot function. (Also, while it would take too much
time and space to debate the Puerto Rico situation here, it bears noting that the entire PR
public debt burden of ~$75 billion comes to around $25,000 per resident -- about a third of
the comparable burden of public sector debt per person in the United States, which itself
ignores tens of trillions of "off balance" sheet liabilities for underfunded social security,
Medicare, Medicaid and public sector pension obligations. The source of PR's problems lies
pretty clearly at the feet of PR's long corrupt politicians -- not the incidental holders of
its bonds who would simply like to be repaid or have the debt reasonably restructured.)
Other minor points worth noting:
Joyce names a few Jews associated with Baupost but misleadingly omits its president, the
guy who is running the show: Jim Mooney, a proud graduate of Holy Cross and big supporter of
Catholic and Jesuit causes. If memory serves, Jim was also the guy behind some of Baupost's
biggest and most successeful distressed debt (or "vulture" to use Joyce's pejorative term)
trades. The firm's Jewish founder (Seth Klarman) has also donated tons of money to secular
causes, including something like $60 million for a huge facility at Cornell.
Speaking of donations and Jews, I believe Bloomberg (not technically a "vulture"
capitalist but clearly just as bad -- I.e., Jewish -- on the Joyce scale) gave $1.5 billion
to his alma mater, Johns Hopkins. If memory serves, that may have been the largest donation
to any university ever. Maybe Carnegie's donations were greater in "real" dollars, but
Bloomberg's donation is still pretty significant -- with likely more to come.
@sally
Sally, please, knock it off. If you worked on Wall Street you'd know this article is just the
tip of the iceberg of Jewish financial criminality. Years ago Jim Cramer of CNBC fame, who
used to appear with Goldman Sachs' former and current PR man Larry Kudlow, also headed Wall
Street's top hedge fund at the time, Cramer Berkowitz. A former employee and Jewish at that
wrote an expose, Trading With the Enemy letting non-Jews in the reading public in on
what's really going on. Of course there's a Jewish pipeline giving them the news before it's
news, which is what it means to be a Wall Street insider. Or so says Jim Cramer, and the book
establishes this with solid evidence and not speculation.
For example, one of the Jewish anchors on CNBC would routinely call Cramer, which the
author overheard at the trading desk, and tip Cramer off about a market moving news story
about to be aired so Cramer could front run the market, fanatically divvying the orders out
to avoid scrutiny. His most important client was Norman Podoretz of socialist fame, who put
up the seed money for Cramer, who'd be on the phone to Cramer throughout the day checking on
his investments when not pushing socialism on the stupid goys. That's what socialism means in
America. The big names among Jewish stock and bond analysts at the big houses would also be
on the line with Cramer right before market making analysis was about to be released.
It's also the case that no economy and society can survive the sort of FIRE parasitism
this country's now burdened with, which as Spengler put it a century ago, amounts to tricking
a profit off every penny of goyisher labor. A dog can handle a number of ticks and fleas
sucking its blood, but will die soon enough when the ticks and fleas are consuming a quarter
or more of its blood. As Dr Joyce points out in yet another brilliant article, DJT is
demonstrably a puppet of the Jewish billionaires mentioned, who're in a rage to destroy the
families and everything the fools attending his rallies hold dear.
@J
Adelman Yes, the Jews have always stood up for the underdog (except when they were slave
traders) and promoted social harmony (except for cultural Marxism) and "Jewish influence" is
purely a figment of your imagination (except WWI and the Communist revolution .and and ). And
they definitely have nothing to do with the financial industry or banks (it is all a
conspiracy the protocols ya know).
Do you really believe your own poopaganda? A little introspection goes a long way. Why
have you been persecuted or kicked out of every country you have ever lived in? You never,
ever do anything wrong?
No one is demonizing you. You do it to yourself. People like Epstein and Weinstein are
your standard bearers. Events like 9/11 are your trophies. Your infiltration of the body
politic and malign influence in society is once again becoming visible to everyone and it is
making you afraid.
You have done it again. You never, ever learn. You play the perpetual victim .everyone
hates me without a reason. My sin is greater than I can bear (Cain) everyone who comes across
me will kill me. I spend my time wandering the earth (boo ho). And despite slaying your
brother you are accorded divine protection.
Jesus said (paraphrasing here) that if the unclean spirit is cast out of a man and is not
replaced with something wholesome he takes "seven other spirits" into himself and becomes
totally insane. You did this to yourself and you will realize that your problem is no longer
with man but with God himself. Jacob the deceiver has wrestled all his life against his
fellow man and triumphed but now he will confront God himself. Get ready to meet your Maker
and see how far your excuses will get you with the Almighty.
Jewish financists are no longer Jewish, much like a socialist who became minister is no
longer a socialist minister. Unregulated finance promotes a set of destructive behaviors which
has nothing to do with nationality or ethnicity.
Of course that Joyce is peddling his own obsessions, but I have to admit that Singer &
comp. are detestable. I know that what they’re doing is not illegal, but it should be (in
my opinion), and those who are involved in such affairs are somehow odious. The same goes for
Icahn, Soros etc. Still Ethnic angle is evident, too: how come Singer works exclusively with his
co-ethnics in this multi-ethnic USA? Non-Jewish & most Jewish entrepreneurs don’t
behave that way.
It was very gratifying to see Tucker Carlson's
recent attack on the activities of Paul Singer's vulture fund, Elliot Associates, a group I
first
profiled four years ago. In many respects, it is truly remarkable that vulture funds like
Singer's escaped major media attention prior to this, especially when one considers how
extraordinarily harmful and exploitative they are. Many countries are now in very significant
debt to groups like Elliot Associates and, as Tucker's segment very starkly illustrated, their
reach has now extended into the very heart of small-town America. Shining a spotlight on the
spread of this virus is definitely welcome. I strongly believe, however, that the problem
presented by these cabals of exploitative financiers will only be solved if their true nature
is fully discerned. Thus far, the descriptive terminology employed in discussing their
activities has revolved only around the scavenging and parasitic nature of their activities.
Elliot Associates have therefore been described as a quintessential example of a "vulture fund"
practicing "vulture capitalism." But these funds aren't run by carrion birds. They are operated
almost exclusively by Jews. In the following essay, I want us to examine the largest and most
influential "vulture funds," to assess their leadership, ethos, financial practices, and how
they disseminate their dubiously acquired wealth. I want us to set aside colorful metaphors. I
want us to strike through the mask.
It is commonly agreed that the most significant global vulture funds are Elliot Management,
Cerberus, FG Hemisphere, Autonomy Capital, Baupost Group, Canyon Capital Advisors, Monarch
Alternative Capital, GoldenTree Asset Management, Aurelius Capital Management, OakTree Capital,
Fundamental Advisors, and Tilden Park Investment Master Fund LP. The names of these groups are
very interesting, being either blankly nondescript or evoking vague inklings of Anglo-Saxon or
rural/pastoral origins (note the prevalence of oak, trees, parks, canyons, monarchs, or the use
of names like Aurelius and Elliot). This is the same tactic employed by the Jew Jordan Belfort,
the "Wolf of Wall Street," who operated multiple major frauds under the business name Stratton
Oakmont.
These names are masks. They are designed to cultivate trust and obscure the real background
of the various groupings of financiers. None of these groups have Anglo-Saxon or venerable
origins. None are based in rural idylls. All of the vulture funds named above were founded by,
and continue to be operated by, ethnocentric, globalist, urban-dwelling Jews. A quick review of
each of their websites reveals their founders and central figures to be:
Elliot Management
-- Paul Singer, Zion Shohet, Jesse Cohn, Stephen Taub, Elliot Greenberg and Richard Zabel
Cerberus -- Stephen Feinberg, Lee Millstein, Jeffrey Lomasky, Seth Plattus, Joshua Weintraub,
Daniel Wolf, David Teitelbaum FG Hemisphere -- Peter Grossman Autonomy Capital -- Derek Goodman
Baupost Group -- Seth Klarman, Jordan Baruch, Isaac Auerbach Canyon Capital Advisors -- Joshua
Friedman, Mitchell Julis Monarch Alternative Capital -- Andrew Herenstein, Michael Weinstock
GoldenTree Asset Management -- Steven Tananbaum, Steven Shapiro Aurelius Capital Management --
Mark Brodsky, Samuel Rubin, Eleazer Klein, Jason Kaplan OakTree Capital -- Howard Marks, Bruce
Karsh, Jay Wintrob, John Frank, Sheldon Stone Fundamental Advisors -- Laurence Gottlieb,
Jonathan Stern Tilden Park Investment Master Fund LP -- Josh Birnbaum, Sam Alcoff
The fact that all of these vulture funds, widely acknowledged as the most influential and
predatory, are owned and operated by Jews is remarkable in itself, especially in a contemporary
context in which we are constantly bombarded with the suggestion that Jews don't have a special
relationship with money or usury, and that any such idea is an example of ignorant prejudice.
Equally remarkable, however, is the fact that Jewish representation saturates the board level
of these companies also, suggesting that their beginnings and methods of internal promotion and
operation rely heavily on ethnic-communal origins, and religious and social cohesion more
generally. As such, these Jewish funds provide an excellent opportunity to examine their
financial and political activities as expressions of Jewishness, and can thus be placed in the
broader framework of the Jewish group evolutionary strategy and the long historical trajectory
of Jewish-European relations.
How They Feed
In May 2018, Puerto Rico declared a form of municipal bankruptcy after falling into more
than
$74.8 billion in debt, of which more than $34 billion is interest and fees. The debt was
owed to
all of the Jewish capitalists named above, with the exception of Stephen Feinberg's
Cerberus group. In order to commence payments, the government had instituted a policy of fiscal
austerity, closing schools and raising utility bills, but when Hurricane Maria hit the island
in September 2017, Puerto Rico was forced to stop transfers to their Jewish creditors. This
provoked an aggressive attempt by the Jewish funds to seize assets from an island suffering
from an 80% power outage, with the addition of further interest and fees. Protests broke out in
several US cities calling for the debt to be forgiven. After a quick stop in Puerto Rico in
late 2018, Donald Trump pandered to this sentiment when he told Fox News, "They owe a lot of
money to your friends on Wall Street, and we're going to have to wipe that out." But Trump's
statement, like all of Trump's statements, had no substance. The following day, the director of
the White House budget office, Mick Mulvaney, told reporters: "I think what you heard the
president say is that Puerto Rico is going to have to figure out a way to solve its debt
problem." In other words, Puerto Rico is going to have to figure out a way to pay its Jews.
Trump's reversal is hardly surprising, given that the President is considered extremely
friendly to Jewish financial power. When he referred to "your friends on Wall Street" he really
meant his friends on Wall Street. One of his closest allies is Stephen Feinberg, founder
and CEO of Cerberus, a war-profiteering vulture fund that has now accumulated
more than $1.5 billion in Irish debt , leaving the country prone to a "
wave of home repossessions " on a scale not seen since the Jewish mortgage traders behind
Quicken Loans (Daniel Gilbert) and Ameriquest (Roland Arnall)
made thousands of Americans homeless . Feinberg has also been associated with mass
evictions in Spain, causing a collective of Barcelona anarchists to
label him a "Jewish mega parasite" in charge of the "world's vilest vulture fund." In May
2018, Trump made Feinberg
chair of his Intelligence Advisory Board , and one of the reasons for Trump's sluggish
retreat from Afghanistan has been the fact Feinberg's DynCorp has enjoyed years of lucrative government
defense contracts training Afghan police and providing ancillary services to the military.
But Trump's association with Jewish vultures goes far beyond Feinberg. A recent piece
in the New York Post declared "Orthodox Jews are opening up their wallets for Trump in
2020." This is a predictable outcome of the period 2016 to 2020, an era that could be neatly
characterised as How Jews learned to stop worrying and love the Don. Jewish financiers
are opening their wallets for Trump because it is now clear he utterly failed to fulfil
promises on mass immigration to White America, while pledging his commitment to Zionism and to
socially destructive Jewish side projects like the promotion of homosexuality. These actions,
coupled with his commuting
of Hasidic meatpacking boss Sholom Rubashkin 's 27-year-sentence for bank fraud and money
laundering in 2017, have sent a message to Jewish finance that Trump is someone they can do
business with. Since these globalist exploiters are essentially politically amorphous, knowing
no loyalty but that to their own tribe and its interests, there is significant drift of Jewish
mega-money between the Democratic and Republican parties. The New York Post reports, for
example, that when Trump attended a $25,000-per-couple luncheon in November at a Midtown hotel,
where 400 moneyed Jews raised at least $4 million for the America First [!] SuperPAC, the
luncheon organiser Kelly Sadler, told reporters, "We screened all of the people in attendance,
and we were surprised to see how many have given before to Democrats, but never a Republican.
People were standing up on their chairs chanting eight more years." The reality, of course, is
that these people are not Democrats or Republicans, but Jews, willing to push their money in
whatever direction the wind of Jewish interests is blowing.
The collapse of Puerto Rico under Jewish debt and elite courting of Jewish financial
predators is certainly nothing new. Congo , Zambia , Liberia ,
Argentina , Peru ,
Panama , Ecuador ,
Vietnam , Poland , and
Ireland are just some of the countries that have slipped fatefully into the hands of the
Jews listed above, and these same people are now closely watching
Greece and
India . The methodology used to acquire such leverage is as simple as it is ruthless. On
its most basic level, "vulture capitalism" is really just a combination of the
continued intense relationship between Jews and usury and Jewish involvement in medieval
tax farming. On the older practice, Salo Baron writes in Economic History of the Jews
that Jewish speculators would pay a lump sum to the treasury before mercilessly turning on the
peasantry to obtain "considerable surpluses if need be, by ruthless methods." [1] S. Baron
(ed) Economic History of the Jews (New York, 1976), 46-7. The activities of the
Jewish vulture funds are essentially the same speculation in debt, except here the trade in
usury is carried out on a global scale with the feudal peasants of old now replaced with entire
nations. Wealthy Jews pool resources, purchase debts, add astronomical fees and interests, and
when the inevitable default occurs they engage in aggressive legal activity to seize assets,
bringing waves of jobs losses and home repossessions.
This type of predation is so pernicious and morally perverse that both the
Belgian and
UK governments have taken steps to ban these Jewish firms from using their court systems to
sue for distressed debt owed by poor nations. Tucker Carlson, commenting on Paul Singer's
predation and the ruin of the town of Sidney, Nebraska, has said:
It couldn't be uglier or more destructive. So why is it still allowed in the United
States? The short answer: Because people like Paul Singer have tremendous influence over our
political process. Singer himself was the second largest donor to the Republican Party in
2016. He's given millions to a super-PAC that supports Republican senators. You may never
have heard of Paul Singer -- which tells you a lot in itself -- but in Washington, he's
rock-star famous. And that is why he is almost certainly paying a lower effective tax rate
than your average fireman, just in case you were still wondering if our system is rigged. Oh
yeah, it is.
Aside from direct political donations, these Jewish financiers also escape scrutiny by
hiding behind a mask of simplistic anti-socialist rhetoric that is common in the American
Right, especially the older, Christian, and pro-Zionist demographic. Rod Dreher, in a
commentary on Carlson's
piece at the American Conservative , points out that Singer gave a speech in May
2019 attacking the "rising threat of socialism within the Democratic Party." Singer continued,
"They call it socialism, but it is more accurately described as left-wing statism lubricated by
showers of free stuff promised by politicians who believe that money comes from a printing
press rather than the productive efforts of businesspeople and workers." Dreher comments: "The
productive efforts of businesspeople and workers"? The gall of that man, after what he did to
the people of Sidney."
What Singer and the other Jewish vultures engage in is not productive, and isn't even any
recognisable form of work or business. It is greed-motivated parasitism carried out on a
perversely extravagant and highly nepotistic scale. In truth, it is Singer and his co-ethnics
who believe that money can be printed on the backs of productive workers, and who ultimately
believe they have a right to be "showered by free stuff promised by politicians." Singer places
himself in an infantile paradigm meant to entertain the goyim, that of Free Enterprise vs
Socialism, but, as Carlson points out, "this is not the free enterprise that we all learned
about." That's because it's Jewish enterprise -- exploitative, inorganic, and attached to
socio-political goals that have nothing to do with individual freedom and private property.
This might not be the free enterprise Carlson learned about, but it's clearly the free
enterprise Jews learn about -- as illustrated in their extraordinary
over-representation in all forms of financial exploitation and white collar crime. The
Talmud, whether actively studied or culturally absorbed, is their code of ethics and their
curriculum in regards to fraud, fraudulent bankruptcy, embezzlement, usury, and financial
exploitation. Vulture capitalism is Jewish capitalism.
Whom They Feed
Singer's duplicity is a perfect example of the way in which Jewish finance postures as
conservative while conserving nothing. Indeed, Jewish capitalism may be regarded as the root
cause of the rise of Conservative Inc., a form or shadow of right wing politics reduced solely
to fiscal concerns that are ultimately, in themselves, harmful to the interests of the majority
of those who stupidly support them. The spirit of Jewish capitalism, ultimately, can be
discerned not in insincere bleating about socialism and business, intended merely to entertain
semi-educated Zio-patriots, but in the manner in which the Jewish vulture funds disseminate the
proceeds of their parasitism. Real vultures are weak, so will gorge at a carcass and
regurgitate food to feed their young. So then, who sits in the nests of the vulture funds,
awaiting the regurgitated remains of troubled nations?
Boston-based Seth Klarman (net worth $1.5 billion), who like Paul Singer has
declared "free enterprise has been good for me," is a rapacious debt exploiter who was
integral to the financial collapse of Puerto Rico, where he hid much of activities behind a
series of shell companies. Investigative journalists eventually discovered that Klarman's
Baupost group was behind much of the aggressive legal action intended to squeeze the decimated
island for bond payments. It's clear that the Jews involved in these companies are very much
aware that what they are doing is wrong, and they are careful to avoid too much reputational
damage, whether to themselves individually or to their ethnic group. Puerto Rican journalists,
investigating the debt trail to Klarman, recall trying to follow one of the shell companies
(Decagon) to Baupost via a shell company lawyer (and yet another Jew) named Jeffrey Katz:
Returning to the Ropes & Gray thread, we identified several attorneys who had worked
with the Baupost Group, and one, Jeffrey Katz, who – in addition to having worked
directly
with Baupost – seemed to describe a particularly close and longstanding relationship
with a firm fitting Baupost's profile on his experience page. I called
Katz and he picked up, to my surprise. I identified myself, as well as my affiliation with
the Public Accountability Initiative, and asked if he was the right person to talk to about
Decagon Holdings and Baupost. He paused, started to respond, and then evidently thought
better of it and said that he was actually in a meeting, and that I would need to call back
(apparently, this high-powered lawyer picks up calls from strange numbers when he is in
important meetings). As he was telling me to call back, I asked him again if he was the right
person to talk to about Decagon, and that I wouldn't call back if he wasn't, and he seemed to
get even more flustered. At that point he started talking too much, about how he was a lawyer
and has clients, how I must think I'm onto some kind of big scoop, and how there was a person
standing right in front of him – literally, standing right in front of him –
while I rudely insisted on keeping him on the line.
One of the reasons for such secrecy is the intensive Jewish philanthropy engaged in by
Klarman under his Klarman Family
Foundation . While Puerto Rican schools are being closed, and pensions and health
provisions slashed, Klarman is regurgitating the proceeds of massive debt speculation to his "
areas of
focus " which prominently includes " Supporting the global Jewish community
and Israel ." While plundering the treasuries of the crippled nations of the goyim, Klarman
and his co-ethnic associates have committed themselves to "improving the quality of life and
access to opportunities for all Israeli citizens so that they may benefit from the country's
prosperity." Among those in Klarman's nest, their beaks agape for Puerto Rican debt interest,
are the American Jewish Committee, Boston's Combined Jewish Philanthropies, the Holocaust
Memorial Museum, the Honeymoon Israel Foundation, Israel-America Academic Exchange, and the
Israel Project. Klarman, like Singer, has also been an enthusiastic proponent of liberalising
attitudes to homosexuality, donating $1 million to a Republican super PAC aimed at supporting
pro-gay marriage GOP candidates in 2014 (Singer donated $1.75 million). Klarman, who also
contributes to candidates
who support immigration reform, including a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants,
has said "The right to gay marriage is the largest remaining civil rights issue of our time. I
work one-on-one with individual Republicans to try to get them to realize they are being
Neanderthals on this issue."
Steven Tananbaum's GoldenTree Asset Management has also fed well on Puerto Rico, owning $2.5
billion of the island's debt. The Centre for Economic and Policy Research has
commented :
Steven Tananbaum, GoldenTree's chief investment officer, told a business conference in
September (after Hurricane Irma, but before Hurricane Maria) that he continued to view Puerto
Rican bonds as an attractive investment. GoldenTree is spearheading a group of COFINA
bondholders that collectively holds about $3.3 billion in bonds. But with Puerto Rico facing
an unprecedented humanitarian crisis, and lacking enough funds to even begin to pay back its
massive debt load, these vulture funds are relying on their ability to convince politicians
and the courts to make them whole. The COFINA bondholder group has spent
$610,000 to lobby Congress over the last two years, while GoldenTree itself
made $64,000 in political contributions to federal candidates in the 2016 cycle. For
vulture funds like GoldenTree, the destruction of Puerto Rico is yet another opportunity for
exorbitant profits.
Whom does Tananbaum feed with these profits? A brief glance at the spending of the
Lisa and Steven Tananbaum Charitable Trust reveals a relatively short list of beneficiaries
including United Jewish Appeal Foundation, American Friends of Israel Museum, Jewish Community
Center, to be among the most generously funded, with sizeable donations also going to museums
specialising in the display of degenerate and demoralising art.
Following the collapse in Irish asset values in 2008, Jewish vulture funds including OakTree
Capital swooped on mortgagee debt to seize tens of thousands of Irish homes, shopping malls,
and utilities (Steve Feinberg's Cerberus took control of public waste disposal). In 2011,
Ireland emerged as a hotspot for distressed property assets, after its bad banks began selling
loans that had once been held by struggling financial institutions. These loans were quickly
purchased at knockdown prices by Jewish fund managers, who then aggressively sought the
eviction of residents in order to sell them for a fast profit. Michael Byrne, a researcher at
the School of Social Policy at University College Dublin, Ireland's largest university,
comments : "The
aggressive strategies used by vulture funds lead to human tragedies." One homeowner, Anna Flynn
recalls how her mortgage fell into the hands of Mars Capital, an affiliate of Oaktree Capital,
owned and operated by the Los Angeles-based Jews Howard Marks and Bruce Karsh. They were "very,
very difficult to deal with," said Flynn, a mother of four. "All [Mars] wanted was for me to
leave the house; they didn't want a solution [to ensure I could retain my home]."
When Bruce Karsh isn't making Irish people homeless, whom does he feed with his profits? A
brief glance at the spending of the
Karsh Family Foundation reveals millions of dollars of donations to the Jewish Federation,
Jewish Community Center, and the United Jewish Fund.
Paul Singer, his son Gordin, and their Elliot Associates colleagues Zion Shohet, Jesse Cohn,
Stephen Taub, Elliot Greenberg and Richard Zabel, have a foothold in almost every country, and
have a stake in every company you're likely to be familiar with, from book stores to dollar
stores. With the profits of exploitation, they
fund campaigns for homosexuality and mass migration , boost Zionist politics,
invest millions in security for Jews , and promote wars for Israel. Singer is a Republican,
and is on the Board of the Republican Jewish Coalition. He is a former board member of the
Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, has funded neoconservative research groups like
the Middle East Media Research Institute and the Center for Security Policy, and is among the
largest funders of the neoconservative Foundation for Defense of Democracies. He was also
connected to the pro-Iraq War advocacy group Freedom's Watch. Another key Singer project was
the Foreign Policy Initiative (FPI), a Washington D.C.-based advocacy group that was founded in
2009 by several high-profile Jewish neoconservative figures to promote militaristic U.S.
policies in the Middle East on behalf of Israel and which received its seed money from
Singer.
Although Singer was initially anti-Trump, and although Trump once
attacked Singer for his pro-immigration politics ("Paul Singer represents amnesty and he
represents illegal immigration pouring into the country"), Trump is now essentially funded by
three Jews -- Singer, Bernard Marcus, and Sheldon Adelson, together accounting for over $250
million in pro-Trump political money . In return, they want war with Iran. Employees of
Elliott Management were one of the main sources of funding for the 2014 candidacy of the
Senate's most outspoken Iran hawk, Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR), who urged Trump to conduct a
"retaliatory strike" against Iran for purportedly attacking two commercial tankers. These
exploitative Jewish financiers have been clear that they expect a war with Iran, and they are
lobbying hard and preparing to call in their pound of flesh. As one political commentator put
it, "These donors have made their policy preferences on Iran plainly known. They surely expect
a return on their investment in Trump's GOP."
The same pattern is witnessed again and again, illustrating the stark reality that the
prosperity and influence of Zionist globalism rests to an overwhelming degree on the predations
of the most successful and ruthless Jewish financial parasites. This is not conjecture,
exaggeration, or hyperbole. This is simply a matter of striking through the mask, looking at
the heads of the world's most predatory financial funds, and following the direction of
regurgitated profits.
Make no mistake, these cabals are everywhere and growing. They could be ignored when they
preyed on distant small nations, but their intention was always to come for you too. They are
now on your doorstep. The working people of Sidney, Nebraska probably had no idea what a
vulture fund was until their factories closed and their homes were taken. These funds will move
onto the next town. And the next. And another after that. They won't be stopped through blunt
support of "free enterprise," and they won't be stopped by simply calling them "vulture
capitalists."
Strike through the mask!
Notes
[1] S.
Baron (ed) Economic History of the Jews (New York, 1976), 46-7.
To what extent is Jewish success a product of Jewish intellect and industry versus being a
result of a willingness to use low, dirty, honorless and anti-social tactics which, while
maybe not in violation of the word of the law, certainly violate its spirit?
An application of "chutzpah" to business, if you will – the gall to break social
conventions to get what you want, while making other people feel uncomfortable; to wheedle
your way in at the joints of social norms and conventions – not illegal, but selfish
and rude.
Krav Maga applies the same concept to the martial arts: You're taught to go after the
things that every other martial art forbids you to target: the eyes, the testicles, etc. In
other sports this is considered "low" and "cheap." In Krav Maga, as perhaps a metaphor for
Jewish behavior in general, nothing is too low because it's all about winning .
There's a rather good article on the New Yorker discussing the Sacklers and the
Oxycontin epidemic. It focusses on the dichotomy between the family's ruthless promotion of
the drug and their lavish philanthropy. 'Leave the world a better place for your presence'
and similar pieties and Oxycontin.
The article lightly touches on the extent of their giving to Hebrew University of
Jerusalem -- but in general, treads lightly when it comes to their Judaism.
understandably. The New Yorker isn't exactly alt-right country, after all. But can
Joyce or anyone else provide a more exact breakdown on the Sacklers' giving? Are they genuine
philanthropists, or is it mostly for the Cause?
@anon'To what extent is Jewish success a product of Jewish intellect and industry versus being
a result of a willingness to use low, dirty, honorless and anti-social tactics which, while
maybe not in violation of the word of the law, certainly violate its spirit? '
It's important not to get carried away with this. Figures such as Andrew Carnegie, while
impeccably gentile, were hardly paragons of scrupulous ethics and disinterested virtue.
I won't defend high finance because I don't like it either. But this is a retarded and highly
uninformed attack on it.
1. The article bounces back and forth between two completely different fields: private
equity and distressed debt funds. The latter is completely defensible. A lot of bondholders,
probably the majority, cannot hold distressed or defaulted debt. Insurance companies often
can't by law. Bond mutual funds set out in their prospectuses they don't invest in anything
rated lower than A, AA, or whatever. Even those allowed to hold distressed debt don't want
the extra costs involved with doing so, such as carefully following bankruptcy proceedings
and dealing with delayed and irregular payments.
As a result, it is natural that normal investors sell off such debt at a discount to funds
that specialize in it.
2. Joyce defends large borrowers that default on their debt. Maybe the laws protecting
bankrupts and insolvents should be stronger. But you do that, and lenders become more
conservative, investment declines, and worthy businesses can't get investments. I think
myself the laws in the US are too favorable to lenders, but there's definitely a tradeoff,
and the question is where the happy middle ground is. In Florida a creditor can't force the
sale of a primary residence, even if it is worth $20 million. That's going too far in the
other direction.
3. " either blankly nondescript or evoking vague inklings of Anglo-Saxon or rural/pastoral
origins "
More retardation. Cerberus is a greek dog monster guarding the gates of hell. Aurelius is
from the Latin word for gold. "Hemisphere" isn't an Anglosaxon word nor does in invoke rural
origins.
Besides being retardedly wrong, the broader point is likewise retarded: when
English-speaking Jews name their businesses they shouldn't use English words. Naming a
company "Oaktree" should be limited to those of purely English blood! Jews must name their
companies "Cosmopolitan Capital" or RosenMoses Chutzpah Advisors."
4. The final and most general point: it's trivially easy to attack particular excesses of
capitalism. Fixing the excesses without creating bigger problem is the hard part. Two ideas I
favor are usury laws and Tobin taxes.
Jewishness aside, maximizing shareholder is the holy grail of all capitalist enterprises. The
capitalist rush to abandon the American working class when tariff barriers evaporated is just
another case of vulturism. Tax corporations based on the domestic content of their products
and ban usury and vulturism will evaporate.
Someone with the username kikz posted a link to this article in the occidental observer. I
read it and thought it was a great article. I'm glad it's featured here.
The article goes straight for the jugular and pulls no punches. It hits hard. I like
that:
1. It shines a light on the some of the scummiest of the scummiest Wall Street
players.
2. It names names. From the actual vulture funds to the rollcall of Jewish actors running
each. It's astounding how ethnically uniform it is.
3. It proves Trump's ties with the most successful Vulture kingpin, Singer.
4. It shows how money flows from the fund owners to Zionist and Jewish causes.
This thing reads like a court indictment. It puts real world examples to many of the
theories that are represents on this site. Excellent article.
Andrew Carnegie left behind institutions like Carnegie Hall, Carnegie-Mellon University,
and over 2500 Free Libraries from coast to coast, in a time when very little was done to
help what we now call the “underprivileged”.
And he funded the building of the Peace Palace (“Vredespaleis”) in The Hague,
presently the seat of the International Court of Justice, an institution not held in high
esteem in the home country of the generous donor.
"I could not in good conscience vote against impeachment because I believe President Trump
is guilty of wrongdoing," she said. "I also could not in good conscience vote for impeachment
because removal of a sitting President must not be the culmination of a partisan process,
fueled by tribal animosities that have so gravely divided our country."
A censure would "send a strong message to this president and future presidents that their
abuses of power will not go unchecked, while leaving the question of removing Trump from
office to the voters to decide," Gabbard said.
"The CIA was the central protagonist in Russiagate. The origins of the New Cold War are found
in Bill Clinton's first term, when administration neo-cons looted, plundered and moved NATO
against a prostrate Russia in
contradiction to explicit guarantees not to do so made by the George H.W. Bush
administration. Vladimir Putin's apparent crime was to oust the Clintonites from Russia and
restore Russian sovereignty." CounterPunch.org
"Russiagate was a declaration of war by the 'intelligence community' against a duly elected
President. As argued below, the CIA's motive is to move its own foreign policy agenda forward
without even the illusion of democratic consent." CounterPunch.org
Notable quotes:
"... Actions in the Washington cesspool never surprise -- by members of both right wing of the US war party. They represent the greatest threat to world peace and ordinary people everywhere at home and abroad. Pro-war, pro-business, pro-Wall Street, anti-progressive Speaker Pelosi is part of the problem, never part of the solution. ..."
Actions in the Washington cesspool never surprise -- by members of both right wing of the US
war party. They represent the greatest threat to world peace and ordinary people everywhere at home and
abroad. Pro-war, pro-business, pro-Wall Street, anti-progressive Speaker Pelosi is part of the
problem, never part of the solution.
Her long disturbing congressional record shows she exclusively serves wealth and power
interests at the expense of the vast majority of Americans she disdains, proving it time and
again.
Her deplorable voting record speaks for itself, backing:
the 1999 Gramm-Leach-Blily Act repeal of Glass-Steagall, permitting some of the most
egregious financial abuses in the modern era;
the September 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF), permitting endless
wars of aggression in multiple theaters, raging endlessly;
annual National Defense Authorization Acts and US wars of aggression;
Obama's neoliberal harshness, continuing under Trump, along with tax cuts for the rich,
benefitting her and her husband enormously, without admitting it;
increasingly unaffordable marketplace medicine, ripping off consumers for profit, leaving
millions uninsured, most Americans way underinsured;
the USA Patriot Act, Anti-Terrorism Act and other police state law;
the 9/11 whitewash Commission Recommendation Act;
the FISA Amendments Act -- permitting warrantless spying post-9/11, Big Brother watching
everyone;
NAFTA and other anti-consumer/corporate coup d'etat trade bills;
the repressive US gulag prison system, the world's largest by far; incarcerating
millions by federal, state, and local authorities, it includes global torture prisons;
unapologetic support for Israeli apartheid viciousness;
fierce opposition to Russia, China, Iran, Syria, Venezuela, North Korea, and other
nonbelligerent sovereign states threatening no one;
the Russiagate witch hunt and Ukrainegate scams.
Calling exploitive/predatory "free market (capitalism) our greatest asset" shows her
contempt for equity and justice.
Her support for the military, industrial, security, media complex is all about backing
endless wars of aggression against invented enemies. No real ones exist.
Pelosi represents what belligerent, plutocratic, oligarchic, increasingly totalitarian rule
is all about, notably contemptuous of nations on the US target list for regime change --
Russia, China and Iran topping the list.
On Friday, she falsely accused Russia of involvement in Ukrainegate, a failed Russiagate
scam spinoff with no legitimacy, supported by undemocratic Dems and their echo-chamber
media.
Repeating the long ago debunked Russian US election meddling Big Lie that won't die, she
falsely accused Moscow of "ha(ving) a hand in this."
Referring to the Ukrainegate scam, she offered no evidence backing her accusation because
none exists.
During a Friday press conference on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in New York,
Sergey Lavrov slammed Pelosi's Big Lie, saying:
"Russia's been accused of all the deadly sins, and then some. It's paranoia, and I think
it's obvious to everyone."
It's unacceptable anti-Russia hate-mongering, what goes on endlessly, Cold War 2.0
raging.
Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said the following on her facebook
page:
"Speaker of the lower house of Congress Nancy Pelosi believes that Russia is involved in the
scandal over July telephone conversation between us and Ukraine Presidents Donald Trump and
Vladimir Zelensky."
"This (baseless) assumption was made on Friday Pelosi (not) explaining what it means, and
without providing evidence of her words."
"Considering that it was Nancy Pelosi who caused the 'Scandal around the telephone
conversation between the presidents of the United States and Ukraine,' then, according to the
speaker's logic, Russia attached the hand to her."
What's going on is continuation of the most shameful political chapter in US history,
ongoing since Trump took office, along with railroading Richard Nixon.
Both episodes represent McCarthyism on steroids – supported by establishment media,
furious about Trump's triumph over Hillary, targeting him largely for the wrong reasons,
ignoring plenty of right ones.
Mueller's probe ended with a whimper, not the bang Dems wanted, Ukrainegate their second
bite of the apple to try discrediting Trump for political advantage ahead of November 2020
elections.
That's what Russiagate and Ukrainegate are all about.
These actions by undemocratic Dems and their media press agents are further clear proof that
Washington's deeply corrupted political system to its rotten core is far too debauched to
fix.
Afghan war demonstrated that the USA got into the trap, the Catch 22 situation: it can't
stop following an expensive and self-destructive positive feedback loop of threat inflation
and larger and large expenditures on MIC, because there is no countervailing force for the
MIC since WWII ended. Financial oligarchy is aligned with MIC.
This is the same suicidal grip of MIC on the country that was one of the key factors
in the collapse of the USSR means that in this key area the USA does not have two party
system, It is a Uniparty: a singe War party with two superficially different factions.
Feeding and care MIC is No.1 task for both. Ordinary Americans wellbeing does matter much
for either party. New generation of Americans is punished with crushing debt and low paying
jobs. They do not care that people over 50 who lost their jobs are essentially thrown out
like a garbage.
"41 Million people in the US suffer from hunger and lack of food security"–US Dept.
of Agriculture. FDR addressed the needs of this faction of the population when he delivered
his One-Third of a Nation speech for his 2nd Inaugural. About four years later, FDR expanded
on that issue in his Four Freedoms speech: 1.Freedom of speech; 2.Freedom of worship;
3.Freedom from want; 4.Freedom from fear.
Items 3 and 4 are probably unachievable under neoliberalism. And fear is artificially
instilled to unite the nation against the external scapegoat much like in Orwell 1984.
Currently this is Russia, later probably will be China. With regular minutes of hate replaced
by Rachel Maddow show ;-)
Derailing Tulsi had shown that in the USA any politician, who try to challenge MIC, will
be instantly attacked by MIC lapdogs in MSM and neutered in no time.
One interesting tidbit from Fiona Hill testimony is that neocons who dominate the USA
foreign policy establishment make their living off threat inflation. They literally are
bought by MIC, which indirectly finance Brookings institution, Atlantic Council and similar
think tanks. And this isn't cheap cynicism. It is simply a fact. Rephrasing Samuel Johnson's
famous quote, we can say, "MIC lobbyism (which often is presented as patriotism) is the last
refuge of scoundrels."
The House impeachment is driven by several factors:
After Russiagate, when Trump began to investigate its fraudulent origins, the Dems feared the exposure of Obama-era
corruption if not high crimes. Hence Ukrainegate is preemptive political tactics.
The investigation into Russiagate led right to Ukraine, and thus to Biden. In the context of Sanders' campaign,
Ukrainegate became an imperative for the factions of the capitalist class that dominates the DNC. If Biden falls on Ukraine
issues, then Sanders is inevitable; an anathema to Wall Street and Big Tech DNC donors.
3. While 1 and 2 dominate DNC machinations, foreign policy is also a factor. The foreign policy establishment is absolutely
against any hesitation with respect to confronting Russia as part of a regional and global strategy for primacy. Trump's limited
prevarications on Russia might threaten the long established strategy to expand Nato to Ukraine and thereby to encircle Russia
and maintain US dominance over Europe. So, even though Trump names great power rivalry as the name of the game today, his inclination
for making nice with Putin threatens to weaken the US hold over Europe, which Trump wants to label as an economic competitor.
It is with these points that the strategic differences become apparent: Trump is raising a realist, neo-mercantalist strategy
against ALL potential competitors; the DNC and the deep state hold a strategy of liberal hegemony: globalization and US primacy
through dominating regional alliances, and impregnating US hegemony INSIDE the vassal States of the empire.
All of this, however, is bound to fail for the DNC, and down the road for Trump himself.
The contradictions of US empire and global capitalism cannot be mitigated by either more liberal strategies or realist ones.
@ Posted by: jalp | Dec 19 2019 6:00 utc | 80 with the Green Party status....Thanks
If Tulsi is totally left out of the Democratic race, is it possible that she could be a
Green candidate? When is the "drop dead" date for that to occur? How is the VP pick
handled?
I see Tulsi Gabbard managed to distance herself from the affair and rise above it by
voting "present" instead of "yes" or "no". I sense she is purposely putting a lot of space
between herself and the DNC, and may even be positioning herself to run as an independent
come spring, despite saying that was not her objective only a couple of months ago. Given the
lack of wisdom and loss of sense of direction being shown by the Democrat leadership it would
be a very wise move.
Pres. Trump wants to go down in history for something other than the impeachment
charade.
He thinks outside the box, is afraid of nothing, can turn on a dime, and may be the only
person who can kick open a door that seems jammed, thereby healing half the nation.
"... But as we know it has become politically incorrect on the left to do anything but to put on your clown makeup and join the circus. ..."
"... But Tulsi Gabbard as usual doesn't play their game. And because of that, like Trump she is also a target of the deep state and not just the deep state of America--it is the deep state of the entire 5-Eyes security apparatus who together work overtime to overthrow Trump and any and all who resist their attempt to rule the world. ..."
"... Today's Deep State most resembles the colonial administrations during the heyday of European imperialism. These too worked to run their own secret foreign policy, and to bring their power to bear on domestic policy as well. ..."
Tulsi Gabbard did the smart thing and abstained in the vote from the circus. But as we know
it has become politically incorrect on the left to do anything but to put on your clown
makeup and join the circus.
But Tulsi Gabbard as usual doesn't play their game. And because of that, like Trump she is
also a target of the deep state and not just the deep state of America--it is the deep state
of the entire 5-Eyes security apparatus who together work overtime to overthrow Trump and any
and all who resist their attempt to rule the world.
Historically the ability of unelected, unaccountable, secretive bureaucracies (aka the "Deep
State") to exercise their own policy without regard for the public or elected officials,
often in defiance of these, has always been the hallmark of the destruction of democracy and
incipient tyranny.
Today's Deep State most resembles the colonial administrations during the heyday of
European imperialism. These too worked to run their own secret foreign policy, and to bring
their power to bear on domestic policy as well.
Although both halves of the One-Party really want the effective tyranny of state and
corporate bureaucracies, it's not surprising that it's the Democrats (along with the MSM)
taking the lead in openly defending the tyrannical proposition that the CIA should be
running its own foreign (and implicitly domestic) policy, and that the president should be
just a figurehead which follows orders. That goes with the Democrats' more avowedly
technocratic style, and it goes with the ratchet effect whereby it's usually Democrats which
push the policy envelope toward ever greater inequality, ecocide and tyranny.
Now is a time of rising irredentism and the decline of all the ideas of
globalization and technocracy, though the reality is likely to hang on for awhile. The whole
Deep State-Zionist-Russia-Deranged-Trump-Deranged-MSM-social media censorship campaign is
globalization trying to maintain its monopoly of ideas by force, since it knows it can never
win in a free clash of ideas.
Impeachment, and the pro-bureaucracy anti-democracy campaign related to it, besides its
more petty purposes (distraction from real social problems; forestalling Sanders), is the
culmination of technocracy's attempted coup against a president who, even though he agrees
with this cabal on all policy matters, is considered too unreliable, too undisciplined, too
damn honest about the evil of the US empire. If they can take him down, they think
they can restore the full business-as-usual status quo including the compliance of the rest
of the world.
Since impeachment's going to fail, we can expect the system to try other ways.
But also may I compliment Kali@18 and Russ@19 for their terrific comments. I have just
finished reading the link provided by Kali, which is an outstanding essay by Pam Ho- a
paradigm shifter if ever there was one! I have been making a determined effort to liberate my
thinking from ideological partisanship and reading this essay was like pressing a refresh
button in my brain.
Despite the ra ra b. s.,Trump's letter will become an historical document, as it does
encapsulate all the manufactured tribulations that have been foisted on his presidency,
though I would have liked b to include all those words which were CAPITALIZED. He's quite a
personality, your president The best summation of the man is, curiosly enough, provided by
Syria's president Assad. There is an honesty about him even when he's uttering a bald-faced
lie!
Tulsi has been newsworthy for a number of years now and right from the getgo I said to
myself "she's my kind of gal"
Here is a woman of courage and presence. She's young and principled, even if she's a
member of a very corrupted party.
@ Posted by: Australian lady | Dec 19 2019 3:26 utc | 71 who ended her comment expressing
support for Tulsi Gabbard
When the impeachment vote was taken today, there were two Dems that voted against and
Tulsi voted Present
She will be ostracized for her non vote but I give her credit for distancing herself from
the impeachment circus. Given that she has stated that she won't run again for Congress, I
speculate that she may jump to the Green Party if given the chance to run ahead of or with
Jill Stein.....any barflies know how the Greens are shaping up for this coming election?
I read in a couple of places today that the strategy of the Dems is to not forward the
impeachment to the Senate for an indeterminate amount of time......let the stew, the Senate
and Trump simmer a bit.....more kabuki for the masses while the public continues to be
screwed economically.
Frequently attributed, often in the context of strikebreaking activities during the
Great Southwest Railroad
Strike of 1886 . See for example Philip Sheldon Foner, History of the Labor Movement in the
United States, Volume 2 - Page 50 (1975). A contemporary source has not been identified.
Varying forms of the quotation circulated in the labor press as early as 1893, with or without
the attribution to Gould.
@sally " ..the
goal is to establish conflict ."
Good ole Jay Gould, the very archetype of a rapacious wall street oligarch, put it succinctly
over 100 years ago when he reflected that "he could always pay half the working class to
murder the other half". Truer words were never spoken.
Neocons lie should properly be called "threat inflation"
The underlying critical
point-at-issue is credibility as I noted in my comment on b's 2017 article. I've since
linked to tweets and other items by that trio; the one major change seems to have been the
epiphany by them that they needed to go to where the action is and report it from there to
regain their credibility.
The fact remains that used car salespeople have a stereotypical reputation for lacking
credibility sans a confession as to why they feel the need to lie to sell cars.
Their actions belie the guilt they feel for their choices, but a confession works much
better at assuaging the soul while helping convince the audience that the change in heart's
genuine. And that's the point as b notes--genuineness, whose first predicate is
credibility.
The recent shootings of three U.S. soldiers in Florida at the hands of a Saudi citizen raises a standard question in the U.S.
government's perpetual "war on terrorism": "Why do they hate us?"
Soon after the 9/11 attacks, the official mantra began being issued: The terrorists just hate us for our "freedom and values."
No other explanation for motive was to be considered. If anyone suggested an alternative motive -- such as "They are retaliating
for U.S. governmental killings over there" -- U.S. officials and interventionists would immediately go on the attack, heaping a mountain
of calumny on that person, accusing him of treason, hating America, loving the terrorists, and justifying their attacks.
It happened to me and other libertarians who dared to challenge the official motive behind the 9/11 attacks. Shortly after the
attacks, I spoke at a freedom conference in Arizona consisting of both libertarians and conservatives. When I pointed out that the
attacks were the predictable consequence of a foreign policy that kills people over there, another of the speakers was filled with
anger and rage over such an "unpatriotic" suggestion. Then, a few weeks after the 9/11 attacks, FFF published an article by me entitled,
" Is This the Wrong Time
to Question Foreign Policy? " in which I pointed out the role that U.S. interventionism had played in the attacks. FFF was hit
with the most nasty and angry attacks I have ever seen.
Eighteen years later, the evidence is virtually conclusive that the reason that the United States has been suffering a constant,
never-ending threat of terrorism is because U.S. military and CIA forces have been killing people in the Middle East and Afghanistan
since at least the end of the Cold War, and even before.
After all, if the terrorists hate us for our "freedom and values," why haven't they been attacking the Swiss? They have pretty
much the same freedom and values that Americans have. And they are much closer geographically to Middle East terrorists than the
United States is. Why haven't the terrorists been attacking them?
The answer is simple: the Swiss government, unlike the U.S. government, hasn't been killing, maiming, and injuring people and
hasn't been bombing and destroying countries in the Middle East and Afghanistan.
A long history of U.S. interventionism
U.S. interventions in the Middle East began, of course, long before the 9/11 attacks. There was the 1953 CIA coup that destroyed
Iran's experiment with democracy with a coup that replaced the democratically elected prime minister of the country with a tyrannical
pro-U.S. dictator. Not surprisingly, that produced the violent Iranian revolution almost 25 years later. The Iranian revolutionaries
didn't hate America for its "freedom and values." They hated America for the U.S. government's installation, training, and support
of the tyrannical regime against which they revolted.
In the 1980s, there was the sending of U.S. troops into Lebanon as interventionist "peacekeepers." The terrorists ended up blowing
up a Marine barracks, killing 241 U.S. soldiers. The terrorists didn't hate America for its "freedom and values." They hated America
for the federal government's interventionism into Lebanon. As soon as all U.S. troops were withdrawn from Lebanon, which was the
right thing to do, there were obviously no more deaths of U.S. soldiers in that country.
It was after the Pentagon and the CIA lost their official Cold War enemy, the Soviet Union (i.e., Russia), that they proceeded
headlong into the Middle East and began killing multitudes of people. There was the Persian Gulf War, waged without the constitutionally
required congressional declaration of war, where thousands of Iraqis were killed or injured. That was followed by a decade of brutal
sanctions against Iraq, which contributed to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children.
Thus, when Ramzi Yousef, one of the terrorists who tried to bring down the World Trade Center with a bomb in 1993, appeared before
a federal judge for sentencing, he angrily told the judge that it was U.S. officials who were the butchers, for killing multitudes
of innocent children in Iraq.
As those Iraqi children were dying, there were retaliatory terrorist strikes on the USS Cole and the U.S. embassies in East Africa.
Once again, however, U.S. officials continued to steadfastly maintain that was all about hatred for America's "freedom and values"
and had nothing to do with the deadly and destructive U.S. interventionism in the Middle East.
Then came Osama bin Laden's declaration of war against the United States, in which he expressly cited U.S. interventionism in
the Middle East as his motivating factor. That was followed by the 9/11 attacks, along with other terrorist attacks both here and
abroad. Through it all, U.S. officials and interventionists have blindly maintained that the terrorists hate us for our "freedom
and values," not because the U.S. government kills, maims, injures, and destroys people over there.
The recent Florida killings
And now we have the latest killing spree, this one at the hands of a Saudi citizen in Florida. According to
a story in yesterday's Washington Post about the killing of three U.S. soldiers, the killer, Ahmed Mohammed al-Shamrani
was described as "strange" and "angry." "He looked like he was angry at the world," said one person who knew him. Another said that
he looked at people in an "angry, challenging" way.
The article says that "the FBI has not yet determined a motive for the mass shooting."
Well, of course it hasn't. That's undoubtedly because the FBI hasn't yet found any statements in which the killer states that
he hates America for its "freedom and values."
But the Post article does point out something quite interesting. The article states: "The gunman, who was shot dead by
a sheriff's deputy responding to the shooting, is thought to have written a 'will' that was posted to the account a few hours before
the rampage. In it, he blasts U.S. policies in Muslim countries."
Well, isn't that interesting! Unfortunately, the Post didn't provide a verbatim transcript of the killer's "will" in which
he "blasts U.S. policies in the Muslim countries." The Post does point out though that "the writer says he does not dislike
Americans per se -- 'I don't hate you because of your freedoms,' he begins -- but that he hates U.S. policies that he views as anti-Muslim
and 'evil.'"
I n an article at antiwar.com entitled, " Pensacola: Blowback Terrorism ," Scott Horton provides a verbatim transcript of the
killer's "will," in which the killer states in part:
I'm not against you for just being American, I don't hate you for your freedom, I hate you because every day you supporting,
funding, and committing crimes not only against Muslims but also humanity. I am against evil, and America as a whole has turned
into a nation of evil. What I see from America is the supporting of Israel which is invasion of Muslim countrie, I see invasion
of many countries by it's troops, I see Guantanamo Bay. I see cruise missiles, cluster bombs and UAV.
Now, if one goes back to Ramzi Yousef's sentencing hearing in 1995 -- some 24 years ago -- one will see that Yousef angrily said
much the same thing to the federal judge who was getting ready to sentence him to jail for his 1993 terrorist attack on the World
Trade Center.
Americans have a choice:
One, continue the U.S. government's decades-long killing spree in the Middle East, in which case America will continue to experience
never-ending terrorist retaliation, the perpetual "war on terrorism, and the ongoing destruction of our liberty and privacy at the
hands of our government, which is purportedly protecting us from the terrorist threats that it produces with its foreign interventionism.
Or, two, stop U.S. forces from killing any more people, bring them all home and discharge them, which would help get America back
on the right track, one toward liberty, peace, prosperity, morality, normality, and harmony with the world.
This post was written by: Jacob G. Hornberger
Jacob G. Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation. He was born and raised in Laredo, Texas, and received
his B.A. in economics from Virginia Military Institute and his law degree from the University of Texas. He was a trial attorney for
twelve years in Texas. He also was an adjunct professor at the University of Dallas, where he taught law and economics. In 1987,
Mr. Hornberger left the practice of law to become director of programs at the Foundation for Economic Education. He has advanced
freedom and free markets on talk-radio stations all across the country as well as on Fox News' Neil Cavuto and Greta van Susteren
shows and he appeared as a regular commentator on Judge Andrew Napolitano's show Freedom Watch . View these interviews at
LewRockwell.com and from
Full Context
. Send him email .
@Peripatetic
Commenter "He has built more wall than the last three presidents and is on track to have
one fully built by November next year. He has also reduced the amount of illegal immigration
into the US."
To date (August 2019), the administration has replaced about 60 miles of dilapidated
barriers with new fencing. And a major component of Trump's pledge -- that Mexico would pay for
the wall -- hasn't been part of the equation. U.S. taxpayers have paid the cost.
"So right now, 78 miles have been built, have been built where there was an existing form of
barrier," [Acting CBP Commissioner Mark] Morgan said, effectively admitting that none of the
wall that has been constructed has been in new areas.
For the record, I have no problem with rebuilding and/or replacing our border wall. But
Trump has failed to deliver on his campaign promise.
This war is 18 years old. It's no longer a minor in the eyes of the law. It's old enough to
think for itself, to vote, to move out of the house and get it's own place. Afghanistan will
figure it out. Once we withdraw to allow Afghanistan to return to self-governance.
started by an unemployed Englishman named Eliot Higgins
Good on him – being able to create a thing that rises to such prominence in such a
short space of time speaks volumes about this Higgins guy's entrepreneurial ability. And if
he wasn't mobbed-up to begin with, he sure as fuck is now – which is a double-
mitzvah (for him).
If he did so starting from being unemployed, then anybody who turned down a job
application from the guy must be kicking themselves. (' Unemployed ' is obviously used
pejoratively in the blockquote; 'Englishman' is purely-descriptive).
.
Also, the entire article accepts Bernays' conclusion, but disagrees as to which objectives
should be pursued.
Bernays' conclusions are hardly controversial: most people are gullible imbeciles .
It's not clear to me how much more empirical evidence we need before that becomes just a
thing that everyone with an IQ above 115 accepts.
So the question then becomes " OK, now what? ".
As usual, the right answer is " Depends " – and not just for those with
bladder control problems.
If you want to do things that are just , exploiting gullible imbeciles would appear
to violate the playing conditions. It would be hors jeu ; not done; just not
cricket .
As the Laconian famously said . " IF ."
For those for whom the 'if' condition returns 'false', it does very little to bleat about
how awful they are. You're not going to cause a little switch in their brain to flick on (or
off?), whereupon they realise the error of their ways and make a conscious decision to leave
the gullible imbeciles unexploited.
It's even unlikely to affect their victims (remember, they're imbeciles) – because
otherwise some infra-marginal imbeciles would have to process their way through quite a bit
of cognitive dissonance, and they're not wired for introspection (or processing).
So the sole real purpose (apart from κάθαρσις
catharsis ) is prophylaxis (προ +
φύλαξις – guarding ). Both good enough aims
obviously the writer is the one who gets the cathartic benefit, but who is going to be on
heightened alert as a result of this Cassandra -ish jeremiad -ing?
Non-imbeciles don't need it; imbeciles won't benefit.
Here's the thing: the gullible imbeciles are going to be exploited by
someone .
.
This is something that people of my persuasion struggle with. It boils down to the
following:
Let's assume that a reprehensible thing exists already, and is unlikely to be overthrown
by my opposition to it. Should I just participate and line my pockets?
The resources used are going to be used whether I participate or not, so it may as well
be me who gets them. After all, I will put them to moral uses – and while inside, I
can do things that are contrary to the interests of the reprehensible thing.
There is no satisfactory counter-argument to that line of reasoning, and yet I reject
it.
Then again: I was dropped on my head as an infant, so YMMV.
The US lied about the Gulf of Tonkin in order to justify attacking North Vietnam, it then
proceeded to lie about the conduct of the war and the terrible genocide it was committing. No
lesson learned because in a heartbeat the US was lying about Chile, Brazil, Argentina,
Colombia, Nicaragua and El Salvador, committing a wide range of atrocities in each.
Add Somalia, Libya, proxy wars in Angola and Yemen, efforts to destabilize Cuba, Venezuela
and Iran, illegal wars in the Lebanon and Syria, the annihilation of Afghanistan in
retaliation for what was actually a Saudi terrorist act, the destruction of modern Iraq and
her people using trumped up claims, to say nothing of Clinton's cheery disregard for the
welfare of Balkan residents when the US rained (illegal) uranium bombs down on the hapless
inhabitants.
And now the WP and Congress are worked up over spending a trillion dollars when plainly
they could care less about the Afghan casualties and American war crimes. Heck this goes back
to Theodore Roosevelt seizing Cuba claiming he was saving it from the ravages of Spain or
even further back to government backed settler land grabs "saving their white women from the
savages". Savages, indeed. Zero accountability and Britain still playing faithful lap
dog.
My take on this is that the American Department of Defense war machine remained in a state of
perpetual excitement after their successes in WW11.. almost as if they had to continuously
invent an enemy in order to maintain their war time budget.. (and therefore demonstrate their
ongoing prowess etc etc) in a cycle of wars starting with Korea and bringing us up to date
with Afghanistan.. so that's nearly 70 years worth of international hubris on display.
All on the excuse of spreading their version of democracy.. is money talks!!
In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted
influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential
for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the
weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take
nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper
meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods
and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.
That both the Afghan war and the invasion of Iraq could happen at all tells us that the UN
Security Council is not fit for purpose. These wars also told us that British pretense at
being the voice of reason or the steadying hand that prevents US foreign policy being
subsumed by the visceral and synthesised reactions of a US public is no more than empty cant.
If the US is unable to prevent foreign and defence policy being captured by money
interests and remains inclined to deliver revenge to its public on demand howsoever it might
be misdirected then the US should not be on the UN Security Council at all. They are fast
becoming the number one major rogue state. And the outlook suggests this is more likely to
get worse than improve. Whatever happens to Trump One more (and likely smarter) Trumps are
coming down the track. More Dick Cheneys too. More Bushes, more Rumsfelds, more Nixons,
Boltons, Kissingers, Johnsons and a host of others we'd all much rather were one offs. The US
is the biggest extant threat to world peace. It is too powerful and far too easily played by
warmongers and terrorists of every stripe and every persuasion. And by those seeking to
profit from war.
To call war profiteering and murder a geopolitical "mistake" is to EXCUSE criminal activity.
Anyone responding to this latest revelation of military dishonest as a "mistake" is
actually part of the crime. They are aiding the abettors. Everyone in Congress knows what
everyone in this comments section knows: our military and its global actions are, first and
foremost, a financial fraud.
But not American oil companies which were basically shut out outside of a few minor service
and procurement contracts. Looks like all the "Blood for Oil" poster were BS.
The Iraq War was only partly, however, about big profits for Anglo-American oil
conglomerates - that would be a bonus (one which in the end has failed to materialise - not
for want of trying though).
Yes, and it made no conclusion as to whether the war was legal or not.
" The inquiry did not reach a view on the legality of the war , saying this
could only be assessed by a "properly constituted and internationally recognised court", but
did make a damning assessment of how the decision was made."
Just think - the USA spends more on its military then the combined amount of the next 10
nations in the list (incl. China/Russia/India). That is a major major spend commitment. A
small percentage of that could be used for US citizens to fund their healthcare - but I
suppose they prefer to spend it to threaten and bomb other nations to their will.
Just to think - a similar report was produced post Vietnam and in the 50's even Eisenhower
was worried about the US military backed by private companies becoming a perpetual spending
machine.
But there's one big question the Post report raises but does not address: why? Why did
so many people – from government contractors and high-ranking military officers, to
state department and National Security Council officials – feel the need to lie about
how the war in Afghanistan was going?
Because "how the war is going" is not the operating question. Because it does not matter
if the war is just or unjust, whether it's winnable or not winnable, nor whether it's
supported in the "homeland" or not. No, the operating principle is that there is a war. By
its existence, the war creates funding and jobs and profits for the people that matter, the
people the author mentions, from the Security/Military complex corporations all the way to
careerists in the Pentagon and State.
So, it is NOT a waste of $1 trillion dollars ... it is just as it was supposed to be. That
is why the war president (W), the peace president (Obama), and the swamp drainer (Trump) have
all supported it. The war is doing what it's supposed to do.
In time, the US national debt will force them to rein in their military spending. By lowering
taxes while continuing to spend like drunken sailors on military adventures the national debt
is ballooning. US government debt is currently rated AA whereas Canada is AAA. US debt to GDP
is significantly higher than Canada's. (and that's just Canada vs the US). Trump is trying to
create a mafia style protection racket to force other countries to subsidize reckless US
military spending. "Pay up or who knows what might happen?" It is high time US taxpayers ask
why the US can't lower its' out of control military spending rather than pressuring others to
match their profligate ways? Some US citizens say they pay low taxes but it seems they get
nothing in return; no health care, no equal access to education, decaying public
infrastructure, etc. The rest feel overtaxed when they realize they get nothing in return but
don't question the elephant in the room. If other countries maintain responsible levels of
military spending the US will dig itself deeper into debt until the debt markets force them
to see sense.
Military spending is a fine way to transfer wealth from the general population to the rich.
War has always been a fabulous business opportunity, but what has never been so very clear is
how, even for the winning side, it represents a major defeat as wealth is transferred from
the common good into the hands of the rich.
In such matters always consider 'Who will prosper'.
Follow the money...
Considering the United States has been involved in one war or another, directly or
indirectly, for all but about 20 years of its existence, this latest revelation shouldn't
shock anyone. We're a violent country with a violent history and never more so than now, with
our built-on-conflict empire losing steam. We point fingers ("It's the Russians!" "It's the
Chinese!" It's the Iranians!") to deceive ourselves and others, but we're the real threat to
peace. Us. The United States.
Every time I see a person on the street nobly collecting 50ps or the odd fiver for a good
cause like Cancer Research or some other charity, I wonder why they have to do this when the
US has spent over a USD$1 trillion on the Afghan war and other militaries continue to soak up
massive amounts of funding. How much more could we have achieved by now for the real good of
humanity if these funds were focused on research and real human need?
Te US military has been practicing genocide around the world since WW2, millions have been
murdered and still are. But hey, they are the leaders of the free world, the corruption in
the US government, corporations, and military has no bounds. Their own poorer members of this
society are dying in their thousands for lack of medical care, innocent black people are
murdered by police, yet the greed must go on nothing else matters. The only question now
being, which country will they invade next, which government will they plot to overthrow. How
many will be murdered in the process, not that it matters, greed cannot be measured in dead
people.
World peace and the safety of the American public has never been a priority. Entirely the
opposite. Standard procedure: foment fear to wage immoral, endless, profitable war.
This isn't conjecture or "conspiracy theory"; it's as obvious as the sun rising. Anyone
casting this in any other way is either behind the curve or dangerously soft pedaling -- or
lying to stave off actual accountability.
Please stop pretending that our "leaders" are mistaken. They aren't They're doing the jobs
for which they were paid.
It's worse even than a crime... it's insanity to keep excusing a failed 18 year strategy
costing a trillion dollars, resulting in the death of more than 100,000, and the country
ending up worse than when they started. The military, politicians and the media are all to
blame. The military for being too frightened and too stupid to admit they were losing and had
no idea how to correct it.. the politicians for being too frightened to call out their
beloved but incompetent military, and for not "getting it" after more than a trillion dollars
had already been spent; the press and media for being embedded (sometimes literally) with the
military and acting as no more than unquestioning cheerleaders for a self-evidently failed
strategy. It is a terrible indictment of the US on so many levels... where were the public
anti-war protests or activists? Couldn't they see or didn't they care? Either way it's
pathetic.
Almost every year US generals stood before the media and politicians, jutting jaws and
feeble minds, to say that this year was going to be decisive against the Taliban. The fact
is, after Al Qaeda was scattered in 2001, the US picked on the Taliban pointlessly. They
stayed pretending they were engaged in countering the return of al Qaeda (that was never
going to happen) but actually made a new enemy of the Taliban by picking the wrong side in
what was a civil war. The US never understood what it was trying to do so it lied and lied
out of fear of being found out. I find it sickening that this country -the US - pretends it
is a force for good in the world when they are quite prepared to keep killing innocent people
in order to mask the generals' cowardice about facing the truth of their own
incompetence.
A terrible but interesting dichotomy. You have Governments and a broad part of the public
fiercely opposed to public spending and any kind of redistribution. It is all about the
individual.
Yet they sport and actually worship an institution where the individual counts for naught.
In the military it always is about the collective. They throw huge swaths of money to the
military. Which is the only place in the US where dreaded universal healthcare, pensions and
free education exists. Not only that, even the army shops sell goods as subsidised prices,
something unthinkable outside the barracks.
Entirely intentional according the PNAC document Rebuilding America's Defences, Orwellian for
we're going to make a lot of pointless weapons with huge mark-ups for profit by bombing the
shit out of foreigners.
I was listening to NPR about how Veterans turned against the Vietnam war. The people of south
Vietnam would collect shells and explosives that did not detonate and gave to US troops for a
small financial reward. In one such case - the shell exploded killing few kids and injuring a
girl. That girl was refused treatment from US medics because she was one of them. That
soldier involved later joined the anti war movement.
All the veterans were surprised with the image that soldiers coming back from war were spat
at and disrespected by the anti war protesters - this could not have been further from truth.
Back in Vietnam you were taught how to destroy a village, poison drinking water sources
etc. And understandably many GIs fought back.
There are similar stories out of Afghanistan - the naked prisoners with soldiers acting as
if they are engaging in a sexual act and many such shameless incidents. These soldiers were
acquitted which is another way of saying - An Afghan and his life and honor are below us. It
has de-stabilized the region for many decades.
There is a bright side to Donny and his conmen - maybe there will be less intervention and
more introspection - which can only be good for the World.
I think it should have been seen as a thirty year campaign and the same with Iraq and Libya.
The northern Ireland campaign took 30 years and many people are as bitter as they ever were
much of it secondhand from younger people who weren't even alive during the conflict. The
idea of a quick war is a very big mistake I think and flawed short-term thinking.
The West and the USA in particular have always taken the stand that their ideology is the
only right one. That they have a right to interfere in the interns, affairs of other
countries but their own internal affairs are sacrosanct.
So - USA, with UK support decided that Saddam Hussein had to be removed. They moved in to
do so - they killed Saddam but had no plan to return the country to a functioning nation.
Instead they facilitated the unleashing of internal wars and have now left the citizens of
that country in utter turmoil.
& then went and repeated the exercise n Libya.
Decades ago, Britain decided that Palestinians could be thrown out of their homes to make
way for the creation of Israel and laid the foundation for the Middle-East turmoil that has
caused untold misery and suffering. They followed that up with throwing out the Chagosians
out of their homes and making them homeless. Invited Caribbean's to the 'Mother Country' to
serve their erstwhile lords, ladies, masters and mistresses only to then drive to despair the
children and grandchildren of the invitees who had contributed to the 'Mother Country' for
decades.
We are 18 years into an illegal invasion and occupation of Afghanistan. We are the invaders,
the terrorists. The Taliban are fighting for their country, they may use brutal methods but
so did the French, Dutch, Russian freedom fighters during the Nazi invasions. America's
puppet regime in Afghanistan is reminiscent of the Quislings of WW2. And to use drones to
kill Afghans and to say it is progress that there is more transparency is the height of
hubris. All it does is show the corrosive effect of unfettered power in America and it's
military. Why do we tolerate this inhuman action on another country's society? America is by
far the greatest contributor to the rise in terrorism in the world and if not somehow stopped
the greatest threat to world peace. It keeps on invading country after country with it's MSM
propaganda machine claiming it is spreading Democracy throughout the globe. Thank you America
!
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I have just finished reading William
Shirer's
Berlin Diary
. (This may not fascinate you, but I am coming to something.) I first
encountered it in high school. It is of course Shirer's account as a correspondent in Germany of the rise of
the Nazis. Most of it is well known to the educated. The Nazis, who had control over the domestic press,
convinced the German population that the Poles were threatening Germany, as plausible as Guatemala
threatening the United States. The Poles were said to be committing atrocities against Germans.
Then the Reich, with no justification
whatever, having absolute air superiority, attacked Poland, bombing undefended cities and killing huge
numbers of people. It was a German pattern several times repeated. Many reporters told of the smell of
rotting bodies, of refugees dying of hunger and thirst. Today the Reich is endlessly remembered as a paragon
of evil. It was.
How did Nazi Germany differ from the
United States today? There is the same lying. Washington insisted that Iraq was about to get nuclear
weapons, biological agents, that it had poisonous gas. None of this was true. The government, unimpeded by
the media, persuaded over half of the American population that Iraq was responsible for Nine-Eleven. Now it
says that Iran works to get nuclear weapons, and of course that the Russians are coming. The American press,
informally but strictly controlled, carefully doesn't challenge any of this.
Having prepped the American public as the
Nazis prepped theirs, Washington unleashed a savage attack against Iraq, deliberately destroying
infrastructure, leaving the country without power or purified water. The slaughter was godawful. But, said
America, the war was to rid the Iraqi people of an evil dictator, to bring them democracy, freedom, and
human rights. (The oil was entirely incidental. The oil is always incidental.)
Fallujah, Iraq, after the American military brought it democracy, human rights, and freedom.
Guernica, after the visit of the Kondor Legion. For the historically challenged, this was the Spanish
city bombed during the Spánish Civil War by the Germans in support of the Falangists.
Washington never sleeps in its campaigns to improve the lives of people
whose most fervent wish is that America stop improving their lives. To give the Afghans democracy, human
rights, and American values, the US has for eighteen years been bombing, bombing, bombing a largely
illiterate population in a nation where America has no business. It is a coward's war with warplanes
butchering peasants who have no defenses. The pilots and drone operators who do this deserve contempt, as
does the country that sends them. How many more years? For what purpose? And how were the German Nazis
different?
The German Gestapo perpetrated sickening
torture in hidden basements. America does the same, mainltaining torture prisons around the world. In these,
men, and no doubt women, are hung by their wrists for days, naked in very cold rooms, kept awake and
periodically beaten (exactly as described by survivors of Soviet torture. Nazis, whether American, Russian,
or German, are Nazis.)
Photos of Iraqis at the American torture
operation at Abu Ghraib showed prisoners, almost naked, lying in pools of blood. Tell me, please, how this
differs from what was done by the Reich? (The bloodier photos are no longer online. Many that remain seem to
have been edited.)
Abu Ghraib.
A happy American girl soldier. Note rubber gloves. The US military used many
female soldiers for this duty. They apparently were kinky, as they seemed to get a kick out of it. A
female general ran the operation.
Gina Haspel, head of the CIA, is a sadist
who tortured Moslem prisoners, reminiscent of Ilse Koch, the notorious Nazi torturess, who also worked in
prisons. It is easy to find victims there, I suppose.
An Abu Ghraib pic apparently no longer online. I found it on an ancient memory stick. Are we having
fun yet?
President Trump has just
pardoned
several American war criminals, saying he wanted to give US soldiers the "confidence to
fight." This amounts to blanket permission to commit atrocities. A purpose of military training being to
extirpate human decency and mercifulness, the obscene barbarism is not surprising. Atrocities are what
soldiers do, and will do as long as the wars go on, being furiously denied by the government. (When I
covered Force Recon, the Marine Corps Special Forces, the motto on the wall was "Crush Their Skulls and Eat
Their Faces.")
Perhaps the best known example of
implied approval was Nixon's pardon of Lt. Calley, who ordered the murder of Vietnamese villagers, for which
he received three years of house arrest.
The Germans wanted empire,
lebensraum,
and resources, in particular oil. Americans want empire and oil, control of which allows
control of the world They go about getting them by invasion and intimidation. Thus America wants to bring
democracy and human rights to Iraq, Iran, Venezuela, and Nigeria, which have
lots
of oil, while it
has occupation troops in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and elsewhere in the Mideast. What part of Syria is Trump
occupying? Surprise, surprise! The part with the oil. Oil for the Americans, land for the Germans.
As Shirer points out, the German public
was not enthusiastic about the war, at least not through 1940, as neither is the American public today.
Neither public showed any concern about the hideousness its government inflicted around the world. What is
the difference?
The parallels with the Reich are not
complete. Washington does not essay genocide against Jews or blacks or any other internal population, being
content with killing whoever its bombs fall upon. Trump cannot reasonably be likened to Hitler. He lacks the
vision, the backbone, and apparently the viciousness. Hitler was a very smart, very evil man who knew
exactly what he was doing, at least politically. This cannot be said of Trump. However, Hitler was, and
Trump is, surrounded by freak-show curiosities of great bellicosity. Adolf had Goering, Goebbels, Himler,
Rheinhardt Heydrich, Julius Streicher, Eichman. Trump has John Bolton, as amoral and pathologically
aggressive as any in the Fuehrer's entourage, or under a log. Pompeo, a bloated toad of a man, bears an
uncanny resemblance to Goering. Both he and Pence are Christian heretics, Evangelicals, who believe they are
connected to God on broadband. O'Brien sounds like Bolton. All want war with Iran and perhaps with China and
Russia. Sieg heil, and run like hell.
My Lai, after Lt. Calley of the SS Totenkopf Div excuse me, the Americal Division, I meant to say,
brought human rights, freedom, and the American way.
Wikipedia:
"Between 347 and 504 unarmed people were killed by U.S. Army soldiers Victims
included men, women, children, and infants. Some of the women were gang-raped and their bodies mutilated as
were children as young as 12.")
For this Calley got three years house
arrest, less than the sentence for a bag of methamphetamine, until pardoned by Nixon. Many Americans said,
and many still say, that he should not have been punished at all, that we needed to take the gloves off, let
the troops fight. Again, this is what Trump said.
The German Nazis worshiped Blood and
Soil, the land of Germany and the Teutonic race, which they believed to be genetically superior to all
others. Americans can't easily worship race. Instead they think themselves Exceptional, Indispensable, a
Shining City on a Hill, the greatest civilization the world has known. Same narcissism and arrogance,
slightly different foundation.
Nazi Germany was, like Nazi America,
intensely militaristic. The US has hundreds of bases around the world (China has one overseas base, in
Djibouti), spends appallingly on the military despite the lack of a credible military enemy. It currently
buys new missile submarines (the Columbia class), aircraft carriers (the Ford class), intercontinental
nuclear bombers (the B21), and fighter planes (the F-35).
Nazi Germany attacked Poland, Norway,
Belgium, France, Russia, America, and England. America? Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Somalia, Syria, supports a
brutal proxy war against Yemen (Yemen is a grave threat to America), threatens Venezuela, China, and Iran
with attack, embargoes Cuba. These are recent. Going back a bit, we have Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam,
Yugoslavia, the intervention in Panama, on and on. Millions and millions killed.
The Third Reich was, and America is, the
chief threat to peace on the planet, a truly rogue state.
Is this something to be proud of?
Other stuff
La FIL,
Feria Internacional
de Libros
, International Book Fair, Guadalajara, an annual event. I post the photo with the joyous sense
of mischief of an eleven-year-old poking a nest of wasps. It will infuriate the Dissident Right, or Alt
Right, or Race Realists. Their leaders excepted, most of these are ill-tempered naifs who insist, and seem
to hope desperately, that Latin Americans are illiterate. I occasionally have conservative friends down and
they are astonished to find that Guadalajara, a large international city, has the sorts of bookstores had by
large international cities. Duh. (If interested,
here
are a couple of dozen.)
Another and cherished conceit of the
Dissident Right is that Latin Americans who can read must be white. Well, I guess. Why, you could easily
mistake the crowd above for Norwegians. Their ancestors probably arrived with Leif Erikson.
Merry Christmas to all! Happy "Winter
Holidays" to none.
Write Fred at
[email protected].
Put the letters "pdq" anywhere in the subject line to avoid autodeletion. All read, reply not guaranteed due
to volume.
This meritorious and beneficial column
will go into hibernation until after New Year, after which it will likely return.
It's almost a century since Smedley Butler wrote his incisive pamphlet War is a Racket.
If you've never read it, it takes about 15-20 minutes to do so. It will astound, anger and
depress you that the only thing that's changed is the number or zeroes on the eye waterering
profits. Oh, and the players. What is it exactly that makes the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia
untouchable? (Answers on a postcard C/O Beelzebub.)
Smedley Butler knew of what he lectured about, being the most decorated officer in the
history of the Marine Corps.
A brief insight into this insightful all American action man man Hollywood seems to have
overlooked:
"I spent thirty-three years and four months in active military service as a member of this
country's most agile military force, the Marine Corps. I served in all commissioned ranks
from Second Lieutenant to Major-General. And during that period, I spent most of my time
being a high class muscle-man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the Bankers. In
short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism.
"I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I
helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues
in.
I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall
Street.
"The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international
banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for
American sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went its
way unmolested.
"During those years, I had, as the boys in the back room would say, a swell racket.
Looking back on it, I feel that I could have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could
do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents."
There's been a century of endless war and profits since then with this century shaping up
nicely for the racketeers, whose finest day might well have been September 11th, 2001.
Anyway, here's a link to a pdf file of War is a Racket if you're interested.
Is it just part of the human condition that as any writer or any publication gains a
reputation for truth and revelation and dependability, that that reputation is sooner or
later leveraged for gain or influence or access?
I can think of a number of examples where I'm almost certain that that is the case,
although I'll avoid writing their names.
In the end, we are all of us really quite alone in the universe, enjoying only periods
with the illusion of support and fellowship.
On the example of the Kennedys, the assassinations provide perhaps the greatest
illustration of how things work.
I should say that I regard them as two chapters in one book. John's killers had to be
Bobby's killers also because that intense younger man, once holding the powers of the
presidency, would have relentlessly hunted down his brother's killers.
We know that he did not believe the Warren Commission, though he did not go around saying
that. He even apparently had some idea of who the killers might be, never telling others any
details of his suspicions.
Books have for decades been churned out by either the CIA or friends of the CIA or
unwitting assets of the CIA arguing for the truth of the Warren Commission.
On the other hand, as someone with a long interest in the events, I believe that a great
many of the books against the Warren Commission were also written by the same interests. Not
all of them, but many.
Books especially that either are so preposterous or poorly written and edited that they
effectively discredit those who do not accept the (absurd) findings of the Warren
Commission.
After all, it was some CIA disinformation officer who came up with the term "conspiracy
theorist" in the 1960s to discredit genuine critics of the Warren Commission, a term of such
lasting power, it is still widely used, its application having spread to a large number of
topics.
Those with power do tend to keep guiding events no matter how hard we struggle to
understand and correct the course of affairs.
Power is a very real thing, almost physical in its presence, and it is rarely overturned
by truth or justice or fairness.
It's not an inspiring view, but I fear it is reality.
Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI), the outspoken, independent thinker from Hawaii running for the
loftiest perch in the land, has just said "no" to taking the next Democratic presidential
primary debate stage. This signals either a surrender or a strategic end-run around the field.
Yes, we've been down this road before. It is the same sentiment she expressed prior to the last
debate; although she threatened to boycott the circus, she did qualify, show up, and rebuke the
other candidates and the Democratic Party.
Gabbard has been Public Enemy #1 in those
circles since. Instead of playing into the cemented narrative, Tulsi, who has not so far
reached the conditions imposed for participation in the next round, is not wasting her
time.
The Most Repetitive Show On Earth
As the sixth platform for national domination looms, Gabbard tweeted a different plan,
saying:
"For a number of reasons, I have decided not to attend the December 19th 'debate' --
regardless of whether or not there are qualifying polls. I instead choose to spend that
precious time directly meeting with and hearing from the people of New Hampshire and South
Carolina."
Whether her bold decision is based on not quite reaching the necessary baseline
requirements, or because she has had enough of the game playing, Tulsi seems indifferent to
striving
for inclusion . And we all know Gabbard is not one to tread water in the shallow end of the
pool when a good, strong crawl will cover more territory.
Tulsi Gabbard
The Democratic National Committee (DNC) has upped the ante for primetime pandering by
requiring candidates to have a minimum of 4% support in selected national polls and 6% in two
state polls of the early primary states Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, or Nevada.
The deadline for polling qualification is Dec. 12 at the witching hour of 11:59 p.m. in the
Eastern time zone. How dramatic for what is likely to be a boring rehash of Trump-bashing, held
a scant week later.
Although Tulsi has the sheer donor numbers needed – the support of at least 200,000
unique donors – her national polling numbers haven't yet reached the threshold. Those on
the survey leaderboard are Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), Amy Klobuchar
(D-MN), former Vice President Joe Biden, Mayor Pete Buttigieg, billionaire Tom Steyer, and
businessman Andrew Yang.
A Diverse Or One-Note Race?
Tulsi has been tilting
at the DNC and its primary prerequisites since the get-go, claiming the surveyors they used
weren't "accurate" enough, or that the venues were biased. Gabbard's campaign released a
statement in August, which said:
"Many of the uncertified polls, including those conducted by highly reputable
organizations such as The Economist and the Boston Globe, are ranked by Real Clear Politics
and FiveThirtyEight as more accurate than some DNC 'certified' polls."
The DNC was insistent that its criteria for inclusion have been fair and balanced. Just ask
the committee's spokeswoman Xochitl Hinojosa, who responded:
"This has been the most inclusive debate process with more women and candidates of color
participating in more debates than billionaires. We are proud of this historic and diverse
field with 20 candidates participating in the first two debates and at least 10 candidates in
each debate after that."
What's ironic is that no people of color – because of the strident stipulations
imposed – will be at the Dec. 19 debate hosted by PBS NewsHour and Politico at the Loyola
Marymount University in Los Angeles. PBS is set to broadcast the debate, and most likely, fewer
people will watch the event than Gabbard can reach by holding town halls or meet and greets.
Perhaps she's on to something, after all.
Jacques Ellul's 1973 Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Minds is still the antidote to
Bernaysian brainwashing. Short of reading it, there are excellent reviews on Amazon and
elsewhere. Ellul makes the same point as the author here, that no group is more taken in by
propaganda than the educated classes who fancy themselves above propaganda for being
constantly immersed in it.
Any particular American war has no purpose, but the USA waging it does. The main points of
what war does:
1. Transfers wealth from social services to the military industrial complex. Americans
don't have education, infrastructure, or healthcare, but they do have a generation of
soldiers with PTSD, national debt, worldwide hatred, and an ever increasing sense of
exceptionalism.
2. Traps Americans in a cycle of fear and persecution. Americans don't need a bogeyman,
but our corporate overlords do, its how they monetize the populace. Find some disparate
population of brown people who want self autonomy, send in the CIA to fuck them up, and when
they retaliate tell Americans that people who live in a 3rd world land locked country several
thousands of miles away are a threat to their very existence and way of life because they
don't like God and Walmart.
Sadly the US uses the MIC to keep a large chunk of its population under control, as well as
providing a convenient coverup of the actual numbers of people who are unemployable or would
be unemployed if it were'nt for the taxpayer funding humungous spending in the so-called
defence sector, which needs a a constant supply of conflict to keep going. The frankly
moronic 'thank you for your service' soundbite drives me insane but it shows how much the
American public has been brainwashed.
For years my home state of Washington had a New Deal Democrat Senator named Henry Jackson,
AKA the Senator from Boeing.
He did good things for the state & was hugely popular here. One reason being that because
he brought the Federal pork back home.
IMO the things Gen. Butler wrote about in the 1920s are still the modus operandi of US
foreign policy.
If the Afghanistan war ends, the USA will go to war with someone else. You cannot spend so
much on military & not be at war. America must have an enemy. And, don’t forget,
they always have “God on our side!”
The neocons in power during 2001 were hell bent on taking out Saddam Hussein. When 9/11
happened, they were looking for avenues to blame Iraq so that they could launch the war on
that nation. Since things could not be put together, and all evidence pointed to Afghanistan,
they took a detour in their war plan with a half hearted approach.
In fact Afghanistan was never the problem - It was Pakistan that held Afghanistan on the
string and managed all terror related activities. Everything related to 9/11 and beyond
pointed directly at Pakistan. Whatever threat Bush and his cronies projected about Iraq was
true in the case of Pakistan. The war was lost when they made Pakistan an ally on the war on
terror. It is like allying with Al Capone to crack down on the mafia.
Pakistan bilked the gullible American war planners, protected its assets and deflected all
the rage on to the barren lands of Afghanistan. They hid all key Al Qaeda operatives and
handed off the ones that did not align with their strategic interests to the US, while
getting reward for it. War in Iraq happened in a hurry because the Bush family had scores to
settle in Iraq. Pressure was lifted on Afghanistan. This is when the war reached a dead
end.
The Taliban knew time was on their hands and waited it out. Obama did understand the
situation and tried to put Af-Pak together and tightened the grip on Pakistan. He got the
troops out of Iraq. Pakistan is almost bankrupt now for its deep investment on terror
infrastructure. The US has drained billions of dollars and lives in Afghanistan due to
misdirected goals. I am surprised Bush and Cheney have not been sent to jail on lies to
launch the Iraq war and botching the real war on terror.
This war is 18 years old. It's no longer a minor in the eyes of the law. It's old enough to
think for itself, to vote, to move out of the house and get it's own place. Afghanistan will
figure it out. Once we withdraw to allow Afghanistan to return to self-governance.
Why did so many people -- from government contractors and high-ranking military officers, to
state department and National Security Council officials -- feel the need to lie about how
the war in Afghanistan was going?
This is because it's easy cash cow for the old boys club by sending working class kids
to be killed in a far off land.
The pentagon with the full cooperation of MSM will sell it as we are defending our ways of
life by fighting a country 10,000 kms away. This show the poor literacy, poor analytical
thinking of US population constantly brain washed by MSM, holy men, clergy, other neo con
organisations like National rifle club etc.
I never knew USA dropped 2.7 millions tons of bombs and now so many left unexploded and
its same in Vietnam, Cambodia as neutral,
but i met so many injured kids etc from the bombs,.
the total MADNESS OF USA IS NAZI SM AT ITS BEST,.NO SHAME OR COMPASSION FOR THE
VICTIMS.
I cannot comprehend the money it cost USA,. AN ALSO PROFITS FOR SOME,.
With the exceptions of two attacks on American soil-Pearl Harbor and 911- the American people
and for the most part their legislative representatives in Congress- will always remain
cluless what the United States Government does overseas.
This country runs on its own drum beats. The ordinary man on the street needs to take care
of his economic needs. The Big Boys always take care of themselves. That includes the
military establishment, that is always entitled to an absurd amounts of monies, fueled by an
empire building machinery, pushed by the elites that control the fate of economic might, and
political orchestra that feeds its ego and prestige.
Time and again, our American sociopaths in power have a strangle hold on us, regardless of
the destruction and animosity they heap on distant peoples and lands the world over in the
name of national security and the democratic spiel, as they like to tell us ....
Richard Nixon, John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson- Vietnam and the South East Asian countries of
Laos , Cambodia, are an example .
Years later, the establishment manufactures blatant cover-ups with lies upon lies to accuse
on record, as general Powell eloquently presented at the United Nations: That Iraq has
weapons of mass destruction and needs to be held accountable.And now, this report on
Afghanistan with all this pathological violence.
Is it reasonable to conclude that our democracy and its pathological actors in government
and big business will always purchase it by demagoguery and self vested interest, because the
ordinary man whose vote should count will never have the ultimate say when it comes to war
and destruction!
@AnonFromTN It is heartening that there are people who are expecting salvation from
Germany. Let me tell you guys, it is GONE. And it is certainly not heroic to say this, but I
can live with having past my service at an old peoples home, instead, and I can live with not
sending my son off to a trench. And I absolutely subscribe to what Jim Christian said (thanks
for his comments, as for quite some others! ), if you touch my wife or son, I will get wild,
but the rest is not worth defending.
But here is my thought: Agreed, that western and american military is today disfunctional
and deluded about themselves. But they are absolutely superior when it comes to psyop. 9/11
was marvellously executed and to root up the whole middle east and pump the destitute people
from there into Europe to blow it up, that is quite something.
@AnonFromTN It is heartening that there are people who are expecting salvation from
Germany. Let me tell you guys, it is GONE. And it is certainly not heroic to say this, but I
can live with having past my service at an old peoples home, instead, and I can live with not
sending my son off to a trench. And I absolutely subscribe to what Jim Christian said (thanks
for his comments, as for quite some others! ), if you touch my wife or son, I will get wild,
but the rest is not worth defending.
But here is my thought: Agreed, that western and american military is today disfunctional
and deluded about themselves. But they are absolutely superior when it comes to psyop. 9/11
was marvellously executed and to root up the whole middle east and pump the destitute people
from there into Europe to blow it up, that is quite something.
From that perspective, Russiagate is a gift. If any argument was still needed to tell the
peoples of the world that the western empire is terminaly deranged, that is it.
Millions of mistresses are being expensively supported by defense contractors and their
employees. Horny men are not ready to give up defense spending needed to support their gals
for the sake of international peace. Blame it on those expensive Harlots for keeping them
bullets flying.
The world is simply re-bifurcating into 2 camps. More specifically, the Anglo-World is
splitting away from whatever parts it can't bring into their sphere of dominance. They
couldn't dominate the whole playground, so they're taking their toys and carving out a corner
of it for themselves.
The current demonisation of China and Russia sets the stage for the real split that
will happen in the 2020s. Gotta get the sheeple used to the notion so that they will accept,
even demand, bringing the Bamboo Curtain down when the time comes.
What we're seeing now in Europe, the M.E., S. America etc is nothing more than the
Anglo-World's attempt to bring more along with them, and the RoW's attempts to minimize their
success.
With people like these, who needs the ptb ???
The PTB needs the people, not the other way around. People are happy to believe
anything that makes them comfortable. Instilling Sino/Russo-phobia in their otherwise empty
heads is but the prelude to splitting them off from demonic Eurasia/Eastasia, and also so
they'll be happy with whatever they get in Oceania.
They'll be living in the Free World again! Smaller this time around, but Freeeee!!!
It worked the last time. It'll work this time too. One stands in awe of how easy it
is.
Shoigu is 64, while Putin is 67.
This means Shoigu is a one-term successor, if we're talking age. Someone capable of long-term
work and planning after that would be a must. Medvedev is currently 54, which mean he'll be
the age Shoigu is now, if Putin stands down in say a decade.
Which means he himself–Medvedev, that is–will be good for a decade.
So that's one scenario: ten more years of less of Putin, then one mandate by Shoigu, then
another decade by Medvedev. Or fifteen years by Medvedev immediately after Putin, with Shoigu
being his cardinal
We've yet to see what happens to the reds and the browns. The leader of the
commies–Zuyganov–is 75, and the leader of the empire
revivalists–Zhirinovski–is 73. So again, at most a decade from now, the commies
and the far right will either collapse, or choose new strong leaders.
In this sense there a very serious possible reshuffle looming all across the Russian
political landscape. After all, only four parties matter: Putin's national conservatives,
Zyuganov's commies, Zhirinovski's imperialists, and Mironov's social democrats. Mironov is
66, the youngest of the batch.
Russia is still very much a "leader-based" society. Her political parties are also
"leader-based". We'll see if these parties can function beyond the lifespan of their current
leaders. If yes–then Russia has transcended the curse of the "wise emperor" formula,
where stuff only works if you've got a superhuman at the top, and the moment he's gone, shit
falls apart.
One of things which concerns me most about this site and most others inhabited by
contrarian blokes of a certain age is the way that topics discussed are most often the same
topics as those fed to the mugs via corporate media.
Sure the opinions are vastly different, but the subjects are not. So much energy and
time wasted on pointless topics like the amerikan prez when we all know that it really
doesn't matter who jags that gig nothing meaningful will alter for amerikans or the people
outside amerika oppressed by empire.
Now the prez thing is a bit of a troll since so many amerikans have been intensely
indoctrinated right through their lives to believe that all the prezdency guff is
meaningful when it so obviously isn't. That in reality the odds of any amerikan suddenly
having an epiphany about the pointlessness of DC kibuki from reading this, or something
similar written by someone else, are negligible.
So we have to accept, to a degree, that Washington Housewives and Days of Our Lives DC
will continue to feature at MoA.
But what happens when the corporate media chooses not to consider much larger, more
pernicious forms of imperialism than is currently occurring in the ME because that
imperialism is nascent, awful things are being done to humans western populations who have
not been sufficiently propagandised against, so may not greet the tales of murder and
mayhem generated by the actions of french foreign legionaires, english SAS or amerikan
special forces with sufficient approval?
Easy, we just don't talk about it except when told to or where there is no choice
because some action by the imperial thugs for hire has attracted too much attention. In
that case the barest of details make it into the news and we will be told that whoever it
was who had their families butchered belonged to an organisation which 'western
intelligence' said was 'associated with ISIS'. No specificity, not details at all apart
from the one unsubstantiated claim, which lets face it says any village of humans anywhere
that contains a single resident which western intelligence believes is somehow associated
with ISIS, is worthy of being genocided out of existence.
I reckon one of the best indicators of imperial violence is displaced persons. We saw in
the ME that various forms of ethnic cleansing were practised to persuade people to move off
their traditional lands in order to either exploit the natural resources in the area (see
Saudi Amerika driving tribes from the newly discovered hydrocarbon prospects in North
Yemen), or to create lebensraum for another group of humans currently held in favour by the
empire (see the shifting of arabs and Turkamen from North Syria to give ready made villages
to Kurds which only lasted for as long as the Kurds were needed by empire).
So many people were displaced in the ME during the first half of the teens that shock,
horror some european countries felt obliged to allow a few of those whose lives had been
destroyed into their communities.
That was then, yet we still all talk about the ME as though it is where the empire is
committing its most egregious harm, but that is no longer the case.
If you check
this Pew Center article you will see
The total number of people living in
sub-Saharan Africa who were forced to leave their homes due to conflict reached a new high
of 18.4 million in 2017, up sharply from 14.1 million in 2016 -- the largest regional
increase of forcibly displaced people in the world" .
If one checks the chart Pew has provided we can see that the numbers of decent humans in
the ME who have been displaced from their land is alleged to currently be 21.5 million
while the number of persons displaced in sub-Sahara Africa is about 3 million less at 18.4
million.
See so more action in the ME still. No, firstly the ME curve has flattened right out
over the years since 2016 meaning that new displacements are relatively low unless of
course it is your whanau that has been displaced in which case it wouldn't feel
nearly as benign. Secondly if you look at the fine-print on that chart you will see the 21.5 million line is
labelled "Middle East-North Africa".
Libya is an African state which happens to have a proportion of arabic speaking people
in its population, it also contains Berbers (e.g. Muammar Ghadaffi) and what the chart
calls "sub-Saharan Africans when they want say negro but the unfortunate connotations
associated with that term (99% the result of horrific whitefella behaviour) means that
negro is no longer a la mode in whitefella land.
Not enough to rape, steal & steal from black Africans, now we also remove the means
to identify them as a distinct group.
The Libya africa/ME issue matters a great deal because prior to the fukusi rape of
Libya, that nation acted as a bulwark for all the supra-saharan nations, some Saharan eg
Niger and that was just as likely a reason for amerika to destroy Libya setting loose the
ethno-centrists of Misratah to kill black africans, standover Berbers & Turks to ensure
that only Arab speaking semites can get control. This is the deal the empire struck. Not to
enable italy to get some of that sweet sweet crude at the sort of bargain basement prices
Italy hadn't enjoyed since Mussolini invaded Libya - that was purely a minor side benefit,
now the good colonel was no more, fukus became the only game in town. There was no longer any white knight determined to protect his/her neigbours from the
outright theft, extortion, bribery, rape & murder which are the empire's stock in
trade.
It is foolish and counterproductive to ignore the horrors that a US-led fukus mission
which runs across the entire African continent has created in the name of more billions to
the already rich. Do it if you want, but all you are really achieving is enabling the arseholes.
There is a scarcity of relevant links for the usual reasons. Not only are you more
likely to put faith in info from sources you already know & trust, getting there will
help you comprehend this crime far better than something easily digestible from a user, and
most importantly the final paras were done long after the sun rose over the yardarm
here.
@ A User 72
All very true. I would place the de jure war onslaughts within the overall context of
globalization and in particular the imperialistic assault of corporate industrial agriculture
upon Africa, the last great semi-frontier which wasn't fully assimilated by the first "Green
Revolution" onslaught. A main goal as the global empire faces decline or collapse is to seize
control of all land and drive the people OUT.
Globalization acts to destroy all local production and distribution. It destroys this
outright or seizes control of it in order to force it into the global commodity framework. It
seizes control of indigenous land and resources. It dumps subsidized Western goods. It
destroys any functional politics and democracy. It imposes the control of multinational
corporations over every part of life it can. It does this purely in the power interests of
Western elites. Any benefits it lets trickle down to locals are purely calculated payouts to
accomplices. Much of the global South has been crushed under the corporate boot this way, and
Africa has already been subject to the IMF and World Bank’s debt indenture shock
treatment (“structural adjustment”).
All this has been accompanied by the systematic ravaging of African ecosystems,
culminating in the rising climate chaos driven by the patterns of energy consumption, waste,
and ecological destruction practiced and imposed by Western industrialized productionism and
consumerism. Climate change is caused by these actions. Since corporate state elites and
their supporters have long known this and in spite of lots of lip service have refused to do
anything to avert the worst of it, it’s long been true that climate change is an
intentional campaign of aggression against the Earth and all vulnerable peoples. Thus climate
change takes its place as the most extreme and far-reaching of the corporate campaigns
designed to cause disaster, destruction, and chaos. According to this pattern of disaster
capitalism the corporations then proceed to use the crises they intentionally generate as
further opportunities for aggression and profit. All corporate sectors practice this, and
corporate agriculture is the most aggressive and destructive practitioner of all. Today
Africa is its primary new target.
Corporate control of agriculture and food has always been at the core of the globalization
onslaught. In accordance with its food weapon the US government systematically has waged
economic, political, chemical, biological (both of the former in the form of poison-based
agriculture and other pretexts for systemic and systematic environmental poisoning), and
often literal shooting warfare. Throughout this history of war and sublimated war, corporate
agriculture has been a constant weapon and battleground as well as its aggrandizement being a
constant goal.
Don't be so sure. Note that Trump congratulated Tulsi on Kamala's demise. If she isn't the
nominee, her mere presence in the campaign is a boon to Trump because she exposes the rot in
the DNC and the Empire.
Dem Establishment can't control me and that scares the hell out of them
"... The way I see it now he basically had the backing of big Jewish gangstas like Adelson plus his own charisma resonated with a lot of people plus the fact that what self-respecting human on earth could vote for the she-devil Hillary ? ..."
"... I think too a lot of people were sick of Obama who was clearly one of the greatest con artists of all time President Hopium, as Mike Whitney tagged him ..."
"... So other than his rich Jewish friends The Donald really is pretty much alone except for a very lot of regular folks and I mean right across the socio-economic spectrum it's not just the blue collar folks, but a lot of people I know in my own profession [and others] ..."
"... So all things considered, I think Trump has actually made some pretty spectacular plays considering he is a one-man football team LOL ..."
"... As for Trump I think he's going to be re-elected the 'resistance' is just making themselves look incredibly bad they are getting up everyone's fucking nose and even Pelosi, as she was standing there the other day announcing the 'impeachment' darn well knew it they are toast ..."
"... I too believe he isn't dumb, but the real question is whether he's playing the fool in furtherance of a plan, or whether it's just who he is and his successes are accidental. ..."
"... The Deep State's (aka: PFPE's) ongoing behaviour indicates that Trump's using buffoonery to work a plan that's anathema to their created realities, and their increasing shrillness indicates it's working. At every turn, he's managed to make unavailable the resources their reality called for. From the M.E., to the Ukraine to N. Korea to Venezuela, things just aren't working the way they're supposed to. In fact, they're invariably working out in a way that exposes the Deep State's ineptitude and malevolence, and maximizes its embarrassment. ..."
"... Even though I can't imagine a more effective single handed way to accomplish what he promised to do, that he's lasted this long and has been so effective is astonishing. I guess we'll see if he abandons buffoonery when his opponents finally sink into the tar. ..."
"... Trump is a thief and an occupier in Syria, Afghanistan and many other countries. Only dummies think that he is a man of 'peace'. Only impostors spread lies that he wants to bring 'peace' but the 'deep state' does not allow. In fact the phony 'deep state' does not want war with Iran because knows that they will never win, only chaos. Israel wants war, and his servant Trump is pushing for one. ..."
"... I agree with you about all those examples Ukraine, Venezuela, even Iran seem to be a case of giving 'his' neocon 'team' enough rope to hang themselves while POTUS holds the hammer and ultimately gives a big NAY to going kinetic and then the whole thing crumbles into cracker crumbs ..."
"... On 1 May, Mosaddegh nationalized the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, canceling its oil concession (expired in 1993) and expropriating its assets. ..."
"... In March 1953, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles directed the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), which was headed by his younger brother Allen Dulles, to draft plans to overthrow Mossadegh. On 4 April 1953, Allen Dulles approved $1 million to be used "in any way that would bring about the fall of Mosaddegh". Soon the CIA's Tehran station started to launch a propaganda campaign against Mossadegh. ..."
"... The zionized "progressives" have a new battle cry -- "Putin is new Hitler." Worked great for Hillary Clinton, this model of "humanitarian" interventionist. ..."
"... It does not do any good for your brains to read the Atlantic Council's idiotic propaganda. It is the same as the "Integrity Initiative" production, the dirty and poisonous brew made on orders by NATO/MIC/the Lobby. ..."
"... When Nazi propagandist Julius Streicher could get hanged at Nuremberg in 1946 for crimes against humanity, I wonder, why not the likes of Amanpour? Guess history is written by the winning side. ..."
"... Say hello to more than a century of perpetual war for profit. The Deep State, consisting of Jewish bankers and their hanger-ons, has been calling the shots since passage of the Federal Reserve Act in the closing hours of 1913, while most members of Congress were home on holiday recess. ..."
"... The current demonisation of China and Russia sets the stage for the real split that will happen in the 2020s. Gotta get the sheeple used to the notion so that they will accept, even demand, bringing the Bamboo Curtain down when the time comes. ..."
"... The PTB needs the people, not the other way around. People are happy to believe anything that makes them comfortable. Instilling Sino/Russo-phobia in their otherwise empty heads is but the prelude to splitting them off from demonic Eurasia/Eastasia, and also so they'll be happy with whatever they get in Oceania. ..."
I had assumed that a real outsider couldn't have gotten to his position and that they
had a plan and would make a stand against the Empire's nomenclatura to try to turn the
ship of state to face the coming crisis head on.
Everybody has a plan until they get hit in the face.–'Iron' Mike Tyson
Yes indeed E I think PCR has commented at length about how Trump just doesn't have anyone in
his corner and yes, it is kind of surprising
Now the funny thing is that I too thought for the longest time there must be some kind of
establishment faction behind the scenes that was backing the Trump agenda of getting real and
changing course from an obvious dead end path
But I'm not so sure about that anymore Trump may indeed be the guy that 'wasn't supposed to
win' as far as all the invisible heavyweights behind the curtain are concerned
The way I see it now he basically had the backing of big Jewish gangstas like Adelson plus
his own charisma resonated with a lot of people plus the fact that what self-respecting human
on earth could vote for the she-devil Hillary ?
I think too a lot of people were sick of Obama who was clearly one of the greatest con
artists of all time President Hopium, as Mike Whitney tagged him
So other than his rich Jewish friends The Donald really is pretty much alone except for a
very lot of regular folks and I mean right across the socio-economic spectrum it's not just
the blue collar folks, but a lot of people I know in my own profession [and others]
But at this point it becomes abundantly clear that what Prof Cohen says here is what
everybody knows the ' permanent foreign policy establishment' which is quite out in the
open and neither 'deep' nor secret
For me that 'Anonymous' oped in the NYT was the milestone event that they could be that
brazen and open about basically ripping the wheel out of the president's hands I mean that's
brass they even called themselves the 'steady state' not even worried one bit about what that
says about this sham 'democracy'
It's like everyone knows right and is cool with it ?
Amazing
So all things considered, I think Trump has actually made some pretty spectacular plays
considering he is a one-man football team LOL
I point to the Syria almost-withdrawal which is in reality almost as good as a full
withdrawal since the SAA has regained almost its entire northern border and the remaining fleck
of a US footprint is a logistical and political impossibility
Let's face it for all the complainers [and yes, we've all got a lot of legit beefs] who the
fuck would have been able to do even this anyone else would have escalated a long time ago this
is the die-hard imperialist mentality of the neocons
I remember reading how some of these very people named here [including I think the harpy
Fiona Hill] were mouth-foaming freaking out at the SDF leadership and literally breaking
pencils in their face to try to stop them from accepting the lifesaver offered by the Russians
and SAA, with the Turks bearing down on them
I mean these people are just NUTS they are simply not rooted in reality at some point you
run into a brick wall going 500 miles an hour that is what awaits this crowd
As for Trump I think he's going to be re-elected the 'resistance' is just making themselves
look incredibly bad they are getting up everyone's fucking nose and even Pelosi, as she was
standing there the other day announcing the 'impeachment' darn well knew it they are toast
In the second term watch out Trump is not as dumb as they think
In the days of Kissinger, Baker, et al the Imperial Staff were well coached in the
Calculus of Power, knew the limits to Empire and thrived within them. Since the end of
history, and the apparent end of limits, policy makers had no more need of realists and their
confusing calculations and analyses.
The US had power, and no-one else had any. That's all they needed to know, and set about
creating new, wonderfully intoxicating realities. As Rove famously inverted the MO they'll
act first, creating realities and the analysis and calculation can come later. In awe of
their creations, they failed to notice that while history may have ended in Washington,
elsewhere it moved on to surround them with a reality where they found themselves in
zugzwang, with no understanding how they got there. Flailing (and wailing) like a Mastodon in
a tar pit, they've managed only to attract an unhelpful crowd of onlookers, fascinated by the
abomination.
In the second term watch out Trump is not as dumb as they think
I too believe he isn't dumb, but the real question is whether he's playing the fool in
furtherance of a plan, or whether it's just who he is and his successes are accidental.
The Deep State's (aka: PFPE's) ongoing behaviour indicates that Trump's using buffoonery
to work a plan that's anathema to their created realities, and their increasing shrillness
indicates it's working. At every turn, he's managed to make unavailable the resources their
reality called for. From the M.E., to the Ukraine to N. Korea to Venezuela, things just
aren't working the way they're supposed to. In fact, they're invariably working out in a way
that exposes the Deep State's ineptitude and malevolence, and maximizes its
embarrassment.
If that's so, his is the most extraordinary political performance I thought I'd ever see.
Even though I can't imagine a more effective single handed way to accomplish what he promised
to do, that he's lasted this long and has been so effective is astonishing. I guess we'll see
if he abandons buffoonery when his opponents finally sink into the tar.
The latest zionist plan designed by Donald Trump and associate to zionist stooges Pompeo and
Brian Hook, intend to expand the war against Iran, has been failed. Trump ordered fomenting
riots using the poor citizen of these countries who are under the Jewish mafia economic
sanction in Iraq, Iran and Lebanon to create choas for the expansion of Jewish mafia and
Israel in the region that he is a member of. Trump expanded the WAR against these counties,
axis of resistance, using the US treasury runs by dual citizens pro Israel, and then
supporting a US/Israel/Saudi proxies in these counties funded by the Saudi Arabia – to
kill the citizens who are fed up with economic pressure force upon them by the criminal Tribe
and its stooge Trump, and to burn buildings to create chaos so Trump can use it against Iran.
This project was funded by the MBS Saudi Arabia and UAE.
Brian Hook, a U.S. Special Representative for Iran, has done everything to satisfy his
masters, the Jewish mafia and made a big HOOK to bring down Iran, but he couldn't and now
they are trying to go after Iran with FABRICATED news, spreading lies that Iran has killed up
to 1000 people.
Trump must answer his own crimes against humanity FIRST and then shut up and focus on US
interest NOT a Israel interests, because he will be viewed as a fifth column.
Trump is a thief and an occupier in Syria, Afghanistan and many other countries. Only
dummies think that he is a man of 'peace'. Only impostors spread lies that he wants to bring
'peace' but the 'deep state' does not allow. In fact the phony 'deep state' does not want war
with Iran because knows that they will never win, only chaos. Israel wants war, and his
servant Trump is pushing for one.
they failed to notice that while history may have ended in Washington, elsewhere it
moved on to surround them with a reality where they found themselves in zugzwang ,
with no understanding how they got there.
Flailing (and wailing) like a Mastodon in a tar pit, they've managed only to
attract an unhelpful crowd of onlookers, fascinated by the abomination.
LOL that is quote-worthy E
What can I add here you've pretty much nailed 'er down to the floor
I agree with you about all those examples Ukraine, Venezuela, even Iran seem to be a case
of giving 'his' neocon 'team' enough rope to hang themselves while POTUS holds the hammer and
ultimately gives a big NAY to going kinetic and then the whole thing crumbles into cracker
crumbs
If that's so, his is the most extraordinary political performance I thought I'd ever
see. Even though I can't imagine a more effective single handed way to accomplish what he
promised to do, that he's lasted this long and has been so effective is astonishing.
Yup the one-man football team and he's actually WINNING LOL
@Priss
Factor Over the years that we've been reading Dr. Cohen who has written about Russia, the
US, etc., we've become more and more convinced that Dr. Cohen, as a Jew, refuses to come out
in bold-faced print to tell the real truths; in this case The Ukraine.
If he were to do so, his Jewish brethren, as seen in The Deep State and in Ukraine would
simply destroy this man. In effect, he's a milquetoast figure of little importance.
"Chinese will soon become a majority in swaths of Russia; why not let them vote
to secede & join the Han motherland?"
-- You think by the zionists' rules, whether the rules are applied in Palestine or
Ukraine. Just give some efforts to learning the history of Russia and the history of Ukraine.
You might also need to refresh your knowledge of the history of the Middle East, for good
measure.
@NegroPantera
Leave the ancient civilization of Persia alone. Тhe US that had been messing with
democratic development in Iran in the 1950-s. The "chosen" behave like homicidal maniacs
towards Iran and cannot wait to see Americans dying for Eretz Israel project.
On 1 May, Mosaddegh nationalized the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, canceling its oil
concession (expired in 1993) and expropriating its assets.
"Our long years of negotiations with foreign countries have yielded no results thus far.
With the oil revenues, we could meet our entire budget and combat poverty, disease, and
backwardness among our people. Another important consideration is that by the elimination
of the power of the British company, we would also eliminate corruption and intrigue, by
means of which the internal affairs of our country have been influenced. Once this tutelage
has ceased, Iran will have achieved its economic and political independence."
In March 1953, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles directed the Central Intelligence
Agency (CIA), which was headed by his younger brother Allen Dulles, to draft plans to
overthrow Mossadegh. On 4 April 1953, Allen Dulles approved $1 million to be used "in any
way that would bring about the fall of Mosaddegh". Soon the CIA's Tehran station started to
launch a propaganda campaign against Mossadegh.
The zionized "progressives" have a new battle cry -- "Putin is new Hitler."
Worked great for Hillary Clinton, this model of "humanitarian" interventionist.
It does not do any good for your brains to read the Atlantic Council's idiotic propaganda.
It is the same as the "Integrity Initiative" production, the dirty and poisonous brew made on
orders by NATO/MIC/the Lobby.
Here are some of the Atlantic Council stars: Eliot Higgins (Bellingcat) and Anne Applebaum
("historian").
Eliot Higgins is no journalist -- his forte has been to manage sales of ladies underwear
and to produce laughable and ignorant stuff about Ukraine and Syria. He has zero (0) training
in engineering, military, sciences. He is a perfect useful idiot and successful
war-profiteer.
The exposing of the Integrity Initiative has just scratched the surface of what appears
to be a much more sophisticated, insidious, and extremely online version of Operation
Mockingbird.
Don't be so sure. Note that Trump congratulated Tulsi on Kamala's demise. If she isn't the
nominee, her mere presence in the campaign is a boon to Trump because she exposes the rot in
the DNC . and the Empire.
Dem Establishment can't control me and that scares the hell out of them
@anonymous
Because Israel is cautious not to cross a line beyond which Russia will have no choice but to
retaliate. Contrary to Americans, Russians don't have a short fuse and don't feel the need to
"pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the
world she means business". Since Russia got involved, Israel's actions have had exactly zero
effect on the course of events in Syria. Russia's goal is not to further ignite the Middle
East. Overreacting to Israel's gesticulations would be counterproductive.
Scum like Amanpour operating from within anti-imperialist countries are the reason why
those places ever needed laws curtailing the hallowed "freedom of the press." Words ARE
weapons, and the West knows this
Comments:
When Nazi propagandist Julius Streicher could get hanged at Nuremberg in 1946 for crimes
against humanity, I wonder, why not the likes of Amanpour? Guess history is written by the
winning side.
Say hello to more than a century of perpetual war for profit. The Deep State, consisting of
Jewish bankers and their hanger-ons, has been calling the shots since passage of the Federal
Reserve Act in the closing hours of 1913, while most members of Congress were home on holiday
recess.
The world is simply re-bifurcating into 2 camps. More specifically, the Anglo-World is
splitting away from whatever parts it can't bring into their sphere of dominance. They
couldn't dominate the whole playground, so they're taking their toys and carving out a corner
of it for themselves.
The current demonisation of China and Russia sets the stage for the real split that
will happen in the 2020s. Gotta get the sheeple used to the notion so that they will accept,
even demand, bringing the Bamboo Curtain down when the time comes.
What we're seeing now in Europe, the M.E., S. America etc is nothing more than the
Anglo-World's attempt to bring more along with them, and the RoW's attempts to minimize their
success.
With people like these, who needs the ptb ???
The PTB needs the people, not the other way around. People are happy to believe anything
that makes them comfortable. Instilling Sino/Russo-phobia in their otherwise empty heads is
but the prelude to splitting them off from demonic Eurasia/Eastasia, and also so they'll be
happy with whatever they get in Oceania.
They'll be living in the Free World again! Smaller this time around, but Freeeee!!!
It worked the last time. It'll work this time too. One stands in awe of how easy it
is.
@Realist
True. If he appointed all these banksters and neocons by mistake, then there should have
been a few who weren't neocons or banksters. Making a lot of mistakes could be seen as
proof of stupidity. Making nothing but mistakes has to be by design
That pos said that those who commit "hate crimes" should get the death penalty without
trail.
@Dave from Oz Dietrich Doerner's Logic of Failure makes clear that decision makers
consistently make grotesque errors based on faulty modeling of the world, incomplete feedback
assumed to be complete, and so on. Even the data are often mistaken for deductive truths, but
if one looks at, for example, the number of actual weather data points used to create those
complex surface maps, it becomes obvious why the results are disappointing -- in that case
possibly spoiling a picnic, but with the military, destroying a civilization.
You might recall the lessons of Longterm Capital Management's use of predictions based on
PDE's, with results that should have been foreseen as being predictably as unreliable as
weather forecasting, and for the same reasons -- that beneath all the fancy math lie guesses
of all too fallible men.
Regarding a faulty worldview, could there possibly be a more distorted model of reality
than America serving as Israel's footstool, the country that with its fifth column is
responsible for Lavon, USS Liberty, JFK/RFK, and, not least, 9/11. In the world of
probabilities, there is no standard of textual evidence evaluation or mathematical
demonstration so low it won't give cover to the Pentagon's costumed bureaucrats and members
of Congress to look the other way regarding Israel and its fifth columns' acts of war against
the country they're all sworn to protect.
MLK became a problem when he joined RFK against Vietnam in early 1968. When he started
counseling his young Black men against Vietnam, he had to go too. I'll never forget that.
Hideous.
Why do they always shoot their rivals in the head? Never a miss back then, ever..
@Anonymous I have doubts that zionists were central to, or instigators of, the JFK coup,
but the Jewish mob sure was in on it, and since they knew and were involved, as was Lyndon,
that gave the zionists Mossad the blackmail they needed to put Lyndon in their pocket. They
proved this when he covered up the Liberty affair. Since then the zionists have been free to
do as they wished. I propose these changes were gradual, and that zionism has been curated as
a MI6 intelop since the Balfour Declaration, in part to create the 5th column we have now.
Looks like it got out of control, Golem-like. This is a pity, as it may result in the ruin of
their own people, just as we see Semitic zionists shooting Semitic natives in a sort of
turkeyshoot every Friday is it kosher to kill on Shabbos? I wonder.. . a kind of civil war,
so we see a vast schism forming between Jews and nominally Jewish zionists.
@Walter The Zionism Psy-Op began much earlier than the Balfour declaration. It was a
result of losing sovereignty when Poland disappeared in 1772 and was partitioned between
Prussia, Russia, and Austria. (Poland was a condominium with two governments, a Jewish one
and a Polish one. The Jews had their own parliament, and the Poles theirs, plus a king. This
evolved out of the original agreements the Khazars of the south made with the Lithuanians to
be a mercenary army, police force, and tax collectors.) Having lost control of one country,
Poland (through their own misuse of taxes), the High Command in Lithuania decided they needed
another country. The propaganda was that the riots -- pogroms -- that began in Russia at the
end of the 19th century were anti-Jewish riots; that the Czar was anti-Jewish, etc. And the
big Psy-Op was the Dreyfus Affair, which was completely fake. Which is why the original
written offer to sell "secrets" -- which were not secrets at all -- mysteriously disappeared
before the Germans occupied France in 1940. But the phony Dreyfus Affair immediately led to
the first Zionist Congress in Basel. Herzl was only a hired propagandist, and disposed off
when he finished the job for which he was recruited as a journalist (as was Wilhelm Marr --
who popularized the term "Antisemitism"). World War I and the Balfour agreement to get
America into the war on the British side delivered the goods.
The world is simply re-bifurcating into 2 camps. More specifically, the Anglo-World is
splitting away from whatever parts it can't bring into their sphere of dominance. They
couldn't dominate the whole playground, so they're taking their toys and carving out a corner
of it for themselves.
The current demonisation of China and Russia sets the stage for the real split that
will happen in the 2020s. Gotta get the sheeple used to the notion so that they will accept,
even demand, bringing the Bamboo Curtain down when the time comes.
What we're seeing now in Europe, the M.E., S. America etc is nothing more than the
Anglo-World's attempt to bring more along with them, and the RoW's attempts to minimize their
success.
With people like these, who needs the ptb ???
The PTB needs the people, not the other way around. People are happy to believe
anything that makes them comfortable. Instilling Sino/Russo-phobia in their otherwise empty
heads is but the prelude to splitting them off from demonic Eurasia/Eastasia, and also so
they'll be happy with whatever they get in Oceania.
They'll be living in the Free World again! Smaller this time around, but Freeeee!!!
It worked the last time. It'll work this time too. One stands in awe of how easy it
is.
@anonymous
Because Israel is cautious not to cross a line beyond which Russia will have no choice but to
retaliate. Contrary to Americans, Russians don't have a short fuse and don't feel the need to
"pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world
she means business".
Since Russia got involved, Israel's actions have had exactly zero effect
on the course of events in Syria. Russia's goal is not to further ignite the Middle East.
Overreacting to Israel's gesticulations would be counterproductive.
Clamoring for retaliation. Putin only retaliated economically, although it was pretty bad for
Turkey. The Uncle showed his "gratitude" by helping the coup. Putin likely forewarned the
sultan about that coup, so it failed miserably as the result.
Now he holds sultan firmly by the
balls, economically, politically, and militarily, using Turks to push the US around in Syria
and selling them S-400, so that Uncle won't be able to "democratically" bomb Turkey.
That's the
game worthy of the Grand Master, while Trump and pathetic Europeans play checkers, at best
(their game often degenerates to the level of tick-tack-toe).
Shoigu is 64, while Putin is 67.
This means Shoigu is a one-term successor, if we're talking age. Someone capable of long-term
work and planning after that would be a must. Medvedev is currently 54, which mean he'll be
the age Shoigu is now, if Putin stands down in say a decade.
Which means he himself–Medvedev, that is–will be good for a decade.
So that's one scenario: ten more years of less of Putin, then one mandate by Shoigu, then
another decade by Medvedev. Or fifteen years by Medvedev immediately after Putin, with Shoigu
being his cardinal
We've yet to see what happens to the reds and the browns. The leader of the
commies–Zuyganov–is 75, and the leader of the empire
revivalists–Zhirinovski–is 73. So again, at most a decade from now, the commies
and the far right will either collapse, or choose new strong leaders.
In this sense there a very serious possible reshuffle looming all across the Russian
political landscape. After all, only four parties matter: Putin's national conservatives,
Zyuganov's commies, Zhirinovski's imperialists, and Mironov's social democrats. Mironov is
66, the youngest of the batch.
Russia is still very much a "leader-based" society. Her political parties are also
"leader-based". We'll see if these parties can function beyond the lifespan of their current
leaders. If yes–then Russia has transcended the curse of the "wise emperor" formula,
where stuff only works if you've got a superhuman at the top, and the moment he's gone, shit
falls apart.
@Moi You are quite correct. The overly sanguine attitude of many Christians toward
nuclear war one might call "nuclear exceptionalism." They adopted the imaginary hope of
Anglo-Irish 1800's cult leader John Nelson Darby: "Darby has been credited with originating
the pre-tribulational rapture theory wherein Christ will suddenly remove His bride, the
Church, from this world to its heavenly destiny before the judgments of the tribulation."
(Wikipedia).
The military leadership are loaded with rapture believers, in particular the Air Force. So
if the world nukes itself, that's fine by them; they have no skin in the "game."
Except that on Judgment Day they will have to give account for the lives they destroy by
their recklessness. The turning of Christ into a war god is both blasphemy and idolatry, for
which also they will give account. "My Kingdom is not of this world," said the Lord to
Pilate. Christians are to contend for the Gospel through love, not war.
Both Saker reviews are important, and I'll get both books.
My own experience with US Army officers and enlisted – and this extended over40
years off and on, the last encounters six continuous years ending in 1992 – was that
the WW2 men were realists and competent. And that their replacements were delusional fools.
The level of incompetence was breath-taking by 1992 – when NATO as the cloak of Empire
undertook to bomb cities in Yugoslavia – self evidently criminal and foolish officers
went along And I said Adios MoFo
@peterAUS Tactical nukes. Such a humane idea. Doesn't that make everyone feel warm and
fuzzy all over. Nuclear war, even a first strike, is now acceptable. Isn't semantics
wonderful! Tactical nukes are the thing, to NOT prick the conscience of the western public.
I do not envy the Russian position. They can't publicly warn the US/Israel against nuclear
strikes. The MSM would take such a common sense position and spin into more Russian bullying.
How dare they tell us what we can't do! The Russian message would quickly be lost in a wave
of western hysterics.
On the other hand, a secret warning is of limited value. If they listen, great. What if
they call Russia's bluff? Being secret, the Russians could back down and not even lose face.
It seems obvious that the psychopathic thinking among western elites is based on the idea
that they can get away with nuclear strikes against Iran because Russian retaliation will
mean the end of humanity therefore they will not respond.
I'm sure the Russians have already calculated what is and is not acceptable when war comes
to Iran. How much damage will nuking an entire country do to Russia and all of Asia? If the
fall out is that extreme then they might treat such an attack as an attack on Russia itself.
I do think the likely plan is to make the best of whatever happens. No matter how one spins
it, a Russian nuclear response is the end of humanity. An extreme option the Russians will
try to avoid if possible.
All this is based on the assumption Israel or America will use their nuclear arsenal. If
Hitler had the bomb in 1945 would he have used it? Of course he would have. The people
running the West have shown the same callous disregard for human life. There is no moral
deterrent to stop these people. Plus all western propaganda the past 20 years has been aimed
at making the use of nuclear weapons acceptable. Why would they be conditioning their public
unless they wished to have the option to use them?
How do we get there? Yes the US military has the ability to drop lots of bombs and destroy
many things. Yet in any war primary targets will all be hit fairly quickly. Then what? From
Day Two they are into the phase of diminishing returns. This is what confronted the IDF in
2006. So you go to tactical nukes. However I see the nuclear attack coming on the heels of a
ferocious Iranian counter attack. Psychologically can America handle even minimal losses? The
most likely response will be a huge temper tantrum: "how dare they fight back!" The nuclear
option will be taken because things will have gone wrong. It will be as much a show of
weakness as strength. Plus it won't be just one of two bombs. Because the Iranians will not
say "Uncle". The Japanese did after Nagasaki, however the Japanese were trying to surrender
the entire time. The Iranians will never surrender. Therefore 80 million dead might not be
unreasonable. Especially if there is no longer any Reason left in the western world.
This can be prevented but only by the western public. You know the most apathetic/ignorant
and propagandized public on the planet. As Vietnam and Iraq proved, Americans have no
conscience when it comes to dead foreigners. They get what they deserve for "starting" a war
against Uncle Sam. Yet there are two Achilles Heels.
1) Americans hate losing. Iraq was a great success during the Mission Accomplished phase.
The moment the narrative changed Americans quickly switched to hating their leadership for
botching Iraq. So how long before Americans turn against an Iran War that isn't an easy win
– and can't be won because the Iranians will never surrender. Or how well does the MSM
do in turning such losses into part of a patriotic war that Americans' must support and
win?
2) Quality of life. All westerners are the most spoiled people in human history.
Consequently we have become the most materialistic and the most superficial people ever. We
are an "end justifies the means" society. So long as we have our tvs and weekend football and
our quality of life hasn't fallen too far, too fast, we are perfectly happy to give our
political elites a blank cheque to do whatever they like. Bomb Yugoslavia, invade
Afghanistan, destroy Iraq, Libya, Syria and Yemen, murder Palestinians, sanction or threaten
regime change the list is endless. Everything is on the table – likely nuclear
holocaust too(so long as it's them doing the dying) – just don't mess with our Cozy
Prisons! Support for war on Iran will evaporate pretty fast unless such a war can be
prosecuted quickly and everything can return to normal fast. Definitely westerners –
not just Americans – will support nuclear strikes. There will be some initial shock,
which the MSM will cover over. Then everyone will fall into line because we'll need to win
the war and get back to normal. Nuclear weapons will be seen as the convenient solution for
the problem. End justifies the means.
Maybe I'm wrong about westerners and they still have a conscience. After 20 years of
accepting endless wars, it doesn't seem likely.
Circle 2021 on your calendars. Once Trump is re-elected there will be nothing to stop him.
If there are any history classes in the future then 2021 will be remember like 1914 or 1789
or 1066. I still hope it is remembered as the year the states of Israel and USA ceased to
exist.
@Jim Christian "Fact is, if the elites and corporate defense establishment of the US
would become diplomatic, imagine the cooperation between us and Russia that could take place.
Imagine the prosperity! Even the elites could share in it!"
Exactly so. This was the basis for my immediate initial support for Trump; his calling
bullshit on the entire rationale behind the empire, and the potential benefits of a new
detente. (Even if we were evil geni, it would make more sense to at least pretend to be
non-threatening.) This is the root of the hostility to Trump, IMO.
Incidentally, this piece and it's commentary is greatly supportive of Ron's argument that
heavy users should step up and financially support the UR. I haven't seen this sort of thing
anywhere else easily available on the web. I don't comment much here (feeling somewhat too
short for this ride ) but I do spend hours everyday, reading most of the articles and many
comments. Would definitely donate.
@Andrei Martyanov I suspect that the US is extremely concerned about Russia's
decapitating first strike capability via nuclear armed Zircons (1-2 minutes flight time to
Washington DC or New York) who are hard to detect, almost impossible to stop missiles. The US
does not have a capability like this. This is why the whole talk about buying Greenland. It
is very important to stop russian subs from reaching the Atlantic US Coast.
How can a US president sleep if he knows that a russian tactical nuclear missile could
arrive in 1-2 minutes?
In 1-2 minutes the WhiteHouse, Congress, Federal Reserve HQ, CIA and NSA HQs, Pentagon,
etc will be gone. No wonder Putin is trolling the US about selling some hypersonic
weapons.
.the psychopathic thinking among western elites is based on the idea that they can get
away with nuclear strikes against Iran because Russian retaliation will mean the end of
humanity therefore they will not respond.
Something like that.
I'm sure the Russians have already calculated what is and is not acceptable when war
comes to Iran.
Any interested state-level player has.
No matter how one spins it, a Russian nuclear response is the end of humanity.
Yep.
There is no moral deterrent to stop these people.
You mean TPTBs in the West? Yep ..
The Iranians will never surrender. Therefore 80 million dead might not be
unreasonable.
Disagree.
This can be prevented but only by the western public. You know the most
apathetic/ignorant and propagandized public on the planet.
Don't say.
So how long before Americans turn against an Iran War that isn't an easy win – and
can't be won because the Iranians will never surrender.
The Iranian regime can surrender–>from then on there are a couple of
scenarios.
As, for example:
So long as we have our tvs and weekend football and our quality of life hasn't fallen
too far, too fast, we are perfectly happy to give our political elites a blank cheque to do
whatever they like
And so long as I don't get drafted to be a part of occupying force in Iran among some
other things.
Definitely westerners – not just Americans – will support nuclear strikes.
There will be some initial shock, which the MSM will cover over. Then everyone will fall
into line because we'll need to win the war and get back to normal. Nuclear weapons will be
seen as the convenient solution for the problem. End justifies the means.
Yep.
Maybe I'm wrong about westerners and they still have a conscience. After 20 years of
accepting endless wars, it doesn't seem likely.
Now, the key question is, how is this relevant. I have no doubt that this and previous book
contain good info, but can this info be ever digested by the US politicians and neocons? Of
course not!
The US elites have degenerated to the point of no return. This always happens to the
elites of dying empires. So, discussing the reality, military or economic, with them is like
teaching madhouse inmates calculus. You might be right, but they won't appreciate it.
@Jim Christian There is already some internal opposition to war with Iran. Out of the
various recent provocations, the US has been reluctant to escalate. Maybe its Trump's
skepticism regarding the list of options provided by the military. Or his political
instincts. It would be an unpopular war without a rapid, decisive victory, which is
unrealistic.
I think other than a rather weak veto power, Trump is too weak to prevent a war. So I
think some other faction of the elite is resisting. Maybe the military. It would be logical
for them to resist. They got their big budget without needing a war. And they would be stuck
with the mess.
The war has been teed up for a Trump signoff two or three times lately. If the only
missing piece is finding the sucker to take the blame, it is inevitable. Rather, I would
infer that there is some deep opposition, that is lying low. The large defense contractors
have it pretty good right now, but they probably aren't set up to oppose any war, however
foolish.
@Andrei Martyanov Our societies have been gutted by thieves and their accomplices while
the thieves buddies look on and play loud music to confuse everyone. The thieves are the
buzzard 'capitalists', the accomplices are the crooked politicians and the noise comes from
the media.
The common denominator in the U.S., Canada, Australia, the U.K., NZ and others is that the
thieves den is a triumvirate: Old Money 'elite' (read: scum), New Money Jews and the
politicos (multi-generational civil servant families and the con artists talking head actors
who play president, pm, etc.).
The West has been systematically destroyed. Every institution has been corrupted including
our religions. The Vatican, for example, was completely corrupted in the early 1960's when,
according to Father Malachi Martin, Satan formally enthroned himself in Vatican City.
There is a common denominator here gentlemen: destruction. Satan is always close to any such
destruction which is why Communism has always been so anti-Christian and anti-religion (China
destroyed Buddhism and is destroying Falun Gong, or trying to). Our elites and the elite Jews
have a religion of their own: Luciferianism.
It is time to pray gentlemen. We need a miracle. It isn't too late to turn this ship around.
We just need the willpower to do it. Prayer is the beginning of building the strength to do
what is needed for our progeny.
@Passer by{ the US is extremely concerned about Russia's decapitating first strike
capability} {How can a US president sleep if he knows that a russian tactical nuclear missile could
arrive in 1-2 minutes?}
By making sure US does not initiate a nuke strike on Russia.
Why would Russia initiate a 'decapitating* nuke strike' on US?
What will she gain by it? Nothing.
Both US and Russia will have more than enough surviving nukes to wipe the other out, and then
some, if one of them initiates a nuke first strike.
My guess is Russia continues developing faster, harder to detect nuke strike systems to
deter the psychopaths in US from doing something stupid and awful. But the problem with all
these developments of ever faster strike capabilities – on both sides – is that
the possibility of an accidental nuke strike by one side or another, keeps increasing.
Because it takes a few minutes for a missile to reach its target, you cannot afford to wait:
if your defenses falsely detect a 'launch', then you _have_ to launch and then the runaway
chain reaction of strike-counterstrike-countercounterstrike begins ..and everything ends.
______________________________
* there is no such thing as 'decapitating' nuke strike against US or Russia. Both are
large enough and have enough nuke warheads (8,000-10,000) to render the idea of a
'decapitating' strike meaningless. Just one (surviving) boomer sub (US or Russia) carries
enough nuke warheads/megatons to wipe most of US/Russia.
If only Those Russians could play chess or compose classical music or
write a few serious novels. Oh well, I guess you can't expect everything from people with no
GDP.
I am all for such definitions; their scope is too narrow, if anything.
I'd prefer a broad definition that would describe as anti-Semite any person who attends a
church or a mosque; who does not contribute to Jewish settlements; who does not believe in
God-chosen Jewish nation being above all mortal laws.
Maybe then the Gentiles would be healed of their fear of being labelled 'anti-Semite'.
Citizens of France. To arms! Man the ramparts. The American barbarians are coming. They
shall not pass!
Le Trump's threat to France's splendid wines and Roquefort cheese are the gravest menace
France has faced since the Germans invaded this fair land in 1914. Burgundy wines and France's
300 fromages form the very soul of la Belle France.
Trump does not know or care that France saved America from British mis-rule. He wants
revenge because France – which taxes nearly everything – seeks to tax US IT firms
like Google and Amazon. Trump considers this a personal affront. Besides, he dislikes wine and
lives on desiccated burgers made with petrochemical cheese, washed down by acidic Diet
Cokes.
On top of this outrage comes the squabble over NATO. Trump used to scoff at the Alliance,
saying it was 'obsolete' as well as under-armed and short of money. The president and his
backers really dislike France and all it stands for, including wine and cheese.
"... Primacists use the security threats that are responding to the unnecessary use of U.S. military force to justify why the U.S. shouldn't stop, or in fact increase, the use of force. ..."
"... These stale arguments claim there will be consequences of leaving while conveniently ignoring the consequences of staying, which of course are far from trivial. For example, veteran suicide is an epidemics and military spending to perpetuate U.S. primacy continues at unnecessarily high rates. The presence of U.S. soldiers in these complex conflicts can even draw us into more unnecessary wars. The United States can engage the world in ways that don't induce the security dilemma to undermine our own security; reduce our military presence in the Middle East, engage Iran and other states in the region diplomatically and economically, and don't walk away from already agreed upon diplomatic arraignments that are favorable to all parties involved. ..."
"... September 11th was planned in Germany and the United States, the ability to exist in Afghanistan under the Taliban without persecution didn't enable 9/11, and denying this space wouldn't have prevented it. ..."
"... For those arguing to maintain the ongoing forever wars, American credibility will always be ruined in the aftermath of withdrawal. Here's the WSJ piece on that point: "When America withdraws from the Middle East unilaterally, the Russians internalize this and move into Crimea and Ukraine; the Chinese internalize it and move into the South China Sea and beyond in the Pacific." ..."
"... The exorbitant costs of the U.S.'s numerous military engagements around the world need to be justified by arguing that they secure vital U.S. interests. Without it, Primacists couldn't justify the cost in American lives. Whether the military even has the ability to solve all problems in international relations aside, not all interests are equal in severity and importance. ..."
"... This article originally appeared on LobeLog.com . ..."
The unrivaled and unchallenged exertion of American military power around the world, or
what's known as "primacy," has been the basis for U.S. Grand Strategy over the past 70 years
and has faced few intellectual and political challenges. The result has been stagnant ideas,
poor logic, and an ineffective foreign policy. As global security challenges have evolved, our
foreign policy debate has remained in favor of primacy, repeatedly relying on a select few,
poorly conceived ideas and arguments. Primacy's greatest hits arguments are played on repeat
throughout the policy and journalism worlds and its latest presentation is in a recent
article in
the Wall Street Journal, written by its chief foreign policy correspondent, titled,
"America Can't Escape the Middle East." The piece provides a case study in how stagnant these
ideas have become, and how different actors throughout the system present them without serious
thought or contemplation.
Hyping the threat of withdrawal
The WSJ piece trotted out one of the most well-worn cases for unending American military
deployments in the region. "The 2003 invasion of Iraq proved to be a debacle," it rightly
notes. However, there's always a "but":[B]ut subsequent attempts to pivot away from the region
or ignore it altogether have contributed to humanitarian catastrophes, terrorist outrages and
geopolitical setbacks, further eroding America's standing in the world."
Primacists often warn of the dire security threats that will result from leaving Middle East
conflict zones. The reality is that the threats they cite are actually caused by the
unnecessary use of force by the United States in the first place. For example, the U.S. sends
military assets to deter Iran, only to have Iran increase attacks or provocations in response.
The U.S. then beefs up its military presence
to protect the forces that are already there. Primacists use the security threats that
are responding to the unnecessary use of U.S. military force to justify why the U.S. shouldn't
stop, or in fact increase, the use of force.
These stale arguments claim there will be consequences of leaving while conveniently
ignoring the consequences of staying, which of course are far from trivial. For example,
veteran suicide is an epidemics and military spending to perpetuate U.S. primacy continues at
unnecessarily high rates. The presence of U.S. soldiers in these complex conflicts can even
draw us into more unnecessary wars. The United States can engage the world in ways that don't
induce the security dilemma to undermine our own security; reduce our military presence in the
Middle East, engage Iran and other states in the region diplomatically and economically, and
don't walk away from already agreed upon diplomatic arraignments that are favorable to all
parties involved.
Terrorism safe havens
And how many times have we heard that we must defend some undefined geographical space to
prevent extremists from plotting attacks? "In the past, jihadists used havens in Afghanistan,
Yemen, Syria and Iraq to plot more ambitious and deadly attacks, including 9/11," the WSJ piece
says. "Though Islamic State's self-styled 'caliphate' has been dismantled, the extremist
movement still hasn't been eliminated -- and can bounce back."
The myth of the terrorism safe havens enabling transnational attacks on the United States
has
persisted despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary and significant scholarly research
that contradicts it. The myth persists because it provides a simple and comforting narrative
that's easy to understand. September 11th was planned in Germany and the United States, the
ability to exist in Afghanistan under the Taliban without persecution didn't enable 9/11, and
denying this space wouldn't have prevented it.
Terrorists don't need safe havens to operate, and only gain marginal increases in
capabilities by having access to them. Organizations engage in terrorism because they have such
weak capabilities in the first place. These movements are designed to operate underground with
the constant threat of arrest and execution. The Weatherman Underground in the United States
successfully carried out bombings while operating within the United States itself. The Earth
Liberation Front did the same by organizing into cells where no cell knew anything about the
other cells to prevent the identification of other members if members of one cell were
arrested. Organizations that engage in terrorism can operate with or without safe havens.
Although safe havens don't add significantly to a terrorist groups' capabilities, governing
your own territory is something completely different. ISIS is a commonly used, and misused,
example for why wars should be fought to deny safe havens. A safe haven is a country or region
in which a terrorist group is free from harassment or persecution. This is different from what
ISIS created in 2014. What ISIS had when it swept across Syria and Iraq in 2014 was a
proto-state. This gave them access to a tax base, oil revenues, and governing resources. Safe
havens don't provide any of this, at least not at substantial levels. The Islamic State's
construction of a proto-state in Syria and Iraq did give them operational capabilities they
wouldn't have had otherwise, but this isn't the same as the possible safe havens that would be
gained from a military withdrawal from Middle Eastern conflicts. The conditions of ISIS's rise
in 2014 don't exist today and the fears of an ISIS resurgence like their initial rise are
unfounded .
Credibility doesn't work how you think it works
For those arguing to maintain the ongoing forever wars, American credibility will always
be ruined in the aftermath of withdrawal. Here's the WSJ piece on that point: "When America
withdraws from the Middle East unilaterally, the Russians internalize this and move into Crimea
and Ukraine; the Chinese internalize it and move into the South China Sea and beyond in the
Pacific."
Most commentators have made this claim without recognition of their own contradictions that
abandoning the Kurds in Syria would damage American credibility. They then list all the other
times we've abandoned the Kurds. Each of these betrayals didn't stop them from working with the
United States again, and this latest iteration will be the same. People don't work with the
United States because they trust or respect us, they do it because we have a common interest
and the United States has the capability to get things done. As we were abandoning the Kurds
this time to be attacked by the Turks, Kurdish officials were continuing to
share intelligence with U.S. officials to facilitate the raid on ISIS leader Abu Bakr
al-Baghdadi because both the United States and the Kurds wanted Baghdadi eliminated and only
the United States had the capability to get it done.
Similarly, the idea that pulling out militarily in one region results in a direct chain of
events where our adversaries move into countries or areas in a completely different region is
quite a stretch of the imagination. Russia moved into Crimea because it's a strategic asset and
it was taking advantage of what it saw as an opportunity: instability and chaos in Kiev. Even
if we left troops in every conflict country we've ever been in, Russia would have correctly
assessed that Ukraine just wasn't important enough to spark a U.S. invasion. When the Soviets
withdrew from Afghanistan, did the United States invade Cuba? What alliance did the Soviets or
Chinese abandon before the United States entered the Korean War?
Assessments of credibility , especially in times of crisis (like that in Ukraine), are made
based on what leaders think the other country's interests are and the capabilities they have to
pursue those interests. There is no evidence to support -- in fact there is a lot of evidence
that contradicts -- the idea that withdrawing militarily from one region or ending an alliance
has any impact on assessments of a country's reliability or credibility.
Not all interests are created equal
Threat inflation isn't just common from those who promote a primacy-based foreign policy,
it's necessary. Indeed, as the WSJ piece claimed, "There is no avoiding the fact that the
Middle East still matters a great deal to U.S. interests."
The exorbitant costs of the U.S.'s numerous military engagements around the world need
to be justified by arguing that they secure vital U.S. interests. Without it, Primacists
couldn't justify the cost in American lives. Whether the military even has the ability to solve
all problems in international relations aside, not all interests are equal in severity and
importance. Vital interests are those that directly impact the survival of the United
States. The only thing that can threaten the survival of the United States is another powerful
state consolidating complete control of either Europe or East Asia. This would give them the
capabilities and freedom to strike directly at the territorial United States. This is why the
United States stayed in Europe after WWII, to prevent the consolidation of Europe by the
Soviets. Addressing the rise of China -- which will require some combination of cooperation and
competition -- is America's vital interest today and keeping troops in Afghanistan to prevent a
terrorism safe haven barely registers as a peripheral interest. There are U.S. interests in the
Middle East, but these interests are not important enough to sacrifice American soldiers for
and can't easily be secured through military force anyway.
Consequences
Most of these myths and arguments can be summarized by the claim that any disengagement of
any kind by the United States from the Middle East comes with consequences. This isn't entirely
wrong, but it isn't really relevant either unless compared with the consequences of continuing
engagement at current levels. We currently have 67,000 troops in the
Middle East and Afghanistan and those troops are targets of adversaries, contribute to
instability, empower hardliners in Iran, and provide continuing legitimacy to insurgent and
terrorist organizations fighting against a foreign occupation. One
article in The Atlantic argued that the problem with a progressive foreign policy
is that restraint comes with costs, almost ironically ignoring the fact that the U.S.'s current
foreign policy also comes with, arguably greater, costs. A military withdrawal, or even
drawdown, from the Middle East does come with consequences, but it's only believable that these
costs are higher than staying through the perpetuation of myths and misconceptions that inflate
such risks and costs. No wonder then that these myths have become the greatest hits of a
foreign policy that's stuck in the past.
People : "In
a ceremony in the Great Synagogue of Amsterdam, da Costa was first forced to confess his sins,
then endure 39 lashes, and finally to lie on the (synagogue) threshold and let the entire crowd
step over his body."
Da Costa never recovered from the barbarian ritual. A few months later he shot himself in
the head in the middle of the street.
If Corbyn, his shadow cabinet or anyone else within the Labour party is interested in
forgiveness, the road is open for them to undergo Urial Da Costa's experience.
ORDER IT NOW
However, some major categorical differences between Da Costa and Labour politicians must be
examined before such a development matures into a televised spectacle. While Da Costa was an
exquisite free thinker who served as an inspiration to the great Baruch Spinoza (who was
subjected to similar Rabbinical malevolence just a few years later), Labour's leadership isn't
exactly an intellectual collective. Their contribution to authentic thinking and freedom of
thought is currently in the red. Unlike the sensitive Da Costa who couldn't bear the
humiliation and ended his life under tragic circumstances, Corbyn and the Labour elite are more
than likely to survive such a humiliating scenario, they may even enjoy it. Like most British
politicians, they long ago lost contact with the concepts of dignity and pride.
I am all for such definitions; their scope is too narrow, if anything.
I'd prefer a broad definition that would describe as anti-Semite any person who attends a
church or a mosque; who does not contribute to Jewish settlements; who does not believe in
God-chosen Jewish nation being above all mortal laws.
Maybe then the Gentiles would be healed of their fear of being labelled 'anti-Semite'.
I am all for such definitions; their scope is too narrow, if anything.
I'd prefer a broad definition that would describe as anti-Semite any person who attends a
church or a mosque; who does not contribute to Jewish settlements; who does not believe in
God-chosen Jewish nation being above all mortal laws.
Maybe then the Gentiles would be healed of their fear of being labelled 'anti-Semite'.
After 25 years of repeated failures, Americans want a foreign policy that preserves the
security of the United States, enhances prosperity, and maintains the core U.S. commitment to
individual liberty. They recognize that U.S. power can be a force for good, but only if it is
employed judiciously and for realistic objectives. In short, a large and growing number of
Americans want a foreign policy of restraint.
But what does that mean in practice? In a sense, it's easier to understand what restrainers
don't want. They don't want endless wars, bloated military budgets, and security
commitments that keep expanding, but are never seriously debated or approved by the public. If
restrainers were suddenly put in charge of U.S. foreign and national security policy, however,
what would they do differently? What do restrainers really want?
Without presuming to speak for other members of the Quincy Institute, here's how I would
answer that critical question:
1.Restrainers Want Continued U.S. Economic and Diplomatic Engagement .
Critics often claim that restrainers are isolationists, a bogus charge intended to marginalize
their views and stifle debate before it starts. In fact, restrainers recognize that the United
States benefits from trade, investment, tourism, and other mutually beneficial interactions
with other countries, and they know that Washington must work with foreign powers to address a
number of significant global problems. For these reasons, restrainers reject a return to
"Fortress America" and want the United States to remain fully present in today's world.
2. Restrainers Want a Broad and Honest Debate . In recent years, public debate on
foreign policy and national security has been dominated by those who believe that American
power -- and especially military power -- is the optimal solution to most foreign policy
challenges. As Zack Beauchamp of Vox.com observes
, "Washington's foreign policy debate tends to be mostly conducted between the center and the
right. The issue is typically how much force America should use rather than whether it should
use it at all."
Public discourse on these issues is skewed because the objective case for ceaseless military
intervention is so weak. The United States remains remarkably secure compared to other nations:
it has a large and diverse economy, a robust nuclear deterrent, and faces no powerful enemies
in the Western Hemisphere. Given these enduring advantages, it has little to gain by trying to
reshape politics around the world. To convince the public to go along with an overly ambitious
foreign policy, therefore, proponents of intervention have to inflate threats, exaggerate the
benefits of "global leadership," and mischaracterize the views of their critics. Restrainers
believe a more open and honest debate would undermine the case for military adventurism and
lead to a more prudent and successful foreign policy.
3. Restrainers Want Realistic Foreign Policy Goals . Instead of engaging in costly
and futile efforts to remake the world in our image, restrainers want U.S. foreign policy to
pursue more feasible objectives. The U.S. military must be strong enough to deter attacks on
the U.S. homeland, a task that is relatively easy to accomplish. When necessary, the United
States can also help other states uphold the balance of power and deter war in a few key
strategic areas outside the Western Hemisphere. America's economic clout will also give
Washington considerable influence over the institutions that manage trade, investment and other
beneficial forms of international cooperation, and it should use that influence to ensure these
institutions are working properly. But the United States has neither the need, the capacity,
nor the wisdom to conduct massive social engineering projects ("nation-building") in deeply
divided and conflict prone societies, and it should cease trying.
4. Restrainers Want Credible Foreign Commitments . The United States keeps taking on
new security obligations in Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East, but it rarely debates
their wisdom or value. Americans are now formally committed to defending more countries around
the world than at any time in U.S. history, even though some of these states are hard to
defend, have little strategic importance for the United States, and sometimes act in ways that
damage U.S. interests. Washington is also engaged in less visible military activities in dozens
of other countries, some of them shrouded in secrecy. Yet anytime U.S. leaders contemplate
trimming these obligations, alarmists warn that the slightest reduction in America's global
presence will undermine U.S. credibility, embolden rivals, and lead to catastrophe. Having
allowed itself to become overextended, the United States ends up fighting endless wars in
places with no strategic value in order to convince allies and adversaries that it will still
fight in places of greater importance.
Restrainers believe the United States should pledge itself to defending another
country–and thereby risking the lives of its troops -- only when doing so will make a
direct and significant contribution to U.S. security and prosperity, and when these obligations
command broad support from the American people. Carefully considered commitments will be more
credible, because both allies and adversaries can see for themselves why it is in the U.S.
national interest to live up to them.
In short, restrainers want the United States to define its interests more narrowly but
defend those interests more vigorously. It should focus on commitments and missions that can
command strong support from the American people -- such as helping to ensure that a rising
China does not dominate Asia -- and eschew obligations that do not make America more
secure.
5. Restrainers Want Business-like Relations with All Countries and Special Relations with
None . In his Farewell Address, George Washington famously warned against "passionate
attachments" to foreign powers. His wise counsel still rings true today. No two states have
identical interests, and no U.S. allies are so valuable or virtuous to deserve generous U.S.
support no matter what they do. Restrainers believe the U.S. should support its allies when
doing so makes the United States more secure or prosperous, and distance itself from those
allies when they act in ways that are contrary to our interests and values.
Restrainers also want the United States to maintain diplomatic relations with acknowledged
adversaries, both to facilitate cooperation on issues where our interests overlap and to
maximize U.S. leverage. Refusing to talk directly to a country like Iran does not make the
United States or its allies safer or richer; it just allows other states to take the U.S.
support for granted and allows potential rivals like China or Russia to gain greater influence
in an important region. Maintaining ties with all nations gives each of them greater incentive
to do what we want, lest Washington get a better deal from someone else.
6. Restrainers Want More Diplomacy and Less Coercion . Over the past two decades,
Washington has repeatedly tried to compel weaker powers to do its bidding by issuing
ultimatums, imposing sanctions, and in some cases, unleashing its superior military power. Yet
even weak opponents have repeatedly refused to knuckle under to U.S. pressure, because they
cared more about the interests at stake and Washington typically refused to compromise at all.
Even when Washington was able to overthrow a weaker adversary, the result was a failed state, a
costly occupation, or both.
Restrainers believe diplomacy should take center stage in the conduct of America's foreign
relations and that sanctions and the threat or use of force should be our last resort rather
than our first impulse. They recognize that many of America's greatest foreign policy successes
-- the Marshall Plan, the Bretton Woods economic order, the peaceful reunification of Germany,
etc. -- were won not on a battlefield but across a negotiating table. A more restrained foreign
policy strives for mutually beneficial agreements with other countries, rather than
trying to dictate to them.
7 . Restrainers Want U.S. Allies to Bear a Fair Share of Defense Burdens . The United
States currently spends roughly 4 percent of GDP on the Department of Defense, the intelligence
community, and other national security missions, while allies like Germany or Japan spend a
little more than 1 percent. U.S. leaders have complained about this disparity for decades, but
their efforts have failed to convince these wealthy allies to do more.
Restrainers believe allies will pull their weight only when they no longer see Uncle Sam as
their first line of defense. Because NATO's European members are significantly more populous
and prosperous than Russia, they should assume primary responsibility for their own defense.
Furthermore, the United States should withdraw from Afghanistan, curtail spending on
counter-terrorism operations abroad, and let the contending countries in the Middle East
balance each other. It should focus most of its military efforts on making sure that China does
not achieve a dominant position in Asia, while insisting that its Asian partners pull their
weight as well. Above all, the United States should not do more to protect allies than they are
willing to do themselves.
8. Restrainers Want to Set a Good Example for Others . Restrainers are committed to
classic liberal values -- representative government, a market-based economy, the rule of law,
and basic human rights -- but they believe trying to impose these principles on others is
likely to backfire. Indeed, democracy is now in retreat around the world, and the United States
is deeply polarized and increasingly dysfunctional. When The Economist Magazine's annual "
Democracy Index " downgrades the United States from the category of "full democracy" to
"flawed democracy," as it did in 2017, it's a clear sign that something has gone badly
awry.
For restrainers, promoting liberal values abroad begins by setting a good example at home.
Using American power to remake the world has led to illegal wars, excessive government secrecy,
targeted killings, the deaths of thousands of innocent foreign civilians, and repeated
violations of U.S. and international law. At the same time, it has squandered vast resources
that could have been used to build a better society here in the United States, and distracted
Americans from the efforts needed to improve our own institutions.
These are some of the reforms that (most) restrainers want, and so do a growing number of
Americans. Public opinion polls show steadily diminishing support for foreign adventures --
especially among younger Americans -- and it is perhaps the one idea that unites politicians
like Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Donald Trump. It is also worth remembering that Bill
Clinton ("It's the economy, stupid"), George W. Bush ("a humble foreign policy"), and Barack
Obama ("nation-building at home") all campaigned pledging to do less abroad and more at home,
even if they did not deliver as promised once they were in the White House.
Restraint is the foreign policy most Americans want and deserve. The only question is: how
long will it be before they get it?
The threat to US official impunity panics the regime more than any number of Russian
Sarmats or nuclear ramjets. The ICC is one very new judicial forum, and its halting efforts
to get its institutional footing panicked the US into imposing illegal sanctions on
accredited diplomats. The real threat of the Rome Statute is the universal obligation to
prosecute or extradite war criminals and enemies of humanity.
An increasing number of the most influential US functionaries will be unable to travel
freely. This is, in effect, pariah-state status more abject than North Korea's. This has been
a mounting challenge for years – GW Bush fled Switzerland, scared off by a war crimes
accusation from a single legislator.
And international criminal law is one jaw of a pincer. It complements the doctrine of
state responsibility for internationally wrongful acts. State responsibility provides the
civil equivalent of international criminal law, with the potential to impose restitution,
reparation, satisfaction, and compensation with interest. Satisfaction articulates directly
with international criminal law by providing for prosecution of designated criminals. The
US faces insupportable liabilities for its internationally wrongful acts, and US
functionaries know that any one of them could be sacrificed to get the regime off the
hook.
Russian policy is to enforce this law at gunpoint. Iranian policy is to make its case in
independent international courts. China is vocal about upholding rule of law, and as its
deterrent improves, it will be increasingly active in applying it. The G-192 – 96% of
the world's population – pitches in by withholding the "waterfall" of G-5 privileges.
The UK recently got pushed off the ICJ bench for the first time ever for its lawless conduct.
The US is next.
The US is an underdeveloped country ineffectually waving second-rate weapons. The world is
leaving it behind.
England and France, two antagonists, two mainstays of European civilisation, are
simultaneously engulfed in paroxysm of Judeophilia. The result of the forthcoming very
important parliamentary elections in Britain hinges on this issue, with Labour and Tories
competing who will express their love of Jews more profusely, while the Jews can't decide whom
they loath less. France, after a year of the middle-class Yellow Vests rebellion, enters the
fresh working class uprising with million strikers rioting on the streets, but its parliament
finds prime time to ponder and rule how Frenchmen should love Jews and hate those who hate
them. What is the meaning of this charade?
Surely they do not argue about Jewish cuisine. While palatable, it is rarely more than that.
A proof can be found in Israel, where Arab food rules, Japanese is recognised, Italian
cherished but Jewish cuisine shines by its absence. It is not Jewish noses, though a
significant feature of facial anatomy, they are not more elaborate or prominent than, say,
Sicilian. It is all about ideas.
Judeophilia, love of Jews is a troublesome symptom of a dangerous malady, of elites'
estrangement from its working classes, the malady presently in full bloom in France and
England. Judeophilia strikes divided societies and could lead to their collapse much faster
than its Siamese counter-twin, antisemitism. It did so in the past, most famously in Kingdom of
Poland, where the szlachta (nobility) loved Jews and despised ordinary folks, the
bydlo ( rednecks), until their state collapsed. In a Christian, or post-Christian
society, Jews are a symbol, a signifier of a certain attitude and behaviour that is profoundly
non-Christian.
Jews are a small minority that defies the large society and opposes it. Jews care for
themselves and disregard the majority and its needs; they have no scruples beyond prescribed
by the criminal law; they feel no communality with the majority. Jews do not share communion
with majority, and do not appeal to the same deity. Jews prosper when the majority regresses.
They are fast to see a break and use it for their advantage.
We won't enter a discussion whether the real Jews fit the description, and to what extent.
That is how they are perceived by those who love them and who hate them. There were Jews who
acted against the paradigm, and they weren't considered 'good for Jews'. Bruno Kreisky, the
Austrian Chancellor, Lazar Kaganovich, the Soviet official, Leon Trotsky or Torquemada weren't
'good for Jews'. And there are plentiful Gentiles who were considered 'good for Jews', like
Hillary Clinton or Tony Blair. Usually they were bad for everybody else. So, while we shall
defer our judgment on 'real Jews', there is no doubt that philo-Semites are bad for your
health.
The dominant economic and political paradigm, Neo-Liberalism claims that Jewish attitude
is the right one, and that we all should emulate Jews. This is an impossible claim; a majority
can't emulate a minority. A society whose members relate to each other as Jews-to-Gentiles is a
cannibals' cabal, and that is exactly what happens in our world. Jews prosper because they are
few; if all emulate Jews, the result is misery, not prosperity . An all-Jewish society
can't exist; Israel is a place where Thai, Chinese, Ukrainians and Palestinians work, the
Russians and Druze guard them, while Jews do usual Jewish things.
In England, the Jews are divided about Boris Johnson. They do not want Brexit to succeed,
but the access of Corbyn scares them even more. Corbyn is an avowed enemy of no, not of Jews,
but of neo-liberalism. Combine it with his rejection of Israeli politics, and you come to the
sum of anti-Jewish attitudes. Yes, Corbyn is anti-Jewish, if you wish, even anti-Semite, i.e. a
man whom Jews hate, for he is against both Jewish modes of operation, the capitalist and the
Zionist. He is perfectly ok with people of Jewish origin, he has no prejudice, he is no racist,
but it is irrelevant. His victory won't be 'good for Jews', neither for Jews who bleed
Palestine, nor for Jews who prosper at the expense of the British worker. Perhaps Corbyn would
be wonderful for Jewish workers, but they are not represented in the Board of Deputies , and the Chief Rabbi does not care
for them.
On the international scene, Corbyn is not a friend of NATO. If he could he would take the UK
out of this obsolete military alliance. So would President Trump, who is looking for a
justification to steer the US out of NATO. Jews do not like this attitude. For them, the US and
the UK should stay in NATO, for NATO is a strong defender and supporter of the Jewish
state.
Brits have a difficult choice in the coming elections. Johnson is not too bad, and his stand
against EU should be applauded. Corbyn is likely to seek compromise on every position,
including Brexit, immigration, NATO, but his initial stand is good. For a working man, he is
the right choice. And the Jewish attitude to him is a strong indicator: of the two contenders,
Corbyn would be better for those who do not emulate Jews.
France
In France, the Jews are very close to power, and it is usually a sign that things do not
go well for native middle and working classes. Indeed things go from bad to worse. While a
million of French workers demonstrated against Macron's government, the French parliamentarians
discussed antisemitism. Not surprisingly, they accepted the definition produced by a Jewish
organisation. Demurring against this definition caused a lot of trouble for Corbyn; Macron had
learned a lesson.
I am all for such definitions; their scope is too narrow, if anything. I'd prefer a broad
definition that would describe as anti-Semite any person who attends a church or a mosque; who
does not contribute to Jewish settlements; who does not believe in God-chosen Jewish nation
being above all mortal laws. Maybe then the Gentiles would be healed of their fear of being
labelled 'anti-Semite'. This fear kills their souls more than the accusation. Though, best of
people, Shakespeare, St John the Divine, Dostoyevsky and Chesterton are considered
anti-Semites, and it did not diminish their fame and glory.
You can't escape this label; if they want they will attach it to your name. Likewise, a man
can't avoid being called a male chauvinist and accused of harassment by a radical feminist.
Anna Ardin, the Swedish feminist who accused Julian Assange of rape and destroyed his life as
surely as if she'd knifed him, also accused a student of harassment because he avoided looking
at her. Such accusations should be shrugged off.
France is not doing well because its elites are engaged in the rip-off and sale of their
country's industrial, political, and cultural assets. In the last few years, France had lost
Alstom, Pechiney, Technip, Alcatel. These premium assets were lost to US companies. French
businessmen and officials who were supposed to care about French heirlooms, betrayed their
trust and defrauded their country, that's why France is not doing well.
Not all of these treacherous men are Jewish, not by a long chalk. But Jews are invaluable
partners in such publicity-shy schemes, and that's why: "The Shoah Memorial is a secular temple
for the entirety of France's post-Christian elite. Holocaust foundations, Jewish communal
projects, Jewish benevolent societies and Jewish philanthropies allow the Jewish community to
discourage reporting affairs they are involved in. They can facilitate the deals in obscurity"
– I was told by a knowledgeable Jewish person, well versed with goings-on within the
French Jewish community and in the higher business, banking and political circles of the
Republic. I'll call him JT (I shall share more of his knowledge in the next essay – ISH).
–
"Jewishness has once again become a way of avoiding scrutiny and accountability. Only
anti-Semites dare to see a link between the sale of Alstom, Macron's career, the Rothschilds,
and the Jewish community." Wink wink.
"At two crucial moments Jewish communal support was decisive to Macron's political career;
first, at the second tour of the French elections, in which major Jewish organizations
unanimously cajoled and preached the Macron vote to all and sundry; second, to suppress the
Yellow Vests Uprising. Only anti-Semites dare to think the Rothschilds had anything to do
with either."
JT is very critical with France and French people: "French White gentiles are ashamed of
their past and identity, flee into hedonism, profligacy, drugs, anti-depressants, libertinism,
pornography, and homosexuality. Their Stockholm syndrome is driven by an
extra-European-birth-cohort whose numbers now exceed that of the native population. Unwilling
to fight for their land and heritage, ignorant of their past and increasingly illiterate, their
love of France is futile, superfluous, and incoherent at best.
"As France increasingly resembles a North African backwater, its Jews, the chief
facilitators of this demographic shift, have become its chief losers, and a process of Jewish
de-assimilation from the Republic has began. French Jews cannot identify with a society on
its last legs, and a spineless native population. In such circumstances, French Jews shift
their focus to survival and opportunism, not to national defence. Israel, Miami, New York
have become second homes. France's Jewish patricians (all to the last dual-citizens since the
fifties), are helpless. Their ties to an increasingly hard-up Israel and to the powerful
Jewish American community make them leaders of the fire-sale of France's industrial,
political, and cultural assets. France is sliding into failed nation status in which everyone
is abandoning ship."
French Jews help the US to rob France, says JT. The American companies supported by
all-powerful DoJ are the main reason why France does not prosper. When France attempted to tax
American Internet companies (Amazon, Google, Facebook) Trump threatened to slap 100% custom
duties on French wine. The right choice for France is to part the company with the Yankee
predator, to cease paying billions of fines for breaking unjustifiable unilateral American
'sanctions', to part with NATO and to laugh at Trump's demands to pay more for unnecessary
American protection. But France, and other European nations are hesitant. They do not jump at
the opportunity offered by Trump's stupidity and arrogance, though the Orange man did
everything he could to free the Europeans. He opened the gates, he insulted them and kicked
them, but they refused to leave the stables.
An Excellent American expert in International relations, Prof Michael Brenner of Pittsburgh
U, has noted:
"Europe's political class is psychologically unable to break free of its
dominant/subordinate relationship with America. This pattern endures despite the presence of
a mentally impaired man in the White House. The prognosis, therefore: 'Wither thou goest, we
go!" American leaders have exploited this compulsive deference ruthlessly. It allows
Washington to ensure European fealty at virtually no cost. Moreover, they can extract
compliance across a wide array of non-security issues – commercial, financial, IT
(warring against Huawei), political, diplomatic – by drawing on the same free-floating
loyalties.
Europe has been obedient to the siren call of Uncle Sam in following it over the cliff
time after time – in Afghanistan, in Iraq (France excepted), on Russia, on Iran (by
acquiescing in severe sanctions), on Saudi Arabia, in Yemen, in embracing Bolsonaro (invited
Keynoter at Davos), even on Venezuela and Bolivia. The ultimate test will come were
Washington to pick a fight with China that it, and the West, cannot win; will Europe then
take the final, fatal leap hand-in-hand?"
It appears that love of Jews is an integral element of this fealty, together with LGBT
nonsense and other peculiar American imports. Love of Jews and love of America – are they
separable at all? If and when France and England regain their independence, their Jews would
recover their normal place in their societies. Admittedly, it won't be a place at the top, but
it would be a respectful place of equals in a healthy society, rather than a place of a symbol
and a facilitator of foreign influence on the ruins of Europe, as it is now.
If only Those Russians could play chess or compose classical music or
write a few serious novels. Oh well, I guess you can't expect everything from people with no
GDP.
Citizens of France. To arms! Man the ramparts. The American barbarians are coming. They
shall not pass!
Le Trump's threat to France's splendid wines and Roquefort cheese are the gravest menace
France has faced since the Germans invaded this fair land in 1914. Burgundy wines and France's
300 fromages form the very soul of la Belle France.
Trump does not know or care that France saved America from British mis-rule. He wants
revenge because France – which taxes nearly everything – seeks to tax US IT firms
like Google and Amazon. Trump considers this a personal affront. Besides, he dislikes wine and
lives on desiccated burgers made with petrochemical cheese, washed down by acidic Diet
Cokes.
On top of this outrage comes the squabble over NATO. Trump used to scoff at the Alliance,
saying it was 'obsolete' as well as under-armed and short of money. The president and his
backers really dislike France and all it stands for, including wine and cheese.
but if you take away still viable American aerospace, automotive and pharmaceutical
industries among very few others, you will find a wasteland of financial speculations and
selling the snake oil
Lovely takes, Andrei. The people that need to read you see your name and immediately retort,
"Agent for Putin", Washington Post-style. Gets them off the hook from thinking because after
all, college deliberately taught them NOT to think. Most of the kids, they're hopeless. They're
hopeless idiots, they know nothing of the Constitution, they think all is normal. And they were
fleeced by the academics that dumbed them down. Meanwhile, we have in effect, been selling each
other hamburgers (services) for the past 50 years. Also, they've been selling the oil and gas
right out from under our feet overseas and putting THAT in their pockets even as we pay a world
price for gasoline and finished product. Every other country that produces crude gets a
discount. Not us. To steal a quote from a movie I watched once, they struck oil under our
garden and all we get is dead tomatoes. Our society is hollowed out, depraved, the women
becoming more and more hideous, all the institutions that held us together, deliberately
broken. decay everywhere.
As for the military? A reflection of our society. When I went into the Navy in 1975, it was
Stars and Stripes and we served in large part for Mom, Apple Pie and Chevrolet.
Today it is clear that the Stars and Stripes should be dollar signs over a defense
contractor logo. The rest? From where I sit today, for most kids, Mom is a divorced slut, Apple
Pie is a turd in a wax paper wrapper and Chevrolet is a bent shit can from China. This isn't a
society I'd defend as a nation worth defending. The feminists sit on their fat, comfortable
asses, made such on the labors of us White guys and they declare their hatred. Only a moron or
a kid that needs a shot at a job or trade or gets a kick out of airplanes or such joins. Our
women in general aren't worth defending on the streets or the world. Not in the Blue cities,
they are hideous. Take care of your own wman and kids and community and hell with the rest.
There's no draft, the society mostly hates Vets, so it isn't for country most serve. It's to
grab something, from a trade, to a pilot's license. A military based on that has no staying
power. And our corruptions and waste and outright theft in military procurement for shitty
weapons makes us ripe for the taking. And our talent is wasted building shitty weapons and the
second level builds shitty airliners. Can't fly into space? We cannot fly, literally, to
anywhere in the newest build out, the Maxx. And we're depending on the Theranos of Aerospace,
Spacex/Musk to get us to space? Right! Except for the nukes, we're ripe, man.
Andrei, speaking of Musk, how the Hell does he smoke big fat doobies and keep his security
clearance when everyone else in Washington gets fired for getting near the stuff? Queer
privilege? I'm convinced the whole thing with Musk is a shell game. You?
Thanks for your work. Very good stuff, but we can't get those who need it to even look. Our
people are incapable of marching in the streets or even seeing why they should. Kudos to those
who did it to us. They did a fine job. Read More Agree: Andrei Martyanov
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@Frederick V. Reed It has a dangerous set of nukes. The tripwires are and have always
been easy-sinkers like our surface ships. The psychos that run our policy have subs and silos
with missiles with lots of nukes.
It's a dangerous game to consider a dopey thought like that Fred. Bet your ass Russia sees
plenty of military here to defend against. Iran, Iraq, Vietnam, to them it was impossible, we
killed millions. There's enough military here that Israel wants and has harnessed it. In what
universe do you reside Fred? Ah yes, the moon name of Tequila. Fred? Go drink something.
Jesus.
"... Today USA even is no more an entity. You can not negotiate a thing with "America" because there is no such institution any more, but a hellish swarm of infighting spiders, each delightfully breaking anything negotiated by a rival spider. ..."
US political "elites" are generally appallingly incompetent in matters of war and are
"educated" mostly through Hollywood and Clansiesque "literature". I am not even sure that
they comprehend what Congressional Research Service prepares for them as compressed
briefings. Neocon wing of US political elite is simply mentally inadequate.
Very true, especially the part about "Hollywood and Clansiesque 'literature.'" I used to
read Clancy's books and, while entertaining, in retrospect they appear ridiculous, even
childish. But they probably capture the popular notion of American military invincibility
better than any other.
Most of Hollywood's output is garbage anyway, and its grasp of real war and military
matters appears to be that of a not so precocious third grader.
Katyn, whoever did it, was much before Cold War and before even first relatively small
nuclear blast.
And if you want to go that far – why not remember crisis over West Berlin, where
tank armees were watching one another, but no one pulled trigger?
Afghanistan was attacking one's own ally. Same as Prague 1968 and Hungary 1956.
If you want to compare – that is like USA invading Panama to remove their no longer
reliable puppet Norriega.
Did American attack on their own Panama risk USSR going ballistic? Hardly so. There was no Soviet invasion into Pakistan nor there was Chinese/American invasion into
India.
And looking away from purely military events, there was no attempt to arrest the whole
embassy stuff them, neither in Moscow nor in DC. No killing Soviet ambassadors in NATO states
during official events.
Those dirty games had red lines, both sides maintained. Today? Today USA even is no more
an entity. You can not negotiate a thing with "America" because there is no such institution
any more, but a hellish swarm of infighting spiders, each delightfully breaking anything
negotiated by a rival spider.
> deploying conventional anti-ballistic missile defenses around their most important
cities.
No, by then effective treaty both USSR and USA had only ONE region they were allowed to
protect.
Those were some nuclear launchpads in USA i guess, and one single city (Moscow) in USSR. No
more.
> deterrence [did not] worked > See the last phrase in bullet 2.
You suppose USSR killed itself trying to keep deterrence working.
That does not show it did not work, already.
That shows it worked so well (at least from Soviet perspective) that they gambled all they
had on the futile effort of keeping that deterrence working into the future.
First problem is that in order to be comparable they are converted into the same currency,
typically dollars. That's a problem because things don't cost the same in different
countries. If you want to measure strength of economy you need to measure the purchasing
power based on where the money is spend and not based on the costs of goods and services in
the US (which you inadvertently do when you convert GDP's in US dollar values).
Second problem is that GDP does not measure the 'size' of the economy. It measures how
much money is being pumped around within an economy and how often it is being pumped around
and then the assumption is made that this represents the size of the economy. It's very easy
to artificially increase this pumping around to inflate the apparent size of an 'economy'.
Companies do this routinely before IPO's for example. The perversions we now have
masquerading as stock markets are another. But mostly it is done by creating debt. When you
get a loan, you get money that mostly did not exist prior to you getting it. It's not
backed by anything but the expectation of profits (in the sense that you're expected
to manage to leverage the money into creating at least enough real economic value to back not
just the issue of your loan but also the interest, representing costs for the providers, and
provide your share of the compensation for those loan receivers who fail in this task, ie
provide backing for the previously non-existing money they received).
So in order to get a genuine measure of the economic power of an economy you need to rate
their GDP in terms of local purchasing power which puts Russia equal to Germany. But you also
need to account for the amount of debt in an economy as the money issued as debt for the most
part does not represent actual existing economic value but at best expected economic value
and at worst will not be recouped at all in which case you need to detract it from the GDP
numbers.
That gets far too complicated for most people who just want simple, reassuring numbers,
like comparing economies on GDP numbers based on dollar values. Dream on.
Here are some facts on the Russian economy:
– in 2018 approx. 82% of GDP was spend domestically and only about 18% exported (see
why purchasing power matters?)
– of that 18% exports about a third represented raw materials, so 6% of GDP
– oil and natural gas represented between 35% and 40% percent of raw material exports,
which means between 2% and 2,5% of GDP consisted of oil and gas exports.
– in 2018 Russia achieved a rare economical feat, a triple surplus. The total
government debt (which was only a few percent of GDP) was less than the surpluses on the
government bank accounts meaning there was no net debt. Instead there was a modest net
surplus. The second surplus was the annual government budget. In 2018 Russian government
spending was less than the government revenues that year. And thirdly, they had a trade
surplus, exporting more than they imported.
In case you failed to notice, they exported more than they imported even though only 18%
of GDP consists of exports. Given the other two surpluses they could import a lot more than
that if they wanted to or if they needed to .
They don't because they don't need to. Russia does not depend on the rest of the world to
keep its economy going. It is about as autarkic as it is nowadays possible to be.
Never in the history of America, probably never in the history of any country, had there
been such open and direct control of governmental activities by the very rich. So long as a
handful of men in Wall Street control the credit and industrial processes of the country, they
will continue to control the press, the government, and, by deception, the people. They will
not only compel the public to work for them in peace, but to fight for them in war. -- John
Turner, 1922
This list tells quite a story. It deserves a name such as "US History Written in Blood," but
more ironically and yet sufficient would be "An Inconvenient List." In any case, mass murder
for fun and profit has defined war throughout the entire history of humankind. That in the
modern era of late that the US has pioneered rentier capitalism as a means of extracting
profits from the industrial war machine is a matter of the natural evolution of state
sanctioned murder, far better at returning profits to investors than the mere slaughter of
stone age natives to steal their land.
OTOH, pacifism is indeed an aberration of political thought, not necessarily an unwarranted
aberration, yet one that should be subject to close inspection for its bona fides. My
Cherokee ancestors inform me to always be suspect of the good intentions of white men
claiming that they despise war.
Pacifism for me is individual. I was a cold warrior (pacifist not!) from '72 to '85 when I
went from supporting operating weapons to the "dark side" in weapons development, which a lot
was also nuclear related.
It's pretty obvious that Team Pelosi is more concerned with the affairs of the Empire,
even though she has no constitutional responsibility. than for the welfare of the American
people. The focus of the impeachment hearing on American policy in Ukraine is further
evidence.
Meanwhile, I have gotten no answer to my basic question: what are the top 5 pieces of
progressive legislation that Pelosi has passed--legislation that representations can brag
about to their constituents when running in 2020? It's pretty obvious that their have been
almost none.
Yet, I have been assured by others here at EV that our two party representative political
system is not merely engaging in so much Kabuki theatre in order to appear relevant. Who
knew?
Outside of the fact that this fellow is a liar of monumental proportion - for instance, this
post alone contains 3 different lies - it is fundamentally untrue that BOTH parties are just
engaged in theater. One actually passes legislation to help people and to reduce the
influence of $$$. The other - as former Republican party member Norm Orenstein has pointed
out - is anti-democracy, pro-despotism and a insurgent danger with a propaganda arm.
Huh... all team Pelosi/Schumer of is rant against the US constitution, demean the congress,
disdain the office of the President and make up things about the Donald.
See the continuing resolution good through 20 Dec because Pelosi who owns the House won't
face the responsibility to try and run the US government's purse.
More selective outrage from EMichael, the partisan hack.
Sure, it's horrendous that Trump pardoned a war criminal. But let's not forget that Obama
never even prosecuted torturers ... or closed Guantanamo as promised.
As usual for EMichael and his ilk, what's a horror when their party does something, it's
perfectly acceptable when his party does it.
All these years of being a almost pacifist and now I am seeing the error in my ways.
Sometimes - hopefully increasingly less often - good people must rise up and stomp out evil.
The pardons were not just condoning war crimes - it was telling the nazi ahs in the ranks
that they can do the same domestically. The right has an army within the US. Most of the
officers are okay - but that said, they are tolerating nazis, white supremacists, oathkeepers
and dominionists in their ranks. These exceptions are to let the other nazis know they can
mass murder if the want.
@FB The
"Agree" button is inadequate here. I'm in full agreement.
In a nutshell, I totally misoverestimated Trump during his Presidential campaign. I had
assumed that its strategic and tactical genius meant a powerful faction of patriotic backers
who'd make themselves more apparent after he'd won had his back. I had assumed that a real
outsider couldn't have gotten to his position and that they had a plan and would make a stand
against the Empire's nomenklatura to try to turn the ship of state to face the coming crisis
head on.
They'd have a great deal of international support (esp from China & Russia) and may
just have been able to save much of the nation by letting the Empire go. The world does not
want the American nation to fall into the abyss. Everyone knows that the US doesn't have the
civilizational depth to pull itself back together like Russia did. Or even like the UK. OTOH,
the world does want the US' Empire to go the way of the USSR, and I thought Trump was just
the man to do it. His extravagant smokescreen of blustering buffoonery would give
clear-headed men the running room they'd need to make the deals and do what needed to be
done.
In the event, instead of the Seven Samurai, he brought the Seven Dwarfs and within
weeks of his inauguration, he lost even them. The Empire struck back on all fronts, fronts
Trump and his Dwarfs didn't even know existed, much less defended.
I get the impression that Trump has fallen back on damaging the Empire through
buffoonery. There are no patriots in Washington, and if there were he'd never get them past
their nomination hearings. By picking the least competent ideologues for his cabinet, the
Empire suffers while he holds on to the Presidency. That's as big a success as he and the
world can now hope for. An American carnival barker, aiming for a Gorbachevian
result.
"... A more plausible explanation is that Trump thought that by appointing such anti-Russian hard-liners he could lay to rest the Russiagate allegations that had hung over him for three years and still did: that for some secret nefarious reason he was and remained a "Kremlin puppet." Despite the largely exculpatory Mueller report, Trump's political enemies, mostly Democrats but not only, have kept the allegations alive. ..."
"... The larger question is who should make American foreign policy: an elected president or Washington's permanent foreign policy establishment? (It is scarcely a "deep" or "secret" state, since its representatives appear on CNN and MSNBC almost daily.) Today, Democrats seem to think that it should be the foreign policy establishment, not President Trump. But having heard the cold-war views of much of that establishment, how will they feel when a Democrat occupies the White House? After all, eventually Trump will leave power, but Washington's foreign-policy "blob," as even an Obama aide termed it , will remain. ..."
"... Listen to the podcast here ..."
"... War With Russia? From Putin & Ukraine to Trump & Russiagate ..."
"... The John Batchelor Show ..."
"... Trump's anti-Iranian fever is every bit as ludicrous as the DNC's anti-Russian fever. There is absolutely nothing to support the anti-Iranian policy argument or the anti JCPOA argument. The only thing that is missing from all of this is Iranian hookers, and that would certainly be an explosive headline! ..."
"... You know why Rhodes called it the blob, right? Why he made it sound so formless and squishy? Ask yourself, how does a failed novelist with zilch for foreign-affairs credentials get the big job of Obama's ventriloquist? That's a CIA billet. It so happens that Rhodes' brother has a big job of his own with CBS News, the most servile of the Mockingbird media propaganda mills. ..."
"... It's not a blob, it's a precisely-articulated hierarchy. And the top of it is CIA. So please for once somebody answer this blindingly obvious question, Who is making US foreign policy? CIA, that's who. For the CIA show trial run by Iran/Contra nomenklatura Bill Barr and his blackmailed flunky Durham, Trump's high crime and misdemeanor is conducting diplomacy without CIA supervision. They come out and say so, pointing to the National Security Act's mousetrap bureaucracy. ..."
"... CIA runs your country. They've got impunity, they do what they want. We've got 400,000 academics paid to overthink it. ..."
"... We cannot trust that the people that destroyed the country will repair it. It is run by a Cult of Hedonistic Satanic Psychopaths. If they were limited to just the CIA, America would be in far better shape than its in. The CIA is not capable of thinking or intelligence, so we should stop paying them. ..."
"... Drumpf has been a tool of the Wall Street/Las Vegas Zionist billionaires for many, many years. so his selection of warmongering Zio neo-con advisors should be no surprise. ..."
"... Perhaps part of the reason that Trump often seems to be surrounded by people who don't support his policies or values is, as Paul Craig Roberts suggested in 2016, that Trump would have real problems simply because he was an outsider. An outsider to the Washington swamp, a swamp that Clinton had been swimming in for decades. In short he didn't know who to trust, who to keep "in the tent" & who to shut out. Thus, we have had this huge churn in Secretaries & on so on downwards. ..."
"... Sociopaths are the ones that do the worst because they lack any concern or "Empathy", like robots. So I read that the socio's are some of the brightest people who often are very successful in business etc. and can hide the fact that they would soon as kill as look at ya, but cool as ice, all they want is to get what the hell they want! They don't give a rats petoot who likes likes it or not, except as . ..."
"... Trump hasn't fired any of the neocons, but he proved that he CAN fire defense executives. He fired the Sec of Navy for disagreeing with some ridiculous personal thing that Trump wanted to do. Since Trump hasn't fired any neocons, we have to conclude that he's fully on board. ..."
"... There are so many security holes in the constitution of the USA including that it was ratified by those who invented it, not by a vote put to the people that would be made to suffer being governed by it. Basically the USA is useless as a defender of human rights (one of which is the right to self determination). The so called bill of rights (1st 10 amendments) are contractual promises, but like all clauses in contracts if there is no way to enforce them, then there is no use for the clause except maybe propaganda value. ..."
"... In a normally functioning world you simply can't simultaneously argue that in one case West can bomb a country to force self-determination as in Kosovo, and also denounce exactly the same thing in Crimea. On to Catalonia and more self-determination ..."
"... Trump, among his other occupations, used to engage with the professional wrestling circuit. In that well-staged entertainment there is always a bad guy – or a ' heel ' – who is used to stir up the crowds, the Evil Sheik or Rocky's hapless movie enemies. It makes it ' real '. The ' heel ' is sometimes allowed to win to better manage the audience. But the narrative never changes. Our rational judgments should focus on what happens, and on outcomes – not on talk, slogans, speeches, etc Based on that, Trump is a classical ' heel ' character. He might even be playing it consciously, or he has no choice. ..."
"... To answer the question who runs ' foreign policy ', let's ignore the stadium speeches, and simply look at what happens. In a world bereft of enough profitable consumer things to do, and enough justifiable careers for unemployable geo-political security 'experts' of all kinds, having enemies and maybe even a small war occasionally is not such an irrational thing to want. Plus there are the deep ethnic hatreds and traumas going back generations that were naively imported into the heart of the Western world. (Washington warned against that 200+ years ago.) ..."
"... or maybe trump was a lying neocon, war-loving, immigration-loving neoliberal all along, and you and the trumptards somehow continue to believe his campaign rhetoric? ..."
"... The fact is Trump is not an anti-neocon (Deep State) president he only talks that way. The fact that he surrounded himself with Deep State denizens gives lie to the thought that he is anti-Deep State no one can be that god damn stupid. ..."
"... "TRUMP SUPPORTERS WERE DUPED – Trump supporters are going to find out soon enough that they were duped by Donald Trump. Trump was given the script to run as the "Chaos Candidate" .He is just a pawn of the ruling elite .It is a tactic known as 'CONTROLLED OPPOSITION' ". Wasn't it FDR who said "Presidents are selected , they are not elected " ? ..."
"... Trump selected the Neocons he is surrounded with. And he's given away all kinds of property that he has absolutely no legal authority to give. He was seeking to please American Oligarchs the likes of Adelson. That's American politics. "Money is free speech." Of course, there is another connection with foreign policy beyond the truly total corruption of American domestic politics, and that's through America's brutal empire abroad. ..."
"... Obama or Trump, on the main matters of importance abroad – NATO, Russia, Israel/Palestine, China – there has been no difference, except Trump is more openly bellicose and given to saying really stupid things. ..."
President Trump campaigned and was elected on an anti-neocon platform: he promised to reduce direct US involvement in areas where,
he believed, America had no vital strategic interest, including in Ukraine. He also promised a new détente ("cooperation") with Moscow.
And yet, as we have learned from their recent congressional testimony, key members of his own National Security Council did not
share his views and indeed were opposed to them. Certainly, this was true of Fiona Hill and Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman. Both of them
seemed prepared for a highly risky confrontation with Russia over Ukraine, though whether retroactively because of Moscow's 2014
annexation of Crimea or for more general reasons was not entirely clear.
Similarly, Trump was slow in withdrawing Marie Yovanovitch, a career foreign service officer appointed by President Obama as ambassador
to Kiev, who had made clear, despite her official position in Kiev, that she did not share the new American president's thinking
about Ukraine or Russia. In short, the president was surrounded in his own administration, even in the White House, by opponents
of his foreign policy and presumably not only in regard to Ukraine.
How did this unusual and dysfunctional situation come about? One possibility is that it was the doing and legacy of the neocon
John Bolton, briefly Trump's national security adviser. But this doesn't explain why the president would accept or long tolerate
such appointees.
A more plausible explanation is that Trump thought that by appointing such anti-Russian hard-liners he could lay to rest the
Russiagate allegations that had hung over him for three years and still did: that for some secret nefarious reason he was and remained
a "Kremlin puppet." Despite the largely exculpatory Mueller report, Trump's political enemies, mostly Democrats but not only, have
kept the allegations alive.
The larger question is who should make American foreign policy: an elected president or Washington's permanent foreign policy
establishment? (It is scarcely a "deep" or "secret" state, since its representatives appear on CNN and MSNBC almost daily.) Today,
Democrats seem to think that it should be the foreign policy establishment, not President Trump. But having heard the cold-war views
of much of that establishment, how will they feel when a Democrat occupies the White House? After all, eventually Trump will leave
power, but Washington's foreign-policy "blob," as even
an Obama aide termed it , will remain.
Listen to the podcast
here . Stephen F. Cohen Stephen F.
Cohen is a professor emeritus of Russian studies and politics at New York University and Princeton University. ANationcontributing editor, his most recent book,War With Russia? From Putin & Ukraine to Trump & Russiagate, is available
in paperback and in an ebook edition. His weekly conversations with the host ofThe John Batchelor Show, now in their sixth
year, are available at www.thenation.com .
because of Moscow's 2014 annexation of Crimea or for more general reasons was not entirely clear.
In an otherwise decent overview, this sticks out like a sore thumb. It would be helpful to stop using the word annexation.
While correct in a technical sense – that Crimea was added to the Russian Federation – the word comes with all kinds of connotations,
that imply illegality and or force. Given Crimea was given special status when gifted to Ukraine for administration by the USSR,
one could just as easily apply "annexation" of Crimea to Ukraine. After Ukraine voted to "leave" the USSR, Crimea voted to join
Ukraine. Obviously the "Ukrainian" vote did not include Crimea. Even after voting to join Ukraine, Crimea had special status within
Ukraine, and was semi autonomous. If you can vote to join, you can vote to leave. Either you have the right to self determination,
or you don't.
This is what is so infuriating, Stephen! These silent coups of the executive branch have been taking place for my entire life!
Both parties are guilty of refusing to appoint cabinet members that the elected presidents would have chosen for themselves, because
both parties are more interested in making the president of the opposing party look bad, make him ineffective, and incapable of
carrying out policies that he was elected to carry out. That is the very definition of treason!
Things are a disaster. The JCPOA is at the heart of the issue and Trump and his advisors stubborn refusal to capitulate on
this issue very well may cause Trump to lose the 2020 election. Trump's anti-Iranian fever is every bit as ludicrous as the
DNC's anti-Russian fever. There is absolutely nothing to support the anti-Iranian policy argument or the anti JCPOA argument.
The only thing that is missing from all of this is Iranian hookers, and that would certainly be an explosive headline!
The anti-Iranian fever has created so much havoc not only with Iran, but with every country on earth other than Israel, Saudi
Arabia, and the UAE. Germany announced that it is seeking to unite with Russia, not only for Gazprom, but is now considering purchasing
defense systems from Russia, and Germany is dictating EU policy, by and large. Germany has said that Europe must be able to defend
itself independent of America and is requesting an EU military and Italy is on board with this idea, seeking to create jobs and
weapons for its economy and defense.
The EU is fed up with the economic sanctions placed on countries that the U.S. has black-listed, particularly Russia and Iran,
and China as well for Huwaei 5G.
Nobody in their right mind could ever claim this to be the free market capitalism that Larry Kudlow espouses!
You know why Rhodes called it the blob, right? Why he made it sound so formless and squishy? Ask yourself, how does a failed
novelist with zilch for foreign-affairs credentials get the big job of Obama's ventriloquist? That's a CIA billet. It so happens
that Rhodes' brother has a big job of his own with CBS News, the most servile of the Mockingbird media propaganda mills.
It's not a blob, it's a precisely-articulated hierarchy. And the top of it is CIA. So please for once somebody answer this
blindingly obvious question, Who is making US foreign policy? CIA, that's who. For the CIA show trial run by Iran/Contra nomenklatura
Bill Barr and his blackmailed flunky Durham, Trump's high crime and misdemeanor is conducting diplomacy without CIA supervision.
They come out and say so, pointing to the National Security Act's mousetrap bureaucracy.
CIA runs your country. They've got impunity, they do what they want. We've got 400,000 academics paid to overthink it.
The CIA has no authority what so ever as defined by the supreme law of the land, the constitution. That would make them guilty
of a coup which would be an act of treason, so if what you claim is true, why have they not been prosecuted.
It is a political game between to competing kleptocratic cults. The DNC and RNC are whores and will do what ever their donors
tell them to do. That is also treason. This country is just a total wasteland.
Everyone has pledged allegiance to fraud.
Too big to fail, like the Titanic and the Hindenberg.
We cannot trust that the people that destroyed the country will repair it. It is run by a Cult of Hedonistic Satanic Psychopaths.
If they were limited to just the CIA, America would be in far better shape than its in. The CIA is not capable of thinking or
intelligence, so we should stop paying them.
Drumpf has been a tool of the Wall Street/Las Vegas Zionist billionaires for many, many years. so his selection of warmongering
Zio neo-con advisors should be no surprise.
What kind of stupid question is this? You mean you don't know or asking us for confirmation? If you really don't know then why
are you writing an article about it? If you do know then why are you asking the UNZ readers?
Perhaps part of the reason that Trump often seems to be surrounded by people who don't support his policies or values is,
as Paul Craig Roberts suggested in 2016, that Trump would have real problems simply because he was an outsider. An outsider to
the Washington swamp, a swamp that Clinton had been swimming in for decades. In short he didn't know who to trust, who to keep
"in the tent" & who to shut out. Thus, we have had this huge churn in Secretaries & on so on downwards.
It is run by a Cult of Hedonistic Satanic Psychopaths.
That's ok but it's a bit unfair to Hedonistic Satanic Psychopaths After all most of the country is Hedonistic as hell,
it sells commercials or wtf. Satanic is philosophical and way over the heads of these clowns, though if the be a Satan, then they
are in the plan for sure, and right on the mark. As for psychopaths, those are criminals who are insane, but they can have remorse
and be their own worst enemies, often they just go off and go psycho and bad things happen, but can be unplanned off the wall
stuff, not diabolic.
Sociopaths are the ones that do the worst because they lack any concern or "Empathy", like robots. So I read that the socio's
are some of the brightest people who often are very successful in business etc. and can hide the fact that they would soon as
kill as look at ya, but cool as ice, all they want is to get what the hell they want! They don't give a rats petoot who likes
likes it or not, except as .
So, once upon a time, a people got so hedonistic and they didn't watch the game and theier leaders were low quality
(especially religeous/morals ) and long story short Satan unleashed the Socio's , Things seem to be heading disastrously,
so will bit coin save the day? Green nudeal?
While massive attention is directed towards Russia and the Ukraine, the majority of the public are shown the slight of hand
and their attention is never brought near to the real perpetrators of subverting American and British foreign policy.
Doesn't matter if he's surrounded. A president CAN make foreign policy, and a president CAN fire people who disagree with his
policy. Trump hasn't fired any of the neocons, but he proved that he CAN fire defense executives. He fired the Sec of Navy
for disagreeing with some ridiculous personal thing that Trump wanted to do. Since Trump hasn't fired any neocons, we have to
conclude that he's fully on board.
The CIA has no authority what so ever as defined by the supreme law of the land, the constitution. That would make them
guilty of a coup which would be an act of treason, so if what you claim is true, why have they not been prosecuted.
--
first off the supreme law of the land maybe the Constitution and to oppose it may be Treason, but the Law that is supreme to the
Law of the land is Human rights law.. it is far superior to, and it is the TLD of all laws of the land of all of the Nation States
that mankind has allowed the greedy among its masses, to impose.
There are so many security holes in the constitution of the USA including that it was ratified by those who invented it,
not by a vote put to the people that would be made to suffer being governed by it. Basically the USA is useless as a defender
of human rights (one of which is the right to self determination). The so called bill of rights (1st 10 amendments) are contractual
promises, but like all clauses in contracts if there is no way to enforce them, then there is no use for the clause except maybe
propaganda value.
If you note the USA constitution has seven articles..
Article 1 is about 525 elected members of congress and their very limited powers to control
foreign activities. Each qualified to vote member of the governed (a citizen so to speak) is allowed to
vote for only 3 of the 525 persons. so basically there is no real national election anywhere .
Article II grants the electoral college the power to appoint two persons full control of the assets,
resources and manpower of America to conquer the entire world or to make peace in the entire world.
Either way: the governed are not allowed to vote for either; the EC vote determines the P or VP.
Article III allows the Article II person to appoint yes men to the judiciary
Where exist the power of the governed to deny USA governors the ability to the use the powers the constitution claims
the governors are to have, against the governed? <==No where I can find? Theoretically, the governed are protected from abuse
for as long as it takes to conduct due process?
One person, the Article II person, is basically the king when in comes to constitutional authority to establish, conduct,
prosecute or defend USA involvement in foreign affairs.
No where does the constitution of the USA deny its President the use of American resources or USA military power, to
make and use diplomat appointments, or to use the USA to use the wealth of America and the hegemonic powers of the USA to make
a private or public profit in a foreign land. <= d/n matter if the profit is personal to the President or if it assigned by appointment
(like the feudal powers granted by the feudal kings to the feudal lords) to corporate feudal lords or oligarch personal interest.
AFAICT, the president can USE the USA to conduct war, invade or otherwise infringe on, even destroy, the territory, or a
private or public interest, within a foreign sovereign more or less at will. So if the President wants to command a private
or secret Army like the CIA, he can as far as I can tell, obviously this president does, because he could with his pen alone shut
it down.
Seems to me the "NO" from Wilson's four points
no more secret diplomacy peace settlement must not lead the way to new wars
no retribution, unjust claims, and huge fines <basically indemnities paid by the losers to the winners.
no more war; includes controls on armaments and arming of nations.
no more Trade Barriers so the nations of the world would become more interdependent.
have been made the essence of nation state operations world wide.
IMO, The CIA exists at the pleasure of the President.
@Curmudgeon all of that,
plus the Kosovo precedent.
In a normally functioning world you simply can't simultaneously argue that in one case West can bomb a country to force
self-determination as in Kosovo, and also denounce exactly the same thing in Crimea. On to Catalonia and more self-determination
Trump, among his other occupations, used to engage with the professional wrestling circuit. In that well-staged entertainment
there is always a bad guy – or a ' heel ' – who is used to stir up the crowds, the Evil Sheik or Rocky's hapless movie
enemies. It makes it ' real '. The 'heel ' is sometimes allowed to win to better manage the audience. But
the narrative never changes. Our rational judgments should focus on what happens, and on outcomes – not on talk, slogans, speeches,
etc Based on that, Trump is a classical ' heel ' character. He might even be playing it consciously, or he has no choice.
To answer the question who runs ' foreign policy ', let's ignore the stadium speeches, and simply look at what happens.
In a world bereft of enough profitable consumer things to do, and enough justifiable careers for unemployable geo-political security
'experts' of all kinds, having enemies and maybe even a small war occasionally is not such an irrational thing to want. Plus there
are the deep ethnic hatreds and traumas going back generations that were naively imported into the heart of the Western world.
(Washington warned against that 200+ years ago.)
Trump should have kept Steve Bannon as his advisor and should have fired instead his son-in-law. Perhaps "they" are blackmailing
Trump with photos like here: https://www.pinterest.com/richarddesjarla/creepy/
That would explain why Trump is so ineffective at making a reality anything he campaigned for.
or maybe trump was a lying neocon, war-loving, immigration-loving neoliberal all along, and you and the trumptards somehow
continue to believe his campaign rhetoric?
An anti-neocon president appears to have been surrounded by neocons in his own administration.
The fact is Trump is not an anti-neocon (Deep State) president he only talks that way. The fact that he surrounded himself
with Deep State denizens gives lie to the thought that he is anti-Deep State no one can be that god damn stupid.
or maybe trump was a lying neocon, war-loving, immigration-loving neoliberal all along, and you and the trumptards somehow
continue to believe his campaign rhetoric?
Halfway around the world from Washington's halls of power, Ukraine sits along a civilizational and geopolitical fault line.
To Ukraine's west are the liberal democracies of Europe, governed by rule of law and democratic principles. To its east are
Russia and its client states in Eurasia, almost all of which are corrupt oligarchies. [ ] In this war on democratic movements
and democratic principles, Russia's biggest prize and chief adversary has always been the United States. Until now, however,
Russia has always had to contend with bipartisan resolve to counter
No mention of China, and this is the problem with the whole foreign policy establishment not just the neocons. Russia is more
of an annoyance than anything, but they are still operating assumptions on what is the
Geographical Pivot of History , so they want to talk about Russia. Like an Edwardian sea cadet we are supposed to care about
Russia getting (back) a water port in Crimea. Mahan's definition of sea power included a strong commercial fleet. After tearing
their own environment apart like a car in a wrecking yard and heating up the planet China has taken time out from deforestation
and colonising Tibet, to send huge container vessels full of cheap goods through the melting Arctic round the top of Russia all
the better to get to Europe and deindustrialise it.
Western elites have sold out to China, seen as the future, so we hear about Russia rather than the three million Uyghurs in
concentration camps complete with constantly smoking crematoria, and harvesting of organs for rich foreigners.
Who
poses a greater threat to the West: China or Russia?
By the time the West finds itself in open conflict with Beijing, we will have lost our relative advantage. Brendan Simms and
K.C. Lin [ ] The concept of China being a threat is harder to comprehend. In what way? Yes, its hacking and intellectual property
theft is a headache. But is it worse than what Russia is up to? And don't we need Chinese investment, so does it really matter
if China builds our 5G mobile networks? In London, ministers agonise over these issues -- not knowing whether to pity China
(we still send foreign aid there), beg for its money and contracts (with prime ministerial trade trips), or treat it as a potential
antagonist.
Aid ! They sent robots to the far side of the Moon
Beijing has been the beneficiary of liberal revulsion at the Trump presidency: if the Donald is against the Chinese,
who cannot be for them? As a result, Trump's efforts to address China's unfair trade practices have so far missed the mark
with the domestic and international audience. As Trump declares war on free trade, China -- one of the most protectionist economies
in the world -- is now celebrated at Davos as the avatar of free trade. Later this month, China's Vice-President is likely
to be in attendance at Davos -- and there is even talk of him meeting with Trump. Similarly, the messiness of American politics
has made China's one-party state an apparent poster boy of political stability and governability.
"TRUMP SUPPORTERS WERE DUPED – Trump supporters are going to find out soon enough that they were duped by
Donald Trump. Trump was given the script to run as the "Chaos Candidate" .He is just a pawn of the ruling elite .It is a tactic
known as 'CONTROLLED OPPOSITION' ".
Wasn't it FDR who said "Presidents are selected , they are not elected " ?
Trump selected the Neocons he is surrounded with. And he's given away all kinds of property that he has absolutely no legal
authority to give. He was seeking to please American Oligarchs the likes of Adelson. That's American politics. "Money is free
speech." Of course, there is another connection with foreign policy beyond the truly total corruption of American domestic politics,
and that's through America's brutal empire abroad.
The military/intelligence imperial establishment definitely see Israel as a kind of American colony in the Mideast, and they
make sure that it's well provided for. That's what the Neocon Wars have been about. Paving over large parts of Israel's noisy
neighborhood. And that includes matters like keeping Syria off-balance with occupation in its northeast. And constantly threatening
Iran.
Obama or Trump, on the main matters of importance abroad – NATO, Russia, Israel/Palestine, China – there has been no difference,
except Trump is more openly bellicose and given to saying really stupid things.
By the way, the last President who tried seriously to make foreign policy as the elected head of government left half of his
head splattered on thec streets of Dallas.
@Jon Baptist We have
all been brainwashed by the propaganda screened by the massmedia ,whether it be FOX , MSNBC , CBS ,etc.. SeptemberClues.info has
a good article entitled "The central role of the news media on 9/11 " :
"The 9/11 psyop relied foremostly on that weakspot of ours .We all fell for the images we saw on TV at the time we can only
wonder why so many never questioned the absurd TV coverage proposed by all the major networks The 9/11 TV imagery of the crucial
morning events was just a computer-animated, pre-fabricated movie."
@follyofwar Pat inhabits
a strange Hollywood type world, where the US is always the good guy. He believes that, although the US may make foreign policy
mistakes, its aims and ambitions are nevertheless noble and well intentioned.
In Pat's world it's still circa 1955, but even then, his take on US foreign policy would have been hopelessly unrealistic.
After presiding over a far-right coup in Bolivia, the US dubbed Nicaragua a "national
security threat" and announced new sanctions, while Trump designated drug cartels in Mexico as
"terrorists" and refused to rule out military intervention.
One successful coup against a democratically elected socialist president is not enough, it
seems.
Washington dubbed Nicaragua a threat to US national security, and announced that it will be
expanding its suffocating sanctions on the tiny Central American nation.
Trump is also turning up the heat on Mexico, baselessly linking the country to terrorism and
even hinting at potential military intervention. The moves come as the country's left-leaning
President Andrés Manuel López Obrador warns of right-wing attempts at a coup.
As Washington's rightist allies in Colombia, Brazil, Chile, and Ecuador are desperately
beating back massive grassroots uprisings against neoliberal austerity policies and yawning
inequality gaps, the United States is ramping up its aggression against the region's few
remaining progressive governments.
These moves have led left-wing forces in Latin America to warn of a 21st-century revival of
Operation Condor, the Cold War era campaign of violent subterfuge and US support for right-wing
dictatorships across the region.
Trump admin declares Nicaragua a 'national security
threat'
A day after the US-backed far-right coup in Bolivia, the White House released a statement
applauding the military putsch and making it clear that two countries were next on Washington's
target list: "These events send a strong signal to the illegitimate regimes in
Venezuela and Nicaragua ," Trump declared.
On November 25, the Trump White House then quietly issued a statement characterizing
Nicaragua as an "unusual and
extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States."
This prolonged for an additional year an executive order Trump had signed in 2018 declaring
a state of "national emergency" on the Central American country.
Trump's 2018 declaration came after a failed violent right-wing
coup attempt in Nicaragua . The US government has funded and supported many of
the opposition groups that sought to topple elected Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega, and
cheered them on as they sought to overthrow him.
The 2018 national security threat designation was quickly followed by economic warfare. In
December the US Congress approved
the NICA Act without any opposition. This legislation gave Trump the authority to impose
sanctions on Nicaragua, and prevents international financial institutions from doing business
with Managua.
Trump's new 2019 statement spewed outlandish propaganda against Nicaragua, referring to its
democratically elected government -- which for decades has been targeted for overthrow by
Washington -- as a supposedly violent and corrupt "regime."
This executive order is similar to one made by President Barack Obama in 2015, which
designated Venezuela as a threat to US national security.
Both orders were used to justify the unilateral imposition of suffocating economic
sanctions. And Trump's renewal of the order paves the way for an escalated economic attack on
Nicaragua.
The extension received negligible coverage in mainstream English-language corporate media,
but right-wing Spanish-language outlets in Latin America heavily amplified it.
And opposition activists are gleefully cheering on the intensification of Washington's
hybrid warfare against Managua.
More aggressive US sanctions against Nicaragua
Voice of America (VOA), the US government's main foreign broadcasting service, noted that
the extension of the executive order will be followed with more economic attacks.
Washington's ambassador to the Organization
of American States (OAS), Carlos Trujillo, told VOA, "The pressure against Nicaragua is
going to continue."
The OAS representative added that Trump will be announcing new sanctions against the
Nicaraguan government in the coming weeks.
VOA stated clearly that "Nicaragua, along with Cuba and Venezuela, is one of the Latin
American countries whose government Trump has made a priority to put diplomatic and economic
pressure on to bring about regime change."
This is not just rhetoric. The US Department of the Treasury updated the Nicaragua-related
sanctions section of its website as recently as November 8.
And in September, the Treasury Office of Foreign Assets Control announced a " more
comprehensive set of regulations ," strengthening the existing sanctions on Nicaragua.
Voice of America's report quoted several right-wing Nicaraguans who openly called for more
US pressure against their country.
Bianca Jagger, a celebrity opposition activist formerly married to Rolling Stones frontman
Mick Jagger, called on the US to impose sanctions on Nicaragua's military in particular.
"The Nicaraguan military has not been touched because they [US officials] are hoping that
the military will like act the military in Bolivia," Jagger said, referring to the military
officials who violently overthrew Bolivia's democratically elected president.
Many of these military leaders had been
trained at the US government's School of the Americas , a notorious base of subversion
dating back to Operation Condor. Latin American media has been filled in recent days with
reports that Bolivian soldiers were paid $50,000 and generals were paid up to $1 million to
carry out the putsch.
VOA added that "in the case of the Central American government [of Nicaragua], the effect
that sanctions can have can be greater because it is a more economically vulnerable
country."
VOA quoted Roberto Courtney, a prominent exiled right-wing activist and executive director
of the opposition group Ethics and Transparency, which monitors elections in Nicaragua and is
supported by the US
government's
regime-change arm , the
National Endowment for Democracy (NED).
Courtney, who claims to be a human rights activist, salivated over the prospects of US
economic war on his country, telling VOA, "There is a bit of a difference [between Nicaragua
and Bolivia] the economic vulnerability makes it more likely that the sanctions will have an
effect."
Courtney, who was described by VOA as an "expert on the electoral process," added, "If there
is a stick, there must also be a carrot." He said the OAS could help apply diplomatic and
political pressure against Nicaragua's government.
These unilateral American sanctions are illegal under international law, and considered an
act of war. Iran's foreign minister,
Javad Zarif , has characterized US economic warfare "financial terrorism," explaining that
it disproportionately targets civilians in order to turn them against their government.
Top right-wing Nicaraguan opposition groups applauded Trump for extending the executive
order and for pledging new sanctions against their country.
The Nicaraguan Civic Alliance for Justice and Democracy, an opposition front group that
brings together numerous opposition groups , several of which are
also
funded by the US government's NED , welcomed the order.
Trump dubs drug cartels in
Mexico "terrorists," refuses to rule out drone strikes
While the US targeting of Nicaragua and Venezuela's governments is nothing new, Donald Trump
is setting his sights on a longtime US ally in Mexico.
In 2018, Mexican voters made history when they elected Andrés Manuel López
Obrador as president in a landslide. López Obrador, who is often referred to by his
initials AMLO, is Mexico's first left-wing president in more than five decades. He ran on a
progressive campaign pledging to boost social spending, cut poverty, combat corruption, and
even decriminalize drugs.
AMLO is wildly popular in Mexico. In February, he had a record-breaking
86 percent approval rating . And he has earned this widespread support by pledging to
combat neoliberal capitalist orthodoxy.
"The neoliberal economic model has
been a disaster, a calamity for the public life of the country," AMLO has declared. "The child
of neoliberalism is corruption."
When he unveiled his multibillion-dollar National Development Plan, López Obrador
announced the end to "the long night of neoliberalism."
AMLO's left-wing policies have caused shockwaves in Washington, which has long relied on
neoliberal Mexican leaders ensuring a steady cheap exploitable labor base and maintaining a
reliable market for US goods and open borders for US capital and corporations.
On November 27 -- a day after declaring Nicaragua a "national security threat" -- Trump
announced that the US government will be designating Mexican drug cartels as "
terrorist organizations ."
Such a designation could pave the way for direct US military intervention in Mexico.
Trump revealed this new policy in an interview with right-wing Fox News host Bill O'Reilly.
"Are you going to designate those cartels in Mexico as terror groups and start hitting them
with drones and things like that?" O'Reilly asked.
The US president refused to rule out drone strikes or other military action against drug
cartels in Mexico.
Trump's announcement seemed to surprise the Mexican government, which immediately called for
a meeting with the US State Department.
The designation was particularly ironic considering some top drug cartel leaders in Mexico
have long-standing ties to the US government. The leaders of the notoriously brutal cartel the
Zetas, for instance, were originally trained in
counter-insurgency tactics by the US military.
Throughout the Cold War, the US government armed, trained, and funded right-wing
death squads throughout Latin America, many of which were involved in drug trafficking. The
CIA also used drug money to fund far-right counter-insurgency paramilitary groups in Central
America.
These tactics were also employed in the Middle East and South Asia. The United States armed,
trained, and funded far-right Islamist
extremists in Afghanistan in the 1980s in order to fight the Soviet Union. These same
US-backed Salafi-jihadists then founded al-Qaeda and the Taliban.
This strategy was later repeated in the US wars on Libya and Syria. ISIS commander
Omar al-Shishani
, to take one example, had been trained by the US military and enjoyed direct support from
Washington when he was fighting against Russia.
The Barack Obama administration also oversaw a campaign called Project Gunrunne r
and Operation Fast and Furious, in which the US government helped send thousands of guns to
cartels in Mexico.
Mexican journalist Alina Duarte explained that, with the Trump administration's designation
of cartels as terrorists, "They are creating the idea that Mexico represents a threat to their
national security ."
"Should we start talking about the possibility of a coup against Lopez Obrador in
Mexico?" Duarte asked.
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She noted that the US corporate media has embarked on an increasingly ferocious campaign to
demonize
AMLO , portraying the democratically elected president as a power-hungry aspiring dictator
who is supposedly wrecking Mexico's economy.
Duarte discussed the issue of US interference in Mexican politics in an interview with The
Grayzone's Max Blumenthal and Ben Norton, on their podcast Moderate
Rebels:
https://www.youtube.com/embed/7OJyCHjxCEs
Now, a whisper campaign over fears that the right-wing opposition may try to overthrow
President Andrés Manuel López Obrador is spreading across Mexico.
AMLO himself has publicly addressed the rumors, making it clear that he will not tolerate
any discussion of coups.
"How wrong the conservatives and their hawks are," López Obrador tweeted on November
2. Referencing the 1913 assassination of progressive President Francisco Madero, who had been a
leader of the Mexican Revolution, AMLO wrote, "Now is different."
"Another coup d'état will now be allowed," he declared.
In recent months, as fears of a coup intensify, López Obrador has swung even further
to the left, directly challenging the US government and asserting an independent foreign policy
that contrasts starkly to the subservience of his predecessors.
AMLO's government has rejected US efforts to delegitimize Venezuela's leftist government,
throwing a wrench in Washington's efforts to impose right-wing activist
Juan Guaidó as coup leader.
AMLO has welcomed Ecuador's ousted socialist leader Rafael Correa and hosted Argentina's
left-leaning Alberto Fernández for his first foreign trip after winning the
presidency.
https://www.youtube.com/embed/D4T0zbASfbA
In October, López Obrador even welcomed Cuban President Díaz-Canel to Mexico
for a historic visit.
Trump's Operation Condor 2.0
For Washington, an independent and left-wing Mexico is intolerable.
In a speech for right-wing, MAGA hat-wearing
Venezuelans in Miami , Florida in February, Trump ranted against socialism for nearly an
hour, threatened the remaining leftist countries in Latin America with regime change.
"The days of socialism and communism are numbered not only in Venezuela, but in Nicaragua
and in Cuba as well," he declared, adding that socialism would never be allowed to take root in
heart of capitalism in the United States.
While Trump has claimed he seeks to withdraw from wars in the Middle East (when he is not
occupying its oil fields
), he has ramped up aggressive US intervention in Latin America.
During the height of the Cold War, Operation Condor thousands of dissidents were murdered,
and hundreds of thousands more were disappeared, tortured, or imprisoned with the assistance of
the US intelligence apparatus.
Today, as Latin America is increasingly viewed through the lens of a new Cold War, Operation
Condor is being reignited with new mechanisms of sabotage and subversion in play. The mayhem
has only begun.
This has nothing to do with ethnicity. Profits before people is the slogan of neoliberlaism.
May be simply Jewish organization adopted neoliberalism earlier and deeper then other.
"(the Chief Rabbi) has actually made the wider Jewish community in the UK much less
safe"
How exactly? And how is this any different from the Rabbi's own hysterical rhetoric? Jews
have their own police force and their own Community Security Trust funded by us the tax
payer. Who else in Britain has such privileges?
"Corbyn has spent his entire political career as an anti-racism campaigner, and his
anti-racism activism as a backbencher was especially prominent inside a party that itself has
traditionally taken the political lead in tackling racism."
No, not really. He's been a particular kind of 'anti racism' campaigner – the type
which is aghast at all forms of racism except against white Britons. After hundreds of racist
attacks on white lads in Oldham in the late 90s and early 00s, a protest was held by the BNP
at the NUJ's head office. It was met by a counter-protest by the SWP, attended by none other
than Jeremy Corbyn. They claimed of course that the BNP were exploiting these attacks. Except
they had no answer as to why the SWP were not organising against these racist attacks
themselves and why they pressed the media to not report on them. Indeed, these same 'anti
racists' went on to claim that the mass rape of tens of thousands of white girls and hundreds
of Sikh girls by Muslim men who held openly racist attitudes were wait for it 'racist myths'.
In other words, they helped create the institutional (non)response to mass child abuse.
"that there is no significant threat posed by antisemitism from the right or the
rapidly emerging far right.
If there is no perceptible populist tide of white nationalism sweeping Europe and the
globe, one that hates immigrants and minorities,"
As far as I can see, what Jonathan means is no one is allowed to criticise Jews except him
and on his terms alone. Europeans aren't allowed to ask why ALL the Jewish organisations have
supported open borders, multiculturalism and hate speech laws.
I don't hate anyone. I have a right to ask why I'm being made in a minority in my country.
You talk of 'minorities' yet you afford no such respect to the majority who were never asked
about any of this and who've faced a relentless psychological barrage to get them to shut up
about opposing any of it.
"White nationalists are all over social media warning of supposed Jewish global
conspiracies, of supposed Jewish control of the media, of supposed Jewish subversion of
"white rights"."
I think you'll find articles by Jews boasting of their control of the media and Hollywood
and you'll find the ADL at the forefront of the campaign to close down free speech. As for
'white rights' in inverted commas, I'll come back to that later.
"It was precisely this kind of thinking that drove European politics a century
ago."
You mean people reacted against Jewish behaviour back then? How dare they, eh? It's ok for
you to rail against Europeans but we can't say a thing about you.
"It was arch-antisemite Arthur Balfour who signed off the Balfour Declaration of 1917
that sought to end Britain's "Jewish problem" by encouraging European Jews to move far away,
to a part of the Middle East then known as Palestine."
Damned if you do, damned if you don't. Extremely powerful Zionists (which yes, included
the Rothschilds) lobbied for decades to get the British to agree to what was eventually
promised by Balfour. Would it really be a surprise that a people or government sought to rid
themselves of a problem which the LEFT wing idol Marx himself called "the Jewish
Question"?
"That is, of course, why today's white supremacists love Israel The white supremacists'
love of Israel is intimately bound up with their hatred and fear of Jews."
Some do, some don't. Some hate the Jews who have attacked their ethnic interests, others
just want to be left alone. Please stop projecting, it's bad for you.
"It will persuade them once again that "the Jews" are a "problem"."
It will persuade some people that the major Jewish organisations are a problem and they'd
be right to think that.
"or that white nationalism is no threat to the UK"
Because it isn't and never has been. Might I remind you that according to all the
available research, we are very low in ethnocentricity and that we actually rejected the BUF
/ Mosely and then went on to fight Hitler? I mean, this really is some thanks for that.
"Other surveys show even worse racism among Conservatives towards more obviously
non-white minorities, such as Muslims and black people."
Note how Conservatives here is taken to mean white people only. No mention of the fact
that Jews overwhelmingly vote Tory now as do Hindus and large numbers of Sikhs. But hey, just
imagine if those groups had noticed the epic crime rates owing to blacks and Muslims. How
dare they notice such patterns? How dare Sikhs, whose religion was founded in response to
Islam, be aggrieved that their girls are raped by Muslims. How dare white Britons wonder how
on earth all this ethnic conflict was brought to their once homogeneous land.
"but waves of European Jewish immigrants were either encouraged or compelled to come to
the newly created state of Israel by racist immigration quotas designed to prevent them
fleeing elsewhere, most especially to the United States."
My God Zionists WANTED Jews to go to Israel and Jewish leaders in the US helped them make
it happen but hey! It's still whitey's fault.
"The west helped engineer both the ethnic cleansing of Palestine and Israel's creation
to solve Europe's "Jewish problem". It provided the components necessary for Israel to build
a nuclear bomb that won it a place at the international top table and ensured the
Palestinians were made Israel's serfs in perpetuity. Ever since, the west has provided Israel
with diplomatic cover, military aid and special trading status, even as Israel has worked
relentlessly to disappear the Palestinian people from their homeland."
Extremely wealthy Zionists wanted this and Western politicians gave it to them. At the top
level, they worked together. Stop passing the buck.
Now, here's the really juicy bit: Palestinians and their homeland.
Do I, a native Briton, have a homeland, Jonathan? And if not, why not? And why have Jewish
organisations relentlessly sought to change my homeland? Do you recognise the commonalities
that I have with Palestinians?
"In the UK, the Conservative manifesto similarly promises to bar local councils from
upholding international law and boycotting products from Israel's illegal
settlements."
David Cameron once called the Tories 'the Torah party'. Do you think that might have some
connection with the anti BDS movement?
"But ardent friends of Israel such as Mirvis are blind to these arguments. For them,
one western antisemitic crime – the Holocaust – entirely obscures another western
antisemitic crime: seeking to rid Europe of Jews by forcing them into the Middle East,
serving as pawns on an imperial chessboard that paid no regard to the Palestinians whose
homeland was being sacrificed."
The self pity is truly monstrous. Has it ever occurred to you that if you keep finding
yourselves in trouble, maybe it's you that is the problem?
"The real left in Britain speaks out against Israel not because it hates Jews but
because it holds dear a commitment to justice and a compassion for all."
Yeah, like the tens of thousands of white girls and hundreds of Sikh girls 'the real Left'
left at the mercy of rapists and torturers in Rotherham, Rochdale, Oxford, Telford, Newcastle
and all the other places. Like the countless Muslim girls it allows to be destroyed via FGM
all so the bloc votes keep rolling in.
Truly the most moral of people!!
You really need to get over this monstrous ego that you have and try finding a bit of
dignity.
Mirvis'
intervention in the election campaign makes sense only if he believes in one of two
highly improbable scenarios.
The first requires several demonstrably untrue things to be true. It needs for Corbyn to be
a proven antisemite – and not just of the variety that occasionally or accidentally lets
slip an antisemitic trope or is susceptible to the unthinking prejudice most of us occasionally
display, including (as we shall see) Rabbi Mirvis.
No, for Mirvis to have interfered in the election campaign he would need to believe that
Corbyn intends actively as prime minister to inflame a wider antisemitism in British society or
implement policies designed to harm the Jewish community. And in addition, the chief rabbi
would have to believe that Corbyn presides over a Labour party that will willingly indulge
race-hate speeches or stand by impassively as Corbyn carries out racist policies.
If Mirvis really believes any of that, I have a bridge to sell him. Corbyn has spent his
entire political career as an anti-racism campaigner, and his anti-racism activism as a
backbencher was especially prominent inside a party that itself has traditionally taken the
political lead in tackling racism.
... ... ...
Even now, our most prized rights, such as free speech, are being eroded and subverted to
protect Israel from criticism. In the US, the only infringements on the American public's First
Amendment rights have been legislated to silence those seeking to
pressure Israel over its crimes against the Palestinians with a boycott – similar to the
campaign against apartheid South Africa. In the UK, the Conservative manifesto similarly
promises to
bar local councils from upholding international law and boycotting products from Israel's
illegal settlements.
Rewarding war crimes
The real left focuses on this continuing colonial crime against the Palestinians not because
it is antisemitic (a claim the Economist survey amply refutes), but because the left treats
Israel as emblematic of British and western bad faith and hypocrisy. Israel is the imperial
west's Achilles' heel, the proof that war crimes, massacres and ethnic cleansing are not only
not punished but actively rewarded if these crimes accord with western imperial
interests.
But ardent friends of Israel such as Mirvis are blind to these arguments. For them, one
western antisemitic crime – the Holocaust – entirely obscures another western
antisemitic crime: seeking to rid Europe of Jews by forcing them into the Middle East, serving
as pawns on an imperial chessboard that paid no regard to the Palestinians whose homeland was
being sacrificed.
In his state of historical and political myopia, Mirvis cannot begin to understand that
there might be political activists who, in defending the Palestinian people, are also defending
Jews. That they, unlike him, understand that Israel was created not out of western benevolence
towards Jews, but out of western malevolence towards "lesser peoples". The real left in Britain
speaks out against Israel not because it hates Jews but because it holds dear a commitment to
justice and a compassion for all.
Mirvis, on the other hand, is the Zionist equivalent of a little Englander. He prefers
particularist, short-term interests over universalist, long-term ones.
It was he, remember, who threw his
full support behind Israel in 2014 as it indiscriminately bombed Gaza, killing some 550
children – a bombing campaign that came after years of an Israeli blockade on the
Palestinian population there. That siege has led the United Nations to warn that the enclave
will be uninhabitable by next
year.
It was Mirvis, along with his predecessor Jonathan Sacks, who in 2017 endorsed
the fanatical Jewish settlers – Israel's equivalent of white supremacists – on
their annual march through the occupied Old City of Jerusalem. This is the march where the
majority of the participants are recorded every year waving masses of Israeli flags at
Palestinians and chanting "Death to the Arabs". One Israeli newspaper columnist has
described the Jerusalem Day march as a "religious carnival of hatred".
Just goes to show how ... so called "Chief Rabbi" has become the most important commentator
on a British general election, and the Tories and much of the media in Britain absolutely
love it.
Not even America they would let a Rabbi blatantly interfere with a presidential election.
It's incredible how a British general election has literally become about Jews, I've never
seen anything like it in any other country. The media is so obsessed with what Jews think
anyone would think Corbyn was running to be PM of Israel!
The Epstein Pedoscandal Mossad
Timeline shows in detail how Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell were working for the
Israeli intelligence agency, Mossad.
Link to Unz.com article
The timeline generated many comments at Unz.com but surprisingly most of them dealt whether
Epstein was a pedophile or not. This despite the overwhelming evidence of pedophilia.
Many have also totally missed – or are afraid to notice – the big picture:
Israeli intelligence agencies and especially Mossad seem to be running pedophile rings that
blackmail Western political, business and scientific leaders.
Furthermore, it seems that Ghislaine Maxwell was and still is the master mind behind many of
these pedophile rings.
One of the reasons Epstein and Ghislaine were able to continue sex trafficking with impunity
for so long was the appearance that Epstein was a victim of jealous people and overzealous
police. Many people thought that Epstein had only had sex with a 17-year old girl who had lied
about her age.
This excuse worked well because in Florida the age of consent is 18 while in most other
American states it is 16.
Link to Wikipedia
Epstein was able to play the martyr by not only claiming that unscrupulous girls had lied
their age but also by implying that the age of consent is too high anyway in Florida.
This was also one reason why in New Mexico where Epstein had his Zorro Ranch the officials
refused to register him as a sex offender. In New Mexico the age of consent was 16 until in
2018 it was raised to 18.
Furthermore, unlike in many other states, in New Mexico the courts recognize a mistake of
age defense.
New Mexico courts recognize a mistake of
age defense . The mistake of age defense is basically "I thought she was 17." However,
this is no guarantee that this defense will work in court. Moreover, the mistake of age is
the creation of judges in the absence of a direct statute addressing the defense. State
lawmakers may pass a law overriding the courts on this issue at any time. ( LegalMatch
)
In reality the Epstein-Ghislaine case is not whether it is wrong for an adult to have sex
with a 17 year old. Instead it is about many other things such as prostitution, grooming,
pedophilia and the exploitation of children.
This all is connected to global politics involving sex trafficking, drug and arms trade,
money laundering, Ponzi schemes, spy networks and blackmailing for Mossad.
Epstein's victims were caught in a web of international spy network that used them as pawns
for blackmail operations. The younger the girls were, the more leverage Israel would have over
politicians, billionaires and scientists. Thus Epstein and Ghislaine tried to also recruit
girls who were well under the age of 16.
What is more, they personally enjoyed having sex with these very young girls. Both Epstein
and Ghislaine seem to have been pedophiles who were attracted to prepubescent girls and boys,
i.e. small children.
Note that in order to be a pedophile it is enough to have merely occasional sexual
attraction to prepubescent, i.e. sexually immature children who have not yet developed
secondary
sex characteristics, such as breasts.
Julie Brown from Miami Herald notes that Courtney Wild was only 14 when she was
recruited into Epstein's sex ring.
Wild still had braces on her teeth when she was introduced to him in 2002 at the age of
14.
She was fair, petite and slender, blonde and blue-eyed. (emphasis added. Miami Herald
)
Link to Miami Herald
Julie Brown also notes that Epstein preferred girls who were not only white [and non-Jewish]
but also appeared prepubescent.
Wild, who later helped recruit other girls, said Epstein preferred girls who were
white, appeared prepubescent and those who were easy to manipulate into going further each
time. (Emphasis added. Miami Herald )
For Epstein and Ghislaine it was important that the girls at the very least looked like
small children. This is obviously why they preferred girls who were under 16.
Courtney Wild told the police that she brought Epstein over 70 girls and they were all under
16.
By the time I was 16, I had probably brought him 70 to 80 girls who were all 14 and 15
years old (Emphasis added. Miami Herald )
Some girls were even younger. According to the police many were 13 year old.
The girls -- mostly 13 to 16 -- were lured to his pink waterfront mansion by Wild and
other girls, who went to malls, house parties and other places where girls congregated, and
told recruits that they could earn $200 to $300 to give a man -- Epstein -- a massage,
according to an unredacted copy of the Palm Beach police investigation obtained by the
Herald. (Emphasis added. Miami Herald )
It is also important to note that even 13 was not the minimum age for Epstein and Ghislaine.
In fact, there was no limit to how young the girls could be. Both Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell
emphasized that the younger the better.
Eventually, she said Maxwell trained her to recruit new girls for Epstein.
"Jeffrey was very particular in the kind of girls he wanted. First off, the younger the
better ."
Epstein said that to her, Giuffre claimed, and " Maxwell said that too . During the
training and telling me how to do it, she said 'You always have to go for the
youngest-looking ones .'" (Emphasis added.
The Daily Beast )
Link to The Daily Beast
It seems the primary purpose was not even blackmail since especially Epstein was having sex
with these young girls all the time. On some days Epstein was having sex several times a
day.
Sex games were more important for Epstein than work. Obviously, he was extremely attracted
to these young girls.
In six months, I never saw him do a day's work," Ransome told The Telegraph. "I never
saw him work. He was literally sexually abusing us all day long . (Emphasis added.
Business Insider )
Link to Business Insider
Ghislaine also seemed to be obsessed with sex. Just like her father, Robert Maxwell she was
rumored to be interested in unconventional sex which includes also sex with young children.
As she [Ghislaine] posed for the pics, which ran in a publication meant to promote
Sotheby's vintage fashion collection, she allegedly let slip comments that hinted at a
twisted double life.
"She didn't talk about Epstein, but during the shoot she did tell a story about how she
just hosted a dinner party for a number of young girls, and she put dildos at each place
setting," the source said. "Ghislaine then described how during the dinner two guests, who
were a couple, began demonstrating how to do the perfect fellatio on a man for all at the
table. She was laughing about it."
"A friend of mine has a whole theory about her, that Epstein was like her father Robert
Maxwell, who himself is believed to have had some strange sexual practices." (
Page Six )
Link to PageSix
The Epstein Mossad-Timeline shows how Ghislaine was most probably trained by Mossad to use
sex to gather information. That training would not have been too difficult for her since she
was hypersexual. Many even considered her a nymphomaniac.
In fact, even many Israeli Jews – who usually have much fewer sexual taboos than
puritan English and Americans – were shocked by her raunchy sexuality.
Flirtatious indeed: I understand from a mutual friend that after school she travelled
to Israel and visited a kibbutz; she was immediately ostracised by the other girls for making
a rather-too-obvious beeline for the Adonis-like lifeguard at the kibbutz pool. Very quickly
she got her way, as she would with much in her life. ( Tatler . Emphasis
added.)
Even Ghislaine's friend were sometimes shocked by her open sexuality that so often
contrasted with her otherwise lady-like behavior and position in high society.
Ghislaine was, added Mason, 'fantastically entertaining' and 'saucy' – the paper
said that she talked openly about sex .
In fact, said another acquaintance who saw her often at parties, she was 'obsessed by
sex . She's Sphinx-like, mysterious. The last time I saw her, five, 10 years ago, I said what
are you up to? And she said "I'm selling this product – stainless-steel mini dumb-bells
– that you put up your fanny. For exercising your vaginal muscles, exercise your pelvic
floor, learn the Singapore Grip. I'm giving seminars in LA and they all turn up and I tell
them, this is how you keep your man."' ( Tatler . Emphasis
added.)
Epstein and Ghislaine were both hypersexual. All kind of sex interested them. Little girls
were just part of the menu. Or more specifically, the best – and most profitable –
part.
Epstein and Ghislaine were so attracted to young girls that nothing seemed to satisfy them.
Perhaps this is why Epstein and Ghislaine created the highly risky sexual pyramid scheme. The
girls were offered two alternatives: Either satisfy Epstein and Ghislaine sexually or get more
girls to satisfy them.
In this way Epstein and Ghislaine were able to recruit literally hundreds of young girls.
However, some of these girls went to the police and the sexual pyramid scheme collapsed.
When Epstein got out of jail in 2009 he had half-learned his lesson: American girls are too
risky.
Now Epstein and Ghislaine would only concentrate on East European girls with the help of
their Jewish-Ukrainian friend Peter Listerman.
One of the lesser-known shadowy figures linked to Jeffrey Epstein and his sex ring of
teenage girls and young women is Ukrainian-born Peter Listerman, who has worked as a
businessman and television presenter but is most known for his "match-making"
abilities.
What match-making really means is that Listerman procures women, often underage, for
the jet-set society to use for sexual purposes. His "clients" include Russian oligarchs and
American businessmen and seems to have also
included Jeffrey Epstein. ( Citizen
Truth )
Link to the Citizen Truth.org
Listerman has such a bad reputation that he is shunned even in Ukraine!
Tatiana Savchenko, who founded the first modeling school in Odessa, Ukraine
explained to the Daily Beast the lengths she had to go to keep Listerman from getting his
hands on young women and trafficking them for sex work.
She claimed that he would frequently approach her students and attempt to lure them
with promises of a luxurious lifestyle, and that "It took a lot of work to keep him from
tricking our teen models in his traps." ( Citizen
Truth )
Peter Listerman is the usual suspect. Link to Fishki.net Do you think I am
kidding? I am Peter Listerman! Link to Fishki.net
Both Epstein and Listerman were attracted to very young girls. Neither even tried to hide it
much. In fact, Epstein was quite open about his attraction to tweens.
Just three months ago, as federal prosecutors were closing in with new charges, Mr.
Epstein had a conversation with R. Couri Hay, a publicist, about continuing to improve his
reputation. Mr. Epstein asserted that what he was convicted of did not constitute pedophilia,
said Mr. Hay, who declined to represent him.
The girls he had sex with were "tweens and teens," Mr. Epstein told him. ( The New
York Times )
But what is a tween?
Preadolescent is generally defined as those ranging from age 10 to 13 years.
[4][6] While known
as preadolescent in psychology, the terms preteen, preteenager or tween are common in
everyday use. ( Wikipedia
)
Epstein was right, of course. What he was convicted of in 2007 did not constitute
pedophilia. However, that is precisely one reason why people are so outraged!
Epstein and Ghislaine did not see any problem of recruiting, grooming and having sex also
with tweens. And apparently neither did the Justice Department and the FBI led by
Robert Mueller !
But it gets even worse. As pointed out in the Epstein Pedoscandal Mossad Timeline ,
it seems that Epstein and Ghislaine were after even younger girls.
In 2003 Epstein financed Jean-Luc Brunell's(?) and Jeff Fuller's(J) new modelling agency
MC2 that seemed to have worked with Peter Listerman.
MC2 obviously refers to the famous Einstein equation E = MC2 , the energy-mass
equivalence. Equally obviously, E equals Epstein, the energy, whereas the girls equal MC2, the
mass energized by Epstein.
Despite all this – or for the very reason – Epstein invested in MC2 and became
particularly
close to its founders Brunel and Fuller.
The agency operates in New York, Miami and Tel Aviv. It's in practice half-Israeli.
Many call Israel the capital of human trafficking and organ
harvesting .
Link to
Ynet.com
MC2 concentrates on importing East European girls to Israel and America. The younger the
better.
Marina Lynchuk of MC2 Lolita Lvola from MC2 Linta Lapinda from MC2
Brunel seems to have given 12-year old triplets to Epstein as a birthday present.
'Jeffrey bragged after he met them that they were 12-year-olds and flown over from
France because they're really poor over there, and their parents needed the money or whatever
the case is and they were absolutely free to stay and flew out,' Giuffre said.
She said she saw the three girls with her own eyes and that Epstein had repeatedly
described to her how the girls had massaged him and performed oral sex on him. They were
flown back to France the next day.
Link to Daily Mail
It seems that even tweens were not young enough for Epstein.
According to court papers in 2005 Brunel called Epstein and left a message that "he is
sending him a 16-year-old Russian girl for purposes of sex". However, the written message says
something even worse.
The message, filed as an exhibit in the case, was written on an office message pad,
partly in code, and read: "He [Brunel] has a teacher for you to teach you how to speak
Russian. She is 2×8 years old not blonde. Lessons are free and you can have your 1st
today if you call." ( New
York Post )
Does it mean that two eight year olds are involved? Or does 2 x 8 mean to sex 8 year old?
(2=to, x=sex)
Why would the lessons be free and why is it relevant that the "teacher" is not a blond?
There is no denying that Epstein and Ghislaine sexualised even small children. This became
clear in 2005 when police raided Epstein's Palm Peach mansion.
In one photo that was hanging on the wall a small six or seven year old girl was bending
over in a tiny dress. Police blurred out the photo in the video taken during the raid.
NEW YORK CITY, NY – MARCH 13: Atmosphere at
Hamish Bowles, Ghislaine Maxwell and Lillian von Stauffenberg dinner for ALLEGRA HICKS at Home
of Ghislaine Maxwell on March 13, 2007 in New York City. (Photo by Patrick McMullan/Patrick
McMullan via Getty Images). Link to Getty Images.
The so called artwork seems to be full of pedophile symbols.
Link to Wikileaks.org
The quality of the photos taken at Ghislaine's home are so good that even more symbols have
been found in her artwork.
For some reason the mainstream media has not picked up on this pedophilia angle. No
mainstream media journalist has even tried to ask why would Ghislaine have such art and symbols
on her home wall.
This despite the fact that Ghislaine is most probably an Israeli superspy just like was her
father, Robert Maxwell. She probably has been trained to use sex – including pedophilia
– as a tool for blackmail and manipulation.
At the time in Israel females molesting little boys was not even considered rape.
Link to
Haaretz.com
Nor have mainstream journalists asked where was Ghislaine when Madeline McCann was
abducted.
That would not be an unreasonable question since one of the E-Fit images looks a lot like
Ghislaine.
Link to Enchanted Life Path.com
Furthermore, two of the E-Fit images (1A, 1B) look like the Podesta brothers. John Podesta was White House
Chief of Staff to Bill Clinton and the Chairman of the 2016 Hillary Clinton presidential
campaign.
Ghislaine and Epstein were close to the Clintons and the Podesta brothers have been directly
linked also to Pizzagate.
Was Ghislaine helping to run also Pizzagate and other pedophile rings for Mossad?
At least she seems to be perfectly trained to do just that. First, her own hypersexuality,
family background and possible training by Mossad made it easy for her to master mind the
pedophilia ring she run with Epstein.
Second, Ghislaine and Epstein had all the apparel to help run also other pedophile rings:
Lolita express airplanes and helicopters, Zorro Ranch in New Mexico and luxury mansions in New
York, Palm Peach and Paris.
Even more importantly they had their own island in the Virgin Islands.
In the 90s Epstein bought Little St.
James island from the Virgin islands. It had a mansion which Epstein expanded.
Soon locals started to call it the Pedophile Island.
Little St. James island. Link to
Wall Street Journal article
The island seems to have tunnels with several underground entrances.
Ghislaine has a Helicopter Pilot License and often transported quests to the island.
On the weekends in the 1990s, Maxwell would have her Rollerblades FedExed to Epstein's
island in the Caribbean, and said she got her helicopter's license so she could transport
anyone she liked without pilots knowing who they were .
Maxwell also said the island had been completely wired for video; the friend thought
that she and Epstein were videotaping everyone on the island as an insurance policy, as
blackmail.
A source close to Maxwell says she spoke glibly and confidently about getting girls to
sexually service Epstein, saying this was simply what he wanted, and describing the way she'd
drive around to spas and trailer parks in Florida to recruit them. She would claim she had a
phone job for them, "and you'll make lots of money, meet everyone, and I'll change your
life."
Maxwell had one other thing to tell this woman: "When I asked what she thought of the
underage girls, she looked at me and said, 'they're nothing, these girls. They are trash .'"
(Emphasis added. Vanity
Fair )
Ghislaine was naturally using Epstein's helicopters. Some of them shared their FAA tail
number with a US contractor, Dyncorp . That would have helped Ghislaine and
Epstein to fly drugs and children.
FAA records and Epstein's pilot's flight manifest indicate that Epstein's Bell
helicopter used the same tail number of N474AW . This was the same tail number used until
2006 by State Department contractor Dyncorp for counter-insurgency operations in Latin
America.
The congruence of Epstein's Bell N474AW and Dincorp's Bronco N474AW is noteworthy. In
2002, the year Epstein's aircraft fleet stands accused of flying underage teen girls, some
between the ages of 12 and 15 , coincided with Dyncorp's trafficking in underage females
between the ages of 12 and 15 from Kosovo and Bosnia in the Balkans.
One Dyncorp whistleblower reported to The Washington Times's Insight magazine's Kelly
O'Meara in 2002 the following on one Dyncorp employee in Bosnia:
[he] owned a girl who couldn't have been more than 14 years old. It's a sick sight
anyway to see any grown man [having sex] with a child, but to see some 45-year-old man who
weights 400 pounds with a little girl, it just makes you sick."
Tail number N474AW has been shared between Epstein's Bell helicopter like the one in
this photo. (Emphasis added.
Political Bull Pen )
DynCorp's pedophilia ring became internationally infamous with the release of the movie
Whistleblower.
Link to Wikipedia
Helicopters can always be seen. However, Ghislaine also has a license to operate
submarines!
In 2012 – three years after Epstein got out of jail – Maxwell founded The
TerraMar Project ,
[51] a nonprofit
organization that advocated protecting ocean waters.
She gave a lecture for TerraMar at the University of Texas at Dallas and a TED talk, at
TEDx Charlottesville in 2014. [52] Maxwell
accompanied Stuart
Beck (J), a 2013 TerraMar board member, to two United Nations meetings to discuss the
project. [17] ( Wikipedia )
In 2014, a
United Nations event featured Maxwell as a speaker. According to her bio in the program,
Maxwell's "web-based non-profit" aimed "to protect the Oceans by empowering a global
community of ocean citizens ." It further described Maxwell as "a private helicopter pilot
and an Emergency Medical Technician and a qualified ROV and Deepworker submarine pilot
."
A former Coast Guard officer, Borgerson was also a fellow at the Council on Foreign
Relations , which featured Borgerson and Maxwell as speakers during one 2014 talk
titled "Governing the Ocean Commons: Growing Challenges, New Approaches." Friends of Maxwell,
according to The
New York Times , said Borgerson became her boyfriend. Maxwell had allegedly described
Borgerson as a " Navy SEAL " to her pals.
Maxwell's dubious charity also roped in the Clinton Global Initiative , the now-defunct
networking platform for the Clinton Foundation. In the fall of 2013, CGI named TerraMar as
one of the "commitments to action" at their annual meeting. (Emphasis added.
Daily Beast )
Did the Pedophile Island have an underground submarine base? Was it a part of global
pedophile network?
And was the Ocean Citizens project an attempt to escape national jurisdictions and thus gain
at least a partial immunity from police investigations and prosecutions?
Link to TerraMar
Project
Interestingly, as late as 2016 Epstein bought also the nearby Great St. James Island. He
started to build on the island without permits.
There were rumors that he was building underground. For some reason the mainstream media has
had no interest in this second island.
Why is the mainstream media not interested in Ghislaine's many links to pedophilia?
Perhaps because Ghislaine has so many powerful friends. The photo of the pedophile artwork
on Ghislaine's wall was taken 13 March 2007 during a party at Ghislaine's New York townhouse.
The guest list included a curious combination of elite Jews, aristocratic Brits and American
WASPs.
The party was in Ghislaine's huge 7000-square-foot townhouse. It is located in the most
opulent and prestigious neighborhood of America, the Upper East Side , New York on East 65th
Street just off Park Avenue. Epstein's townhouse was only 10 blocks away.
Ghislaine's five
story townhouse. Link to Street Easy Ghislaine's townhouse floor plan. Link to Street Easy
Ghislaine's townhouse 2nd floor gallery. Link to Street Easy
There are reports from reliable sources that the townhouse was sold in 2000 to Ghislaine by
Lynn
Forester de Rothschild . The very same woman who had introduced Epstein and Ghislaine to
Alan Dershowits and the Clintons in the 90s.
The Manhattan property, which is close to Epstein's mansion, is owned by Lynn Forester
de Rothschild, wife of British financier Sir Evelyn de Rothschild. (See
The Times and the original article .)
According to Business Insider Forester sold the townhouse to Ghislaine for less than half the
price.
Forester sold the mansion for about $8.5 million less than its assessed market value,
which was more than $13.4 million.
Was this a pay-off to Ghislaine from the King of Jews, the Rothschilds for services
rendered?
Hillary Clinton, Evelyn de Rothschild, Bill Clinton and Lynn Forester de
Rothschild. Link to Mint Press
It probably is also relevant that at the time of the sale of the townhouse the Prime
Minister of Israel was Ehud
Barak. In the 80s he had been the head of Aman, the Israeli Military Intelligence Agency.
As the Epstein Pedoscandal Mossad Timeline revealed, both Epstein and Ghislaine worked
for the Israeli intelligence agencies already in the 80s during the Iran-Contra operation.
Note that it was around year 2000 that Epstein and Ghislaine started the pedophile operation
in earnest. In the 80s and 90s blackmail operations were a side show but now it became the main
show involving hundreds of young girls.
Sexual blackmail – especially involving little children – can be an extremely
efficient way to influence key politicians and even military officials. A successful blackmail
operation can achieve more than several army divisions. No wonder Barak was so close to Epstein
and Ghislaine.
Furthermore, in 2000 the president of Israel was Moshe Katsev who was sexually harassing and
even raping his female subordinates. Later Katsev would be convicted of rape.
It was also in 2000 when the Israeli Vice-Consul of Rio de Janeiro, Arie Scher and Hebrew
language Professor George Schteinberg were running a pedophile ring for Israeli tourists. When
the Brasilian police started to investigate the Israeli consulate Scher managed to flee back to
Israel.
Link to Rodoh.info
In Israel Scher was not prosecuted. Instead in 2005 he was promoted to Consul of Canberra,
the capital of Australia. A spokesman for the Israeli Foreign Ministry in Jerusalem, Mark Regev
explained:
He [Arie Scher] was a young and single man at the time [in Brazil]. Now he is married
and he's six years older and there is no reason why he shouldn't make an excellent diplomatic
appointment in Australia.
Australia refused to let Scher enter the country.
Link to William Bowles Info
The most shocking part of the Arie/Aryeh Scher story is that the mainstream media was not
interested. Either the stories have been scrubbed from the internet or no stories were ever
written by mainstream journalists except one short story by BBC in 2000 and one even smaller
story
by The Sydney Morning Herald in 2005. Even more surprisingly Youtube does not seem to
have any videos about the Scher case.
No wonder Barak was absolutely convinced that the Western mainstream media would never dare
to criticize Israel and its intelligence agencies. Not even when Mossad was running pedophile
rings.
It was probably the Israeli leaders Shimon Peres, Ehud Barak and Moshe Katsev together with
the ultra-Zionist
Mega Group who made sure Epstein and especially the Maxwell family had not only immunity
from prosecution but also all the blackmail apparel necessary including luxury townhouses,
airplanes, yachts, submarines, ranch and a private island. All, of course, bugged to the
hilt.
Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak (R) talks to Shimon Peres, Minister of Regional
Planning, after Barak's speech at the opening session of parliament in Jerusalem 30 October
2000. AFP PHOTO / SVEN NACKSTRAND (Photo credit should read SVEN NACKSTRAND/AFP/Getty Images)
Link to Getty Images
Here the pedophile artwork at Ghislaine's New York townhouse can be seen behind Lillian von
Staufenberg who in March 2007 together with Ghislaine and Hamish Bowles organized a dinner
party in honor of Allegra Hicks. This at a time when Epstein had already been charged with
abusing young girls.
Why would Ghislaine have such a suspicious artwork on her wall knowing that it would
probably be photographed during the parties?
Why would Ghislaine and her quests take such a huge risk? Or was it a sign meant to be seen?
Was Ghislaine flaunting her power?
Ghislaine and her quests seemed to be absolutely sure that the mainstream media would not
dare to ask embarrassing questions.
They were right, of course. The mainstream media knows its place.
However, occasionally some courageous mainstream journalist or editor does try to give
hints. Some have even reported on Ghislaine's hyper-sexual reputation and her orgies. It is
just that the stories have mostly been scrubbed from the internet.
Fortunately, Whitney Webb from Mintpress has
found many of the scrubbed stories. Some of them mention the Mossad connection and others
note the orgies. For example, in 2003 a British newspaper, The Evening Standardreported
a revealing rumor.
Salacious reports have crossed the Atlantic about Ghislaine hosting bizarre parties at
her house to which she invites a dozen or so young girls, then brandishes a whip and teaches
them how to improve their sexual techniques.
It seems that Ghislaine was not only a madame to Epstein but also to the ruling elite. This
would both explain her popularity and the fact that the media – and especially the
American media – dares not to criticize her too much. Not even after her boyfriend
Epstein was charged with sex trafficking minors!
Ghislaine's friends are just too powerful. After the March 2007 party the British Daily
Mail newspaper was amazed how Ghislaine could still have attracted such creme de la
creme of the highest elite. Even more amazingly, the elite was practically swooning over
her.
The night before the party, the hostess [Ghislaine] had been inundated with calls from
disgruntled socialites, irked that they hadn't received an invitation.
The hostess greeted their objections with her customary charm, but remained unmoved. As
always, her list had been carefully edited, and she intended it to stay that way.
Among the select few were Hollywood star Matthew Modine, Kennedy family member Mrs
Anthony Radziwill, Peggy Siegel, PR consultant to the stars, and Julie Janklow, heir to a
literary dynasty.
There was a Rockefeller on the list, as well as the inevitable countesses, billionaires
and New York luminaries.
Link to Daily Mail
The guests at the party included also Renee Rockefeller who is married to Mark Rockefeller , the son of ex-Vice
President Nelson Rockefeller and nephew of David Rockefeller.
David Rockefeller lived at 146 East on the same 65th Street in the Upper East Side as
Ghislaine. They were practically neighbors. Ghislaine would have to walk only two minutes to
visit David.
David liked to pose for photos in his Beetle Room next to his favorite Picasso painting
depicting a nude child "prostitute".
David Rockefeller. Link to Jeffrey Harris Desing.com
David was often visited by his close friend Jacob Rothschild, the patriarch of the
Rothschild family.
The very same family that got Ghislaine her luxury townhouse next door.
The patriarchs,
Jacob Rothschild and David Rockefeller. Link to Jeffrey Harris Design.com
As shown by the Epstein Pedoscandal Mossad Timeline both Epstein and Ghislaine
continued to move in the highest circles long after Epstein got out of jail. In fact, only last
year Ghislaine was invited to a secret writers' retreat hosted by the richest man in the world,
Jeff Bezos.
Link to The Daily Mail
Not only billionaires but also royalty kept in close contact with Ghislaine.
Prince Andrew was recently interviewed by the BBC about his relationship with Epstein,
Ghislaine and their sex slave Virginia Roberts.
Amazingly, Andrew claimed she has no recollection of Epstein's and Ghislaine's sex slave,
Virginia Roberts. This despite the fact that they were photographed together!
Prince Andrew,
Virginia Roberts and Ghislaine Maxwell. Link to Daily Mail Link to The Sun.com
Hardly anybody believes Andrew. The queen had no choice but to sack his own son.
Link to
Daily Mail
Andrew got sacked because he was caught in a lie.
Andrew claimed he could not have had sex with the 17-year old Virginia in 2001 because he
had stayed with the British consul general.
The problem is the consul general does not recall Andrew staying with him.
Link to Daily
Mail
Curiously, most of the mainstream media has forgotten that it was Ghislaine who recruited
and manipulated Virginia Roberts to become a sex slave.
Even the BBC forgot this crucial fact despite Andrew mentioning Ghislaine many times during
the interview.
Time and again, the Prince invoked his friendship with Maxwell, 57, daughter of
disgraced media tycoon Robert Maxwell, as the reason he came into paedophile Epstein's
orbit.
Asked when he last saw Maxwell, Andrew said his last contact was 'earlier this year,
funnily enough', when she 'was here doing some rally'. (
Daily Mail )
Andrew claimed to have met Ghislaine last spring. In fact, they met in June just after US
prosecutors reopened the case against Epstein.
The Duke of York held a meeting with Ghislaine Maxwell in London two weeks after US
prosecutors announced they wanted to reopen their investigation into Jeffrey Epstein.
The meeting took place on or about June 5, the day before Ms Maxwell took part in a
four-day charity motoring rally from London to Monte Carlo.
Did Ghislaine demand that Andrew help make sure that the her own parallel case would not be
reopened?
After meeting Andrew she literally disappeared from the face of the earth.
The ex-socialite has not been seen since although rumours have placed her in Brazil,
France, the American mid-West and even the UK.
'No one knows where she is,' a lawyer for one of Epstein's victims said last night.
'She's done the greatest disappearing act known to man – or woman.' (
Daily Mail )
Link to Daily Mail
Shockingly, during the BBC interview Prince Andrew mentioned Ghislaine many times and seemed
to be proud of their friendship. Despite this the interviewer did not dare to ask questions
about their relationship.
Was this a message to all: Leave Ghislaine alone.
Ghislaine is obviously protected not only by the royal family but also by the whole ruling
elite. No wonder that she has the
Get-Out-of-Jail-Free card .
Ghislaine also tries to protect other Epstein associates.
Link to Daily Mail
Prince Andrew is now afraid to go to the US.
Five women who accuse Jeffrey Epstein of abusing them say Prince Andrew witnessed how
people were given massages at the sex offender's homes.
The lawyer for the women has told BBC
Panorama he plans to serve subpoenas to force the Duke of York to testify as a witness in
all five cases.
He says the prince could have important information about sex trafficking. ( BBC )
Link to BBC story and video
The BBC has now finally zoomed in on Ghislaine.
Another Epstein victim, Sarah Ransome told Panorama Ghislaine Maxwell, one of Prince
Andrew's oldest friends, worked hand in hand with Epstein.
"Ghislaine controlled the girls. She was like the Madam," she said.
"She was like the nuts and bolts of the sex trafficking operation and she would always
visit Jeffrey on the island to make sure the girls were doing what they were supposed to be
doing.
"She knew what Jeffrey liked. She worked and helped maintain Jeffrey's standard by
intimidation, by intimidating the girls, so this was very much a joint effort."
Ms Maxwell could not be reached for comment but has previously denied any involvement
in or knowledge of Epstein's abuse. ( BBC )
But the American media is still not interested in Ghislaine.
What the American mainstream media always willfully forgets is that Ghislaine Maxwell is the
key person and mastermind behind the whole pedo sex trafficking operation.
The key role of Ghislaine is not surprising. After all, her father was an Israeli super spy,
Robert Maxwell.
But perhaps this is the very reason why the American media is not interested.
For years Ghislaine has been at the center of a vast pedophile sex trafficking network. But
still to this day the American police has never dared to even interview her.
I think the answer to the question in the title of this article is pretty damn obvious to
anyone and everyone outside of the controlled media. smdh. Call me crazy, but I wouldn't be
shocked to learn that pervert Jeffrey Epstein is still alive somewhere, not only do I not buy
the "suicide story," but I am not buying he was murdered either. Ghislane described the girls
involved in this pedophile ring/honey pot as "trash." If these girls are or were "trash" than
what in the hell does that this demonic witch named Ghislane Maxwell?
"... The creation of a think tank dedicated to "an approach to the world based on diplomacy and restraint rather than threats, sanctions, and bombing" is very welcome news. Other than the Cato Institute, there has been nothing like this in Washington, and this tank's focus will be entirely on foreign policy. ..."
"... I am quite amazed that Soros and Koch bro are involved. We will wait to see how this plays out. ..."
Stephen Kinzer
comments on the creation of a new think tank, The Quincy Institute, committed to promoting a foreign policy of restraint and
non-interventionism:
Since peaceful foreign policy was a founding principle of the United States, it's appropriate that the name of this think tank
harken back to history. It will be called the Quincy Institute, an homage to John Quincy Adams, who in a seminal speech on Independence
Day in 1821 declared that the United States "goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom
and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own." The Quincy Institute will promote a foreign policy
based on that live-and-let-live principle.
The creation of a think tank dedicated to "an approach to the world based on diplomacy and restraint rather than threats,
sanctions, and bombing" is very welcome news. Other than the Cato Institute, there has been nothing like this in Washington, and
this tank's focus will be entirely on foreign policy. The lack of institutional support has put advocates of peace and restraint
at a disadvantage for a very long time, so it is encouraging to see that there is an effort underway to change that. The Quincy Institute
represents another example of how antiwar progressives and conservatives can and should work together to change U.S. foreign policy
for the better. The coalition opposed to the war on Yemen showed what Americans opposed to illegal and unnecessary war can do when
they work towards a shared goal of peace and non-intervention, and this institute promises to be an important part of such efforts
in the future. Considering how long the U.S. has been
waging war without end
, there couldn't be a better time for this.
TAC readers and especially readers of this blog will be familiar with the people involved in creating the think tank:
The institute plans to open its doors in September and hold an official inauguration later in the autumn. Its founding donors
-- Soros's Open Society Foundation and the Charles Koch Foundation -- have each contributed half a million dollars to fund its
takeoff. A handful of individual donors have joined to add another $800,000. By next year the institute hopes to have a $3.5 million
budget and a staff of policy experts who will churn out material for use in Congress and in public debates. Hiring is underway.
Among Parsi's co-founders are several well-known critics of American foreign policy, including Suzanne DiMaggio, who has spent
decades promoting negotiated alternatives to conflict with China, Iran and North Korea; the historian and essayist Stephen Wertheim;
and the anti-militarist author and retired Army colonel Andrew Bacevich.
"The Quincy Institute will invite both progressives and anti-interventionist conservatives to consider a new, less militarized
approach to policy," Bacevich said, when asked why he signed up. "We oppose endless, counterproductive war. We want to restore
the pursuit of peace to the nation's foreign policy agenda."
Trita Parsi and Andrew Bacevich are both TAC contributors and have participated in our foreign policy conferences in recent
years. Parsi and I were on the same panel last fall at our most recent conference. I have also cited and learned from arguments made
by Suzanne DiMaggio and Stephen Wertheim in my
posts here . Their involvement is a
very good sign, and it shows both the political breadth and intellectual depth of this new institution. I look forward to seeing
what they do, and I wish them luck.
Good luck. I hope you will be invited on cable shows. I am tired of seeing the beard from the Foundation of the Defense of Democracies
and his clones.
Once in a while the hosts mess up and they interview someone who doesn't give the correct answer about the M.E., or somewhere
else and I see the blank look on their face as they thank the guess as since it is obvious they cannot process the information.
I generally do not see those guests ever again.
The guidelines are, the world is divided into those who crave U.S. leadership and the evildoers who are constantly testing
our leadership. We must always be vigilant against the latter. It is inconceivable that anyone merely act in their own interest.
It is all about us.
I also am looking forward to reading their thoughts and ideas about a foreign policy that doesn't include the US invading yet
another country under the ridiculous notion that we are somehow being threatened by them. We have the largest military on earth.
It's also telling that we pick on and invade countries that can't actually hurt us. That makes us all the more the bully on the
block. It's to our shame that we even consider these shameful actions.
Exciting news. An early endeavor , if not already accomplished, should be consideration of relevant theoretical models for understanding
competition and cooperation. Since the Cold War and to the present day, variants of the Prisoners Dilemma serve this function.
Prior to that, misconceptions of survival of the fittest led to the disasters of eugenics and WW2. Maybe the new think tank will
outline or draw inspiration from a new theory.
Re: "I look forward to seeing what they do, and I wish them luck."
So do I. Very much so. However, the most prominent realist Washington Think Tank is the Cato Institute. It has well spoken
advocates of realism and restraint including Christopher Preble, Doug Bandow and Ted Galen Carpenter. Unfortunately, the thoughtful
Cato scribes get very little exposure on the MSM compared to the atrocious Heritage, AEI and Brookings nests of go along to get
along Neocon / Neoliberal lackeys. It's not clear to me how and why the Quincy Institute will generate any more leverage.
I've argued many times before that the linchpin of the busted U.S. Global Cop foreign policy model is the Pentagon. As long
as the Pentagon hacks are considered the paragons of Olympian insight and wisdom by the political class and the MSM, nothing will
change.
Related to that though, there actually was a hopeful article in the Atlantic about the newest Pentagon Big Mouth, CENTCOM Commander
General General Kenneth McKenzie:
Hopefully, that is a crack in the wall of Military Exceptionalism. The sooner others start taking a 2x4 to the sanctified occupants
of the 5-Sided Pleasure Palace, knocking them off of their pedestals, the better.
BTW, the new Acting Defense Secretary and MIC Parasite Mark Esper is no friend of the taxpayers. Expect that failed Pentagon
audit that was deep-sixed by Mad Dog Mattis to stay deep-sixed with Esper in the Big Seat.
I am quite amazed that Soros and Koch bro are involved. We will wait to see how this plays out.
Jeez, who can believe this amongst the "think" tanks: "an approach to the world based on diplomacy and restraint rather than
threats, sanctions, and bombing"
ParadoxRocks says:
November
28, 2019 at 4:25 am GMT 200 Words Just as the war on terrorism has turned the West into a
self-destructive vortex that works to regenerate the causes of the evil it claims to eradicate,
the suicidal tendencies of Western culture are, in effect, the mirror image – or
monstrous double – of the suicide bomber of radical Islamic terrorism. And so, the
"Islamic other" is not so other after all. Most of the perpetrators of the terrorist attacks
that haunt us the most lived in the West, were trained in the West, shared the same experience
of globalisation, and used the same means of media communication to gain their support. These
so-called Muslim terrorists may indeed be the closest of all possible neighbours. And as such,
we must understand ourselves in a similar struggle as our Middle Eastern sisters and brothers,
where those with no-part in the existing order of things speak truth and fight for justice as
the immediate embodiment of society as such, in its universality, against the particular power
interests of the small tribe of degenerate oligarchs that are running civilization off the edge
of a cliff. For all truly emancipatory politics is generated by the intrusion of the excluded
into the socio-political space.
"... Authored by Peter Hitchens via The Mail On Sunday blog, ..."
"... I stood outside the safe house, in a road I cannot name, in a major European city I cannot identify, not sure what I might find inside. I had no way of being sure. ..."
"... In decades of journalism I have received quite a few leaks ..."
"... But I've never seen one like this. It scared me. ..."
"... If bodies such as the OPCW cannot be trusted, then World War Three could one day be started by a falsehood. ..."
I stood outside the safe house, in a road I cannot name, in a major European city I cannot
identify, not sure what I might find inside. I had no way of being sure.
I had travelled a long distance by train to an address I had been given over an encrypted email.
I was nervous that the meeting might be some sort of trap.
Leaks from inside arms
verification organisations are very sensitive matters. Powerful people mind about them.
I wasn't sure whether to be afraid of being followed, or to be worried about who might be waiting behind
the anonymous door on a dark afternoon, far from home. I took all the amateurish precautions that I could
think of.
As it happened, it was not a trap. Now, on carefully selected neutral ground, I was to meet a person
who would confirm suspicions that had been growing in my mind over several years – that there is something
rotten in the way that chemical weapons inspections are being conducted and reported. And that the world
could be hurried into war on the basis of such inspections.
Inside the safe house, I was greeted by a serious, patient expert, a non-political scientist
whose priority had until now always been to do the hard, gritty work of verification
– travelling
to the scenes of alleged horrors, sifting and searching for hard evidence of what had really happened.
But this entirely honourable occupation had slowly turned sour.
The whiff of political interference had begun as a faint unpleasant smell in the air and grown
until it was an intolerable stench.
Formerly easy-going superiors had turned into tricky bureaucrats.
The Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) had become so important that it could
no longer be allowed to do its job properly.
Too many of the big powers that sponsor and finance it were breathing down its neck, wanting certain
results, whether the facts justified them or not.
My source calmly showed me various pieces of evidence that they were who they said they were,
and knew what they claimed to know, making it clear that they worked for the OPCW and knew its inner workings.
They then revealed a document to me.
This was the email of protest, sent to senior OPCW officials, saying that a report on the alleged Syrian
poison gas attack in Douma, in April 2018, had been savagely censored so as to alter its meaning.
In decades of journalism I have received quite a few leaks
:
leaks
over luxurious, expensive lunches with Cabinet Ministers, anonymous leaks that just turned up in envelopes,
leaks from union officials and employers, diplomats and academics.
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But I've never seen one like this. It scared me.
If it was true, then
something hugely dishonest and dangerous was going on, in a place where absolute integrity was vital.
If bodies such as the OPCW cannot be trusted, then World War Three could one day be
started by a falsehood.
Last week I reported on the first episode in this story. Within days the OPCW had confirmed that the
email I leaked was authentic.
Nobody followed me home or threatened me. A few silly people on social media told blatant lies about
me, insinuating that I was somehow a Russian patsy or a defender of the disgusting Syrian regime that
I have been attacking in print for nearly 20 years. That was what I had expected.
But there is much more to come.
And, as it grows harder for everyone to ignore this
enormous, dangerous story,
I suspect I shall be looking over my shoulder rather more than usual.
"... Aha! There you have it. Back in February 2016, Gabbard resigned her position as vice-chair of the DNC to endorse Sanders, and the DNC, controlled by establishment centrists like the Clintons as well as Barack Obama, have never forgiven her. Recently, Hillary Clinton smeared her (as well as Jill Stein, Green Party candidate from 2016) as a Russian asset, and various mainstream networks and news shows, such as "The View" and NBC, have suggested (with no evidence) she's the favored candidate of Russia and Vladimir Putin. ..."
"... Just what we don't need: two bought-and-paid-for political parties in the service of the wealthiest and the corporations. But at least the Republicans are (mostly) honest about their priorities ..."
Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard is a
compelling choice for president in 2020. She's principled, she's against America's disastrous
regimen of regime-change wars, and she's got the guts to criticize her own party for being too
closely aligned with rich and powerful interests. She's also a military veteran who enlisted in
the Army National Guard in Hawaii after the 9/11 attacks (she currently serves as a major and
deployed overseas to Iraq during that war).
What's not to like about a female veteran who oozes intelligence and independence, a woman
who represents diversity (she's a practicing Hindu and a Samoan-American), an early supporter
of Bernie Sanders who called out the DNC for its favoritism toward Hillary Clinton
Aha! There you have it. Back in February 2016, Gabbard resigned
her position as vice-chair of the DNC to endorse Sanders, and the DNC, controlled by
establishment centrists like the Clintons as well as Barack Obama, have never forgiven her.
Recently, Hillary Clinton
smeared her (as well as Jill Stein, Green Party candidate from 2016) as a Russian asset,
and various mainstream networks and news shows, such as "The View" and NBC, have suggested
(with no evidence) she's the favored candidate of Russia and Vladimir Putin.
Think about that. Hillary Clinton and much of the mainstream media are accusing a serving
major in the U.S. military of being an asset to a foreign power. It's an accusation bordering
on a charge of treason -- a charge that is libelous and recklessly irresponsible.
A reminder: Tulsi Gabbard enlisted in the military to serve her country in the aftermath of
9/11. What did Hillary Clinton do? Can you imagine Hillary going through basic training as a
private, or serving in the military in a war zone? (Hillary did falsely claim that she came
under
sniper fire in Bosnia , but that's a story for another day.)
Tulsi Gabbard is her own person. She's willing to buck the system and has shown compassion
and commitment on the campaign trail. She may be a long shot, but she deserves a long look for
the presidency, especially when you consider the (low) quality of the enemies she's made.
Reply
Whenever I post anything remotely positive about Tulsi Gabbard on Facebook, the same few
people come out to denounce her. My response is below, though I know you can't reason with
haters:
That Tulsi has been on Fox News is an argument in her favor, i.e. her crossover appeal and
her willingness to engage with the "other side." That Tulsi met with Assad is, in my view,
reasonable; true leaders are always willing to meet with "bad" people, even ruthless
dictators, in the cause of averting war. My main point is how she's being smeared as some
kind of traitor, or at least a useful idiot. She's neither. Also, I've read the piece on
Tulsi in Jacobin, and I've heard about alleged cults. Is this really the best the media can
do? Guilt by association?
Some of our readers may have concerns about Tulsi, e.g. alleged Islamophobia, alleged
cults, etc. The main point is this: Does she deserve to be smeared as a Putin puppet? What
does this say about our media? And why are they doing this? I can tell you why. Trillions of
dollars are spent on wars and weapons, and Tulsi is calling for an end to regime-change wars
and a return to diplomacy. She also, like Bernie, is willing to call out the DNC as being
against the interests of ordinary Americans -- and she's right about this. She has a lot in
her favor. I'm a Bernie fan myself, but I'll take Tulsi over all those phony "centrists" like
Buttigieg, Klobuchar, Harris, and Biden.
I can't speak to the RSS/BJP connection; I've read about it, but I admit to ignorance on the
matter. Of course, every candidate has multiple connections, positions, donors, etc. All
politicians carry baggage. So far, from what I've read, Tulsi is more principled and more
courageous than most of her peers.
I'm still a Bernie fan -- his long record of helping the poor and vulnerable speaks for
itself. Of course, he once went to Moscow oh no! Run away! 🙂
Tulsi has now done four courageous, unusual, and very positive things while merely a
candidate:
1) Tulsi effectively took down a leading contender and DNC favorite, by demonstrating that
Senator Harris had been a corrupt prosecutor.
2) Tulsi defended democracy as she sued Google for at least $50 million, for playing
favorites in search-routing of candidates.
3) Tulsi called out Hillary Clinton for the monster she is.
4) Tulsi supported a process toward 911 truth by supporting 911-victims' families' right to
see FBI documents that have been denied to them.
Tulsi is the anti-war candidate. Tulsi Gabbard should be Commander-in-Chief. Yang should
be VP and in charge of the economy. Read his book. UBI is the way to go. Tulsi needs someone
she can trust as VP.
I consider the vicious persecution of Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning -- both
languishing in prison for having committed no crime whatsoever -- along with the exile of
Edward Snowden, among the greatest travesties of justice ever committed by the U.S. and U.K.
(dishonorable mention goes to Sweden and the latest Ecuadorian government, as well). I had
hoped for this subject to come up in the "debates," giving Tulsi yet another opportunity to
shine relative to her competitors, most of whom would soil their undergarments in panic at
the thought of "crossing" the absurdly named "intelligence community" and its entirely
co-opted corporate media outlets.
If Tulsi Gabbard had done no other principled thing than this, I would have considered her
heads and shoulders above anyone else campaigning for a position in the U.S. government
today.
I ought to dedicate this one to Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard for her principled defense of
Julian Assange and Edward Snowden (and no-doubt Chelsea Manning, as well):
Star Chamber, Incorporated
Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning
Jailed as twin examples for the proles:
"Look what happens if you publish secrets:
More totalitarian controls."
In Chinese: "Kill the Chicken scare the Monkey."
Rat-out your colleagues. Do not Power tempt.
Or otherwise the judges and grand juries
Will hold you in what lawyers call "contempt."
A strange word-choice, indeed, by Power's minions
Who spend careers perfecting rank abuse.
For them I'd have to feel respect much greater
Before that is the word that I would use.
I've nothing good to say for prosecutors.
Some say I wish to "damn them with faint praise."
But I reply: "You praise with faint damnation.
So which of us has coined the the better phrase?"
Despicable, the treatment of these heroes.
The US and UK have sunk so low.
Still, Julian and Chelsea have together
More balls than these two governments can grow.
No matter, they have passed into the ages.
Already they have earned a fair renown.
Each day they live defiant, undefeated,
They rise as jailers try to put them down.
As JFK once said of his elite class:
"The ship of state leaks mainly from the top."
But if some lowly, powerless, poor person
Tries that, they'll feel the lash. No truth. Now stop!
To scare a monkey, kill another monkey.
If not, the monkeys learn impunity.
While eating KFC they ask, obtusely:
"What has a chicken got to do with me?"
And so the Corporation-State must silence
Reports of its incompetence and crime.
If citizens knew what it did they'd order
Its dissolution. Now. And just in time.
Historically, they called it the Star Chamber
A secret court designed to thwart the king.
But power then perverted it to serve him.
Grand juries in the US, same damn thing.
They now indict ham sandwiches routinely
With no protection for the innocents.
Presumed as guilty, evidence not needed.
Conviction guaranteed. No court repents.
A judge may do whatever he determines
He can. So levy fines. Coerce. Demand
On penalty of prison, testimony
Against oneself, alone upon the stand.
"Democracy" is just a euphemism
If citizens allow this to proceed.
Orwellian: first Hate then Fear of Goldstein.
Two Minutes, daily. Really, all you need.
This is a good commentary. military experience is a good thing especially when we are dealing
with the fact that over half of the national budget is devoted to the military.
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar has a thoughtful article on playing it safe, running out the clock,
prevent defense, etc., on your opponent as it would apply to politics.
Jabbar writes: Almost every poll showed her with a respectable lead over Trump just days
before the election. So, the Clinton campaign tried to run out the clock by not campaigning
much in Wisconsin, Michigan, Minnesota, Indiana, Missouri, North Dakota, and South Dakota,
all of which turned much redder than in the previous presidential election.
The tactic of trying to pick a "safe" candidate who can beat Trump by appealing to their
ideas about Middle America sends the wrong message to all of America. No team devise a game
strategy based on fear: they emphasize their strengths and exploit their opponents'
weaknesses. The Democratic candidate shouldn't be the least objectionable, but the one who
boldly forges ahead with clear and detailed plans for Making America America Again.
Democrats can't pander to voters by denigrating Trump but then promising them Trump-lite
with a wink. Promote progressive policies and plans worthy of a party that wants to lead this
country without fear of being called "socialists" or "the radical left" or whatever else your
opposing team chants.
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2019/oct/15/how-sports-tactics-can-help-the-democrats-beat-donald-trump-in-2020
===================================
Jabbar is correct. The Corporate Democrats among them Biden, Buttigieg and Bloomberg are
fighting desperately to preserve a perceived lead aided and abetted by the McMega-Media.
Chicago Alderman, Paddy Bauler (1890-1977) said in 1955 on the election of Daley the
Elder, "Chicago ain't ready for reform yet", or "Chicago ain't ready for a reform mayor".
Today, the pundits employed by Corporate America, along with various Democratic Party
stooges for Wall Street tell us America ain't ready for Reform.
Yes, ML, so goes American 'Exceptionalism', after WW2 Victory. Today, so goes a Great
American City in violence, all so shortsighted. I'm still confused with our never-ending wars
overseas, as our cities rot in crime & violence, my main concern. I didn't grow up
– or party! -later on in today's disaster areas of Baltimore or Philadelphia, etc.It
was GREAT!
But somethings going on I don't know about, when the WORST cities have black Congresspeople
(Maxime Waters?) living in 6.5$Mil mansions as their "districts" die.
I have NO PROBLEM with black people! Such a smear an insult. But it's worth investigating why
these characters who have ruined their cities are supporters of Dems, & Billary! Oh! They
spend & vote lavishly on more money for our wars, but nothing for their own cities!
Finally starting to figure it out: They're traitors to their own race, for their personal
benefit. They make Dems "look proud", vs "REP's!" Yes, they too re dreadful maybe that's why
I feel: TULCI GO! She's neither dreadful party!
ML: Good citation of KA-J -- - although I've seen the same-sort of criticism of the Dems
elsewhere, Kareem's sports analogy is very helpful in understanding the concept.
(I have to say that I got sick of the Dems milquetoast approach to politics. Maybe it was
an understandable response to a frustrating right-wing zeitgeist, but DAMN, did they have to
be SO passive against the Reps?? Even when they briefly held majorities in Congress under
Obama, the wouldn't introduce/push bills that weren't 'filibuster-proof'!?!? I for one might
still be voting Dem POTUS IF they had pushed those progressive bills., then let the Reps
filibuster for weeks or months, meantime the Dems & Obama could've gone in front of the
public daily and said something like "We're trying to help you by passing Bill X, but the
Reps are filibustering and stopping Congress from getting any work done!" Let the government
shut-down for a few weeks because of it and keep hammering away at the Reps for being the
BLOCKERS, etc. Call their bluff, and use it against them during elections. Instead they tried
to be overly accommodating & conciliatory BEFORE debate had even begun!)
Yes. Eddie. The Democratic Party not only gets its ass kicked for breakfast, lunch, and
dinner, but it seems to have developed something of a masochistic taste for the Republican
abuse. Hence two of my verse compositions essentially agreeing with your observations:
(1) From eight years ago. From "Hope" and "Change" to despair and the status quo. And with
a Nobel Peace Prize for Endless War, too.
Congenital Stockholm Syndrome
He started by giving up quickly,
Surrendering early his case.
He offered to kiss their asses.
Replying, they pissed in his face.
Their urine, he thought, tasted strangely;
Yet not at all bad to his taste.
He'd gotten so used to it, plainly.
Why let such a drink go to waste?
The people who voted in favor
Of him and his promise of "change"
Now see in his many betrayals
A poodle afflicted with mange.
Each time that the surly and crazy
Republicans out for his skin
Condemn him for living and breathing,
He graciously helps them to win.
He'll turn on his base in an instant
With threats and disdain and neglect
While bombing some Muslims so Cheney
Might thrill to the lives that he's wrecked.
A black man in love with apartheid
He offers his stalwart support
To Zionists and their extortion
With "More, please!" his only retort.
A masochist begging for beatings
Obama takes joy in abuse
Receiving just what he has asked for
Which makes him of no earthly use
The little brown men that he's murdered
In homes far away from our land
Bring profits obscene to his backers
Who give him the back of their hand.
Obama seeks praise from the vicious
Republicans, no matter what.
He suffers, apparently, nothing
So much as his need to kiss butt.
Michael Murry, "The Misfortune Teller," Copyright 2011
(2) From twelve years ago and on the Congressional side of the Surrender Monkey
Syndrome:
Nancy the Negotiator
Nancy the Negotiator
Gives up first; surrenders later;
Takes her cards from off the table,
Then recites her loser fable:
"We don't have the votes we need,"
Nancy says, in tones that bleed:
"Mean Republicans will whine
If we do not toe their line."
Nancy bows to George and Dick
While her skinny ass they kick;
Writes them checks both blank and rubber,
Then proceeds to lamely blubber:
"We don't like what Dubya's doing.
Still, we quite enjoy the screwing.
Masochism's what we offer,
Helping crooks to loot the coffer"
"Sure, the squandered blood and treasure
Goes to those we will not measure.
Still, we promise you'll adore us
If you mark your ballot for us."
"Choices you don't have assail you,
Leaving only us who fail you.
Nonetheless, we've gotten fatter.
Why, then, should we think you matter?"
After six years in Uncle Sam's Canoe Club (the last eighteen months of that in the
now-defunct Republic of South Vietnam) it didn't take me long to realize that the Republicans
get paid a lavish salary to do what the fabulously wealthy demand, while the Democrats get a
comparatively meager allowance to do what the Republicans tell them to do, also on behalf of
the fabulously wealthy: namely, betray their own working-class anti-war base so that the
Republicans will not have anything even remotely "leftist" to worry about. In truth, the
Democratic party crawled up its own ass and died so many years ago that I think I've lost
count.
Just what we don't need: two bought-and-paid-for political parties in the service of the
wealthiest and the corporations. But at least the Republicans are (mostly) honest about their
priorities
"And how on earth did an ex comedian and MMA commentator become one of the better
political interviewers around?"
Dereliction of duty by the gatekeeper oligarch press, and discontent by the
ever-more-discerning consumer to be served cold lies? Baby Boomers and Silent Generation
dying off more by the day? People under 40 who have never experienced an economy that doesn't
suck for the non-rich?
I've started listening to Rogan interviews since Sanders's blockbuster interview a few
months ago.
The guy is actually a surprisingly good interviewer, for reasons that are hard to
understand. For one thing, he is invariably friendly and respectful, which I think draws the
subject out. His format also allows almost unlimited and uninterrupted time, (2-3 hours is
typical), which removes time pressure and allows extended and nuanced conversation. He also
has no particular agenda, and allows the conversation to go where it will, jumping in with
"questions" only when a particular topic seems to be exhausted.
The interesting thing is that anyone, either inside the media or outside it, could be
doing a similar program; it's not technically hard. But no one is.
If I didn't miss anything, then it is not 100% clear that USA will stop invading and
bombing other countries with Gabbard. She is slippery enough to continue the bombings. She
still mentions war as a last option. It is highly subjective to judge whether you have used
up all diplomatic channels to achieve your goal or not.
The wars and invasions has been about stealing natural resources, oil mainly but now
lithium too, feed the MIC-swamp creatures in general and selling out state resources to
American interests. In no way does she tackle the causes of the wars, only the
symptoms.
When have you tried all diplomatic channels to steal Iraq's, Venezuela's, Syria's and
Libya's oil fields? What do the diplomatic tools look like? Economic strangulation? IMF on
steroids?
She needs to talk about a society getting off of oil for a starter
It is amazing on how so many arguments against progressive policies coming from the
Democratic Party all seem to boil down to "Shut up and get back to work, peasants!"
Incrementalists do not even slowly improve things most of the time, as the neoliberal
Democratic Party "incrementally" follows the Republicans rightward with every broad shift to
the right on the GOP side. Today's deregulators and supply-side economic proponents are just
as likely to be Democrats as Republicans and many Democrats are probably cheering on
Kavanaugh's attacks on environmental standards as we speak.
Our aristocracy do not even pretend to adhere to any sort of sense of noblisse oblige,
unlike the feudal lords of old.
Max is one of the greatest journalists of our time ! Thank You , but take care because
their are many that are threatened by truth and integrity ! RESPECT !
The msm is full of CIA swamp lobbyist liars. Max is just objectively reporting
substantiated data points that counter lies that are meant to sell taxpayers war.
he Democratic establishment is increasingly irritated. Representative Tulsi Gabbard,
long-shot candidate for president, is attacking her own party for promoting the "deeply
destructive" policy of "regime change wars." Gabbard has even called Hillary Clinton "the queen
of warmongers, embodiment of corruption, and personification of the rot that has sickened the
Democratic Party."
Senator Chris Murphy complained: "It's a little hard to figure out what itch she's trying to
scratch in the Democratic Party right now." Some conservatives seem equally confused. The
Washington Examiner 's Eddie Scarry asked: "where is Tulsi distinguishing herself when
it really matters?"
The answer is that foreign policy "really matters." Gabbard recognizes that George W. Bush
is not the only simpleton warmonger who's plunged the nation into conflict, causing enormous
harm. In the last Democratic presidential debate, she explained that the issue was "personal to
me" since she'd "served in a medical unit where every single day, I saw the terribly high,
human costs of war." Compare her perspective to that of the ivory tower warriors of Right and
Left, ever ready to send others off to fight not so grand crusades.
The best estimate of the costs of the post-9/11 wars comes from the Watson Institute for
International and Public Affairs at Brown University. The Institute says that $6.4 trillion
will be spent through 2020. They estimate that our wars have killed 801,000 directly and
resulted in a multiple of that number dead indirectly. More than 335,000 civilians have died --
and that's an extremely conservative guess. Some 21 million people have been forced from their
homes. Yet the terrorism risk has only grown, with the U.S. military involved in
counter-terrorism in 80 nations.
Obviously, without American involvement there would still be conflicts. Some
counter-terrorism activities would be necessary even if the U.S. was not constantly swatting
geopolitical wasps' nests. Nevertheless, it was Washington that started or joined these
unnecessary wars (e.g., Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Yemen) and expanded necessary wars well beyond
their legitimate purposes (Afghanistan). As a result, American policymakers bear responsibility
for much of the carnage.
The Department of Defense is responsible for close to half of the estimated expenditures.
About $1.4 trillion goes to care for veterans. Homeland security and interest on security
expenditures take roughly $1 trillion each. And $131 million goes to the State Department and
the U.S. Agency for International Development, which have overspent on projects that have
delivered little.
More than 7,000 American military personnel and nearly 8,000 American contractors have died.
About 1,500 Western allied troops and 11,000 Syrians fighting ISIS have been killed. The Watson
Institute figures that as many as 336,000 civilians have died, but that uses the very
conservative numbers provided by the Iraq Body Count. The IBC counts 207,000 documented
civilian deaths but admits that doubling the estimate would probably yield a more accurate
figure. Two other respected surveys put the number of deaths in Iraq alone at nearly 700,000
and more than a million, though those figures have been contested.
More than a thousand aid workers and journalists have died, as well as up to 260,000
opposition fighters. Iraq is the costliest conflict overall, with as many as 308,000 dead (or
515,000 from doubling the IBC count). Syria cost 180,000 lives, Afghanistan 157,000, Yemen
90,000, and Pakistan 66,000.
Roughly 32,000 American military personnel have been wounded; some 300,000 suffer from PTSD
or significant depression and even more have endured traumatic brain injuries. There are other
human costs -- 4.5 million Iraqi refugees and millions more in other nations, as well as the
destruction of Iraq's indigenous Christian community and persecution of other religious
minorities. There has been widespread rape and other sexual violence. Civilians, including
children, suffer from PTSD.
Even stopping the wars won't end the costs. Explained Nita Crawford of Boston University and
co-director of Brown's Cost of War Project: "the total budgetary burden of the post-9/11 wars
will continue to rise as the U.S. pays the on-going costs of veterans' care and for interest no
borrowing to pay for the wars."
People would continue to die. Unexploded shells and bombs still turn up in Europe from World
Wars I and II. In Afghanistan, virtually the entire country is a battlefield, filled with
landmines, shells, bombs, and improvised explosive devices. Between 2001 and 2018, 5,442
Afghans were killed and 14,693 were wounded from unexploded ordnance. Some of these explosives
predate American involvement, but the U.S. has contributed plenty over the last 18 years.
Moreover, the number of indirect deaths often exceeds battle-related casualties. Journalist
and activist David Swanson noted an "estimate that to 480,000 direct deaths in Afghanistan,
Iraq, and Pakistan, one must add at least one million deaths in those countries indirectly
caused by the recent and ongoing wars. This is because the wars have caused illnesses,
injuries, malnutrition, homelessness, poverty, lack of social support, lack of healthcare,
trauma, depression, suicide, refugee crises, disease epidemics, the poisoning of the
environment, and the spread of small-scale violence." Consider Yemen, ravaged by famine and
cholera. Most civilian casualties have resulted not from Saudi and Emirati bombing, but from
the consequences of the bombing.
Only a naif would imagine that these wars will disappear absent a dramatic change in
national leadership. Wrote Crawford: "The mission of the post-9/11 wars, as originally defined,
was to defend the United States against future terrorist threats from al-Qaeda and affiliated
organizations. Since 2001, the wars have expanded from the fighting in Afghanistan, to wars and
smaller operations elsewhere, in more than 80 countries -- becoming a truly 'global war on
terror'."
Yet every expansion of conflict makes the American homeland more, not less, vulnerable.
Contrary to the nonsensical claim that if we don't occupy Afghanistan forever and overthrow
Syria's Bashar al-Assad, al-Qaeda and ISIS will turn Chicago and Omaha into terrorist
abattoirs, intervening in more conflicts and killing more foreigners creates additional
terrorists at home and abroad. In this regard, drone campaigns are little better than invasions
and occupations.
For instance, when questioned by the presiding judge in his trial, the failed 2010 Times
Square bomber, Faisal Shahzad, a U.S. citizen, cited the drone campaign in Pakistan. His
colloquy with the judge was striking: "I'm going to plead guilty 100 times forward because
until the hour the U.S. pulls its forces from Iraq and Afghanistan and stops the drone strikes
in Somalia and Yemen and in Pakistan and stops the occupation of Muslim lands and stops Somalia
and Yemen and in Pakistan, and stops the occupation of Muslim lands, and stops killing the
Muslims."
Ajani Marwat, with the New York City Police Department's intelligence division, outlined
Shahzad's perspective to TheGuardian : "'It's American policies in his country.'
'We don't have to do anything to attract them,' a terrorist organizer in Lahore told me. 'The
Americans and the Pakistani government do our work for us. With the drone attacks targeting the
innocents who live in Waziristan and the media broadcasting this news all the time, the
sympathies of most of the nation are always with us. Then it's simply a case of converting
these sentiments into action'."
Washington does make an effort to avoid civilian casualties, but war will never be pristine.
Combatting insurgencies inevitably harms innocents. Air and drone strikes rely on often
unreliable informants. The U.S. employs "signature" strikes based on supposedly suspicious
behavior. And America's allies, most notably the Saudis and Emiratis -- supplied, armed,
guided, and until recently refueled by Washington -- make little if any effort to avoid killing
noncombatants and destroying civilian infrastructure.
Thus will the cycle of terrorism and war continue. Yet which leading Democrats have
expressed concern? Most complain that President Donald Trump is negotiating with North Korea,
leaving Syria, and reducing force levels in Afghanistan. Congressional Democrats care about
Yemen only because it has become Trump's war; there were few complaints under President Barack
Obama.
What has Washington achieved after years of combat? Even the capitals of its client states
are unsafe. The State Department warns travelers to Iraq that kidnapping is a risk and urges
businessmen to hire private security. In Kabul, embassy officials now travel to the airport via
helicopter rather than car.
Tulsi Gabbard is talking about what really matters. The bipartisan War Party has done its
best to wreck America and plenty of other nations too. Gabbard is courageously challenging the
Democrats in this coalition, who have become complicit in Washington's criminal wars.
Doug Bandow is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and a former special assistant to
President Ronald Reagan. He is the author of Foreign Follies: America's New Global
Empire.
And, by the way, it's important to stress that Tulsi ain't picking at Her Majesty all of a
sudden. It was the said majesty who has recently started picking at Tulsi first out of no
reason, extrapolating that joke of Trump's "Russia's candidate" status on her as well.
Also, this:
People would continue to die. Unexploded shells and bombs still turn up in Europe from
World Wars I and II. In Afghanistan, virtually the entire country is a battlefield,
filled with
landmines, shells, bombs, and improvised explosive devices.
At least in Europe it is indeed shells and bombs, which are kind of big schmucks thus
easily noticed when approached and then disarmed by engineers. While all over the Middle
East it is first and foremost IEDs that can look like, virtually, anything starting from a
hand grenade's size.
On one hand, you're right. On the other hand, the average neocon/neolib commenter who will
come to enlighten us as to Russian agents behind the authorship of the article will be
utmostly unable to read the damn thing. For such a feller it ain't gonna be much different
from 5D21DBA0000.
Unfortunately, a lot of Americans in recent years were more concerned about gays getting
married and poor women terminating their pregnancies.
At Thanksgiving dinner today, the conversation eventually turned to politics and more
specifically, Ukraine. I asked the other diners if they knew who Victoria Nuland was and
got blank stares. Most didn't know that Crimea had been part of the Russian Empire going
back to 1783, which happens to be the year that the US was formally recognized as a
separate country under the Treaty of Paris.
How big is $6.4 trillion? Enough to cover outstanding student loans about 4 times. Or
enough to stabilize Social Security and Medicare for decades to come.
Mostly a very good article - but - what possible legitimate purpose was there invading
Afghanistan ? This was the biggest war crime of the lot and you're still there. Afghanistan
had nothing whatsoever to do with the New York plane attacks. It was a failed state and had
the misfortune to have bin Laden and co supposedly holed up in the mountains there and
unable to do much about it. Dealing with that required a specific police style action.
Instead you carpet bombed Kabul to start and unleashed a frenzy of killing across the
country. Unfortunately pretty much as a lot of us predicted around the middle of Sept 2001.
And where did you find Osama in the end ? Oh yeah, hiding in luxury in a Pakistan army
town.
In response to the plane attacks you murdered countless thousands in an immiserated land
and after another brain fart thought Iraq was a good idea because they had nothing to do
with it either.
The only civilian plane to fly out of the US on Sept 11 2001 was carrying the Saudi
Royal family back home. Almost all the plane terrorists were Saudi and Pakistan conspired
against you continually. But you didn't have the guts or brains to take either of them on
and instead picked in the weakest of the lot, Afghanistan followed by a nice flat country
you'd already half destroyed and without nukes.
I'm not sure if it was a "failed state" at that point. True, we did not like the brutal
Taliban to be in charge, but I don't think it had no effective central government. It did.
How clueless do you have to be to express antipathy towards Gabbard's stance and question
"what really matters"? What do these idiots think is more important than policies that send
our children to war?
"Senator Chris Murphy complained: "It's a little hard to figure out what itch she's
trying to scratch in the Democratic Party right now.""
Couldn't agree more, Senator Chris. Most Democrats really like these pointless, endless,
trillion dollar wars. They want to keep them going strong as long as possible, because
there's nothing Democrats like better than staggeringly expensive government programs, and
when it comes down to a choice
between being more frugal and getting Americans out of the Middle East on the one hand, or
a big, juicy budget-busting festival of spending, refugee floods, and death on the other,
there's no question where Chris Murphy and the Democratic Party stand.
As for Tulsi Gabbard, who does she think she's kidding? An anti-war Democrat? A fiscal
restraint Democrat? A "focus on America not foreign wars" Democrat? Whoever heard of such a
thing? She needs a new party, one that isn't run by billionaire elites serving corporate or
foreign interests. Call it "the American Party", to distinguish it from the corrupt garbage
offered by the globalist elites and foreign interests who run the Democrats and GOP.
I appreciate your silly tirade against the Democrats, hate to rain on your biased parade
BUT it is BOTH corrupt political parties that perpetuate this senseless crusade! Both of
these parties should be dismantled and banned!
Tulsi would make the best of all presidents but I am afraid the CIA working for the owner
Oligarchs of the evil Military Industrial War Crime Complex would do the same thing they
did to Kennedy so they could put a stooge in office to do their bidding.
All these wars weren't against terrorists and such. For a good strategist, that was the
best opportunity to get in the Central Asia and plant your bases there under the belly of
Iran, Russia, and China and start making mischief and prepare for the next phases. At that
point, with the new man at helm in Moscow and China getting lift-off, it was clear that the
planned take over of the entire world economy was not happening, so action needed to be
taken.
As for the 6.4 trillion dollars and such, what should be clear to any with two brain
cells between their ears is that the US has no intention to ever repay those loans, or any,
at least not to foreigners. And is the duty of the American cogs to shed their blood for
their betters' ever expanding profits.
I could remind readers that Hillary Clinton is not now running for president and is not
ever going to be president, but I know the TAC target demographic uses snarls about Hillary
the way the rest of us use punctuation marks, so I guess I can let the gratuitous
first-paragraph sneer slide.
Your representation of the Sen. Murphy quote is upside down, inside out, and completely
obviates the rest of the article. He is not bemused that someone is trying to sell steaks
to vegetarians. He is asking why she is trying to sell refrigerators to eskimos.
Meanwhile, her fellow Democrats appear abysmally unconcerned about the human and
financial toll.
You... couldn't be bothered to spend even 15 seconds typing in a name of one of the
Democratic frontrunners and the words "foreign policy" or "endless wars" into google?
"From endless wars that strain military families to trade policies that crush our middle
class, Washington's foreign policy today serves the wealthy and well-connected at the
expense of everyone else... A strong military should act as a deterrent so that most of the
time, we won't have to use it. We must continue to be vigilant about the threat of
terrorism, but it's time to bring our troops home... That means cutting our bloated defense
budget and ending the stranglehold of defense contractors on our military policy."
I'm well to the left of center, and I donated to Tulsi early in her campaign. So many
conservatives have praised her that she's become suspect for people on the left. She's
allowed herself to become a one issue candidate, and that's unworkable in a presidential
campaign.
Her anti gay activities in the past are problematic, and although she identifies as a
Hindu, there are claims she's or was member of a cult like group. It's very clear to me
that the Evangelicals would attack her for her religion in any event. Tulsi will never be
president, but I hope she continues her battle to end the forever war.
There is blindness across the political spectrum about the perilous state of the world.
They do not see the similarities with 1914 and 1939. The situations are not identical, no
two situations are. But the pattern is clear.
https://www.ghostsofhistory...
"... The worst of these massacres happened in Ghouta in August 2013 when 2000 civilian hostages (rebel claim) were gassed to death by rebels and their pre-White Helmets "civil defence". The OPCW was there to cover up the crime and to fabricate evidence to assign blame to Syria. ..."
Manufacturing a pretext for the U.S.
missile strike on Syria in April 2018 is nowhere near the biggest of OPCW's crimes. The
OPCW is an accessory , both before and after the fact to the crime of
mass murder.
It should now be clear to everyone that Syrian "rebels" gassed thousands of hostages in
cellars, most likely with chlorine gas, and then paraded the victims in White Helmets
snuff videos. OPCW conspired in this crime in both encouraging the terrorists to more murder
and by protecting them afterward by assigning blame to Assad and the Syrian government.
The worst of these massacres happened in Ghouta in August
2013 when 2000 civilian hostages (rebel claim) were gassed to death by rebels and their
pre-White Helmets "civil defence". The OPCW was there to cover up the crime and to fabricate
evidence to assign blame to Syria.
We have been documenting
these crimes and hoaxes at A Closer Look On Syria from December 2012. OPCW was used
from the beginning to manufacture consent for war. See for example:
Of course, the OPCW is already there! I highly suggest Caitlin Johnstone's article b
linked be read, which can be
found here .
We should expand on Petri's number of people involved in this crime to include all the
paid disinformation artists noted in Caitlin's essay at minimum. What becomes very clear in
all this is the total collusion with OPCW upper level management--those whom the
whistleblowers and their allies within OPCW petitioned--in these crimes as Petri contends.
Until they are visibly replaced, nothing issued by OPCW has any credence.
OPCW has shown to be a pure political entity, used at will by few regimes in the UN to
promote their agenda, b has done a tremendous job to humanity to bring the truth to the
public worldwide. Syrians have paid the price for UN leaders support to global terrorism for
too long. It must stop now.
"... Starting to remind me more and more of JFK. She's a natural at public speaking; I don't think I've ever seen her lost for words, and while she must have prepared herself for many of these questions. she launches immediately into her response and does not use recovery pauses like "Ummm " that break up the flow of her speech. She responds instantly and seemingly spontaneously, and delivers the whole message as a seamless package. ..."
Did she say she would not vote for impeachment? Up to recently, I thought that, while she was
the best of a bunch of fakers, clowns and idiots, her lack of experience and toughness were
fatal flaws..
However, her ongoing performances suggests to me that she is capable of being a
good president – the first in decades in my opinion.
Starting to remind me more and more of JFK. She's a natural at public speaking; I don't think
I've ever seen her lost for words, and while she must have prepared herself for many of these
questions. she launches immediately into her response and does not use recovery pauses like
"Ummm " that break up the flow of her speech. She responds instantly and seemingly
spontaneously, and delivers the whole message as a seamless package.
2:42
I find it funny that Kamala said that because if there is any candidate on that stage that
"can speak to all people" it's definitely Tulsi. Conservatives actually appreciate and
respect Tulsi Gabbard, even tho we disagree with her with just about everything, she actually
does a good job speaking to both sides. She's the only candidate that shows respect to
conservatives and isn't afraid to go on Fox News. Unlike Kamala. Conservatives do not like
her and we know she doesn't care about us.
A story has been
circulating suggesting that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo will soon be resigning because
he needs to focus on planning for his campaign to become a Senator from Kansas in 2020.
This is good news for the United States, as Senator Lindsey Graham has had no one he is able
to talk to about exporting democracy by blowing up the planet since Joe Lieberman retired and
John McCain died.
According to the US Census there are 3031 counties in the US.
If we redirected the $3.8 billion plus the 500,000,000 for missile defense that we give
Israel to US counties budgets each county would receive about
$ 1.3 million.
If we included the $1.2 billion each we give to Egypt and Jordon for signing the Carter
peace treaty with Israel that figure increases to $2.3 million for each county.
While $2.3 million may be a small figure for counties with metro cities, it would be a
large amount for the majority of counties across the nation.
Since aid to Israel alone accounts for 50% of US foreign aid who would oppose this re
direct of taxpayers money...besides the politicians...and how would the politicians explain
their opposition to the districts they supposedly represent?
Since its creation in 1948, the modern state of Israel has steadily stolen Palestinian land
and driven Palestinians from their homes, cities and villages.
Nothing has been done to halt Israel's steady march to tighten its absolute control of the
Palestinian people with the obvious goal of ethnic cleansing, an historic fact well documented
by Israeli scholar
Ilan Pappe .
Under the protection of a security-obsessed military occupation, fully supported and
underwritten by U.S. tax payers, Israel denies it has broken any laws. Israel makes its own
self-preservation laws. It listens to no higher authority.
Israel has destroyed olive tree orchards and smothered stolen farmlands and pastures with
modern malls where U.S. firms like Ace Hardware and Burger King enrich stock holders who don't
know, or don't care, that they are taking part in the ugly crime of ethnic cleansing.
(The first time I saw an Ace Hardware store in a Ma'ale Adumim mall, I started my own
personal boycott of Ace, an action unfair to employees of my local Ace outlet, but one that has
increased the receipts of my small neighborhood hardware store.)
The narrative of Israeli governments heeding no call but their own, has been with us all
along, but U.S. media readers/viewers have avoided having to think about it, or do anything
about it.
They live comfortably within their bubble of ignorance which is created and sustained for
them by their newspapers, news magazines, television outlets, radio broadcasts, government
leaders and, alas, their religious leaders.
It does not have to be this way. During the last decade, the narrative of settlements like
Ma'ale Adumim has been available on the internet in reports like this one from Electronic Intafada , which begins
:
It is only a fifteen minute bus ride from Jerusalem to the Ma'ale Adumim settlement. After
entering through guarded gates, one's first impression is of a Miami-style suburb. The town
at noon seems almost abandoned because the major part of Ma'ale Adumim residents head off to
work in Jerusalem during the day. . . .
As soon as Barack Obama demanded from Israel the simple act of "freezing" its settlement expansion , Israel trotted out Public
Relations Plan A for distribution to the media: Have a heart, settlement residents need room
for their families to grow.
Israel operates on the logic of the man found guilty of killing his parents. The guilty man
begged for mercy on the grounds that he was now an orphan.
To tell you about the Israeli settlers' plea for mercy, the Los Angeles Times (July 6) delivered its version of the
orphan story: "Israel's settlements in West Bank present a major hurdle."
The opening paragraphs of the Times story set the tone for the plea with weasel words
(Lobby talking points) used by writer Edmund Sanders:
Reporting from Ma'ale Adumim, West Bank -- This sprawling, well-manicured Israeli
settlement -- with its rows of red-tile roofs, palm trees and air-conditioned shopping mall
-- could almost pass for Orange County. Except the guards in this gated community sometimes
pack automatic weapons.
Settlements such as the city-sized Ma'ale Adumim, about four miles east of Jerusalem in
the West Bank, are viewed by much of the world as illegal because they are built on land
seized by Israel during the 1967 Middle East War. Many Israelis see Ma'ale Adumim as part of
their country.
Now let us review the weasel words.
The reference to the illegality of Ma'ale Adumim is softened by the qualifying rhetorical
device, "viewed by much of the world as illegal". The phase "viewed by" suggests that the issue
at hand is open to debate among reasonable people.
Reasonable, as, for example, as a story that might have appeared in a Birmingham, Alabama,
newspaper, circa 1939, reporting that "segregation is viewed by many in the South as as a way
to maintain harmony between the races and preserve our Southern Way of Life."
Should such an analysis have been open to debate? No, certainly not in the minds of a small
number of courageous Southern liberals, and an increasingly impatient black population.
It required two more decades of U.S. racial oppression for that "debate"–for and
against segregation–to reach a definitive conclusion with "all deliberate speed".
Now we have a 21st century debate. The Times' Monday story includes the phrase: "many
Israelis see Ma'ale Adumim as part of their country." Do they, indeed? How many Israelis?
Most polls suggest that sentiment is largely confined to the pro-settler community, while
"security-minded" government leaders continue to demand the inclusion of Ma'ale Adumimin a
future Israeli state
To other more fair-minded Israelis the phrase "many Israelis see Ma'ale Adumim as part of
their country", unpleasantly evokes the case of the parent-killer who begs for mercy because he
is an orphan.
The Time s story continues:
Now the long-simmering dispute over this and other fast-growing settlements has become a
major obstacle to restarting peace talks.
Settlement building is not a long-simmering dispute. It is part of decades of immoral and
illegal actions by Israel and is much more than a "major obstacle" to peace talks. It is an
indisputable violation of international law, which, if allowed to stand, will block any
successful peace talks.
The parent-killer should mourn his Mom and Dad from his jail cell, not while sitting in the
sun in his well-watered grass covered private backyard, shaded from the hot summer sun by a
picnic umbrella purchased from a nearby Ace Hardware.
The LA Times reserves most of its early sympathy for the illegal settlers of an
illegal city with these touching "facts":
"Why is President Obama interfering with our lives, telling us how many children we can
have and whether we can get married?" asked Benny Kashriel, longtime mayor of Ma'ale Adumim.
. . .
Talk about a possible freeze has many here worried.
"You can't freeze a city," Kashriel said. "If you freeze, you go backwards. Every month we
are not building and people are not coming, it affects the economic situation of the city. .
. . It's punishing."
A freeze, officials say, would threaten the opening of four new synagogues and seven
sorely needed schools. Class sizes are already near the legal limit of 40 students per
room.
An additional 400 units of housing in various stages of construction might also be shut
down, leaving homeowners -- many of whom have already taken out mortgages up to $300,000 --
with monthly payments and no place to live.
The Times knew American readers would identify with those folks holding mortgages of
up to $300,000 with monthly payments and no place to live. And those same readers can also
identify with parents whose children are in schools "near the legal limit of 40 students per
room".
Further down in the story, the Times reports on the Arab village of Aziriyeh, (in
biblical times, the village of Bethany), where Lazarus was called from his grave by Jesus. (Or
as the Times writes, carefully avoiding any validation of a religious belief, "where the
biblical Lazarus is said to have risen from the dead").
The comparison of Aziriyeh (Bethany) with Ma'ale Adumim is fact-filled. The comparison also
strains for a "balance" that is impossible to achieve between occupiers and the occupied.
Since 1967, the story reports, the village of Aziriyeh has had three-fourths of its land
stolen to enlarge Ma'ale Adumim. Its mayor, Issam Faroun, makes a comparison between his
citizens and those of the illegal citizens of Ma'ale Adumim. The facts are presented fairly.
The comparative use of water is an example.
Mayor Faroun said:
. . . that as Ma'ale Adumim frets about the fate of its landscaped grounds or swimming
pools, Azariyah residents receive water only once a week. The town gateway has turned into a
junkyard of trash, scrap metal and old appliances. Schools have 45 students per class and
unemployment is 50%, in part because the barrier prevents workers from reaching
Jerusalem.
With no room to expand horizontally, families are adding second and third stories to their
homes as children grow up and marry. Bassem abu Roomy, 31, still lives in his parents' house,
sharing two rooms with his pregnant wife and two children. His younger brothers are not so
lucky.
"We can't add any more stories because the foundation of the house can't support it," he
said. "So they can't get married."
When did the relationship between Palestinians and Israelis in Aziriyeh (Bethany) and Ma'ale
Adumim go wrong? When that first brick was laid in Maale Adumim soon after 1967? When Ma'ale
Adumim gobbled up three fourths of Aziriyeh's farmland for its own use? Name your own moment in
recent memory.
The LA Times wants us to look back no further than two decades when the biblical
village of Lazarus and the modern Israeli city of Ma'ale Adumim had, as the Times
describes it, their harmonious relations "strained".
A decade ago, the two communities lived somewhat harmoniously. Israelis shopped in
Azariyah [Bethany] and Palestinians worked on housing projects in the settlement. But during
the last Palestinian uprising, in 2000, two settlers were shot in the village and relations
have been strained since.
The competing needs of these two communities have become part of the international
debate.
So there you have it. Everything was fine until two Israeli settlers were shot. This is a
case study on why the Israeli Lobby and the U.S. Congress are so grateful for news stories like
this one that appeared in the Los Angeles Times.
For Sanders and the Times , the Arab village of Azariyah and the modern illegal city
of Maale Adumim are merely playing a role in an "international debate".
No wonder that parent-killer failed to get any respect with his request for mercy because he
was now an orphan. He did not have the support of his own personal lobby making a case for
orphans who have killed their parents.
The picture above is of a barrier in the Arab village of Azariyah (Bethany). The break
in the barrier has been covered by barbed wire. The wire is removed and replaced on a regular
basis by Israeli authorities, who built the barrier in the first place. This photo is from
the website of the World Council of Churches' Ecumenical Accompaniment Programme in Palestine and
Israel.
Progressive journalist Michael Tracey claimed Tuesday that MSNBC is has dropped all
pretenses for their "contempt" towards Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hawaii).
The political news contributor said the left-leaning network has treated her fellow 2020
Democratic candidates, including businessman Andrew Yang , and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) unfairly, but he argued
that with Gabbard it, "crosses a certain threshold."
"Fundamentally they're beholden to whatever the market incentives are and right now it's
within their market interests to depict Tulsi as an infiltrator, as a Trojan horse in the
Democratic Party and not deal on the substance with what she's saying which is why over and
over again they tar her as a Russian plant essentially," Tracey told Hill.TV.
"There's nobody who can really offer any kind countervailing view because it's just not
economically advantageous for them at this point," he added.
MSNBC didn't immediately return Hill.TV's request for comment.
Tracey pointed to a fiery exchange between Gabbard and Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) during last week's 2020
primary debate as a prime example.
During the debate, Harris accused Gabbard of being a conservative media darling and
consistently going on Fox News to bash President Obama during his tenure.
"I think that it's unfortunate that we have someone on this stage who is attempting to be
the Democratic nominee for president of the United States, who, during the Obama
administration, spent four years full-time on Fox News criticizing President Obama," Harris
said.
Gabbard dismissed the criticism, calling it "ridiculous."
The California senator also hit Gabbard over her meeting Syrian President Bashar al-Assad,
who U.S. officials have accused of being a war criminal. Harris concluded her attack by saying
that Democrats need a candidate who can take on President Trump as well as "bring the party and
the nation together."
The back-and-forth came after Gabbard criticized the Democratic Party of fashioning outdated
foreign policies "represented "by Hillary Clinton and others' foreign
policy."
"Our Democratic Party unfortunately is not the party that is of, by and for the people. It
is a party that has been and continues to be influenced by the foreign policy establishment in
Washington, represented by Hillary Clinton and others' foreign policy, by the military
industrial complex and other greedy, corporate interests," she said.
Leading up to the fifth Democratic debate, Gabbard engaged in a weeks-long feud with Clinton
after the former Democratic presidential nominee said the Hawaii lawmaker was "the favorite of
the Russians."
'thanks b.. looking at the theatre, it seems dems have backed themselves into a corner... meanwhile obama wants to ca-bosh
sanders... You know if Sanders had some character he would run as an independent with Tulsi.. but you all know that stands a snowball
chance in hell.. the problem with conformists, is they spend too much time conforming and that doesn't end up serving anyone..
and it is the reason trump got elected - he is not a conformist.. self centered narcissist, yes, but conformist - no.. too bad
about american leadership being persona non grata...
what i don't understand is why bernie doesn't run as an independent? if he is so great and would be great for the usa, why
can't he figure this basic picture out? this is why i give merit to jackrabbit sometimes - it is all political theatre and they
are all in it together raping the common people..
A story has been
circulating suggesting that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo will soon be resigning because
he needs to focus on planning for his campaign to become a Senator from Kansas in 2020.
This is good news for the United States, as Senator Lindsey Graham has had no one he is able
to talk to about exporting democracy by blowing up the planet since Joe Lieberman retired and
John McCain died.
"The difficulty here is that Trump thinks he's defending the military, when he's not"
No, this is not about Trump defending the military. What this is about is how Trump thinks war should be fought, "tough" in
his words. What he means by this is troops should be utterly ruthless. They should murder and kill civilians, as this strikes
fear into the enemy and shows them how "tough" we are. Plus of course Trump likes vengeance. No one should be surprised by this
as Trump has voiced strong support for war crimes, he wants "strong" torture, he wants the families of terrorists, women, children,
elderly murdered to punish the terrorists. Sad thing is, I've heard lots of support for this kind of warfighting among conservatives.
Trump has the mentality of an authoritarian dictator, thankfully he's not that smart.
Army Col. Keven Benson suggests Trump may have overplayed his hand, considering all the wreckage he wrought playing to his base
at the possible cost of his legitimacy among those in uniform. Benson charges, too, that the president's decision to reverse the
directives of senior Navy officers in disciplining one of their own might lose him support not only among senior officers, but
among the rank and file -- a constituency that voted overwhelmingly to put him in the White House.
"You know, these guys, these three knuckleheads -- Lorance, Golsteyn and Gallagher -- might be welcome on Fox News," Benson
says, "but they wouldn't be welcome in my platoon."
Damn.
If it is all the same to everyone, I think we shouldn't indulge in the kind of permissiveness that makes incidents like the
My Lai Massacre or the Abu Graib prisoner abuse scandal possible.
I served as a medical corpsman in Vietnam (31 May 1967 - 31 May 1968). That is to be blunt, I served as an enlisted man which
is equivalent to a working class peon in civilian life or an Indentured servant who didn't have the money to pay his passage to
the American colony but promised to serve an extended period of apprenticeship to pay it off. In American society at that time
an indentured servant was one rung above being a slave. So I am no fan of the brass. And I have never been a big fan of our Commander-in-Chief
"Bone Spurs" given what I saw during my tour of duty in Vietnam.
But on his decision to deny the brass javing their way and giving them the fickle finger of fate, i.e. the middle finger if
you don't get my drift, I support President Trump wholeheartedly. Anyone who can piss off the brass and make them whine like melting
snowflakes must be doing something right. Also does Mr. Perry remember when President Richard Nixon pardoned Lt. William Calley
after being convicted for the infamous My Lai Massacre?
The American people overwhelmingly supported Nixon's pardon.They will again support President Trump's decision. They do not
read the TAC. Nor do they read any other high-falutin' journal of political opinion. But they are still patriots in their minds.
But being populists they are not necessarily patriots when it comes to the brass who in their thinking are the equivalent of the
1% in civilian life.
It's historical class warfare that fuels populism even though these populists have probably never read Karl Marx. So the brass
can disagree vehemently with Trump, They can also resign like Richard Spencer did and join the private sector. But they may be
in for a rude awakening when they try to give an order to average civilians and are instead given fickle fingers of fate. And
besides, let's be real about this latest crisis du jour, there are plenty more brass where these whiners came from. I bet you
at the Pentagon the brass are literally bumping into each other just walking down the halls.
But they swore allegiance to our Constitution. The president gives orders to them as commander-in-chief. Not the other way
around. Mr. Perry doesn't get how our country has changed since Trump won the election. I assume reading this essay, and if I
am wrong I apologize here, he probably has never broken bread with the great unwashed given how he identifies with military authority.
Trump was elected president surfing on a wave of populism. He played his populist cards in this tempest in a teapot. He gets it.
He is playing to his base. He wants to get re-elected.
But I have one question for Mr. Perry. Why didn't the brass resign en masse against the Iraq War or all these useless Forever
Wars we have been fighting?
These same people stood by and watched our military be socially engineered and gender normed to the point of incompetence. These
are Obama sycophants pure and simple.
A "crisis" in Special Ops is good. Anything that weakens Deepstate is good. Trump didn't make his decision on this basis; he only
needed to assuage his ego; but nevertheless he accidentally did the right thing.
I don't much care about this since I consider most all US military to be war criminals. I suppose I just note the cosmic justice
which punishes many of them with PTSD, drug addiction, and suicide. Now... let's get on with privatizing the VA.
The desk jockey keyboard warrior officers in the Pentagon want to make examples even if they have to use prosecutorial misconduct
to do it and that will help morale and discipline?
Trump should get rid of all the swamp Generals and Admirals. I'm sure they
will enjoy retirement making millions at Lockheed and Raytheon. Trump supports the Troops, not the Bureaucrats.
One gets the impression that the "Rules of Engagement" seem to have been the issue in the case discussed here but they were forgotten
in the bureaucratic squabble between the military and the White House.
People like Pete Hegseth call Chief Gallagher's service exemplary and repeat that he was acquitted of 'alleged war crimes'.
He was acquitted because a medic testified that after he and Gallagher stabilized a wounded, sedated prisoner after 20 minutes,
Gallagher inexplicably stabbed him (non-fatally) below the collar bone, stormed off, and then the medic suffocated him before
Iraqi security forces could torture him. Later Gallagher posed with his corpse.
This is not the sign of a well man or one who was making a snap, life or death decision. I'm not interested in punishing Gallagher
but this hero worship of our military and failure to acknowledge that these long deployments are breaking down our military is
self-deception. But I won't be surprised if I see a trifecta of Trump, Hegseth, and Gallagher at a campaign stop.
If we are being honest, I bet the IRGC has a better reputation than us in the M.E.
Julius Caesar was able to march on Rome because the soldiers gave their fealty to him over Rome. I find Trump's pardoning of soldiers
accused of war crimes deeply disturbing.
The first and foremost principle that must be maintained is that the President has complete authority over the military. Its one
of the central constructs of our republic. The most egregious offence was for Spencer to defy Trump's order. Regardless of what
one's opinion on the state of the special forces is, we can't go down that road. To say that Trump is destroying the commanders
authorities is bass ackwards. The US military, like it or not, MUST have civilians over and above them.
Having said that, I completely agree that there is something very bad wrong with the special forces and especially the Navy
Seals. My experience with Green Berets in the Vietnam era is that they were very effective in working with indigenous populations,
to include recruiting fighters to our side, spoke their language, were highly competent, tough as nails, and very humble. Out
of uniform, one would not even know they were Green Berets. Likewise almost all Army Rangers are equally humble. Green Berets
are recruited from the Rangers.
I never had any personal experiences with Navy Seals, but over the last decade or so at least, its obvious that a large percent
of them are a bunch of braggadocios chest thumpers. There is something seriously wrong with the Navy Seal recruitment program
or training or both. They have a very bad reputation of making their missions public, making jokes out of their security clearances
and never seem to be held accountable for such violations.
The regular military has always distrusted the SOF for the very reasons cited in this article. The Pentagon forbade the beret
until JFK overruled the brass in 1963.
The Founding CO of that vaunted Tier 1 unit Seal team 6 was convicted of federal crimes and spent time in prison in the 1980s.
The Green Beret affair in 1965 resulted in the murder of a allied civilian in Vietnam. The military grew these units beyond
reasonable levels and has misused and overused them since 9/11,
One is left to wonder whether the president has really overplayed his hand or these naval officers are simply Trump-haters as
is all too often the case these days. I'd have to go with let the Navy be the Navy and handle it's own business. But one has to
question whether these officers would've objected as strongly had it been Obama giving the orders?
What a disgrace... I'm a dovish, pacifist peacenik, but even I understand maintaining organizational order, respect for authority,
chain-of-command... (and have respect for many in the military for their desire and attempts to play by international rules and
by-the-book procedures.)
Trump & Gallagher (who strikes me as a sadist) are a disgrace and Fox News is especially beyond the pale, giving Gallagher
a platform to impugn his commanding officer! in public! Where has anyone ever gotten away with that before?... unbelievable.
I guess you could hope for some silver lining that this might undermine the DoD's global empire tendencies... but I'm not sure
this is a good way to get that done (ie leaving or promoting arrogant, cruel men like Gallagher, with the stench of by-gone barbarism
clinging to him, in the services:)
If I were one of this president's advisers, I would make one thing clear.
Don't tweet instructs to any department or department member because it is neither a proper channel for official communique's
nor is it conducive to to effectively, management and more times than not creates more trouble that it solves.
After listing the reasons why "twitter" is an inappropriate forum. i would of course be fired. But I am deeply concerned that
the president is conducting official business in open forums such as twitter.
The official in question was certainly being reasonable to request the order either direct communique or in riding. Given the
nature of twitter, it was a reasonable expectation.
Laugh: I think there are plenty of issues with the military justice system. But that is another matter best left out of twitter
feeds.
Why didn't anyone mention what the effect of these democracy wars are having on our soldiers considering they aren't actually
protecting the country but helping the Muslims move over to it, not just here but to Europe as well.
Most of the terrorist fighters are coming and going from other countries and travel freely oh and besides in Syria we're really
not fighting terrorists but over-throwing a government.
To top it all off these actions are helping to bankrupt our nation. I wonder how this plays for morale of our soldiers? I'm
sure many don't care, the majority of people indluding those just coming in ro the country seem to hate the country anyway so
why would anyone want to fight for them and then maybe there is another side who sees it all and cares, cares that they are losing
their nation. What about the "fight them over there but love them and bow down to their diverstity"? What happens when you realize
that you're not the savior you thought you would be and no one is greatful to have you around, they are fighting you endlessly
and ruthlessly while you're ttying to be a gentle invader, not fighting to win but to install democracy and can't figure out why
no one wants your gift of gentrification.
I'm not so sure I could take his rank from him either, maybe just give him a break from the war on the ground and the two sides
of the war in his head.
On the other hand we increasingly see an unwillingness by the military and Deep State to be ruled over by civilian government,
and instead of a commander in chief, to make of elected Presidents mere puppets for their consensus.
I disagree with Lt.Col Milburns (Ret.) The UCMJ is military law and military law is part of federal law. The president has the
right to pardon anyone convicted under the UCMJ but his authority stops where the law is concerned. The president isn't above
the law, he can countermand the conviction but he can't force the military to withdraw the A@D given by the individual services.
That remains the prerogative of the commanders. Discipline must be maintained and the commanders are responsible and accountable
for that discipline.
CIC is a title conferred on a civilian president, he states that they are responsible for the strategic decisions used to justify
the use of our military forces, the Presidents actions with regard to anything other than the pardon does not meet the criteria
of a strategic decision.
And if water isn't involved in the mission then there really isn't need for SEALS to be there. Mission creep on the part of
the Navy to increase Spec Ops budgets.
Rank has their privilege and as far as I know, PDJT is the CiC. So either you - the un-elected bureaucrat, shut up and follow
the order or put up and resign your commission.
"... 38% of respondents want to end the war in Afghanistan now or within one year, and another 31% support negotiations with the Taliban to bring the war to an end. A broad majority of Americans wants to bring the war to a conclusion. I already mentioned the survey's finding that there is majority support for reducing the U.S. military presence in East Asia last night. Americans not only want to get out of our interminable wars overseas, but they also want to scale back U.S. involvement overall. ..."
"... The survey asked respondents how the U.S. should respond if "Iran gets back on track with its nuclear weapons program." That is a loaded and potentially misleading question, since Iran has not had anything resembling a nuclear weapons program in 16 years, so there has been nothing to get "back on track" for a long time. Framing the question this way is likely to elicit a more hawkish response. In spite of the questionable wording, the results from this year show that there is less support for coercive measures against Iran than last year and more support for negotiations and non-intervention: ..."
"... With only around 10% favoring it, there is almost no support for preventive war against Iran. Americans don't want war with Iran even if it were developing nuclear weapons ..."
"... There is substantial and growing support for bringing our current wars to an end and avoiding unnecessary conflicts in the future. This survey shows that there is a significant constituency in America that desires a more peaceful and restrained foreign policy, and right now virtually no political leaders are offering them the foreign policy that they say they want. It is long past time that Washington started listening. ..."
he Eurasia Group Foundation's new survey of public
opinion on U.S. foreign policy finds that support for greater restraint continues to rise:
Americans favor a less aggressive foreign policy. The findings are consistent across a
number of foreign policy issues, and across generations and party lines.
The 2019 survey results show that most Americans support a more restrained foreign policy,
and it also shows an increase in that support since last year. There is very little support for
continuing the war in Afghanistan indefinitely, there is virtually no appetite for war with
Iran, and there is a decline in support for a hawkish sort of American exceptionalism. There is
still very little support for unilateral U.S. intervention for ostensibly humanitarian reasons,
and support for non-intervention has increased slightly:
In 2018, 45 percent of Americans chose restraint as their first choice. In 2019, that has
increased to 47 percent. Only 19 percent opt for a U.S.-led military response and 34 percent
favor a multilateral, UN-led approach to stop humanitarian abuses overseas.
38% of respondents want to end the war in Afghanistan now or within one year, and another
31% support negotiations with the Taliban to bring the war to an end. A broad majority of
Americans wants to bring the war to a conclusion. I already mentioned the survey's finding that
there is majority support for reducing the U.S. military presence in East Asia last night.
Americans not only want to get out of our interminable wars overseas, but they also want to
scale back U.S. involvement overall.
The report's working definition of American exceptionalism is a useful one: "American
exceptionalism is the belief that the foreign policy of the United States should be
unconstrained by the parochial interests or international rules which govern other countries."
This is not the only definition one might use, but it gets at the heart of what a lot of hawks
really mean when they use this phrase. While most Americans still say they subscribe to
American exceptionalism either because of what the U.S. represents or what it has done, there
is less support for these views than before. Among the youngest respondents (age 18-29), there
is now a clear majority that rejects this idea.
The survey asked respondents how the U.S. should respond if "Iran gets back on track with
its nuclear weapons program." That is a loaded and potentially misleading question, since Iran
has not had anything resembling a nuclear weapons program in 16 years, so there has been
nothing to get "back on track" for a long time. Framing the question this way is likely to
elicit a more hawkish response. In spite of the questionable wording, the results from this
year show that there is less support for coercive measures against Iran than last year and more
support for negotiations and non-intervention:
A strong majority of both Republicans and Democrats continue to seek a diplomatic
resolution involving either sanctions or the resumption of nuclear negotiations. This year,
there was an increase in the number of respondents across party lines who would want
negotiations to resume even if Iran is a nuclear power in the short term, and a bipartisan
increase in those who believe outright that Iran has the right to develop nuclear weapons to
defend itself. So while Republicans might be more likely than Democrats to believe Iran
threatens peace in the Middle East, voters in neither party are eager to take a belligerent
stand against it.
With only around 10% favoring it, there is almost no support for preventive war against
Iran. Americans don't want war with Iran even if it were developing nuclear weapons, and it
isn't doing that. It may be that the failure of the "maximum pressure" campaign has also
weakened support for sanctions. Support for the sanctions option dropped by almost 10 points
overall and plunged by more than 20 points among Republicans. In 2018, respondents were evenly
split between war and sanctions on one side or negotiations and non-intervention on the other.
This year, support for diplomacy and non-intervention in response to this imaginary nuclear
weapons program has grown to make up almost 60% of the total. If most Americans favor diplomacy
and non-intervention in this improbable scenario, it is safe to assume that there is even more
support for those options with the real Iranian government that isn't pursuing nuclear
weapons.
There is substantial and growing support for bringing our current wars to an end and
avoiding unnecessary conflicts in the future. This survey shows that there is a significant
constituency in America that desires a more peaceful and restrained foreign policy, and right
now virtually no political leaders are offering them the foreign policy that they say they
want. It is long past time that Washington started listening.
This message is brought to you thanks to the efforts of the combined staffs of the History and Sociology Departments of Alligator
University.
This year of our Lord, the holy Flying Spaghetti Monster 2019, we have discovered a legend--a living, fire-breathing legend at
that. Not since the days of Boudica , a warrior Queen, has the
earth seen such a warrior. Not surpassed by Jean d Árc nor Katherine the Great. This warrior of the wireless age has not only exhibited
compassion on the battlefield, as befits a person of high honor, but has the uncanny ability to perform as the best of Generals (not
just Majors) throughout recorded history have done. Know wherein lies the enemy. Know your own strengths. Know your own weaknesses.
When engaging the enemy, do not hold back. Fight to win! Win as big as you can, while sparing needless damage.
Tulsi, our subject (and [bias apparent here] champion), has arisen, almost from the sea. Far to the West across the Great Water,
from islands spewed from the mouths of living volcanoes, emerged, almost as an eruption, our Warrior Princess Tulsi. She fought to
defend her tribe by joining a council of the advisers, then abandoning such sedentary life and chosing battle instead. Fighting with
distinction, Tulsi saved the lives of many fellow soldiers. Her counsel proved both wise and humane. Troops and others recognized
Tulsi's emerging greatness, coupled with compassion.
To the delight of her cadre, Tulsi sallied forth to the land known today as The Great Swamp. Chauvinistically however, I believe
my south Florida estuary is the true Great Swamp. But we shall leave that debate to a later time.
She joined a regiment called the DNC. At first it seemed to Tulsi this to be a desirable posting, surrounded by fields and rivers
with pleasing structures in which to live. Continuing her steady progress up the ranks, our Warrior Princess, as yet untested by
actual combat, joined others to high councils of War and of Foreign trysts.
But only a few years had yet to pass during her service, Tulsi sensed some problems in the command chain. Plans seemed to favor
neither Nation nor Military, but instead the commanders themselves. Upon thus learning, Tulsi resigned her position, abandoning the
ill-disposed regiment, seeking mission achievement over promotion.
A loosely knit Brigade, called the Democratic Party, united by the power of money and of power itself, was to become the default
posting of TWP. Unfortunately the chain of command was rent asunder by internal factions, an unholy tug of war resulting. This war
is still actively contested--we are in a state of war.
[Injection of unpaid political endorsement, not approved by TWP] Folks, we need this brave general to lead.
Contesting amongst others for the ultimate Brigade command was Tulsi and 21 22 (23?) others. The concept grew either
too tiresome or expensive for many contestants, who either became sick or perished from fatigue and/or loneliness. The field of battle
was becoming clarified, gaining Tulsi progressively improving evaluation and appropriate planning for future campaigns.
The First Slain Enemy, Olaf the Oaf
From the gentle hills and scattered forests of Ohionia came Olaf. Initially he was known as Olaf the Ogre; until he was slain
by sword blows from Warrior Tulsi. Description of her foe is warranted. Her foe was a giant, tall and strong. But Olaf was neither
quick of wit nor of foot. Large he was, as said. The ground would rumble beneath his foot steps. Trees were bent aside as he strode
unstoppably through the woods. Local dwellers both feared and respected Olaf, the mighty.
The battle: the setting is on a level plain under illumination of many cell phones torches soon after sunset.
Other contestants on the field have agreed that only two contestants combat each other. Female referees would enforce rules of combat.
Tulsi and Olaf faced each other. In his ponderous way, Olaf declared his desire to engage. With that, Warrior Tulsi swiftly smote
his pate with a mighty broadsword blow. Owing to the thickness of Olaf's cranium, the sound of the resultant impact was heard for
miles. Yea, more than a thousand miles some say. Rending Olaf's pulsating brain irreversibly damaged, the Oaf staggered from battleground,
only to succumbing to his wounds months later.
Not being particularly fond of Olaf, I did not check the source of the following: it is estimated that 30 people attended his
internment, including undertakers.
Yet the Campaign had only just begun. More foes to conquer.
Second Casualty: Klammer the Camel
Venturing forth from the Kingdom of Kalifornication comes (but not for very long) the former Lord High Executioner, Klammer the
Camel. Since Klammer is of mixed parentage, it is unsure whether Klammer is a Dromedary (one hump camel) or a two hump Bactrian camel.
It is recorded that an expert on Klammer's humping is retired statesman Willie Brown.
It is said said that Klammer's exhalations could kill enemies at 10 paces. Yet Klammer's best weapon was heaving heavy Criminal
Code books at her victims. Strangely, Klammer looked reasonably fit in her drab clothing. Foes who faced her in battle have noted
how white Klammer's teeth are as she gnashes at them. She had a strange reaction to cannabis. When others utilized the substance,
she raged and destroyed them, if she could reach them. Yet when she herself inhaled the aroma of such burning vegetation, she became
as if in a trance.
The battlefield: very much like the field upon which brave Tulsi slew the Oaf, at night with many candles burning held
by acolytes of various contestants. Once again, only two were allowed combat at a time. Supremely self-confident of victory, flush
with self-satisfaction after inflicting a minor wound on former vice-king JoJo the Far Gone. Klammer first engaged other contestants,
smirking from her presumed victories. Now brimming with confidence bordering on hubris, Klammer stood her ground. Then, in a well-planned
straight ahead frontal attack, delivered with swiftness and ferocity, Tulsi struck her foe. And struck her. While Klammer lay quivering
on the ground, TWP demanded an apology of her for her past sins. When none was evinced, Tulsi stuck the tip of her blade into Klammer's
seeming impenetrable armor. This wound, though not immediately fatal, nevertheless is proving fatal to the now debilitated Klammer.
Klammer attempted a counter-attack at another field before falling slack-jawed after a mere glare from Tulsi. Not yet dead, but soon.
Third Casualty: Boots the Jiggler
Wandering from a land not far from the home of Olaf, proceeds the Stolid Boots. He sets his sights on new lands to conquer. The
city he leaves is burning and being plundered by wandering Mnuchkins from the neighboring fiefdom of Illinois. Unconcerned with the
plight of the subjects of the Boots' prior management, Boots bravely strides forth, still not battle-tested. He gathers with him
followers, some of whom are loyal, while others need financial encouragement to participate in his campaign.
Boots has been gifted with the ability to speak so eloquently and at such length that those auditioners of his monologues are
both amazed and yet unable to understand the essence of Boots' message.
The battlefield: interestingly quite similar to those upon which Tulsi administered the blows dispatching the Oaf and crippling
the Camel. Once again, remaining combatants aligned to watch two of their number engage upon combat.
Boots, buoyed by the support of his entourage, summoned forth 400 of his Southern Army to aid in his battle. There Boots turned
upon Tulsi, promising to not only to vanquish her by his superior generalship but send troops across the Southern border. But, becoming
anxious of TWP, he turned to assay his retinue of 400. But lo, none remained, most not having left the barracks.
In face-to-face combat Boots met Tulsi. Mutually acknowledging their military experience, Tulsi struck blows into the Jiggler.
This assault froze Boots into place, unable to respond. The above picture of Boots was made immediately after a biting blow from
Tulsi's broadsword. He was heard to mumble something like "Et tu, Tulsi?".
. . . . .
Campaigns against larger enemies are soon to come. One looming conflict may be likened to a civil war against Brooklyn Bernie
which hopefully be short. A battle against the Hokey Okie is inevitable.
Our AU colleagues assure me that the Feared Medusa will enter the fray after more rivals have fallen. The Snake-head leads a mighty
army, most of whom are oddly cyborg-like. Bots I think they call them. Hilbots actually.
A musical coda is appropriate here. A good choice is a warning, an admonition to those contemplating with the Warrior Princess.
Equally unsustainable is the implication that Big Capital and the establishment ruling class
is not, and has not been, significantly Jewish over historical time. Žižek simplifies
and caricatures the Middle Ages as a time when "the Jew emerged as the enemy, a parasitic
intruder who disturbs the harmonious social edifice." Žižek obviously employs the
term "harmonious social edifice" with skepticism and disdain, seeing the pre-existing order
(that before the arrival of the Jews) as fraught with exploitation, tensions, and
contradictions. In Žižek's framework then, Jews may be a chaotic capitalist force
that enters Europe, but this was a Europe already experiencing chaotic capitalist forces, and
therefore it would be irrational to blame Jews for anything arising from their emergence and
expansion in Europe. What needs to be distinguished here is the distinction between what might
be termed the organic development of finance in Europe, [18]
For an excellent summary in relation to this process in feudalism, see R. Allen Brown,
Origins of English Feudalism, (New York: Barnes and Noble Books, 1973). and the
exorbitant and often extremely negative developments ushered in by the arrival of the Jews and
their subsequent special relationship with European elites and with capitalism itself.
The organic development of finance and class divisions in Europe is demonstrated in the
evolution of feudalism as a result of the adoption of heavy cavalry by the Franks in the eighth
century, with other, non-military, aspects of continental feudalism arising as the inevitable
social repercussions of this change in military organization. [19]
Ibid .
(For an excellent summary in relation to this process in feudalism, see R. Allen Brown,
Origins of English Feudalism, (New York: Barnes and Noble Books, 1973).) Since
knights needed money, horses, servants, attendants, and freedom from all other non-military
occupations, like tilling the soil, knighthood gradually became an upper-class affair.
Increasing technological sophistication then made mounted warfare more and more expensive and
caused knights to become more sharply distinguished from the ordinary peasant. It also caused
free peasants to become less and less valuable as soldiers, and they therefore declined towards
mere servitude. It was, therefore, in a sense inevitable that the new class of knights should
become a landed aristocracy, and its members were thus in a sense destined to low-level
jurisdiction of a semi-agricultural kind over their peasants. This situation really was, in a
sense, a "harmonious social edifice" to the extent that it followed a clear logic and permitted
these communities and their territories to be competitive in a rapidly changing military and
geopolitical context. The ruling classes were obliged to adopt paternalistic practices in
relation to the peasantry, and outright exploitation was rare since it could be dangerous and
counterproductive in that it could provoke a mass uprising and thus damage militarily-valuable
social cohesion. The social edifice was thus indeed "harmonious" in the sense that it was
coordinated and balanced, and was generally beneficial to the organic national community.
The arrival of Jews in Europe undoubtedly created an imbalance in these class relations, and
between the ruling class and the lower orders. Evidence of this imbalance in medieval Europe
can be obtained both from surviving documentation and artefacts, and from analogous modern
situations such as the the Great Romanian Peasant Revolt of 1907, during which Jewish intrusion
into the existing quasi-feudal social arrangement ended in widespread rebellion and societal
collapse due to the specific excesses of Jewish exploitation. The arrival of the Jews in
Western Europe as a financial and geopolitical power can be dated to their ascent under the
Carolingians in the ninth century, and possibly earlier in the Narbonne where they were noted
as an extraordinarily wealthy class. In this development, the birth of formal, symbiotic
relationships between Jews and self-interested European elites, we see a crucial fissure in
European class relations. Jewish financiers entered into the harmonious social edifice as
privileged and protected outsiders whose sole purpose was to accelerate and distort resource
transfer between European classes, rendering internal class division less about communal
efficiency than about personal gain. In this system, paternalism gave way to such situations as
the permitted Jewish trade in Christian slaves (a key reason for the agitations for Agobard of
Lyons) and widespread exploitative tax farming.
One of the great modern myths, a stroke of Jewish revisionist genius, is that Jews were
forced into such practices by restrictive laws on the ownership of land, and certain other
local contexts. This is historicist relativism at its most bankrupt and, thankfully, modern
scholarship is slowly eroding such misrepresentations and outright falsehoods. Take, for
example, the most recent edition of The Oxford Handbook of the Economics of Religion ,
which states the "remarkable" fact that Jews
whether in Narbonne in 899 or Gironne in 922, in Trier in 919 or Worms in 1090, in
Barcelona in 1053 or Toledo in 1222, or in early medieval England, were permitted to acquire
and own land if they wished. Not only were Jews legally permitted to own land, they could
acquire significant amounts (especially in Italy, southern Spain, southern and east-central
France, and Germany); possessed fields, gardens, and vineyards; and owned, transferred, and
mortgaged land holdings. They preferred to hire tenants, sharecroppers, and wage laborers to
work their lands. For themselves, they chose the most skilled and profitable occupations,
foremost money lending. [20]
R. M. McCleary (ed), The Oxford Handbook of the Economics of Religion (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2011, 68.
Essentially then, we see the immediate and deliberate entrance of the Jews into European
society at the level of knight, if not higher, but without any of the logic or benefits of the
position of knight within the organic social edifice. The Jew in this new social order existed
for no logical reason other than the personal enrichment of certain elites and the communal
enrichment of the Jews themselves. This may be regarded as the first perversion of capitalism
and the first true exploitation (excessive or unfair use of workers with no reason other than
greed) of the serving class within this system.
Again, dispensing with historicist relativism, we can demonstrate the pattern of Jewish
disruptive behaviors within capitalism with reference to analogous modern conditions. For
example, the arenda system of late nineteenth- and early twentieth century-eastern
Europe (especially Poland, Ukraine, and Romania) was remarkably similar to the feudal system of
medieval Western Europe. The arenda system can be regarded as broadly harmonious until
the mass influx of Jewish arendasi during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which
saw the Jews increasingly operate as tax farmers, property agents, customs agents, and loan
merchants. Jewish monopoly in these roles prompted both the rapid commercialization of land and
the expansion of Big Capital, both of which were intended by Jews to exclusively benefit their
in-group. Since the existence of entire Jewish communities depended on exploitative capitalism,
Jews fiercely contended for monopolies in key areas. For example , The Va'ad
Medinat Lita (Lithuanian Jewish Council) twice passed a resolution supporting the lease of
customs and taxes by Jews, stating: "We have openly seen the great danger deriving from the
operation of customs in Gentile hands; for the customs to be in Jewish hands is a pivot on
which everything (in commerce) turns, since thereby Jews may exert control."
Crucially, high Jewish position in the social hierarchy was not accompanied by paternalism
of any kind. In fact, Jews are notable throughout history for their incredibly hostile and
exploitative behaviors towards non-elite Europeans. Philip Eidelberg, a historian of the Great
Romanian Peasant Revolt of 1907, describes how Jewish arendasi " exploited the estates
more ruthlessly than the native Rumanian arendasi ." He continues by explaining that
Jews were not interested in the long-term prosperity of estates or their workers, and often
hiked rents to breaking point "even at the risk of eventually exhausting the available land and
inventory." [21] P.
G. Eidelberg, The Great Rumanian Peasant Revolt of 1907: Origins of a Modern Jacquerie
(), 39. In Rumania, Jews enjoyed monopolies, with Eidelberg demonstrating that Jewish
bankers would decline to grant capital to any non-Jew wanting to enter this form of finance.
[22]
Ibid , 120.
(P. G. Eidelberg, The Great Rumanian Peasant Revolt of 1907: Origins of a Modern
Jacquerie (), 39.) Thus, the Jews competed for profit solely with each other,
ever-increasing the chokehold on their European peasantries. Eidelberg writes that "the result
was a bidding spiral in which the peasant was the loser. In fact, it was just such a
competition between the two greatest Jewish arendas families -- the Fischers and the
Justers -- which was to help spark the 1907 revolt." [23]
Ibid, 39.
(P. G. Eidelberg, The Great Rumanian Peasant Revolt of 1907: Origins of a Modern
Jacquerie (), 39.)
Jews, of course, continue to occupy conspicuous roles in the worst and most exploitative
aspects of capitalism. Jews have also continued to acquire land for exploitative purposes, the
most interesting example being the
Argentinian activities of the British Jewish oligarch Joe Lewis , a tax avoider
and currency speculator who made his billions alongside George Soros when both gambled on the
British pound sterling crashing out of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism in 1992. As one
commentator explains, "Soros' and Lewis' bet against the pound actually led to the pound
crashing, after Soros ordered his hedge fund to " go for the
jugular " and aggressively trade against the currency, thereby prompting its sharp
devaluation. Though Soros is often called "the man who broke the Bank of England" as a result
of the $1 billion in profits he made on that fateful day, Lewis is said to have
made an even larger profit than Soros." While these Jews made billions, the British public
suffered a rapid economic recession. Lewis didn't mind. He repeated the experiment in Mexico,
causing the Mexican
peso crisis , which "led to a massive jump in poverty, unemployment and inequality in
Mexico and left its government beholden to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) through a loan
package arranged by then-U.S. President Bill Clinton."
Growing extravagantly rich from parasitic currency speculation, Jewish oligarchs Soros and
Lewis, together with co-ethnic Big Capitalists Eduardo Elsztain and Marcelo Mindlin, started
buying massive tracts of Argentine real estate, particularly in Patagonia, where they pooled
resources to take over local banks, the regional water supply, oil and gas wealth, and the
area's largest energy supplier. Lewis then set about buying tens of thousands of hectares,
declaring his wish to create "his own state in Patagonia." Some locals were willing to sell
their land. One, Irineo Montero, had refused, and he, along with his wife María Ortiz
and their employee José Matamala, were all found dead under mysterious
circumstances. Lewis' land consolidation was then made complete, and paved the way for a
Zionist enclave that has exploited locals so thoroughly that there have been regular massive
demonstrations ("March for Sovereignty) against this new Jewish ruling class, attracting 80
percent of the local population. According to the research of former French intelligence
officer turned journalist Thierry Meyssan, Lewis is much more amenable to his fellow Jews, and
has been inviting thousands of Israel Defense Forces (IDF) soldiers to his territory annually.
In late 2017, former French intelligence officer turned journalist Thierry Meyssan alleged : "Since the
Falklands War, the Israeli army has been organizing 'holiday camps' in Patagonia for its
soldiers. Between 8,000 and 10,000 of them now come every year to spend two weeks on Joe Lewis'
land."
What we see here is just a very modern example of the millennia-old Jewish pattern of
establishing full-scale operations for extracting a nation's riches and exploiting its people.
We must earnestly ask of Slavoj Žižek: Has Big Capital and the establishment
ruling class not been, and does it not remain, significantly Jewish
Another ringer from Andrew Joyce! We are so lucky to have him. He is helping us all to
recover our collective racial memory (as Jung might call it) as White Gentiles.
In April 2019, Žižek and Jordan Peterson sold out the Sony Centre in Toronto
for their debate titled "Happiness: Capitalism vs. Marxism"
And who, pray tell, was invited to defend the honor of National Socialism?
In a 2009 lecture at the European Graduate School titled "Anti-Semitism, Anti-Semite and
Jew," Žižek argued that anti-Semitism places Jews in "impossible Otherness"
Judaism places Jews in "impossible Otherness." Their bizarre 'chosenness' is the
root of their collective pathology. (Notice how all their theories concerning our
supposed ethno-centrism are just so much projection!)
It is a matter of special irony that Marxists should present their own contradictions in
relation to anti-Semitism and the supposed psychosocial aspects of the anti-Semite.
Have these self-described Marxists never read Karl Marx's own scathing treatment of the
Jews in Zur
Judenfrage ? Here's a well-known passage:
"Let us consider the actual, worldly Jew – not the Sabbath Jew but the everyday
Jew. Let us not look for the secret of the Jew in his religion, but let us look for the
secret of his religion in the real Jew. What is the secular basis of Judaism? Practical
need, self-interest. What is the worldly religion of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his
worldly God? Money. Money is the jealous god of Israel, in face of which no other god may
exist. Money degrades all the gods of man – and turns them into commodities . The
bill of exchange is the real god of the Jew. His god is only an illusory bill of exchange .
The chimerical nationality of the Jew is the nationality of the merchant, of the man of
money in general.[ ] The Jew has emancipated himself in a Jewish manner, not only because
he has acquired financial power, but also because, through him and also apart from him,
money has become a world power and the practical Jewish spirit has become the practical
spirit of the Christian nations. The Jews have emancipated themselves insofar as the
Christians have become Jews. [ ] In the final analysis, the emancipation of the Jews is the
emancipation of mankind from Judaism."
Pretty frickin' harsh, eh! I guess if old Karl were still around to hear the pathetic
maunderings of post-modern Communists like Žižek, he would just shake his head and
say, 'I am not a Marxist.'
According to the research of former French intelligence officer turned journalist
Thierry Meyssan
That's interesting, Dr. Joyce. I've been following him over at Voltaire-net on and off for nearly a decade, and I had
no idea that Meyssan had been an intelligence officer. Neither Wikipedia nor Infogalatic ever
mention it. Good to know
Slavoj Zizek went "full Monty" during his recent visit to Tel Aviv at the invitation of
some sincerely dissident Israelis. They expected words of encouragement, but instead he
informed them that fighting anti-Semitism is more important than defending Palestinians. The
Slovenian philosopher spoke kindly of the swindler Bernie Madoff, who was "a scapegoat who
was easy to blame, when in fact the real problem is the system that allowed and even pushed
Madoff to commit his crimes." Indeed, it must have been 'the system' that pushed poor Mr.
Madoff into crime, just as it was 'the system' that pushed Shylock to enter into
money-lending and Jack the Ripper into the business of carving.
Some of the above are correct but there's a much more succinct and accurate description.
There's one idea that describes the Jews perfectly. It describes their parasitism, their
lying, their chameleon like behavior, their sense of superiority and belief that they are
different from everyone else. There's a simple explanation for why the Jews are hated so much
that also explains their behavior and success. The Jews are a tribe of psychopaths. Not all,
maybe not even the majority, but a large number. All of the Jews ancient writings are nothing
more than a manual for psychopaths to live by. The Talmud is nothing but one psychopathic
thought after another. The Talmud "great enlightenment" basically says that everyone not
Jewish is there to serve Jews. All their property is really the Jews. No one is really human
unless they're Jews and their lives don't matter. A psychopathic religion for a psychopathic
people.
Even if I'm wrong thousands of years of history show a bunch of Jews moving into your
territory in in no way distinguishable from a tribe of psychopaths moving into your
country
They've been thrown out of every single country that they've been to in any numbers.
Psychopaths having no empathy themselves can only go by the feedback they get from the
people they are exploiting. So they push and push to see what they can get away with. The
normal people build up resentment towards them. Thinking "surely they will reform or repent"
like a normal person who does wrong. Of course the Jews do not. They don't have the mental
process for reform. Then in a huge mass outpouring of hate for the Jews, fed up with the
refusal to reform their behavior, they attack and/or deport them. In this stage of the cycle
the Big/Rich Jews escape and the little Jews are attacked.
Start over.
Even if it's wrong if you assume the Jews are a tribe of psychopaths you will never be
surprised and Jew's behavior will make sense.
In order to predict Jews behavior read the great book on Psychopaths by Hervey Cleckley,
"The Mask of Sanity". Here's a chapter you should read. It's about the psychopath Stanley.
Who does all kinds of manic bullshit and spends all his time feeding people the most
outrageous lies. Look at the astounding array of things he's able to get away with. Maybe it
will remind you of a certain tribe. New meme. "They're pulling a Stanley". The whole book is
on the web and worth reading.
" In the course of his European Graduate School lecture, Žižek comments that
"the real mystery of anti-Semitism is why it is a constant "
This is not a mystery at all. NO ONE can stand psychopaths over the long term. They're
fucked up. You even hear Jews leaving Israel because the culture is so fucked up. Even
psychopaths don't want to live with psychopaths.
The only know recipe to living with psychopaths recommended by psychiatrist is don't live
with them at all. The sooner we realize that the Jews are a damaged, evil, twisted tribe of
psychopaths and there's no reasoning, dealing, co-opting or living with them the better we
will be. The only 100%. guaranteed, tried and true, tested with 100% satisfaction of dealing
with the Jews is to get rid of them. Peacefully if we can get it but by any means necessary
get them away from you and leave them no control of any sort over your country or any other
aspect of your and your countrymen's lives.
Žižek copying, almost verbatim, a review of MacDonald's book by Stanley
Hornbeck that appeared in the March 1999 issue of The American Renaissance.
What a damning indictment of American Renaissance!
Slavoj Zizek, the uttermost dregs of human intellectual depravity, agrees so utterly with
an Amren article he feels comfortable copying it word for word as it it were his own!
Have these self-described Marxists never read Karl Marx's own scathing treatment of the
Jews in "Zur Judenfrage"?
This "well-known (pretty frickin' harsh) passage" is permanently cited by anti-marxists to
denunciate "Karl" as "antisemite" and with the intention to subsequently ignore his analysis
of capital (for being founded in his "antisemitism").
By the way, it is not necessary to imagine "old Karl" to be "still around" or "to turn in his
grave" to enlighten us with the word "I am not a Marxist". If we can trust in the words of
Engels he said it in reality: "What is certain is that I myself am not a Marxist" (a remark
cited by Engels in his letter to Bernstein of 2-3 November 1882).
Regarding this whole "jews are both for communism and capitalism, and thus anti semites are
full of contradictory nonsense", one needs to point the obvious fact that these jewish
inventions are meant for consumption for the gentiles and not the jews.
Some will think that Ayn Rand and Karl Marx are polar opposites, but this is not true,
both preached a universal ideology, and both would not think it is problem at the same time
that jews are immune from this ideology (because Marx would no doubt support Israel if it
existed at his time).
A car-wreck of logic indeed. What absolute rubbish Zizek comes up with. JM Keynes observed
that economics exists only to give astrology a good name. Judging by today's 'philosophers'
the same could be said about them.
@israel
shamir It's the system that has allowed Slavoj Zizek to showcase his theory . System
works with usual laziness who knows who and not what .
If Maddoff were a victim may be Epstein was , then so were Hitler and Polpot
System around them allowed them to reach mass appeal and inflict severe damages .
Abusing system is not self-victimization . Prince Andrew did not hurt self .
It's the system one works to prevent undesirable products . We undermine the system .
When you side with proponents of right for Palestinian or the victims of usury banking ,
financialization or against penchant for military budget or eternal war you bring normal
perspective , you restore balance between cause and effect and you remove artificial false
intellectual reasoning g like existence of antisemitism or American responsibility or America
being the beacon to humanity or America being a mystic abstract concept of higher values
.
Allowing and worshipping these kinds of ideas
we make inroads by the parasites possible
Abstract concept is easy target for corruption distortion emotional manipulation .
Antisemitidm should be described and that description should be applied to other anti -ism
( anti black anti Arab anti Iran anti Chinese anti Vietnamese anti Russian etc )
epidemiological survey should be conducted along those detailed descriptive points not like
-the way ADL puts out questionnaires .
It is time for Slavoj Zizek. to go to a library and get hold of the books by Herzl just to
get started .
@anon
masonry is clear example of this they tricked british and french people that let jews play an
important paper in the ideological foundation ,germans understanding the danger but
recon¡gnizing that the ilustration was the way of the future adapted his own version of
masonry with greek symbols and pure european myths and of course mantaining jews out of the
inner circle of power more or less like in scandinavia .
spanish people simply banned the masonry .
its curious how italian and iberians and their colonies were able to crush any jewish
resistance and asimilate the rest of them in the new world even if they arent the smartest
europeans .
i think we need a fusion of german and latin character to face this new era
There's around 200 nations in the world and if I may be so bold–since this is going
against the Cultural Marxists agenda that race is a social construct–4 main races that
contain around 30 subgroups.
In other words, lots of stories to pick from for the MSM.
Yet, day after day after day, we usually only hear about ONE nation and ONE race, Israel
and the Jews.
It's gotten all so tiresome to have these human peacocks constantly parading around,
demanding that us Goyim worship them or else.
And if we fail–in their minds–to show them the proper adoration, we get accused
of anti-Semitism.
@HammerJack
Andrew Joyce's work would never appear in American Renaissance. Taylor and his cohorts
prevent any criticism of Jewish involvement in White dispossession.
Herzl did not like Jews , celebrated possible future conversion of his son , thought en
masse conversion to Christianity , did not think of allowing Hebrew as state language and did
not conceive Shabbat a holiday
But also thought sneak attack on local Arab , planned deceptive discussions and ploys to
make them leave Palestine without arousing immediate large scale protests , he offered the
service of new state to be a barrier between uncivilized Asia and developed Europe , he
promised Balfour of protecting British interest
He wanted no Arab in the midst and eagerly and glowingly promised his visions of equal
democratic society .
Above all he can't pull it off himself . He needed help . He needed money that he by
threat and persuasion got from rich Jew . What about other nations shedding their non Jews
blood to erect a pure Jews nation ????
His minions got there also by lying false promising misrepresenting and bribing They also
used religious hatred of Christianity to Islam and racial hatred of European to Arab and
Turkey .
Britain pod in blood and money Now its Germany and USA .
-- -- --
But there are antisemite thinking or musing that. A-gentile never be able to get rid of ,
so said the Slovenian
The paradoxes Mr Slovenian sees in antisemite argument is what litter the philosophy of
Zionism .
@Digital
Samizdat Meyssan is a leftist of North African origin. Earlier in his career, he was
involved in harassing the National Front and other parties of the right.
From 1996 to 1999, he worked as substitute coordinator of the National Committee of
Surveillance against the extreme right, which held weekly meetings with the 45 major
political parties, unions and associations belonging to the French left-wing in order to
draw up a common response to escalating intolerance
I think Dr Joyce mistakes Meyssan's involvement in the above committee with that of
performing intelligence functions. Meyssan was an enthusiastic supporter of Hate Speech laws
to be used against the Right. Except later he fell foul of them himself and no longer lives
in France.
Indeed, for an anti-segregation organization, the early NAACP was essentially divided between
the Jews who ran it, and the Blacks who went along for the ride. As Hasia Diner puts it in In
the Almost Promised Land: American Jews and Blacks, 1915–1935, many in the NAACP's
Jewish leadership "worked most intensely with other Jews."[7]"
Muslim has replaced Blacks . Muslim "leaders " seek in Israel the conduit to power or
pipeline to something ( usually end up getting less scornful hateful mutterings in Fox and
WSJ ) . In return they attend interfaith meeting to be lectured ,open up discussing Koran
with ideas of dropping some pages ,and agreeing to hate Shia ,agreeing to start propaganda
against Iran Syria and Muslim Brotherhood ,spreading the FDD orchestrated fear of Iran,
imbibing hook line and slinkier the narrative against Iran Syria Hizbullah Libya Houthi and
Taliban or Qatar . Add to that Russia and china also. And they start discussing direct flight
from Tel Aviv to Medina from where their prophet once banned the Jews after decades of
deceptive behaviors of the Jewish clan.
What does muslim get ? The same stuff the blacks got- violence drugs sex trafiiciking,
destruction of community, shuttering down of school college and enrichment of few who sing
Hosana to the Jews .
For the time it is ;limited mostly to ME S Asia and N Africa . But I won't be supposed to see
it get into a more permanent footing in USA ,Canada,Australia. For a back on the back Muslim
will hurt themselves the way Afroamerican were taken for a ride.
Nice, that the Oxford Handbook cited sells for $429 over at Amazon. I hadn't liked Joyce's
articles particularly, but this one is helpful because it shows not just history, but the
link to current events. Particularly useful the info about Joe Lewis, (never heard about him
before). Doubly so in view of the fact that South America seems very unstable now, with a
migrant expulsion towards Mexico/US that is as bad as the Syria-to-Europe a few years back.
But much more under the radar.. no "color this" or "spring that" hashtags this time.
@neutral
Capitalism and communism have materialism in common. Various schemes based on religious
principles vary from both.
Secondly, a capitalist can favor communism so long as it doesn't damage his own
interests.
1) He may be able to make money trading with a foreign communist government e.g. Kaiser,
Ford.
2) He may favor communism as a means of destroying the old Christian order, which was the
case with US capitalists who funded the Bolsheviks e.g. Schiff, Warburg, Hammer.
3) A corrupt communist regime may allow selected friendly capitalists to flourish with in
effect a state subsidy. Most regimes of any kind are corrupt.
The idea that a capitalist can't be a communist is childishly simplistic, really just a
slogan.
@israel
shamir [Slavoj Zizek went "full Monty" during his recent visit to Tel Aviv at the
invitation of some sincerely dissident Israelis. They expected words of encouragement, but
instead he informed them that fighting anti-Semitism is more important than defending
Palestinians. ]
Who were these 'sincerely dissident Israelis' who didnot' know Zizek is a zionist
charlatan?
They are not 'sincere' but they are like him zionist jews.
This fact is obvious many years now and he showed himself as a zionist racist anti
Palestinians and non Jew many years ago in Israel. Who are these dummies that they don't know
who is Zizek.
Zizek like Trump is a charlatan zionist racist. He is a fraud like Henry Bernard Levy
You should see the video when he appeared at 'charlie Rose program' – a womanizer
and racist American exceptionalism, to see how this 'communist' clown was admiring Jewish
capitalism to please another clown charlie rose.
In 2001 and in 2002 Congress passed authorizations for war. While not declarations of war,
these mandates, each titled an Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) provided the
legal framework for attacks against al-Qaeda in 2001 and in 2002 for the Iraq War. Both AUMFs
are still in effect today. As Congress considers its annual authorization to fund the Pentagon
our current members of Congress, both in the House and the Senate, are in positions of
responsibility and ability to repeal these AUMFs.
The effect of the AUMFs :
Based on FBI and
journalist
investigations, al Qaeda had between 200-400 members worldwide in September of 2001. Al Qaeda
now has affiliates in every corner of the world, their
strength measures in the tens of thousands of members, and they control territory in Yemen,
Syria and parts of Africa. In Afghanistan, the Taliban now control as much as 60 percent of the
territory and, with regards to international terrorism, where there was one international
terror group in Afghanistan in 2001, the Pentagon now
reports twenty such groups .
ISIS was formerly al Qaeda in Iraq, an organization that came into existence solely due to
the invasion and occupation of Iraq by the United States. US military
,
intelligence agencies, journalists
and other
international organizations continually report that the reason people join such groups is
not out of ideology or religious devotion, but out of resistance to invasion and occupation,
and in response to the killing of family, friends and neighbors by foreign and government
forces. It is clear the AUMFs have worsened terrorism, not defeated it.
The cost of the AUMFs :
More
than 7,000 US service members have been killed and more than 50,000 wounded in the wars
since 9/11. Of the 2.5 million troops deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan as many as 20% percent are
afflicted with PTSD, while 20 percent
more may have traumatic brain injury. The Veterans Administration reports Afghan and Iraq
veterans have rates of suicide
4-10 times higher than their civilian peers. This means almost two Afghan and Iraq veterans
are die by suicide every day. Do the math and it is clear more Afghan and Iraq veterans are
dying by suicide than by combat. The cost to the people overseas to whom we have brought these
wars is hard to grasp.
Between one and four million people have been killed, directly and indirectly, by these
wars, while tens of millions more have been wounded or psychologically traumatized, and tens of
millions more made homeless – the cause of the worst refugee crisis since WWII.
Financially, the cost of these wars is immense, at least $6 trillion. Of a vast many statistics that
compose this incomprehensible figure of $6 trillion, is that nearly $1 trillion of it is simply
just interest and debt payments. For any American, Democrat, Republican or independent, these
interest and debt payments alone should cause them to reconsider these wars.
The AUMFs have allowed for wars to be waged without end by the executive branch, wars the
American people, including veterans, say
have not been worth fighting . Congress has the ability and responsibility to help bring
about an end to these wars by ensuring the repeal of the 2001 and 2002 AUMFs. Join the debate
on Facebook More articles by: Matthew Hoh
Matthew Hoh is a member of the advisory boards of Expose Facts, Veterans For Peace and
World Beyond War. In 2009 he resigned his position with the State Department in Afghanistan in
protest of the escalation of the Afghan War by the Obama Administration. He previously had been
in Iraq with a State Department team and with the U.S. Marines. He is a Senior Fellow with the
Center for International Policy.
"... America was feared by many intellectuals, both in the United States and Britain of the 1940s and 1950s, and their fears were not unwarranted. ..."
"... Big, brawny America – its power establishment – very much was inclined towards dominating the world after WWII. The whole tone of the American press and speeches of major political figures in the period was actually quite frightening. Any highly intelligent, sensitive type would be concerned by it. ..."
"... America wanted a monopoly on nuclear weapons, so that it would be in an unassailable position as it built its imperial apparatus after WWII, the time effectively it "took over" as world imperial power with so many potential competitors flattened. ..."
"... Later, the Pentagon actually planned things like an all-out first strike on the Soviets – it did that more once as well as doing so later for China – so there were indeed plenty of dark intentions in Washington. ..."
"... Spies and ex-spies often put disinformation into their books. Sometimes officials even insist they do so. ..."
The motives for so many Western spies serving the Soviet Union – and in the 1940s and
1950s the Soviets had the best "humint" on earth – were rather idealistic. This was
largely true for the Cambridge Circle in Britain. They were concerned that America was going
to "lord it over" the Russians and everyone else.
America was feared by many intellectuals, both in the United States and Britain of the
1940s and 1950s, and their fears were not unwarranted.
Big, brawny America – its power establishment – very much was inclined
towards dominating the world after WWII. The whole tone of the American press and speeches of
major political figures in the period was actually quite frightening. Any highly intelligent,
sensitive type would be concerned by it.
You certainly did not have to be a communist to feel that way, but being one assisted with
access to important Soviet contacts. They sought you out.
America wanted a monopoly on nuclear weapons, so that it would be in an unassailable
position as it built its imperial apparatus after WWII, the time effectively it "took over"
as world imperial power with so many potential competitors flattened.
It made little secret of its desire to keep such a monopoly, so brilliant people like
Oppenheimer would be well aware of something they might well regard as ominous.
Later, the Pentagon actually planned things like an all-out first strike on the
Soviets – it did that more once as well as doing so later for China – so there
were indeed plenty of dark intentions in Washington.
A hugely important general like MacArthur was unblinkingly ready in 1950 to use atomic
weapons in the Korean War to destroy North Korea's connections with China.
I read several major biographies of Oppenheimer, and there is little to nothing concerning
Soviet intelligence work. When I came across the Sudoplatov book with its straightforward
declaration of Oppenheimer's assistance, it was difficult to know how to weigh the claim.
Spies and ex-spies often put disinformation into their books. Sometimes officials even
insist they do so.
Judging by what is suggested here, if Oppenheimer did help, it was in subtle ways like
letting Klaus Fuchs, a fellow scientist and a rather distinguished one (but a Soviet spy),
look at certain papers. But the scientific community always has some considerable tendency to
share information, a tendency having nothing to do with spying.
In general, it should be understood, that Oppenheimer, despite all his brilliance, was a
rather disturbed man all his life. Quite early on, as just one example, he attempted to
poison someone he did not like. Only pure luck prevented the man's eating a lethally-laced
apple. There were other disturbing behaviors too.
Later they believed that equality of superpower status for the Soviet Union would
contribute to world peace.
How dumb were these "scientists". Everyone knows that once Soviet Union fell, peace and
freedom and democracy are flowering all over the world and United States are not waging any
wars anymore.
Alligator Ed
on Fri, 11/22/2019 - 8:53pm This message is brought to you thanks to the efforts of the
combined staffs of the History and Sociology Departments of Alligator University.
This year of our Lord, the holy Flying Spaghetti Monster 2019, we have discovered a
legend--a living, fire-breathing legend at that. Not since the days of Boudica , a warrior Queen, has the earth seen such
a warrior. Not surpassed by Jean d Árc nor Katherine the Great. This warrior of the
wireless age has not only exhibited compassion on the battlefield, as befits a person of high
honor, but has the uncanny ability to perform as the best of Generals (not just Majors)
throughout recorded history have done. Know wherein lies the enemy. Know your own strengths.
Know your own weaknesses. When engaging the enemy, do not hold back. Fight to win! Win as big
as you can, while sparing needless damage.
Tulsi, our subject (and [bias apparent here] champion), has arisen, almost from the sea. Far
to the West across the Great Water, from islands spewed from the mouths of living volcanoes,
emerged, almost as an eruption, our Warrior Princess Tulsi. She fought to defend her tribe by
joining a council of the advisers, then abandoning such sedentary life and chosing battle
instead. Fighting with distinction, Tulsi saved the lives of many fellow soldiers. Her counsel
proved both wise and humane. Troops and others recognized Tulsi's emerging greatness, coupled
with compassion.
To the delight of her cadre, Tulsi sallied forth to the land known today as The Great Swamp.
Chauvinistically however, I believe my south Florida estuary is the true Great Swamp. But we
shall leave that debate to a later time.
She joined a regiment called the DNC. At first it seemed to Tulsi this to be a desirable
posting, surrounded by fields and rivers with pleasing structures in which to live. Continuing
her steady progress up the ranks, our Warrior Princess, as yet untested by actual combat,
joined others to high councils of War and of Foreign trysts.
But only a few years had yet to pass during her service, Tulsi sensed some problems in the
command chain. Plans seemed to favor neither Nation nor Military, but instead the commanders
themselves. Upon thus learning, Tulsi resigned her position, abandoning the ill-disposed
regiment, seeking mission achievement over promotion.
A loosely knit Brigade, called the Democratic Party, united by the power of money and of
power itself, was to become the default posting of TWP. Unfortunately the chain of command was
rent asunder by internal factions, an unholy tug of war resulting. This war is still actively
contested--we are in a state of war.
[Injection of unpaid political endorsement, not approved by TWP] Folks, we need this brave
general to lead.
Contesting amongst others for the ultimate Brigade command was Tulsi and 21 22
(23?) others. The concept grew either too tiresome or expensive for many contestants, who
either became sick or perished from fatigue and/or loneliness. The field of battle was becoming
clarified, gaining Tulsi progressively improving evaluation and appropriate planning for future
campaigns.
The First Slain Enemy, Olaf the Oaf
From the gentle hills and scattered forests of Ohionia came Olaf. Initially he was known as
Olaf the Ogre; until he was slain by sword blows from Warrior Tulsi. Description of her foe is
warranted. Her foe was a giant, tall and strong. But Olaf was neither quick of wit nor of foot.
Large he was, as said. The ground would rumble beneath his foot steps. Trees were bent aside as
he strode unstoppably through the woods. Local dwellers both feared and respected Olaf, the
mighty.
The battle: the setting is on a level plain under illumination of many cell
phones torches soon after sunset. Other contestants on the field have agreed that only
two contestants combat each other. Female referees would enforce rules of combat.
Tulsi and Olaf faced each other. In his ponderous way, Olaf declared his desire to engage.
With that, Warrior Tulsi swiftly smote his pate with a mighty broadsword blow. Owing to the
thickness of Olaf's cranium, the sound of the resultant impact was heard for miles. Yea, more
than a thousand miles some say. Rending Olaf's pulsating brain irreversibly damaged, the Oaf
staggered from battleground, only to succumbing to his wounds months later.
Not being particularly fond of Olaf, I did not check the source of the following: it is
estimated that 30 people attended his internment, including undertakers.
Yet the Campaign had only just begun. More foes to conquer.
Second Casualty: Klammer
the Camel
Venturing forth from the Kingdom of Kalifornication comes (but not for very long) the former
Lord High Executioner, Klammer the Camel. Since Klammer is of mixed parentage, it is unsure
whether Klammer is a Dromedary (one hump camel) or a two hump Bactrian camel. It is recorded
that an expert on Klammer's humping is retired statesman Willie Brown.
It is said said that Klammer's exhalations could kill enemies at 10 paces. Yet Klammer's
best weapon was heaving heavy Criminal Code books at her victims. Strangely, Klammer looked
reasonably fit in her drab clothing. Foes who faced her in battle have noted how white
Klammer's teeth are as she gnashes at them. She had a strange reaction to cannabis. When others
utilized the substance, she raged and destroyed them, if she could reach them. Yet when she
herself inhaled the aroma of such burning vegetation, she became as if in a trance.
The battlefield: very much like the field upon which brave Tulsi slew the Oaf, at
night with many candles burning held by acolytes of various contestants. Once again, only two
were allowed combat at a time. Supremely self-confident of victory, flush with
self-satisfaction after inflicting a minor wound on former vice-king JoJo the Far Gone. Klammer
first engaged other contestants, smirking from her presumed victories. Now brimming with
confidence bordering on hubris, Klammer stood her ground. Then, in a well-planned straight
ahead frontal attack, delivered with swiftness and ferocity, Tulsi struck her foe. And struck
her. While Klammer lay quivering on the ground, TWP demanded an apology of her for her past
sins. When none was evinced, Tulsi stuck the tip of her blade into Klammer's seeming
impenetrable armor. This wound, though not immediately fatal, nevertheless is proving fatal to
the now debilitated Klammer. Klammer attempted a counter-attack at another field before falling
slack-jawed after a mere glare from Tulsi. Not yet dead, but soon.
Third Casualty: Boots
the Jiggler
Wandering from a land not far from the home of Olaf, proceeds the Stolid Boots. He sets his
sights on new lands to conquer. The city he leaves is burning and being plundered by wandering
Mnuchkins from the neighboring fiefdom of Illinois. Unconcerned with the plight of the subjects
of the Boots' prior management, Boots bravely strides forth, still not battle-tested. He
gathers with him followers, some of whom are loyal, while others need financial encouragement
to participate in his campaign.
Boots has been gifted with the ability to speak so eloquently and at such length that those
auditioners of his monologues are both amazed and yet unable to understand the essence of
Boots' message.
The battlefield: interestingly quite similar to those upon which Tulsi administered the
blows dispatching the Oaf and crippling the Camel. Once again, remaining combatants aligned to
watch two of their number engage upon combat.
Boots, buoyed by the support of his entourage, summoned forth 400 of his Southern Army to
aid in his battle. There Boots turned upon Tulsi, promising to not only to vanquish her by his
superior generalship but send troops across the Southern border. But, becoming anxious of TWP,
he turned to assay his retinue of 400. But lo, none remained, most not having left the
barracks.
In face-to-face combat Boots met Tulsi. Mutually acknowledging their military experience,
Tulsi struck blows into the Jiggler. This assault froze Boots into place, unable to respond.
The above picture of Boots was made immediately after a biting blow from Tulsi's broadsword. He
was heard to mumble something like "Et tu, Tulsi?".
. . . . .
Campaigns against larger enemies are soon to come. One looming conflict may be likened to a
civil war against Brooklyn Bernie which hopefully be short. A battle against the Hokey Okie is
inevitable.
Our AU colleagues assure me that the Feared Medusa will enter the fray after more rivals
have fallen. The Snake-head leads a mighty army, most of whom are oddly cyborg-like. Bots I
think they call them. Hilbots actually.
A musical coda is appropriate here. A good choice is a warning, an admonition to those
contemplating with the Warrior Princess.
"... "Yeah," Tulsi answers. "I point to two things. One is you have the foreign policy establishment and the military-industrial complex in Washington that carries such a huge amount of influence over both parties." ..."
"... She continues, "There are campaign contributions, the influence that these contractors have in this pay-to-play culture , this corrupt culture in Washington, but you also just have people who don't understand foreign policy and who lack the experience to make these critical decisions that impact our lives and the safety and security of the American people. This is so serious about what's at stake here." ..."
"... Democratic presidential primary debate, Wednesday, Nov. 20, 2019, in Atlanta, via the AP. ..."
In a rare moment with MSNBC's Chris Matthews, Democratic presidential candidate Tulsi
Gabbard explained why the leading figures in her party are war hawks. Far from days of the
Democrats feigning to have any semblance of an 'anti-war' platform (only convenient for Liberal
activism during the Bush years, but fizzling out under Obama), today's party attempts to
out-hawk Republicans at every turn.
"I'm looking at the Democratic establishment figures," Matthews introduced, "people I
normally like. John Kerry, Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton. You go down the list. They all supported
the war in Iraq. Why were they hawks? " (Though we might ask, what do you mean, "
were ?"). "Why so many Democrats with a party that's not hawkish, why are so many of
their leaders hawks?" Matthews reiterated.
In the segment, Matthews heaps rare praise on Tulsi for being "out there all alone tonight
fighting against the neocons."
"Yeah," Tulsi answers. "I point to two things. One is you have the foreign policy
establishment and the military-industrial complex in Washington that carries such a huge amount
of influence over both parties."
She continues, "There are campaign contributions, the influence that these contractors
have in this pay-to-play culture , this corrupt culture in Washington, but you also just have
people who don't understand foreign policy and who lack the experience to make these critical
decisions that impact our lives and the safety and security of the American people. This is so
serious about what's at stake here."
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and try again.
The interview happened immediately after this week's fifth Democratic debate Wednesday night
in Atlanta, and after pundits have continued to complain that Gabbard is a 'single issue
candidate'.
However, is there any candidate in her party or in the GOP saying these things?
We find ourselves in a rare moment of agreement with MSNBC's Matthews: she is "out there all
alone tonight fighting against the neocons." Tags Politics
And again, if we do win despite all the structural injustices in the system the Rs inherited and seek to expand, well, those
injustices don't really absolutely need to be corrected, because we will still have gotten the right result from the system
as is.
This is a pretty apt description of the mindset of Corporate Democrats. Thank you !
May I recommend you to listen to Chris Hedge 2011 talk
On Death of the Liberal Class At least to the first
part of it.
Corporate Dems definitely lack courage, and as such are probably doomed in 2020.
Of course, the impeachment process will weight on Trump, but the Senate hold all trump cards, and might reverse those effects
very quickly and destroy, or at lease greatly diminish, any chances for Corporate Demorats even complete on equal footing in 2020
elections. IMHO Pelosi gambit is a really dangerous gambit, a desperate move, a kind of "Heil Mary" pass.
Despair is a very powerful factor in the resurgence of far right forces. And that's what happening right now and that's why
I suspect that far right populism probably will be the decisive factor in 2020 elections.
IMHO Chris explains what the most probable result on 2020 elections with be with amazing clarity.
Hopefully Kamala Harris never sniffs the White House, we'd all die in a nuclear war. Her
pathetic and stupid swipes at the courageous and brilliant Tulsi Gabbard last night in the
debates were something to cringe at.
"It Was A Coup. Period": Tulsi Gabbard Slams US 'Interference' In Bolivia
Democratic Presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard has come out swinging on Bolivia, following an initial period of being silent
and reflection on the issue after leftist President Evo Morales was forced to step down on November 10 over growing anger at election
irregularities, whereupon he was given political asylum in Mexico.
"What happened in Bolivia is a coup. Period," Gabbard wrote on Twitter in the early hours of Friday while warning against any
US interference.
"The United States and other countries should not be interfering in the Bolivian people's pursuit of self-determination and right
to choose their own government, " she argued.
Washington had been quick to endorse and recognize opposition senator Jeanine Anez as 'interim president' after she controversially
declared herself such without a senatorial quorum or public vote, and as Morales' Movement for Socialism was said to be barred from
the senate building when it happened.
Gabbard's statement, which again sets her far apart from a large field of establishment and centrist candidates on foreign policy
issues , comes a few days after Bernie Sanders was the first to condemn the events which led to Evo's ouster as a military coup.
"When the military intervened and asked President Evo Morales to leave, in my view, that's called a coup," Sanders tweeted Monday,
while linking to a video showing Bolivian security forces dispersing an indigenous pro-Morales protest using a volley of tear gas
canisters.
Meanwhile, in a new interview with Russian media this week, Evo Morales said the right-leaning Organization of American States
(OAS), which had initially cited "clear manipulations" in the voting surrounding his controversial re-election to a fourth term,
played a prime role in deposing him, and that ultimately Bolivia's huge reserves of lithium were being eyed by the United States
and its right-wing Latin American allies .
"The OAS made a decision and its report is not based on a technical report, but on a political decision,"
Evo told RT in the interview from Mexico.
Addressing his country's most valued natural resource, he said, "In Bolivia we could define the price of lithium for the world...Now
I have realized that some industrialized countries do not want competition" -- while implying Washington had helped engineer his
downfall.
Most estimates put the impoverished country's Lithium supply at about 60% of the world's known reserves .
The White House in the days after Evo's ouster
had called it a "significant moment for democracy in the Western Hemisphere"; however, the now exiled former president described
it as "the sneakiest, most nefarious coup in history."
* * *
Watch key moments of the translated RT interview below:
"... Authored by Paul Joseph Watson via Summit News, ..."
"... My favorite paragraph from the NYT article depicting Tulsi as a fringe, divisive cult leader because she wears white pants suits - by the same author and paper who heaped praise on how Hillary's white pants suit shows she's ready to carry the nuclear codes. ..."
My favorite paragraph from the NYT article depicting Tulsi as a fringe, divisive cult
leader because she wears white pants suits - by the same author and paper who heaped praise
on how Hillary's white pants suit shows she's ready to carry the nuclear codes.
Her white suits are not the white suits of Ms. Clinton, nor even the white of Ms.
Williamson, whose early appearances in the shadeoften seemed tied to her wellness gospel
and ideas of renewal and rebirth. Rather, they are the white of avenging angels and flaming
swords, of somewhat combative righteousness (also cult leaders').
And that kind of association, though it can be weirdly compelling, is also not really
community building. It sets someone apart, rather than joining others together. It has
connotations of the fringe, rather than the center.
A New York Times writer who praised Hillary Clinton for wearing a white pantsuit called
Tulsi Gabbard a "cult leader" for wearing exactly the same thing.
Taken together, those twin hasbara refrains evoke a notion of divine punishment. JFK and
RFK were punished for the sins of their Jew-hating, Nazi-loving father. Mind you, it was
Yahweh who took vengeance, not Israel!
Brilliant article by Guyenot. Thoroughly well written & informative.
A Congresswoman, Tulsi Gabbard, is being viciously slandered in article after article in
the Mainstream (Zionist) Media. Read the diatribe carefully, and learn some of how the People
are misdirected-brainwashed.
Ms. Gabbard is, apparently, leading in the Polls, and the Zionist controller Power Elite
are Panicky. They will do to Ms. Gabbard what they did to Ron Paul, and his campaign.
It is a sense of frustration that We-I are not able to Revenge the murder of our last
Constitutional President, John F. Kennedy, the Destruction of our Republic, the millions of
murders from November 22, 1963, to the present, or to effectively defend & protect this
noble lady (Ms. Gabbard).
If we protect her, we protect ourselves and our Country. Freedom is not free. We must
Pay for i t!
"... JFK's assassination made possible the acquisition of nuclear arsenal by Israel and the unhindered growth of the most important foreign lobby such as AIPAC. On the cui bono question Israel is a perfect match. Israel gained everything form the JFK's death ..."
"... Was Johnson having an affair with Israeli agent Mathilde Krim? Did LBJ have reason to fear he was liable to be dumped from the Democratic ticket in 1964 because of the Bobby Baker and Billy Sol Estes scandals? Why did Richard Nixon lie about his own presence in Dallas when Kennedy was killed? Why was George HW Bush for a long time unable to remember his whereabouts on Nov. 22? ..."
"... All available evidence points to the CIA and the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, with the cooperation of the Secret Service, as the murderers of President Kennedy. ..."
"... It is well documented that JFK wanted to break down the power of the Central Intelligence Agency. Could this have had dire consequences and let to his untimely death? Let's have a look! ..."
"... This "Israel did it" theory doesn't quite answer the question of how physical evidence was destroyed and eyewitnesses intimidated by agents of the US government. This I base on an assertion in Douglass's book JFK and the Unspeakable that men with Secret Service and FBI credentials immediately began the cover up operation. ..."
"... Fullbright who publicly denounced Israel and their control of the US Congress on National TV and the fact that Kennedy wanted him as Secretary of State must have also riled the Jews. Fullbright was also against the Vietnam War. ..."
"... Of course, I know the speculation it was Israelis who were behind it (Dimona), but I don't find it persuasive. There are other means to avoid US inspection, and Kennedy was not adamant about it at all. These are things politicians toy with all the time, and while not a "friend" of Israel, Kennedy was not an enemy -- one could consider Eisenhower, if we judge him by his actions during Suez canal crisis- to be an "enemy" of Israel (of course this too is simplistic, politics is a rough business). ..."
"... The Warren Commission hogwash was almost as ridiculous as the official 911 nonsense, and Mark Lane's 1966 book "Rush to Judgment" helped fuel broad public disbelief in the official story. ..."
"... Talk about quid pro quo to the nth degree, as that hideous snake LBJ gave the MIC and its financiers their wars, etc., in exchange for the Presidency and for keeping his sorry ass out of jail for the Billy Sol Estes and Bobby Baker scandals. Sure, the Israelis benefitted, and were likely a cog in the conspiratorial wheel, but the CIA, Secret Service, and various military agents were the movers and shakers, with LBJ their guarantor. ..."
"... Like any good gumshoe worth his salt, the first question he asks himself after arriving at the crime scene is Cui bono, who benefits? In the case of the JFK assassination, there was clearly one very large beneficiary that stood out above the rest, Israel. By Nov 1963, JFK had two big strikes against him ..."
"... "Mr. Trump has been prevented from releasing the rest of the "top secret" files, in spite of his promise to do so." IIRC, it was Trump doing all of the preventing. ..."
"... This "Israel did it" theory doesn't quite answer the question of how physical evidence was destroyed and eyewitnesses intimidated by agents of the US government. ..."
"... The Mossad and the CIA were part of the same "team"–the CIA handled and continues to handle the ongoing domestic coverup operations as needed (including Mockingbird mass media activities). ..."
"... Connelly is a _very_ interesting figure, and his background prior to the day of the assassination is not very well understood. I was stunned to read that he was a key actor in the Korean War "setup" ..."
"... Remember, Kennedy had just buggered up the CIA's Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba and was threatening to pull out of the CIA's war in Vietnam. With a nod from LBJ the CIA could kill Kennedy and be sure of top-down cover from the moment Kennedy's heart stopped beating, cover which, according to the doctors who attended on Kennedy at Parklands Hospital, was promptly given. ..."
"... Then there's the deathbed confession of CIA agent E. Howard Hunt, which provides a tenuous connection with Richard Nixon, who hired Hunt and Frank Sturgis (both believed to have been among the tramps arrested in Dealey Plaza in the immediate aftermath of the assassination) to. among other things, burglarize the Democratic Party headquarters at the Watergate Building in Washington, DC. ..."
"... I think Oswald the CIA agent who agreed to go to Russia on a fake defector mission for the agency with no way of knowing what would happen to him, would have been an insanely extreme patriot. Such an Oswald might be willing to do anything he was ordered to I suppose. The trouble is Oswald seems to have been anti establishment right back into his teens. He was an immature 17 year old when he joined the Marines, and though he toughened up considerably they evidence of him ever being an anti communist fanatic is just lacking. ..."
"... Be sure and dive into all of the data supporting link's located at the bottom of this web page. November 23, 2019 JFK, MLK, RFK, 50 Years of Suppressed History: New Evidence on Assassination of John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy. Failures to Confront the Unspeakable, and The Way Ahead. Part I
"... It is a documented fact that during all past official visits, President Kennedy's motorcade comprised a open-top lorry, driving ahead of the Presidents' limousine, and carrying journalists sat backward on graded tiers, who would film the President and the crowd cheering on him. ..."
"... At Dallas, the journalists' truck got cancelled, and the way paved for the sole Abraham Zapruder to document the circumstances of the JFK assassination. Just another complete coincidence, obviously. ..."
In my view, summarized
here
, John Kennedy was assassinated by Israel for three major reasons:
Dimona:
President
Kennedy, who had made nuclear disarmament his grand mission on the international level, and was on the way
to achieve it with Khrushchev (as shown by James Douglass in
JFK and the Unspeakable
), was determined to stop Israel developing its own nuclear bomb.
According to Colonel Muammar Gaddafi's
interpretation
, it was to plunge into the Israeli deep state and supervise Kennedy's assassination that
Ben-Gurion resigned in July 1963 before receiving Kennedy's ultimatum letter demanding inspections of
Dimona.
American Zionist Council:
John Kennedy and his Attorney General Bobby Kennedy had infuriated Zionist leaders by supporting an
investigation led by Senator William Fulbright (whom Kennedy had been prevented to name as Secretary of
State) aimed at registering the American Zionist Council as a "foreign agent" subject to the obligations
defined by the Foreign Agents Registration Act of 1938, which would have rendered its lobbying division, the
AIPAC, near powerless. On October 11, 1963, the AZC received a formal demand from RFK's office to register
within 72 hours (details
here
).
To these reasons for assassinating
Kennedy, we must add the opposite reasons for putting Johnson instead in the Oval Office, for Johnson buried
both the Dimona and the AZC proceedings, and cut U.S. support for Nasser's in order to boost support to
Israel. In 1967, he would commit high treason against his own country by allowing and covering-up Israel's
failed false-flag attack on the USS Liberty. No wonder Israel loved Johnson as much as they hated Kennedy.
Zionists had reasons to fear that
Joseph Kennedy did "inject some poisonous drops of anti-Semitism in the minds of his children, including his
son John's" (as printed in September 1960 by the
Herut,
Menachem Begin's political party).
[6]
Alan
Hart,
Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews
, vol. 2:
David Becomes Goliath,
Clarity Press, 2013,
p. 252.
In 1940, John had published a book titled
Why England Slept,
adapted from his
Harvard thesis which was, as the title alluded, a response to Churchill's 1938 book
While England Slept,
and a veiled support for his father's pro-appeasement views. In his Pulitzer prize-winning book
Profiles in Courage
(1956), Kennedy had declared his admiration for Senator Robert Taft, who by calling
the Nuremberg trials a shameful parody of justice had sacrificed his political career, including his chances
for the presidency, rather than build it on hypocrisy. Although Zionists probably didn't know it until
recently, in 1945, JFK had written the following in his diary, as quoted
here
by Abigail Abrams:
The Kennedys were a family of strong
traditions and strong convictions. They had to be destroyed, politically as had Charles Lindbergh
(1902-1974), and if necessary physically, before they extirpate America from Zionists' clutches.
Dallas was an Israeli coup, ordered from
Tel Aviv with Johnson's support, and supervised by the local B'nai B'rith under the cover of the Dallas
Citizens Council, who was sponsoring Kennedy's visit, and of whom Abraham Zapruder himself was a member
(watch his satisfaction when interviewed two hours after JFK's assassination in the History Channel
documentary
JFK – 3 Shots That Changed America
, at 43:34).
When trying to make sense of Dallas'
Umbrella Man, we are faced with a dilemma: should we believe Witt's explanation of his strange behavior (as
does Josiah Thompson), or should we consider him an accomplice to the assassination (as does Russ Baker)?
Only in the framework of the Israeli theory pioneered by Michael Collins Piper is it possible to surmount
the dilemma.
Let's recap what we know for certain.
Fact number 1: on the sunny day of November 22, 1963, one man was standing on the President's motorcade
route with an open umbrella, at the precise moment and place when JFK was shot. To assume that the Umbrella
Man's strange behavior and JFK's assassination are unrelated is unreasonable. The coincidence is just too
improbable.
Fact number 2: In 1978, Louie Steven
Witt claimed in front of the HSCA that he was the Umbrella Man and explained that he wanted to heckle JFK
about his father's policy of appeasement of Hitler in 1938.
Although Thompson and Baker disagree
about everything else, they agree that there can be no connection between John Kennedy's assassination and
Joseph Kennedy's appeasement policy. That is where they are both wrong.
Was Louie Steven Witt a Zionist agent, a
sayan
? Not necessarily. Operations like the JFK assassination are planned on a strict need-to-know
basis: no one knows more than he needs to know. Witt
declared to the HSCA
that he belonged to no organization whatsoever. He summarized his motivation for
his "bad joke" in these words:
"In a coffee break conversation
someone had mentioned that the umbrella was a sore spot with the Kennedy family. Being a
conservative-type fellow, I sort of placed him in the liberal camp and I was just going to kind of do a
little heckling."
What would be interesting to know is:
who inspired Witt during his coffee break? Did the coffee break take place in the office of Witt's Jewish
boss, director of the Rio Grande National Life insurance Co. in Dallas? Did Witt have insurmountable debts,
like Jacob Rubenstein, aka Jack Ruby? Russ Baker mentions that the company wrote a lot of insurance for the
military and was located in the same building that housed the local office of the highly negligent Secret
Service.
Mr Witt, would you kindly come forward
again and answer a few questions?
I looked at 43:34 of the documentary posted with Zupruder being interviewed shortly after the assassination;
and what I see is a man aghast and at a loss for words, not "satisfied" as you supposed.
There is no better theory of JFK assassination than outlined by the author. JFK's assassination made
possible the acquisition of nuclear arsenal by Israel and the unhindered growth of the most important
foreign lobby such as AIPAC. On the
cui bono
question Israel is a perfect match. Israel gained
everything form the JFK's death
I am absolutely certain that the murder of JFK was the work of a group of conspirators rather than an
individual. The umbrella man is not new to me. I never gave him much thought though I have read work by
others who factor him as a key role in the assassination. The interview of Josiah Thompson was most thought
provoking in that it showed how someone on the periphery of a big event can be implicated theoretically yet
really it appeared to be nothing more than happenstance.
The takeaway from this is that we should never
take for granted the basic tenet of our justice system that presumes innocence. The burden of proof of guilt
lies with those making the accusation. Was the umbrella man a participant in that homicide? I don't know and
there is really no evidence proving otherwise.
Let's keep our eye on the ball. Sadly no one will ever be held to account for that murder. That is not to
say that the truth will never be known. One day we will know exactly what happened and who was responsible.
The lesson here is to not get immersed in that which can not be proven but can also detract from those who
were really responsible.
I'm quite happy to believe that Jews killed JFK, but things like this are a very thin reed to hang anything
on;
Dallas was an Israeli coup, ordered from Tel Aviv with Johnson's support, and supervised by the local
B'nai B'rith under the cover of the Dallas Citizens Council, who was sponsoring Kennedy's visit, and of
whom Abraham Zapruder himself was a member (watch his satisfaction when interviewed two hours after JFK's
assassination in the History Channel documentary JFK – 3 Shots That Changed America , at 43:34).
Zapruder's expression is totally equivocal. His strange momentary smile could be the natural reaction of
someone who is suddenly embarrassed to be on the point of tears. You can't make history out of 'testimony'
this weak.
Dimona: President Kennedy, who had made nuclear disarmament his grand mission on the international
level, and was on the way to achieve it with Khrushchev (as shown by James Douglass in JFK and the
Unspeakable), was determined to stop Israel developing its own nuclear bomb.
This is the same James Douglass who was incapable of spotting the obvious difference between Oswald's
wide head and Billy Nolan Lovelady's narrow head, thereby establishing himself as someone who is unreliable
with
any
evidence.
@Germanicus
Exactly what I thought when I realized the webpage of
Jewish Life
that I screenshot was taken away,
like the one from the
5 Towns Jewish Times
saying "Our First Jewish President Lyndon Johnson?" (of
which I didn't get a screenshot). So I've just save the screenshot of the page of the Jewish Telegraphic
Agency that you mention, titled: "Lyndon Johnson: no better friend"
the article says:
"Johnson was the most emotionally committed to Israel of any American president -- a fact that is not
popularly known but is clear from his background," Dennis Ross, a veteran Middle East negotiator in
Republican and Democratic administrations, said last year at a symposium of the Washington Institute for
Near East Policy, where he is counselor.
Johnson was the first president to invite an Israeli prime minister, Levi Eshkol, on a state visit. They
got along so well -- both men were farmers -- that Johnson paid Eshkol the rare compliment of inviting him
to his ranch.
LBJ soon abandoned pressure on Israel to come clean about the Dimona reactor. He increased arms sales to
Israel and in 1968, after Israel's primary supplier, France, imposed an embargo as a means of cultivating
ties in the Arab world, the United States became Israel's main supplier of weapons, notably launching the
talks that would lead to the sale of Phantom fighter jets to Israel.
Johnson wanted to commit more forcefully to Israel's cause in the lead-up to the 1967 Six-Day War, but he
felt constrained from a dramatic show of military might because of the failures of the war in Vietnam
then dogging his presidency. Nonetheless, during the war, he ordered warships to within 50 miles of
Syria's coast as a warning to the Soviets not to interfere.
In a speech in the war's immediate aftermath, Johnson effectively nipped in the bud any speculation that
the United States would pressure Israel to unilaterally give up the lands it had captured. He laid down
not only the "land for peace" formula that would inform subsequent U.N. Security Council resolutions, but
made it clear that any formula had to ensure Jewish access to Jerusalem's Old City.
@Daniel Rich
They donated half that money to a police charity on behalf of officers killed/wounded that day to be fair.
And by Kennedy wanting Israel nuke free is more than enough to prompt his assassination even though he was
hated by the entire military industrial complex.
If this was straight
assasination why go to so much trouble. The CIA had at the time developed weapons that could assasinate by
giving heart attacks or cancer and were discussed in the church committee investigation into the CIA. It
would have been very easy for someone to assasinte kennedy for instance when he was viting Marilyn Monroe or
his many mistresses. An affair is a good excuse for a heart attack.
No the murder of kennedy was not just about getting rid of him. It was a highly symbolic , even ritualistic
act.
It showed ultimately the power of the conspirators. It showed the impotence of the public. Its about
immobilizing effective resistance to the elite. Conspiracy theories become part of the psychological control
that they hold over the mass mind. The umbrella man is part of that symbolic control
"No wonder Israel loved Johnson as much as they hated Kennedy."
Y
ou should have written:
No wonder Johnson hated Kennedy as much as he loved Israel.
Was Johnson having an affair with Israeli agent Mathilde Krim? Did LBJ have reason to fear he was liable
to be dumped from the Democratic ticket in 1964 because of the Bobby Baker and Billy Sol Estes scandals? Why
did Richard Nixon lie about his own presence in Dallas when Kennedy was killed? Why was George HW Bush for a
long time unable to remember his whereabouts on Nov. 22?
With previous assassination plots in Chicago and Tampa, and the JBS handing out these posters in Dallas,
it was dereliction of duty for the Secret Service to have failed to clear high rise buildings in Dallas on
the motorcade route. Indeed, it was against their own regulations for Kennedy's limousine to have made those
sharp, slow-speed turns that took it through Dealey Plaza, and it was nothing short of being an accomplice
to murder for Secret Service driver William Greer to have allowed JFK's limousine to slow to a stop in the
killing zone when shots rang out.
With all that, I see umbrella man as nothing but a big red herring.
OK, but that was just on the side: I'm not building anything on that. This whole article is just an
anecdotic appendix to my main Kennedy article.
This is the same James Douglass who was incapable of
Yes, I am aware of the many shortcomings of Douglass, including his many blind spots (never heard of
Dimona, believes Johnson was such a good guy that, having failed to prevent the assassination of his beloved
president, he at least prevented the invasion of Cuba that it was meant to trigger, etc.). Nevertheless, his
book opened my eyes to Kennedy's determination to disarm the world and end the Cold War.
@PeterMX
It is also amazing that, 56 years after the terrible event that ruined America, Mr. Trump has been prevented
from releasing the rest of the "top secret" files, in spite of his promise to do so.
"Just days before he was
assassinated, JFK confided to his secretary that he wanted to replace his vp when he ran for reelection – he
didn't think LBJ was fit for president."
Later in the piece: Looking straight ahead and without hesitating he replied, "At this time I am thinking
about Gov. Terry Sanford of NC. But it will not be Lyndon."
Jack didn't want LBJ as his vp in the first place, but thought that the only way he could win was to put
that evil SOB on the ticket. He probably was right, as LBJ delivered Texas. Given the decades long national
trauma, from which the country has never recovered, it would have been far better if Nixon had won.
Oliver Stone's JFK blames the CIA, the military, and LBJ, makes no mention of Israel, and treats Ruby and
Zapruder sympathetically. No doubt explained by the fact that the movie was funded and produced by Israeli
superagent Arnon Milchan.
The movie is a limited hangout made to ensure that those who cannot swallow the
obvious lies of the Warren Commission will direct their anger otherwise than at Israel.
It showed ultimately the power of the conspirators. It showed the impotence of the public. Its about
immobilizing effective resistance to the elite. Conspiracy theories become part of the psychological
control that they hold over the mass mind. The umbrella man is part of that symbolic control
You nailed it. Also note this was an "Event", where hit men from all over the world (many of whom worked
as contractors for various intelligence agencies) converged in one place to honor their craft. A select few
participated in the actual execution, the rest were there to confuse any future investigators with false
leads.
This was a modern ritual sacrifice–think of it as alchemy in action.
September 24, 2019 The Coverup of President John F. Kennedy's Assassination Is Wearing Thin. All available
evidence points to the CIA and the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, with the cooperation of the Secret Service, as
the murderers of President Kennedy.
It is well documented that JFK wanted to break down the power of the Central Intelligence Agency. Could
this have had dire consequences and let to his untimely death? Let's have a look!
Jan 21, 2019 Celebs and relatives of Martin Luther King Jr. call for new probe into his death ahead of
his public holiday as they claim his assassination and JFK, RFK and Malcolm X's killing were conspiracies
covered up by the government
A group of at least 60 US citizens including journalists, lawyers and historians are calling for new
investigations into four history-making assassinations
Nov 23, 2016 53 YEARS AFTER JFK ASSASSINATION CIA ADMITS THIS CONSPIRACY THEORY IS ACTUALLY FACT
Shortly
after noon on November 22, 1963, President John F. Kennedy was assassinated as he rode in a motorcade
through Dealey Plaza in downtown Dallas, Texas. It's been 53 years since the assassination. Since that
fateful November day, conspiracy theories have abounded. However, when we sift through the disinformation
and look at only verifiable facts, we find no need for theories -- as the conspiracy was a fact.
Israeli PM David Ben-Gurion ordered the murder of JFK, because Kennedy had stood up to that maniac regarding
Israel getting nukes.
Mossad And The JFK Assassination
Their motive? Israel's much touted Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, who ruled that country from its
inception in 1948 until he resigned on June 16, 1963, was so enraged at John F. Kennedy for not allowing
Israel to become a nuclear power that, Collins asserts, in his final days in office he commanded the
Mossad to become involved in a plot to kill America's president.
Ben-Gurion was so convinced that Israel's very survival was in dire jeopardy that in one of his final
letters to JFK he said,
"Mr. President, my people have the right to exist, and this existence is in
danger."
In the days leading up to Ben-Gurion's resignation from office, he and JFK had been involved in an
unpublicized, contentious debate over the possibility of Israel getting nuclear capabilities. Their
disagreement eventually escalated into a full-fledged war of words that was virtually ignored in the
press. Ethan Bronner wrote about this secret battle between JFK and Ben-Gurion years later in a New York
Times article on October 31, 1998, calling it a "fiercely hidden subject." In fact, the
Kennedy/Ben-Gurion conversations are still classified by the United States Government. Maybe this is the
case because Ben-Gurion's rage and frustration became so intense – and his power so great within Israel –
that Piper contends it was at the center of the conspiracy to kill John Kennedy. This stance is supported
by New York banker Abe Feinberg, who describes the situation as such:
"Ben-Gurion could be vicious,
and he had such a hatred of the old man [Joe Kennedy, Sr., JFK's father]."
Ben-Gurion despised Joe
Kennedy because he felt that not only was he an anti-Semite, but that he had also sided with Hitler
during the 1930's and 40's. [We will touch upon this aspect of the story in an upcoming article entitled
The CIA and Organized Crime: Two Sides of the Same Coin].
Anyway, Ben-Gurion was convinced that Israel needed nuclear weapons to insure its survival, while
Kennedy was dead-set against it.
This inability to reach an agreement caused obvious problems.
One
of them revolved around Kennedy's decision that he would make America his top priority in regard to
foreign policy, and not Israel!
Kennedy planned to honor the 1950 Tripartite Declaration which said
that the United States would retaliate against any nation in the Middle East that attacked any other
country. Ben-Gurion, on the other hand, wanted the Kennedy Administration to sell them offensive weapons,
particularly Hawk missiles.
.Gerald Posner, in his 1993 book Case Closed, posited that the errant first shot was fired at Z 160,
which put the entire shooting sequence at 8.4 seconds. (8) In the 13 years since Posner's book, several
highly respected students of the assassination have weighed in with reputable analyses of the first
shot's timing. Their estimates lead to total elapsed times of around 8.8, 8.4, and 8.6 seconds .
@ThreeCranes
Dr.Charles Crenshaw was one of the surgeons who treated JFK when he was brought into Parkland Hospital
stated that he " considered the throat wound to be an entrance wound and the large head wound (at the right
rear of JFK's head ) to be an exit wound Along with many of my Parkland colleagues I believed at the time
that the President had been hit twice from the front ."
"Every doctor who was in the trauma room had his own reasons for not refuting the official line .whatever
was happening was larger than any of us anyone who went as far to eliminate the President of the United
States would surely not hesitate to kill a doctor ."
Charles Crenshaw , " JFK Conspiracy of Silence " 1992
Fyi, in David Lifton's important & scientific book, "Best Evidence," he turned to a
fundamental example as to why JFK's head projected backward & a brain matter fell upon the limo's trunk.
Based upon physics,
Mr.
Lifton offered the kiddie example at a town carnival, & the act of shooting at plastic ducks. He emphasized
that wounded plastic duckies fall backward, not forward.
P.S.: David Lifton concluded unequivocally that a Secret Service role was critical to allow JFK's murder
& subsequent cover-up.
@LondonBob
Maybe so. Perhaps Baker is right: the Umbrella Man was a signal man, and Witt is not the Umbrella Man. But
then, fact number 2 become even more significant: why would someone come forward to make a declaration to
the HSCA that had the effect of connecting in the public psyche JFK's public assassination to the Kennedys'
anti-Semitism, and therefore, implicitly, to Jewish vengeance?
(I should have included that paragraph).
This "Israel did it" theory doesn't quite answer the question of how physical evidence was destroyed and
eyewitnesses intimidated by agents of the US government. This I base on an assertion in Douglass's book JFK
and the Unspeakable that men with Secret Service and FBI credentials immediately began the cover up
operation.
Douglass pointed to this as proof that a group of CIA insiders, no doubt loyal to Dulles, were
the orchestrators. How else to get real credentials for fake agents? That still makes sense to me though M.
Guyenot's writings make it clear that the Israelis would have been happy to lend an assist.
JFK's public assassination to the Kennedys' anti-Semitism,
Laurent Guyenot, I have already posted – my agreement with your well written analysis.
However, (please pay attention),
John F. Kennedy was not an 'anti-Semite,' he liked Arabs.
Semites are Peoples from the Middle East. The overwhelming majority of Jews are NOT Semites. They hail
from Europe, or from America-by route of Europe.
I would recommend
Arthur Koestler's Thirteenth Tribe
, as the first read – of many to understand &
correctly use the term "Semite."
The term Semite is cynically used as a misdirection tool.
The Jewish Oligarch claim to be Semites,
is a deceitful way of laying claim to land in the Middle East. The worst anti-Semites are Jews, who are busy
Ethnically Cleansing Palestinian Arabs, stealing their lands & wealth, and, additionally, attempting to
conquer all of the Middle East, and Remove, or Exterminate the indigenous Semites.
Orwell
exposed the manipulation of Language, in his
1984
, as the key tool of oppressors to
reduce their subjects to slavery.
A couple of years ago I finally fulfilled a promise I made to my self back in November 22nd 1963 as I sat in
Edinburgh Scotland on that fateful Friday night,that I would one day visit Dealey plaza Dallas and see for
my self.
As I drove into the plaza up W Commerce street what struck me immediately was how small it all felt and as I
walked around the compact size of Dealey plaza was reinforced. I had been viewing the unfolding events all
these years through the lens of a narrow angle press camera and Zapruders home movie wide angle lens, which
to me made the place look far more expansive than it is when you are there in person. I have been unable for
some time to come up or read anyone else's theory which explained satisfactorily the shallow back wound in
Kennedy the throat wound with just a tiny knick in the tie , the wounding of Connelly, the Teague face hit,
the damage to the windscreen and the chrome strip of the car and the shot which hit the grass.
who claimed that umbrella man had fired a poison paralysing dart at Kennedy at about z189. I took this
with a pinch of salt when I first read it. The plaza looked to big for this to have been likely and the
distance from the kerb side to the car would be to large to have a realistic chance of success from an
umbrella, but having visited the plaza and seeing how close he actually was, far fetched though it seems,
it's a good theory that fits what you see happening in the Z film.
So I think Richard E. Sprague is pretty much right , first Umbrella man opens his umbrella the coloured
man stands in front of him with his hand in the air and umbrella man fires his flechette hitting Kennedy in
the throat. Then Kennedy's hands go to his throat and he is quickly parallalized. The radio man passes the
message to start shooting. The first shot comes in , it misses but hits the street lamp standard or the tree
and fragments, one of the fragment hits Kennedy in the back and one fragment hits Teague in the face along
with bits hitting the car chrome strip and windscreen. A second shot comes in and hits Connelly in the chest
and Connelly starts screaming "they are going to kill us all". The third shot hits Kennedy in the head as
Z313 as he sits stiff and ridged slightly angled but upright in the car. There may have been a 4th shot from
the grassy knoll which was a head shot also and a possible 5th shot , the one hit the grass in Dealey Plaza.
With a sixth and possible second shot hit on Connelly. Since we now have multiple shooters and Umbrella man
the timing of shots is no longer a factor not if they are coming in close together can we determine exactly
how many.
Ok but here is my justification's for his theory. First you need to read Richard E. Sprague and his
appendages .
We have confirmation that such a weapon existed from Col Prouty.
We have the appearance at the congressional hearing of the Umbrella man Mr Witt in 1978 himself showing the
alleged umbrella he carried that day , which would be rather odd if he had turned up with the real umbrella
and said this is the weapon, so he is an unreliable witness with no evidence chain to this or any umbrella,
so to me he is CIA disinformation.
e said he was putting the umbrella up and down as a protest against Joe Kennedy and Jack Kennedy as
appeasers with some comment about Neville Chamberlain and his appeasement policies in WW2. Sorry Mr Umbrella
man , Mr Chamberlain had died of cancer before America entered WW2 replaced by Churchill in May 1940.
Secondly Mr Chamberlin was an alleged appeaser of Germany not the Soviet Union who were our supposed allies,
while Jack was being accused of Soviet-Cuban appeasement over the Bay of Pigs I assume. It's also safe to
say that in the 30's most middle class people in London wore a bowler hat carried an umbrella and a brief
case.
The lack of reaction from Mr Kennedy as his hands fall to his side when Connelly is crying out and being
pulled into his wife's arms as Jack is frozen in inaction and falling slightly to the side.
The inability of any theory other than the preposterous "magic bullet theory" to explain the lack of
penetration observed with the back wound bullet and the small size of the throat wound would , making it
difficult to be an entrance wound and impossible to be an exit wound favours the explanation of the dart
theory and a bullet fragment causing the back wound. The inexperienced, doctors under great external
pressure would have been looking for a wound with the associated damage that would have been caused by a
whole bullet and none would have heard of the Flechette weapon .
The back wound bullet travelling downwards if it did suddenly deflect and exit the throat so cleanly ,
without significantly damaging the tie is unlikely to hit Connelly also, from its upwards trajectory.
As Mr Holmes would say when you have eliminated the impossible , the magic bullet is one impossible, there
was only 3 bullets is the second impossible, another solution to the small non exiting back wound , and the
small throat wound is another impossible, that Kennedy would have not thrown himself to the floor of the car
after the being hit in the back is another impossible, that Kennedy made not a sound on that day is another
impossible, when Connelly is yelling blue murder.
Did the Jews and the CIA do it , we will never know but it surely was not Oswald.
More on Oliver Stone, taken from the excellent "Final Judgment" by Michael Collins Piper.
THE MOSSAD CONNECTION
David Ben-Gurion – Prime Minister of Israel; resigned his post in disgust with JFK's stance toward
Israel. in April of 1963; Said JFK's position threatened Israel's very survival.
Yitzhak Shamir – A long-time Mossad officer (based largely at the Mossad's chief European office in
Paris), Shamir headed the Mossad's assassination squad at the time of the JFK assassination. A former
French intelligence officer has charged that Shamir himself arranged the hiring of JFK's actual assassins
through a close ally in French intelligence.
Menachem Begin – In 1963, Begin (later prime minister of Israel) was a roving Israeli diplomat; prior to
JFK's assassination he was overheard conspiring with Meyer Lansky's California henchman, Mickey Cohen, in
a conversation that suggested hostile intentions by Israel against the American president.
Luis Kutner – Although known largely as a "mob lawyer," (who was long and closely associated with Jack
Ruby, a sometime-client) Kutner also doubled as an international intelligence operative and functioned as
an advisor to an ad hoc pro-Israel lobby group in the United States.
A. L. Botnick – Head of the New Orleans office of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) of B'nai B'rith, an
intelligence and propaganda arm for Israel's Mossad; a close associate of New Orleans-based CIA contract
operative Guy Banister who helped create Lee Harvey Oswald's preassassination profile as a "pro-Castro"
agitator. Evidence suggests that Banister's manipulation of Oswald may have been carried out under the
guise of an ADL "fact-finding" operation.
Arnon Milchan – Israel's biggest arms dealer, Milchan was "executive producer" (i.e. chief financial
angel) of Oliver Stone's Hollywood fantasy
about the JFK assassination-a fact which may explain
Stone's aversion to exploring the Israeli connection to the affair.
Maurice Tempeisman – The international diamond merchant and Mossad operative who became the lover of
Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and used his connections to double-perhaps triple-her substantial fortune,
thereby co-opting the Kennedy family forever.
It makes sense to me that an order was given to the various independent snipers that Kennedy was to be
shot at the precise moment when the presidential limousine drew level with the man holding an open
umbrella.
W
hy not just use the Stemmons freeway sign, or some other physical landmarks in Dealey Plaza to
delineate the kill zone, rather than some doofus with an umbrella who might draw the attention of the
authorities, and be hauled in for questioning?
Why would the snipers need a signal to begin shooting anyway, when they themselves could see their target
entering the predetermined kill zone? Does the hunter need a signal that this the buck, or a matador a
signal that this is the bull? Killing JFK within that kill zone ensured that the patsy could be framed, so
there was no need for any signal for the assassins to know when to begin firing. If a signal was really
needed, the first shot would have done it.
@Laurent Guyenot
I also heard of the supposed invitation of Lindbergh but didn't believe it because I thought it was
nonsense. Wow! Former ex military that I have known were also partial to the idea that Israel and the Jewish
lobby played a role in his assassination.
Supposedly, Kennedy basically insulted someone from one of the
Jewish Groups and they didn't take kindly to it because he was adamant that these groups would register as
foreign agents. Fullbright who publicly denounced Israel and their control of the US Congress on National TV
and the fact that Kennedy wanted him as Secretary of State must have also riled the Jews. Fullbright was
also against the Vietnam War.
If you look at what's happening to Trump right now with this Ukraine
nonsense all the witnesses are Jews. From Epstein to Trump and so forth this shows that Israel and the Jews
will do anything for control of the world and makes their possible input into the Kennedy's death more
plausible.
@follyofwar
"Given the decades long national trauma, from which the country has never recovered, it would have been far
better if Nixon had won."
There is more than anecdotal evidence to suggest that Nixon SHOULD have won.
C.f., "Chicago", "Mayor Daley" etc. If Nixon had won then maybe there wouldn't have been a Watergate. Who
knows? And, no, this country never recovered. Indeed, 11/22/1963 was the beginning of the slow, steady
unraveling of American society which continues apace.
The Abraham Zapruder heirs did not need an umbrella, when in 1999, the US government rained down $16 million
for the film.
Fyi, according to Dishonest Abe's granddaughter's book, instead of forking over the film to either Dallas
cops or FBI, he made a copy and gave the Secret Service custody of the original.
Well, I'll admit I've never looked into this "Umbrella Man" issue, nor have more than glanced over this long
comment-thread. But frankly, I'm pretty skeptical of this particular "conspiracy analysis."
It's important
to remember the public issues of the early 1960s, especially with regard to JFK. A very large one was that
rightwingers widely regarded JFK as "soft on Communism," especially after the failed Bay of Pigs invasion.
Put another way, they accused him of "appeasing the Communists" much like Neville Chamberlain and Joseph
Kennedy had been vilified by the MSM for "appeasing Hitler."
So it seems perfectly plausible to me that some Texas rightwinger who felt that way might have gone to
the scene displaying an umbrella as a symbol of Munich-style appeasement, though this time towards
Communism. Maybe a little eccentric, but that seems vastly more plausible than e.g. the Umbrella guy being a
shot-signaler for the JFK snipers. Why would professional snipers need a signaler? And for him to have been
working with the assassins in providing some mystical/symbolic attack on JFK seems totally ridiculous.
And for those interested in my own analysis of the JFK Assassination itself, here are the links to a
couple of articles I published last year:
There might not be a better introduction to the Kennedy Assassination than this documentary, "The Men Who
Killed Kennedy'. I would estimate it's accuracy at around 90%.
Joseph Kennedy was right. The "Jews" did win the war, but they did so along with the US and UK Masonic
establishments. It likely all came down to their power through money and influence. Kennedy was a Catholic
and after the success of the communist revolution in Russia and the spread throughout the 1920's, the RC
Church and nations like Germany were besieged by the movement everywhere. It was mostly spawned by the Anglo
Masonic and Zionist cabal which went on to "win" WWII.
Fascism in Italy, Spain and Germany was a direct reaction to the threat of communism. Mussolini in the
1920's nipped it in the bud, but it continued to spread and the source was the same. By the time of the 1932
election in Germany, a number of Germany cities had voted in communist governments. The threat to freedom of
religion was very real based on what had happened in Russia. Whether the communist ideology was based on
Marx, Lenin or Stalin in that nation, Christians in particular were severely persecuted. When the Christian
Democrats in Germany in that election failed to win a majority, coming in third behind the communists and
the Nazis, then in many places in the following 1933 election, the churches threw their weight behind Hitler
in order to keep the communists from taking over. Like in the US today, it was a matter of the lesser of
evils.
When the war ended with Germany, the USSR which had been supplied and supported by the US throughout the
war, continued to occupy the eastern European nations with the consent of the US and the UK. These were
nations with relatively large Catholic and Protestant populations and the people of those religions were
severely persecuted by the communists regimes. (You can read about what they did to Jewish convert and
Lutheran pastor, Richard Wurmbrand, in order to get an idea of the severity.) When the US army took
possession of Rome in June 1944, in effect it was huge victory over the RC Church for the Masons. At least
since 1958 the ame cabal has been extremely influential in determining Church polices, and controlling
Church finances, and it is from then on that the Vatican has been used to push the so-called "new world
order". From my observations over the years, based on of the various deconstruction polices at work in the
Church, it is clear that the Vatican is essentially a Masonic/Zionist instrument. The same forces are
presently working to deconstruct out nations for their new order.
The deep state in the US is made up of a number of factions, which are always at each other's throats.
Oligarchic families have largely made their initial fortunes outside of the law, or if not then in any case
they all believe they are above the law. The "made" Italian, Irish, and Jewish crime families and dons, all
throughout North America are controlled by establishment oligarchs and government agencies. Vices are
legalised mainly for profit and to give more legitimacy to the money flows. Huge power struggles go on
behind the scenes where despite the information on the independent internet we know little about. The entire
system is rotten to the core.
a declaration [..] that had the effect of connecting in the public psyche JFK's public assassination
[..] to Jewish vengeance?
Thanks for yet another first-class article, and thanks even more for bringing up President Kennedy's
memory on the day anniversary of his cruel and untimely passing.
It is very credible that the Chamberlain symbol story was retrospectively deliberately devised to taunt
and threaten the Kennedy family and their supporters, and remind them of Jewish vengeance.
But "Umbrella Man" cannot be dissociated from another suspicious character, "Signal Man", also called
"Dark Complected Man", who was standing close to him at all times and was filmed raising his arm while the
presidential limousine was approaching.
In Frame 226 of the Zapruder Film, the arm of Dark Complected Man can be seen up with its fist closed, which
in military hand signs means "hold" or "stop".
There were many testimonies that JFK's limousine came to a total halt for many seconds for the final,
murderous headshots; his driver was part of the conspiracy.
What is even more unbelievable and strikingly odd is "Umbrella Man" and "Dark Complected Man" sat next to
each other, on the curb, seconds after the shooting, while everybody else is taking shelter from the shooter
at the Grassy Knoll.
Of course, these were not gay lovers comforting each other, but two perpetrators probably sharing the same
walkie-talkie. A walkie-talkie whose shape could be guessed in the right hand of "Dark Complected Man":
@Jefferson Temple
To the question why US government agents would facilitate the cover up, you find the straight answer in
Michael Collins Pipers book. They had themselves organized their own action, likely a fake assassination
attempt to be blamed on Cuba (that would have been Oswalds part), and they had seriously let down the
defenses of the president when the assassination went real.
Many people had to be afraid of being held to account, so the necessary officials to order the cover up
were easily persuaded. Also note, that Johnson was certainly in on the plot. He would order any serious
investigation to be derailed.
Why not just use the Stemmons freeway sign, or some other physical landmarks in Dealey Plaza to
delineate the kill zone, rather than some doofus with an umbrella who might draw the attention of the
authorities, and be hauled in for questioning?
A marksman doesn't operate alone. He's assisted by a spotter and [when needed, in combat situations. fe]
a 3rd man for general protection. So, we have at least two, 2-men teams [at a minimum]. 1 team [of 2 men]
was spotted on the Grassy Knoll, behind a picket fence, and at the spot the bullet had to be fired from, to
make JFK's head slam back and to the left.
Then triangulate the target and fire.
Am not saying umbrella man did give a signal, but logically, the opening of fire had to be synchronized
to have maximum effect.
The driver not hitting the pedal to the metal when the first shot/s rang out remains a mystery to me,
because the man actually slows down the limo and then JFK's brain is blown to smithereens.
@Sparkon
Good questions. I would suggest that there were multiple shooters in multiple locations and all were
completely unaware of each other.
Why not just use the Stemmons freeway sign, or some other physical landmarks in Dealey Plaza to
delineate the kill zone, rather than some doofus with an umbrella who might draw the attention of the
authorities, and be hauled in for questioning?
Using the freeway sign or any other fixed and inanimate object would mean that each shooter would have to
be contacted separately should the hit need to be called off for any reason. That person would thus know far
too much and pose a high risk of exposing the plotters if caught. The stakes were high indeed!
The umbrella man would know nothing more than where to stand and when to open his umbrella so that him
being called in for questioning would reveal nothing.
Killing JFK within that kill zone ensured that the patsy could be framed, so there was no need for any
signal for the assassins to know when to begin firing.
As I stated, the justification for attempting to synchronise the shots is so that they can all be blamed
on just one "crazed" patsy later.
If a signal was really needed, the first shot would have done it.
Snipers need plenty of time and the exact range to take the kill shot.
It makes sense to me that an order was given to the various independent snipers that Kennedy was to be
shot at the precise moment when the presidential limousine drew level with the man holding an open
umbrella,
Completely agree, dear Nosey, with just a quibble.
The men who shot President Kennedy were hired guns, hit men from the Chicago mob. Their job was, always
is, to
shoot the "target" in the head.
There was at least 3 of them in action, positioned to create a triangulated crossfire.
However, the intention was from the onset to blame it on the patsy Oswald, so it was very important that
the headshot to JFK was taken from behind. The best shooter was positioned behind the limousine, in the
Dal-Tex building, and was in charge with taking the head shot.
When he failed to hit President Kennedy at the head, Plan B was put in action and a headshot taken from
the Grassy Knoll.
So the presence of Umbrella Man and Dark Complected Man next to the limit where a successful headshot
from behind becomes unlikely is very easy to understand:
– Umbrella Man is close from the limousine. He sees that the President's head is intact and opens his
umbrella to tell the Grassy Knoll sniper to shoot.
– His accomplice , Dark Complected Man, raises his arm with a closed fist, a military sign telling JFK/s
driver to stop the limousine to facilitate the execution. This stop of many seconds was recounted by the
witnesses present.
It is so simple and logical. People just don't want to accept the idea because it implies that there was
a vast conspiracy with a large number of people involved.
The movie is a limited hangout made to ensure that those who cannot swallow the obvious lies of the
Warren Commission will direct their anger otherwise than at Israel.
That observation is just as valid for the largest part of the yearly anniversary articles on the Kennedy
assasination: Take the time and scan the articles on your favorite sites, how many of them only just mention
Voldemort country in that context. If only just to refute the idea or to proclaim that only sickos believe
it. It cannot have past by the numerous authors over the years that that theory at least exists.
Instead, you are treated to a steady stream of philosophizing on the deep state, Vietnam, the CIA and the
like. Take note and evaluate your reading matter.
@Ron Unz
I remember my father made a comment long after JFK's asssassination in which he felt JFK was soft on
communism. He also felt Khruschev was a tougher and smarter negotiator. It was only a few sentences, but not
everyone loved JFK. But being German, I think he might have had a soft spot for JFK, if we knew then what we
know now, with his diaries published. Of course, today's Germans no longer think like that. I do not recall
any discussion of JFK's father's views on WW II. That was kept quiet and the media did not make it a public
issue. Those were pre "Holocaust Industry" days in which according to Norman Finkelstein, Jews became bolder
and [even] more outspoken with Israel being perceived as a valuable ally after winning the 1967 war. This,
according to Finkelstein.
I recall JFK being very popular, well liked and people thought "Jackie" was beautiful and thought they
had a beautiful family. I think they were also perceived as having "class", probably because that is what
the media said. I think it was after his assassination that the knowledge of his extramarital affairs (and
Bobby's too) became public and then Jackie married the Greek multi-millionaire Onassis. For my mother, that
took all the class out of Jackie that the media always had said she had. I think they were very popular with
the media. By contrast, JFK's opponent in the 1960 election was Richard Nixon, not as good looking as JFK,
remembered for his tough stance on communism and that probably made him more popular with the right and less
popular with the media and the left.
It would be interesting how this would play out if JFK was still alive and his diaries became public
while he was alive. I have a feeling he may have been tougher than people like my father perceived him to be
and maybe he just held the views he had, but maybe not out of any weakness.
The Kennedys were knocked off with major input from Zionists. I think that almost certainly includes John Jr
(if that were an accident and had been avoided, and John John had failed to get 100% behind both Liberal and
Neocon Jews, then they would have killed him). But true Blue WASPs on both sides if the Atlantic also wanted
the Kennedys destroyed. And the WASP hatred of Irish Catholics has been what has been most used, and used
most effectively, in leading non-Catholic white Middle Americans away from recognizing the Kennedys as the
most important murder victims in the march of the Deep State to make serfs of us all.
It all goes back to
the Judaizing heresy Anglo-Saxon Puritanism, most specifically to archetypal WASP Oliver Cromwell's direct
deal with Jews, opening England to be directed, and eventually owned, by Jewish bankers. There has been a
Brit WASP Deep State since at least the Restoration of the monarchy, and it revealed its total power no
later than the 'Glorious Revolution.' And the Brit WASP Deep State then was tied inextricably to Jewish
bankers.
It is almost as if you either
must
play nice and fair, respectfully and equally, with Celts and
white Catholics or else get made a serf by a Jewish-owned WASP Deep State.
Of course, I know the speculation it was Israelis who were behind it (Dimona), but I don't
find it persuasive. There are other means to avoid US inspection, and Kennedy was not adamant about it at
all. These are things politicians toy with all the time, and while not a "friend" of Israel, Kennedy was not
an enemy -- one could consider Eisenhower, if we judge him by his actions during Suez canal crisis- to be an
"enemy" of Israel (of course this too is simplistic, politics is a rough business).
To illustrate the "rough" side of politics, let's see the following. Let's see Henry Kissinger, with his
publicly suppressed answer to Nixon re Soviet Jews:
Just- they deleted Kissinger's original statement, which can be seen in this leftist guy's clip
(comedienne Sarah Silverman reads Kissinger's words, at 2:06):
"The emigration of Jews from the Soviet Union is not an objective of American foreign policy. And if they
put Jews into gas chambers in the Soviet Union, it is not an American concern. Maybe a humanitarian
concern."
Maybe..maaaybe maaaybe.
..
This remark can be read only in the papers, because "it was taken out of context.
Taken "out of context"? I say:
So, it can be read only in 2-3 places, and not seen in a video
Nothing, I just wanted to point that media manipulations have no limits; that American Jews are not
nearly as monolithic; that one should be aware that talk or statements are not something too reliable; that
one can construct from scratches a huge conspiracy.
Who says that Witt was actually the "umbrella man"? Why was he identified only 15 years after the event?
And even if he was that man- what kind of silly gesture would it be, because who in his right mind would
think that JFK would have noticed anyone in this situation & mentally process this like: umbrella >
Chamberlain > my dad > huh, I'm guilty .
JFK had, I think, a Jewish mistress whom he intended to marry (prior to his marriage) & was dissuaded by
his family; he was not anti-Jewish; Israel, as virtually all American Jews, was horrified by his
assassination, which can be seen from Golda Meir's behavior (she seems to have thought that JFK
assassination was a right-wing coup):
@Iris
"People just don't want to accept the idea because it implies that there was a vast conspiracy with a large
number of people involved."
The primary reason for that is for such a large conspiracy to be tried, much
of the WASP establishment had to have been on board, and most of the rest had to have been known to being
the type easily coerced afterwards to remain silent.
It took WASPs and Zionists to plan it and execute and cover it up, and then spread endless propaganda,
including playing hard on WASP hatreds of Irish Catholics to keep culturally conservative and/or
anti-imperialist Protestant Middle Americans from looking at the evidence of cover up.
@Fred Baggins
I suspect that it was Jewish influence which made the capitalists and communists alllies. They played a
leading role in the USSR, Great Britain and the USA, and they are the only ones that could see the benefit
of these otherwise ideological enemies being allies. Except for the USA (separated from the fighting by two
oceans), no one else benefitted from WW II. If Winston Churchill had been more concerned about his beloved
empire than his own reputation and had not accepted bribes from wealthy Jews when he was in financial need,
Europe and Great Britain would still be great. They would still lead the world. And Jews would have a
fraction of the power they have today. Yes, Jews won that war and were its major beneficiaries, despite
being told the direct opposite. They made it into a world war and they brought the suffering to all Europe,
but particularly to their German enemy, and themselves.
@Emblematic
Robert David Steele's Blog review of " Tavistock Institute : Social Engineering the masses " by Daniel
Estulin – "The deep state playbook " :
"Although I have read and heard over the years of CIA and KGB Freemasons collaborating in betrayal of their
countries and organizations by order of the Freemasons we have to deal with the fact that the President
and everyone of consequence in Congress , Justice and the FBI is a high ranking Freemason . "
"Sir Knight
Earl Warren " By Sir Knight Dr. Ivan M. Tribe (Knightstemplar.org ):
"In 1938 he( Earl Warren ) served as Master of Rose Croix and in 1945 presiding office of the Lodge of
Perfection . By that time he had already been coroneted with the 33rd degree "
Gerald McKnight " Breach of Trust : How the Warren Commission failed the Nation and Why " :
"The records of the Commission disclose that the commission's pre-structured task was to support the FBI's
conclusions : Oswald was the assassin and that he acted alone ."
@PeterMX
" and then Jackie married the Greek multi-millionaire Onassis " – The then was after RFK's assassination:
"If they're killing Kennedys, then my children are targets I want to get out of this country"
So the deal was to offer some safety but you are correct that her marriage to Onassiss "took all the
class out of Jackie that the media always had said she had." But this was the price which the forces that
pushed her in this direction wanted her to pay to diminish and tarnish the legend of JFK. The safety was not
coming form the wealth of Onassis but from the tarnished image and marginalization by marrying the rich
Greek creep.
The primary reason for that is for such a large conspiracy to be tried, much of the WASP establishment
had to have been on board
It was much simpler than that: JFK's assassination was a criminal Zionist conspiracy within a more benign
WASP conspiracy.
A secret mission was organised by the loyal Security apparatus to abort an assassination attempt against
President Kennedy at Dallas.
The abort mission would have resulted in unmasking and arresting criminal elements within the
establishment. Oswald the patsy was part of the abort mission, as was Agent Bouck, the head of the WH Secret
Service. And Robert Kennedy was involved too.
But more powerful parties within the Zionist Deep State were at play: they took control of the situation
and turned it into a real assassination, killing two birds with one stone:
– They executed the independent and principled President who stood up to them.
– They compromised the WASP establishment, including RFK, with the murky and failed abort mission that was
turned into a real assassination, making their responsibility undistinguishable.
Finally, Kennedy had enough, and in a personal letter dated May 18, 1963, the president warned that
unless American inspectors were allowed into Dimona (meaning the end of any military activities), Israel
would find itself totally isolated. Rather than answering, Ben-Gurion abruptly resigned.
Ben-Gurion's successor, Levi Eshkol received Kennedy's next letter, which upped the pressure, warning
that the American commitment and support of Israel "could be seriously jeopardized."
And then there was RFK as Attorney General demanding Israel lobbyist to be registered as foreign lobbyist
and how it was undone after RFK was forced to resign by LBJ year or so later after JFK assassination.
http://www.israellobby.org/azcdoj/
"Judge Rifkind then made a plea for no registration, stating it was the opinion of most of the persons
affiliated with the Council that such registration would be so publicized by the American Council on
Judaism that it would eventually destroy the Zionist movement he did not believe his clients would file
any papers or sign any papers indicating that the organization was an agent of a foreign principal. I
told him that any such information or material that is supplied on that basis would be made part of the
Department's public files available for inspection by the public "
In DOJ internal memo on 4/30/1964 before replacing RFK as AG with Nicholas Katzenbach the following was
stated: "This is the most blatant stall we have encountered. Do you mind suggesting what we do next because
all of us here would call their records before a grand jury." RFK resigns as AG in September 1964. When
Katzenbach became acting AG and then AG exchanges between Jewish lobby and DOJ continued but no action was
taken by DOJ. Eventually on n 11/27/1967, four years and five days after JFK's death AIPAC applies for a
federal tax exemption. The lobby has won.
The Warren Commission hogwash was almost as ridiculous as the official 911 nonsense, and Mark Lane's 1966
book "Rush to Judgment" helped fuel broad public disbelief in the official story.
Talk about quid pro quo
to the nth degree, as that hideous snake LBJ gave the MIC and its financiers their wars, etc., in exchange
for the Presidency and for keeping his sorry ass out of jail for the Billy Sol Estes and Bobby Baker
scandals. Sure, the Israelis benefitted, and were likely a cog in the conspiratorial wheel, but the CIA,
Secret Service, and various military agents were the movers and shakers, with LBJ their guarantor.
Much of the conspiratorial framework is exposed in David Lifton's absolutely must-read book "Best
Evidence" which clearly shows that the body was altered before autopsy in an attempt to make the physical
evidence conform to the Oswald-as-shooter narrative. The conspirators left a wide trail of evidence that
only the highest-level actors could suppress, as in the 911 crimes.
There were many testimonies that JFK's limousine came to a total halt for many seconds for the final,
murderous headshots
There is another film of the assasination, taken from the distance across the Plaza (maybe, someone can
link it? It must have been in the comment section of some earlier article). That film clearly shows, how the
police motorcycles continue while the limosine falls back and nearly comes to a hold. If the driver had done
his job he would have speeded of at the first second of realizing something was going on. These people are
trained for nothing else but exactly such situations. The driver and several other people around the
president must have been in on the plot to varying degrees.
Comparing that film with the Zapruder film also shows that the Zapruder film was severly tempered with
before release – anyone believes that Oliver Stone and his team as Hollywood professionals who based their
plot on that film didn't realize that?
In Robert Caro's biography of Lyndon Johnson, he mentions that when LBJ was running against Kennedy for the
Democrat nomination in 1960 he attacked Kennedy for his father's appeasement, saying "I was never a
Chamberlain umbrella man."
Weakness, Johnson had seen in three decades in Washington, was never rewarded. When he said of
Vietnam, "We're not going to have any men with any umbrellas," a pointed reference to the hapless
Chamberlain, the message was clear: America would stand up to Ho Chi Minh and the Vietcong in a way that
Chamberlain had not stood up to Hitler and the Nazi regime.
So it seems perfectly plausible to me that some Texas rightwinger who felt that way might have gone to
the scene displaying an umbrella as a symbol of Munich-style appeasement, though this time towards
Communism.
The whole appeasement thing is bunk.
Chamberlain surely didn't give a damn about appeasing Hitler, except as a manipulative stratagem.
But for Britain, in the late thirties, going to war with Germany would have been insane. Britain had at
most four, and possibly only two, deployable army divisions versus Germany's 40 plus. The threat posed by a
rapidly rearming and aggressive Germany was thus best dealt with by bringing Germany into confrontation with
Russia.
By sacrificing Czechoslovakia to Germany, Chamberlain greatly added to Hitler's military resources, which
were then far smaller than Russia's.
Encouraging Polish obduracy in the matter of Danzig, brought German forces directly to the Russian
frontier. Then it was a matter of waiting for these old adversaries to clash in accordance with the plan von
Ribbentrop had shown Winston Churchill during a visit to England in 1937. (Asked by Ribbentrop what he
thought of the plan for German Eastward expansion, Churchill is said to have replied "We don't like the
Russians, but we don't hate them that much.")
Meantime, the British economy had been placed on a war footing, and was turning out more military
aircraft than Germany.
Once the struggle between Germany and Russia had begun, Britain's only major concerns were to protect her
overseas possession, particularly the ME oil fields, which she did successfully, and to prepare a backstop
with massive American participation (Operation Overlord), on the Western front for the time when a greatly
weakened victor of the Russso-German conflict was in a position to turn West with a view to crushing Britain
and achieving a trans-European empire.
This is the original version. It' s actually 9 plus hours. This is cut to 4hours 33 minutes. Sometime during
the past two years this doc has been cut and revised – and loaded back onto YT with unoriginal content.
I find it hard to explain that this is the same Josiah Thompson who published in 1967 a book titled
Six Seconds in Dallas: a micro-study of the Kennedy assassination proving that three gunmen murdered the
President, for which he studied the Zapruder film and interviewed eyewitnesses in order to come up with a
plausible line of fire, and the conclusion of a conspiracy and government cover-up. What happened to
Josiah in between?
This is a great remark within an already so rich article; it introduces the concept of "Controlled
Conspiracy Theory".
At the time (1967) Josiah Thompson published his book, much courageous research on the JFK cover-up had
been produced, of which the most perilous for the perpetrators was the legal crusade undertaken by
New-Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison.
Thompson's book concluded that the hit men were at the Texas School Book Depository, Dallas County Record
and Grassy Knoll.
Of all possible places, he managed to exonerate the DalTex Building, a building entirely owned and run by
the Dallas Zionist community, in which Zapruder had his offices.
The DalTex Building had the best, shortest and most direct line of fire to JFK's limousine; it was the
principal "sniper nest" of the conspiracy.
The concept of "Controlled Conspiracy Theory" nicely applies to Mr Josiah Thompson.
@refl
The driver of JFK's limousine was William Greer, a Protestant from Ulster who in his youth in Northern
Ireland had been a member of the Orange Order. One of the other two drivers in the presidential detail had
died of an untimely heart attack shortly before Dallas.
Israel, as virtually all American Jews, was horrified by his assassination, which can be seen from Golda
Meir's behavior
Why shouldn't they? I am sure that a significant section of American and Israeli Jews are horrified by the
every day action of the IDF. They were horrified by the assassination of Yitzak Rabin.
It must be horrifying to be tied to maniacal leadership, who will sacrifice you any time in the name of the
fulfillment of their sick plan. So if you are a good Christian or Muslim, Buddhist, Pastafari or whatever,
pray for these poor fellows.
Like any good gumshoe worth his salt, the first question he asks himself after arriving at the crime scene is
Cui bono, who benefits?
In the case of the JFK assassination, there was clearly one very large beneficiary
that stood out above the rest, Israel.
By Nov 1963, JFK had two big strikes against him:
1. In 1963 President Kennedy demanded that Ben-Gurion end Israel's nuclear deterrent program. Kennedy warned
in a letter dated May 18, 1963, that unless American inspectors were allowed into Israel's Dimona facility,
Israel would find itself totally isolated. "We are concerned with the disturbing effects on world stability
which would accompany the development of a nuclear weapons capability by Israel It is because of our
preoccupation with this problem that my Government has sought to arrange with you for periodic visits to Dimona."
As it turned out, his following reassurance fell on deaf ears "As I made clear in my press conference of May 8,
we have a deep commitment to the security of Israel."
2. In 1963 President Kennedy demanded that the American Zionist Council register under FARA as a foreign
agent. In a letter dated October 17, 1963 (one month before JFK's assassination), Judge Rifkind (a
representative of the AZC), responded to the Kennedy Administration's demand: " it was the opinion of most of
the persons affiliated with the Council that
such registration
would be so publicized by the American
Council on Judaism that it
would eventually destroy the Zionist movement.
"
Along with the quote by AZC Representative Judge Rifkind, here is the infamous quote by Jack Ruby's (born
Jacob Rubinstein) rabbi, Hillel Silverman:
"I was shocked," said Silverman. "I visited him the next day in jail, and I said, 'Why, Jack, why?' He
said, 'I did it for the American people.'"
I interrupted Silverman, pointing out that other reports had Ruby saying he did it "to show that Jews had
guts." The rabbi sighed.
"Yes, he mentioned that," Silverman said. "But I don't like to mention it. I think he said, 'I did it
for the Jewish people.' But I've tried to wipe that statement from my mind."
@CanSpeccy
"If Israel assassinated JFK, who assassinated RFK and John, Jr.?"
– That Israel did them would be a very
conservative conclusion, don't you think?
Picking Sirhan Sirhan as a Palestinian patsy who was upset with RFK's alleged love for Israel was a master
stroke. JFK Jr. who can't stop himself from beating around the bush of the topics of assassinations like
picking Woody Harrelson (*) for the December 1996 cover of his magazine or then digging into Yitzach Rabin
conspiracy and then rumors that he will run for Senate
Joseph Chagra later testified during Harrelson's trial that Harrelson claimed to have shot Kennedy and drew
maps to show where he was hiding during the assassination. Chagra said that he did not believe Harrelson's
claim, and the AP reported that the FBI "apparently discounted any involvement by Harrelson in the Kennedy
assassination."[25] According to Jim Marrs in 1989's Crossfire, Harrelson is believed to be the youngest and
tallest of the "three tramps" by many conspiracy theorists.[22] Marrs stated that Harrelson was involved "with
criminals connected to intelligence agencies and the military" and suggested that he was connected to Jack Ruby
through Russell Douglas Matthews, a third party with links to organized crime who was known to both Harrelson
and Ruby.[23] Lois Gibson, a well-known forensic artist, matched photographs of Harrelson to the photographs of
the youngest-looking of the three "tramps".
"Mr. Trump has been prevented from releasing the rest of the "top secret" files, in spite of his promise to do
so."
IIRC, it was Trump doing all of the preventing.
This "Israel did it" theory doesn't quite answer the question of how physical evidence was destroyed and
eyewitnesses intimidated by agents of the US government.
This has been discussed in depth here in this case and the 911 case.
The Mossad and the CIA were part of the same "team"–the CIA handled and continues to handle the ongoing
domestic coverup operations as needed (including Mockingbird mass media activities).
Connelly is a _very_ interesting figure, and his background prior to the day of the assassination is not very
well understood.
I was stunned to read that he was a key actor in the Korean War "setup":
Isn't it significant that the patsy set up to take the blame for the RFK assassination was a Palestinian?
If the CIA did it, they would naturally have arranged to put the blame elsewhere. Is that not why Sirhan
Sirhan remains incarcerated to this day. Given freedom, the fall guy might give the CIA a headache.
Remember, Kennedy had just buggered up the CIA's Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba and was threatening to pull
out of the CIA's war in Vietnam. With
a nod from LBJ
the CIA could kill Kennedy and be sure of top-down cover from the moment Kennedy's heart
stopped beating, cover which, according to the doctors who attended on Kennedy at Parklands Hospital, was
promptly given.
Then there's the deathbed confession of CIA agent E. Howard Hunt, which provides a tenuous connection with
Richard Nixon, who hired Hunt and Frank Sturgis (both believed to have been among the tramps arrested in Dealey
Plaza in the immediate aftermath of the assassination) to. among other things, burglarize the Democratic Party
headquarters at the Watergate Building in Washington, DC.
That's Mary Pinchot Meyer.
Wife of Cord Meyer, of the CIA.
Sister-in-law of Ben Bradlee.
Lover of JFK, to whom he confided his vision for major peaceful change in the US of A and the world.
Kissinger made himself quit clear more than once about Jewish influence in US policy.
Kissinger was more German than Jew he had the typical 'Germanic manner ' .
German Jews in general were more assimilated than the less educated and more tribal Jews of Poland, Hungary,
etc.. If you look up the origins of the Fifth Column Jews in the Us most of them came thru Poland , where
militant Zionism had a stronghold way before WWII.
Kissinger .
""If it were not for the accident of my birth, I would be anti-Semitic," he once quipped, and "any people
who has been persecuted for two thousand years must be doing something wrong."
Another time, he told a friend, "I was born Jewish, but the truth is that has no significance for me. America
has given me everything."
On Israel .
"On the other hand, we can not make our policy hostage to the Israelis, because our interests, while
parallel in respect to that I have outlined, are not identical in overall terms. From an Israeli point of view,
it is no disaster to have the whole Arab world radicalized and anti-American, because this guarantees our
continued support. From an American point of view this is a disaster."
Jewish disloyalty
Kissinger also went as far as
accusing American Jews of behaving traitorously
for supporting the
Jackson-Vanik Amendment that ruined his and Nixon's effort on a détente agreement with Russia.
@Skeptikal
Yes, Skeptical, and 'thanks" for the reiteration as to who and what was the murdered Mary Pinchot Meyer.
I trust Laurent Guyenot knows about Mary's intense love affair with President JFK,
and after his barbaric & election overturning murder, how she knew about CIA's Counterintelligence & Israel
friendly, James Jesus Angleton's, passion
for
Jack's last nightmatish ride on Elm Street.
P.S.: Mary's remains rest in her great-grandfather, Gifford Pinchot's, Milford, Pa-based estate, which I
have visited. Fyi, it's a tourist spot now where her historical relationship with President JFK is unspoken.
What if it were raining and there were numerous people with umbrellas?
P
recisely.
Despite all the special pleading going on here by people who've read too many men's adventure novels, or
watched too many episodes of "Charlie's Angels," this Rube Goldbergian umbrella signalling scheme would never
get off the ground. It is a unnecessary complication with built-in failure modes.
The go-ahead for the operation was likely given the night before. The die was cast. There was no turning
back, and why would they?
If it had kept raining in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963, would it have changed history? Several books and
articles have pondered this question. President John F Kennedy greeted a crowd on a misty morning rain in
Fort Worth at 8:45 a.m. central standard time. The weather in Dallas had been rainy, but the sun came out
before the president's plane had landed.
@Pheasant
The donation could have been sincere, or it could have been a gesture to make them seem concerned patriots, or
it could have been money laundering a payoff to certain members of the Dallas PD for their silence in the
operation. Who knows? I never take any Jewish action at face value.
@Stonehands
Right. I only bought the official story at the time and for a few years after, as a very young kid, but the
idea of Oswald as nothing but a patsy never appealed to me.
@Duke84
I try to avoid the self-certainty that seems to be a bias in the reasoning behind the LHO didn't do it because
he couldn't crowd. On paper the odds against him succeeding increased with every miss and chance for the agents
and cops to fire at him and/or the limo driver to swerve and accelerate. An important point is the chance for
him to get away would decline precipitously too. By my way of thinking the most important factor would have
been single mindedness. He would have had to have been committed to succeed irrespective of the consequences.
We don't know Oswald had no help of encouragement, he may have been talking to Cubans and Soviets about his
intentions and they maybe just listened which he may have interpreted them as having approved. The fact he was
talking to the Cubans and KGB was considered worth keeping secret for several decades, and there is supposed to
be more along the same lines that has still not been declassified.
Even with a miss or two, hitting a moving head from 265 feet would have been workmanlike marksmanship. In
the circumstances that he might have been spotted and shot at any second it was nicely done, but it might have
been a fluke. On the other hand the limo was following a straight track, the driver seems to have brought it to
a near halt before the head shot, and Kennedy was quite exposed. It would depend on the determination of the
shooter not just his skill, but the circumstances and enormity of killing a president are so unique, plus
getting out the area would be so uncertain that it would require someone of formidable resolution.
My feeling is a professional would not even try, and he would understand he'd know too much afterwards
anyway. A loner would not have that problem. Oswald fits the profile better than any CIA agent I think. For the
shooting, you cannot exclude that he may have just got lucky. Whoever did it, they were risking a lot so it
would have to be tremendously meaningful to them.
Oswald seemed such a insignificant person to kill the great man that contingency was ruled out. I think
Oswald the CIA agent who agreed to go to Russia on a fake defector mission for the agency with no way of
knowing what would happen to him, would have been an insanely extreme patriot. Such an Oswald might be willing
to do anything he was ordered to I suppose. The trouble is Oswald seems to have been anti establishment right
back into his teens. He was an immature 17 year old when he joined the Marines, and though he toughened up
considerably they evidence of him ever being an anti communist fanatic is just lacking.
Here is a 60 year old man at 230 yards with a .45 pistol.
@Ted Heath
Once again, let's try to put the "Kennedy wanted to end the FED" myth to bed.
President Kennedy was not assassinated for being anti-Fed. I don't know how much more clearly that can be
said. His death on November 22nd, 1963 was a sad tragedy, but it had nothing to do with any stupid and
baseless Executive Order silver certificate conspiracy.
The claim is not borne out by the facts. First, E.O. 11110 had nothing to do with United States Notes,
and did not affect any section of law referring to them. Second, E.O. 11110 did not anywhere mention any
quantity of money; wherever the $4 billion-plus figure came from, it was not E.O. 11110. Third, The
President had no authority to issue such an edict. Even utilizing the provisions of the Agricultural
Adjustment Act of 1933, the most the President could issue without statutory authorization was $3 billion.
What E.O. 11110 did was to modify previous Executive Order 10289, delegating to the Secretary of the
Treasury various powers of the President. To these delegated powers, E.O. 11110 added the power to alter the
supply of Silver Certificates in circulation. Executive Order 11110, therefore, did not create any new
authority for the Treasury to issue notes; it only affected who could give the order, the Secretary or the
President.
Be sure and dive into all of the data supporting link's located at the bottom of this web page.
November 23,
2019 JFK, MLK, RFK, 50 Years of Suppressed History: New Evidence on Assassination of John F. Kennedy, Martin
Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy. Failures to Confront the Unspeakable, and The Way Ahead. Part I
Today November 22, 2019, we commemorate the passing of JFK. November 22, 1963, the assassination of JFK in
Dallas, Texas. Fifty-six years ago. January 21, 2019. Martin Luther King Day
What is even more unbelievable and strikingly odd is "Umbrella Man" and "Dark Complected Man" sat next to
each other, on the curb, seconds after the shooting, while everybody else is taking shelter from the shooter
at the Grassy Knoll.
Questions concerning 3rd photo from the top: Why are the two camera men in this photo filming the couple on
the ground, who themselves are looking directly at the camera men? Why is no one ducking and running for cover,
for as many as 8 shots were supposedly just fired? Why is Abraham Zapruder missing from his lofty post, which
he was said to be filming from at that precise moment?
JFK "signed" his death warrant as soon as he selected LBJ as his running mate . LBJ was ruthless and likely
murdered his way to his leadership role in Congress . Johnson was determined to become President and it is
reported that his fixer , Bobby Baker , at Kennedy's inauguration turned to an associate and stated that
Kennedy would never complete his term of office .
LBJ was determined to have Earl Warren (33rd degree Freemason )lead the commission to investigate Kennedy's
assassination .
Warren refused LBJ 's requests several times and finally agreed to do so . LBJ recounted to his mentor Senator
Richard Russell how he summoned Warren to the Oval Office and informed him of " what Hoover had told him about
a little incident in Mexico City " whereupon Warren began to cry and told LBJ " I won't turn you down , I'll
just do whatever you say ." Excerpted from History Matters Archive -LBJ-Russell .
@Germanicus
You are making my point. Taking away the presumption of innocence has resulted in the holocaust narrative and
many other crimes against individuals and civilized societies.
If you read Laurent's book "Yahweh to Zion" you'll see he's under no illusions about whether he's real or
not. It's likely the most thorough dissection of the sect you'll ever come across.
Indeed. Laurent Guyenot is an outstanding intellectual. It is a immense privilege to read his works, and the UR is doing an equally great favour to its readers by
publishing him. Thanks to all, including the commentators, for the fascinating discussion.
JFK died mysteriously after being hit by four bullets, one in rear cranium, rear shoulder, front throat and
fragmentary bullet to right front temple. Connelly was hit by a zigzag magic bullet, three bystanders were hit
by Elm Street curb bullet splatter and the limousine front windshield were all hit by a lone gunman. LHO, MLK &
RFK were also killed by lone gunmen, and if you do not believe that you will be persecuted.
I thought it had been rather well established that a sharpshooter had been brought in from the
French/Corsican mob.
Lucien Sarti's involvement is possible, but is a red herring. He might have been approached and brought to Dallas to add to the confusion, as the Kennedy assassination
was a sophisticated "smoke and mirrors" operation, with many deliberate false leads.
The people who shot President Kenned were hired guns, members of the Chicago mob: Charles "Chuck" Nicoletti,
Marshall Caifano, Johnny Roselli and James Sutton Files.
President Kennedy was shot at the head twice, almost instantaneously, first by Charles Nicoletti firing from
the Dal-Tex Building, then by James Files taking a shot from the Grassy Knoll.
James Files used a very powerful round, a frangible bullet.
This is why, on the Z film, the President's head is shown first slightly projected forward, then very
powerfully projected backwards and to the left, when the more powerful bullet hit his right temple.
Thanks for the link to the remarkable History Channel JFK documentary.
For the so called 'progressive'
Anglosphere establishment, in both it's 'right' and 'left' manifestations, the 'Chamberlain umbrella' is most
certainly a hated symbol of weakness, appeasement, and ultimate failure. Whether it's prominent presence at
Dealey Plaza that day was a deliberately placed symbolic 'pièce de résistance' to top off a carefully
choreographed assassination or just a quirk of history is something we may never know.
As for Abraham Zapruder, his family, and their profiting from the famous film he took, there are aspects of
it that are remindful of Larry Silverstein and his profiting from 911 and the destruction of the Twin
Towers/Building 7.
In addition to Zapruder's making about a million dollars in today's money by selling rights to it in the
days following the assassination to Life magazine (the head of which, Charles Douglas Jackson, had extensive
experience in psy-ops work for the US government), the Zapruder family in 1999 would win 16 million dollars in
arbitration with the United States over it's ownership, the government having seized ownership of the film from
them. Time Life had sold the film back to the Zapruders years before for $1.
Arbitration had been decided upon to determine the value of the Zapruder film with the film being compared
to Leonardo da Vinci's Codex.
One of the three arbitrators was Kenneth Feinberg, who besides being US senator Ted Kennedy's chief of staff
for five years, was also the Chairman of the Board of Directors for the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation.
In addition Feinberg headed up the 7 billion dollar 911 victims compensation fund.
Ironically, July 16, 1999, the day the arbitration panel made it's decision that the US government pay 16
million to the Zapruder family for the JFK assassination film, would also be the very day John F Kennedy Jr
would die in a plane crash:
Zapruder Film Nets $16 Million
The other expert compared the six-foot strip of film, climaxed by the horrific head shot that killed the
president, to the Codex of Leonardo da Vinci, for which billionaire Bill Gates recently paid $30 million.
Adams and Feinberg said that "25 years ago, few if any, could predict the value of the Zapruder film as a
unique historical item of unprecedented worth." They also noted that "items associated with President Kennedy
and his family have been increasing in value."..
..The arbitration panel actually made its decision on July 16, the same day John F. Kennedy Jr. died in a
plane crash, but delayed the announcement in the wake of the tragedy.
@Ron Unz
That's a possibility, of course. In my mind, it is a matter of probabilities. And I find it very improbable
that this guy just happened to do his little protest at this precise spot and seconds. But alos, reading his
testimony to the HSCA, he doesn't mention Kennedy being soft on communism at all. Excerp:
Mr. GENZMAN. Could you elaborate further as to the type of symbol you thought you were applying?
Mr. WITT. I just knew it was a sore spot with the Kennedys; I just knew the vague generalities of it. It had
something to do with something that happened years ago with the senior Joe Kennedy when he was Ambassador to
England.
In fact, when asked if his gesture had anything to do with the Kennedys being soft on communism, he denied:
Mr. Fauntroy. I wonder if you would care to tell us a little more about your understanding of the
significance of the umbrella, and why you felt that it would heckle the president to raise the umbrella?
Mr. WITT. I know the generalities of the thing. It had something to do with the–when the senior Mr. Kennedy
was Ambassador or England, and the Prime Minister, some activity they had had in appeasing Hitler. The
umbrella that the Prime Minister of England came back with got to be a symbol in some manner with the
British people. by association, it got transferred to the Kennedy family, and, as I understood, it was a
sore spot with the Kennedy family, like I said, in coffee break conversations someone had mentioned, I think
it is one of the towns in Arizona, it is Tucson or Phoenix, that someone had been out at the airport or some
place where some members of the Kennedy family came through and they were rather irritated by the fact that
they were brandishing the umbrellas. This is how the idea sort of got stuck in my mind.
Mr. FAUNTROY. Is it true that what you felt was that Mr. Kennedy would be sensitive because of the
appeasement image of the umbrella as related to his father?
Mr. WITT. Not the appeasement thing. It was just–excuse me–I just understood that it was sort of a sore
spot, with them and this was just one thing. I personally never thought too much of liberal politics in
general. In this case the Kennedy family just happened to be in office.
Mr. FAUNTROY. I see. And it had no relationship in your own thinking between Mr. Kennedy's posture with;
say, the Russians?
@Laurent Guyenot
Yes, Laurent, and I can confess to busting your balls," * and indeed, Mary Pinchot Meyer's is "a really moving
story. I once called her JFK's Mary Madgalene."
Nonetheless, for the rather affectionate part of Mary
Magdalene's legacy, she got stoned by crazy & self righteous Jews.
In contrast, the bright & adulterous peacenik, Mary Pinchot Meyer, got murdered on a Georgetown canal trail,
and to date, her's is an Unsolved Case Mystery,
which never appeared on the popular American TV series.
* A lyric from Pink Floyd's song, "Mother."
Thanks for another terrific learning experience, Laurent, and fyi, am saddened how Ron Unz rained acid upon
the fascinating "Umbrella Man."
This author blames the CIA for
obstruction suppression and distortion of the facts findings and accuses it of misrepresentation with powerful
people on board like supreme court justice . Also mentions the suspicions of conspiracy raised by LBG ( out of
all people !) de Gaulle , Robert Kennedy and Fidel Castro.
All of them are dead So is Soviet and most of Cuban dissidents are possibly dead as well
So what is preventing the investigation at the manner the previous investigation was carried out with open
visible fatal flaws and biases .
@Truth3
I believe that the presidential motorcade's route was changed at the last minute, ostensibly to bypass the huge
crowds lined up to see JFK, and hurry him off to the Dallas Trade Mart for his speech. This meant bypassing the
TV cameras, so none would be able to film the assassination in live time (just a cohenincidence, I am sure),
but if this is so, it begs the question of why Zapruder and the Babushka Lady were there with their home movie
cameras to capture what the TV networks would miss.
Lover of JFK, to whom he confided his vision for major peaceful change in the US of A and the world.
I really think the vast JFK hagiography that occupies the minds of many JFK conspiracy people, including
some of the most respectable ones, hardly enhances their credibility. Lots of them seem to believe that JFK was
about to establish world peace and was killed by the CIA for that reason. Frankly, I find the whole framework
totally ludicrous.
For example, Seymour Hersh's book on JFK certainly provides lots of very negative details of his activities.
But JFK conspiracy people always discount Hersh, claiming that he's a JFK hater.
Okay, but what about Michael Collins Piper, whose JFK assassination book has certainly been one of the most
important. He provides some reasonable evidence that JFK had been planning to launch an unprovoked "sneak
attack" against China just before he died:
Offhand, it seems to be that an early 1960s American attack against China would have probably had far worse
and more significant long-term geopolitical consequences than e.g. Bush's attack against Iraq or a possible
Trump attack against Iran.
`Ironically, July 16, 1999, the day the arbitration panel made it's decision that the US government pay
16 million to the Zapruder family for the JFK assassination film, would also be the very day John F Kennedy
Jr would die in a plane crash.
Thanks, very interesting comment.
Just a quibble: JFK Jr did not die in a plane crash; he most probably got killed when his plane was shot
down (by a missile?).
At the time of his death, JFK Jr had acquired a piece of hard evidence that would have allowed him to
re-open the investigation into his father's assassination.
This piece of evidence was a Cartier wristwatch that the President was wearing when he was shot. It got
covered in brain matter and mercury from the frangible bullet that hit JFK.
It was kept for a while by RFK, and finally ended up in John John's possession, accompanied with sworn
affidavits proving its chain of possession.
Indeed, the fact that he voluntarily came forward 15 years later and revealed his identity would
certainly seem to suggest the contrary. Why would he do that if he had been part of the conspiracy?
I think that you misunderstand the nature and purpose of the successive official reviews of JFK
assassination records (ARRB, etc..).
These official reviews were not meant at finding the truth, but at finding the evidence that could lead to
the truth and then destroy it to perpetuate the cover-up.
Many honest researchers involved in these reviews have quit in disgust; the fact is well documented and
should be a conscience call. Best.
In politics, one must not play around. John F. Kennedy understood that 1960 was his time. He had to win
then, or lose forever. As a loser, he would have had much less of a chance to become President in 1964, or
1968.
I highly recommend a reading of his "Profiles in Courage" – a great series of essays, with a message for all
Americans.
Kennedy, a brilliant scholar, and Man of action, had on his agenda important things that had to be done, (or
at least begun), in 1960.
JFK as President:
1. 1st President to insist on Legal Equality of all Americans. (Who was his Atty Gen?)?
2. Unravel French & British Empires (arrange independence for 40 African Nations- including South Africa).
3. De Nuclearize the Zionist Land Thieves.
4. Maintain the Sovereignty of the USA.
5. Ensure Prosperity – Employment, stop Inflation, for American workers.
6. Prevent outbreak of Nuclear Conflict with USSR.
7. You continue this list.
Kennedy could not wait, and, therefore, had to choose L B Johnson as his Vice Presidential running mate
(even though he was well warned of the risks involved – including the danger to his life, as it would place a
Zionist Mafioso only a heartbeat from the Presidency).
Kennedy was on a Mission to save the Republic (our American Republic), which had been weakened and was in
great danger. His brother Robert, was with JFK, all the way. They were idealists, and wanted to save the world.
*Yes, Ron Unz, not one of your other writers have made these points. I am available to flesh these points
out – no charge.
We Americans lost everything on November 22, 1963. We have not yet begun to fight back!
@bluedog
Humility means one does not have to choose this truth or that. Anything is possible. There were once very many
people who thought a conspiracy likely. In the last 50 years, there has been a shift away from thinking a
conspiracy was behind the assassination. While this is only the balance of opinion, it should still carry some
weight against 'who benefits' arguments .
This meant bypassing the TV cameras, so none would be able to film the assassination in live time (just a
coincidence, I am sure).
It is very interesting that you bring this topic.
It is a documented fact that during all past official visits, President Kennedy's motorcade comprised a
open-top lorry, driving ahead of the Presidents' limousine, and carrying journalists sat backward on graded
tiers, who would film the President and the crowd cheering on him.
At Dallas, the journalists' truck got cancelled, and the way paved for the sole Abraham Zapruder to document
the circumstances of the JFK assassination. Just another complete coincidence, obviously.
"... Authored by Paul Joseph Watson via Summit News, ..."
"... My favorite paragraph from the NYT article depicting Tulsi as a fringe, divisive cult leader because she wears white pants suits - by the same author and paper who heaped praise on how Hillary's white pants suit shows she's ready to carry the nuclear codes. ..."
My favorite paragraph from the NYT article depicting Tulsi as a fringe, divisive cult
leader because she wears white pants suits - by the same author and paper who heaped praise
on how Hillary's white pants suit shows she's ready to carry the nuclear codes.
Her white suits are not the white suits of Ms. Clinton, nor even the white of Ms.
Williamson, whose early appearances in the shadeoften seemed tied to her wellness gospel
and ideas of renewal and rebirth. Rather, they are the white of avenging angels and flaming
swords, of somewhat combative righteousness (also cult leaders').
And that kind of association, though it can be weirdly compelling, is also not really
community building. It sets someone apart, rather than joining others together. It has
connotations of the fringe, rather than the center.
A New York Times writer who praised Hillary Clinton for wearing a white pantsuit called
Tulsi Gabbard a "cult leader" for wearing exactly the same thing.
"... Is it not possible to have an article on Ukraine without all the N@ZI references? Might have been a non-biased article, but many of us will never know... ..."
"... They certainly aren't National Socialists, and arguably not nationalists. Nationalists are open to what is best for "the nation" regardless of where it lies on the political spectrum. Since they don't consider the people in Donbas to be part of "the nation", that means, if anything, they are useful idiots of Zionism. ..."
In my July 25th article " Zelenskii's dilemma " I pointed
out the fundamental asymmetry of the Ukrainian power configuration following Zelenskii's crushing victory over Poroshenko: while
a vast majority of the Ukrainian people clearly voted to stop the war and restore some kind of peace to the Ukraine, the real levers
of power in the post-Maidan Banderastan are all held by all sorts of very powerful, if also small, minority groups including:
The various "oligarchs" (Kolomoiskii, Akhmetov, etc.) and/or mobsters Arsen Avakov's internal security forces including some "legalized"
Nazi death squads The various non-official Nazi deathsquads (Parubii) The various western intelligence agencies who run various groups
inside the Ukraine The various western financial/political sponsors who run various groups inside the Ukraine The so-called "Sorosites"
(соросята) i.e. Soros and Soros-like sponsored political figures The many folks who want to milk the Ukraine down to the last drop
of Ukrainian blood and then run
These various groups all acted in unison, at least originally, during and after the Euromaidan. This has now dramatically changed
and these groups are now all fighting each other. This is what always happens when things begin to turn south and the remaining loot
shrinks with every passing day,
Whether Zelenskii ever had a chance to use the strong mandate he received from the people to take the real power back from these
groups or not is now a moot point: It did not happen and the first weeks of Zelenskii's presidency clearly showed that Zelenskii
was, indeed, in " free fall ": instead of becoming
a "Ukrainian Putin" Zelenskii became a "Ukrainian Trump" – a weak and, frankly, clueless leader, completely outside his normal element,
whose only "policy" towards all the various extremist minorities was to try to appease them, then appease them some more, and then
even more than that. As a result, a lot of Ukrainians are already speaking about "Ze" being little more than a "Poroshenko 2.0".
More importantly, pretty much everybody is frustrated and even angry at Zelenskii whose popularity is steadily declining.
... ... ...
Another major problem for Zelenskii are two competing narratives: the Ukronazi one and, shall we say, the "Russian" one. I have
outlined the Ukronazi one just above and now I will mention the competing Russian one which goes something like this:
The Euromaidan was a completely illegal violent coup against the democratically elected President of the Ukraine, whose legitimacy
nobody contested, least of all the countries which served as mediators between Poroshenko and the rioters and who betrayed their
word in less than 24 hours (a kind of a record for western politicians and promises of support!).
... ... ...
Some of the threats made by these Ukronazis are dead serious and the only person who, as of now, kinda can keep the Ukrainian
version of the Rwandan " Interahamwe " under control would probably be Arsen Avakov, but since he himself is a hardcore
Nazi nutcase, his attitude is ambiguous and unpredictable. He probably has more firepower than anybody else, but he was a pure "
Porokhobot " (Poroshenko-robot) who, in many ways, controlled Poroshenko more than Poroshenko controlled him. The best move
for Zelenskii would be to arrest the whole lot of them overnight (Poroshenko himself, but also Avakov, Parubii, Iarosh, Farion, Liashko,
Tiagnibok, etc.) and place a man he totally trusts as Minister of the Interior. Next, Zelenskii should either travel to Donetsk or,
at least, meet with the leaders of the LDNR and work with them to implement the Minsk Agreements. That would alienate the Ukronazis
for sure, but it would give Zelenskii a lot of popular support.
Needless to say, that is not going to happen. While Zelenskii's puppet master Kolomoiskii would love to stick this entire gang
in jail and replace them with his own men, it is an open secret that powerful interest groups in the US have told Zelenskii "don't
you dare touch them". Which is fine, except that this also means "don't you dare change their political course either".
...are going through the famous Kübler-Ross stages of griefs: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance: currently,
most of them are zig-zagging between bargaining and depression; acceptance is still far beyond their – very near – horizon. Except
that Zelenskii has nothing left to bargain with.
Thank you for a rational article about Ukraine. The sad thing is that it might take years to reach the "acceptance" phase.
It would take someone like Hitler to clean out the stables. Arrest is not a viable option as they will bribe their way out.
These people need to be put down like rabid dogs. That is the only way to put an end to their mischief and it would be a deterrent
to their replacements.
Personally, I suspect that the Ukraine is being deliberately depopulated to make way for waves of "refugees" from Israel. Another
country that is still in the "denial" phase. Its military and political leaders know full-well that their strategic aims have
all failed. The boot is now firmly on the other foot.
I suspect that Crimea was their preferred destination and hence the massive non-stop propaganda against Russia on that score.
To give you an idea of how ridiculous it has all become, the UK no longer accepts medical degrees awarded by universities in Crimea.
Is it not possible to have an article on Ukraine without all the N@ZI references? Might have been a non-biased article, but
many of us will never know...
I suspect that the Ukraine is being deliberately depopulated to make way for waves of "refugees" from Israel.
You got that right – what it's all about is building a New Khazaria. But they're neither giving up on their Greater Israel
project between the two rivers, and hence more wars, conflict and chaos to drive out the native Arabs from the Middle East.
I suspect that Crimea was their preferred destination and hence the massive non-stop propaganda against Russia on that score.
@AWMThey certainly aren't National Socialists, and arguably not nationalists. Nationalists are open to what is best for
"the nation" regardless of where it lies on the political spectrum. Since they don't consider the people in Donbas to be part
of "the nation", that means, if anything, they are useful idiots of Zionism.
@bob sykes Kolomoiskii is the real hidden owner/controller of the company that bribed the Bidens. He has a finger in lots
of pies. His pretense to leaning towards Russia is his way to try to get the Americans to stop attempts to get at the many millions
that he stole from his own Ukrainians bank – fake loans to his companies.
Of course, the Russians understand all of that. This theater is aimed at the Americans – not at the Russians.
For the Ukrainian state to break up, there need to be some forces interested in a break-up. You won't find such forces inside
the Ukraine.
What is Ukrainian South-East? In pure political terms, "South-East" is a bunch of oligarchs, who are all integrated into Ukrainian
system, and have no reason to seek independence from Kiev, especially if it means getting slapped with Western sanctions.
Even the Kremlin doesn't show much interest in breaking up the Ukraine, so why the hell would it break up?
It's worth pointing out that the so-called "Novorossia movement" started out as Akhmetov's project to win concessions from
new Kiev regime. It was then quickly hijacked by Strelkov, a man who actually wanted to break up the Ukraine, and it is because
of Strelkov, that Donetsk and Lugansk are now de-facto independent. Without similar figures to lead secessionist movements elsewhere
in the Ukraine, this break-up that Saker keeps talking about will never happen.
His ratings must be sky-high, because otherwise I cannot imagine why Fox would allow him to continue to use their network as
a medium to broadcast common sense.
Of course the Dems are making it so easy.
Schiff, Kent, Taylor, Yanovitch -- what a pathetic, nauseating crew.
You're correct.
The Republicrats in the swamp - when push comes to shove - have each other's backs.
One set of laws for them, another for the masses they rule and make no mistake - we are not
governed, we are ruled.
Seems everyone here is down. The Slime mold's job is to kill all virtuous passion in the
populace, and they do a damn good job.
"The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity."
Truer words...
If we don't arise like lions, a seriously dystopian future awaits. Which is an exceedingly
melancholy reality, considering we are on the cusp of a golden age driven by a Fusion Energy
new economic platform, a quantum upshift of productivity and energy-intensive industrial
applications. Ending global poverty. Ending the very reason for war.
"The Slime mold's job is to kill all virtuous passion in the populace, and they do a damn
good job."
Today this podcast appeared in my Inbox.
No Irony Alert was appended; apparently the discussants are serious in maintaining that the
will of the people expressed "through digital media " and by the electorate "threaten
democracy" and "fuel deadly conflict."
So there ARE armed militias under the control of "populists" and they have the financial
wherewithal to form an army and wage war?
"Populism attaches itself to whatever issue provokes fear and outrage [and] hate speech
leads to hate crime".
"Populist parties have risen up across Europe and beyond, galvanising electorates and
threatening the multilateral institutions needed to address transnational challenges like
globalisation, deadly conflict, digital transformations and the climate emergency.
". . .[X] and [Y] . . . discuss how populism works, why its appeal has grown in recent
years, and the threat it poses to European democracy. From its ideological
adaptability and the role of digital media in amplifying its message to its role in
fuelling deadly conflict, they examine what can be done to address the grievances that
these parties feed off.
It could be the trial of the century, no doubt. ...
Would the jury in such a case, in a Democratic Stronghold, as Washington DC, have to be
carefully selected according to some superimposed rule beyond the general jury selection
rules reigning access to classified knowledge?
Strictly there is by now enough expertise on jury selection, even specialists. In
Washington D.C., as suggested, maybe the ultimate challenge. Thus I am sure a lot of experts
would queue up.
Not that the result would satisfy everyone, but if you carefully select people that prove
they grasp the "national interest" or are able to carry its burdons. Why not?
The fact that even the disgraced former DDFBI Andy McCabe, who's four documented, acts of
Perjury, two of which were Recorded. Statements which involve a press leak, irrelevant to any
issue of the Russia-Trump collusion myth. Has still not been Indicted, should give us all
cause for alarm...
We appear to be on the Slippery slope toward Mob Rule over law and order...
This quote from Thursday's article in Politico, says it best.
"This is not a hard case," U.S. District Court Judge Reggie Walton said. "I was a good
prosecutor for a long time. Deciding whether or not you're going to charge someone with false
statements or perjury is not that hard, factually or legally -- maybe politically, but not
factually or legally."
Sundance suggests that FBI Inspector General Horowitz's report is really being delayed so
that the Deep State can push through FISC Court reauthorization -- before we have an
opportunity to learn how the current law has been so horribly abused with a multitude of 4th
Amendment violations and so on.
Unfortunately, much as Republicans regret Fisc abuses by Democrats, this illegitimate
maneuver is so cheap and tempting that even they don't really want to let it die. In short,
the DUOPOLY will ensure continuance.
"And what there is to conquer
By strength and submission, has already been discovered
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope
To emulate -- but there is no competition --
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions
That seem unpropitious."
Can the Constitution be refreshed without patriots' & tyrants' blood? Can the eye of
Mordor stop popular resistance?
Eliot was, of course, writing in England, at the outset of WWII.
"Can the Constitution be refreshed without patriots' & tyrants' blood? Can the eye of
Mordor stop popular resistance?"
You question here makes me shiver.
To me the "tyrant" is the oh-so-cool choom smoking Obama, whose minions have kept our
country in turmoil after he left office. I remember the Roman columns in my city after his
election. He had won with strong support from Soros' capital (the eye of Modor) and took
orders, it seemed to me, from the Bilderberg group of high rollers wanting power over the
world without concern for countries and their governments and their laws that might give
voice to lowly people.
I hope the MAGA hat wearing crowds (our form of Hibbits) grow and grow in number as the
election approaches so that the Democrats see that they will seem like spoiled toddlers who
only want what they want, no matter how absurd their wishes are. (That is unlikely, though,
because toddlers have little ability to see beyond their immediate desires--no
self-reflection.)
Have I interpreted your question correctly?
Who can be the elves and the dwarfs and the men who join the Hobbits? Does Trump have it
in him to be Gandalf?
Two weeks ago I thought I head a different tune. Why the change?
As I said then and say now: Bob Barr did not come to bury the Deep State, but to save
it.
The imperial republic is tottering, and the liberal dispensation of the past three hundred
years that informed it is collapsing, a victim of internal subversion and pathological
egalitarianism.
What will replace it? No one knows.
But the future will probably be like the past: tribal, ethnic, sectarian and vicious.
There is no going back. And the only way out is through.
So attack in two directions.
Shatter left-neoliberalism by provoking the worst ant-white and anti-Semitic tendencies
present in the emerging nonwhite left.
Liquidate its controlled opposition (AKA American conservatism) by attacking its fronts
men as the corporate golems and Zio-shills that they are.
The goal is to eliminate the middle ground and force the gutless middle to choose between
the globalists and us, and to make the price of an unwise choice steep, public, and
permanent.
I read the RCP article by Aaron Mate referenced above and while it was compelling, it
practically made the infamous Peter Strzok, in its brief mention of him, seem like an
innocent bystander. It focused on the CIA as though the FBI wasn't its eager and willing
partner, and yet it was the FBI that paid Christopher Steele, the FBI that obtained FISA
warrants to spy, the FBI that took out Gen. Flynn, the FBI that lied to the new POTUS, the
FBI that led to the appointment of SC Mueller, etc., etc.
Is the FBI playing dumb now as a defense, pretending it was duped by the CIA to engage in
so much nefarious activity?
sorry I am an outsider on this. ... Willmann may help, maybe? basic rules? ... I hardly
grasp my own countries juridical responsiblities, nevermind some venue curiosities. ...
last time I heard the argument concerning the US it didn't seem to be necessary based on
the outcome, at least in hindsight ...
You'll win the bet, but even if you lose, the indicted will be instantly catapulted into bona
fide "Hero of the Republic(R)" status as a result.
Just as the people who took the falls for the Clintons were, except 10x.
The chattering class really really detest Trump, and nothing else matters. They will happy
accept aid from perjurers, torturers and entrapment artists, as long as that gets them
Trump.
I detest Trump as well, but he won the election fair and square, and just because I detest
the man doesn't mean that I need to sink to the level of crackpot conspiracy theory if that
justifies his removal.
Where is the scorecard on Trump's Oct 2016 pre-election speech. Did he call it or what- time
for an accounting - three years later. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G2qIXXafxCQ
I personally will settle for two new Supreme Court Justices, 150 new federal court
justices and breaking up the liberal deadlock of the 9th Circuit. However, Trump's Oct 2016
shot across the bow against the deep state remains a work in progress. However, Trump did not
back off - it is clash of civilizations still going on, as we speak.
Retrospective is often the best perspective for current events.
I think it is important to note that the Real Clear Investigations piece which the Colonel
quotes from was written by Aaron Mate. Aaron Mate is part of the new breed of independent
lefty journalists that are taking on the establishment news media. He has an excellent show
on a youtube channel called The Grayzone.
His cohorts Max Blumenthal, Ben Norton, Dan Cohen, and Anya Parampil have done excellent
reporting on Syria and Venezuela. They are part of a burgeoning new media ecosystem which
includes the other youtube channels 'The Hill' and 'The Jimmy Dore Show'.
Max Blumenthal has savaged the estimable Alison Weir, author of Against Our Better Judgment
and her years long campaign of speaking out against Israel's maltreatment of Palestinians.
Grayzone may go a bit further than establishment media, and perhaps a bit farther on
issues involving Palestine than, say, Phil Weiss at Mondoweiss, but there are still lines
that are not to be crossed by the reporters at Grayzone.
I don't think that Grayzone goes "a bit further" than establishment media. They go a lot
further.
This Grazyone video from a few days ago (Aaron Mate interviews Ali Abunimah of The
Electronic Intifada) is titled "Israel's relentless violence on Gaza met by global
silence": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o16CV4BTuU0
Or from the back cover of Blumenthal's book Goliath:
'As Blumenthal reveals, Israel has become a country where right-wing leaders like Avigdor
Lieberman and Bibi Netanyahu are sacrificing democracy on the altar of their power politics;
where the loyal opposition largely and passively stands aside and watches the organized
assault on civil liberties; where state-funded Orthodox rabbis publish books that provide
instructions on how and when to kill Gentiles; where half of Jewish youth declare their
refusal to sit in a classroom with an Arab; and where mob violence targets Palestinians and
African asylum seekers scapegoated by leading government officials as "demographic
threats."'
So Blumenthal is an anti-zionist, Alison Weir is a critic of Israeli government policy, and
Blumenthal is critical of Weir. Big deal.
The Colonel is critical of Bernie and I like Bernie - that doesn't mean that I have to
stop respecting the Colonel just because I disagree with him on some issues. One of the
lamentable shortcomings of some of those on the left is that they want to fight with each
other about relatively trivial disagreements. This only benefits the Borg.
And if I was thoroughly paranoid I would think that this whole Blumenthal vs Weir thing is
being amplified by an IO operation designed to sow discord among critics of Israel.
What is the point of indictments when the CIA/NSA/FBI can and will be perceived to be able to
blackmail each juror? The "chilling effect" is real and it will prevent successful
prosecution of any but sacrificial deep state actors.
After what has been done to Trump associates, he is politically radioactive. No one will
want to be part of his team and subject themselves to the tender ministrations of the
FBI.
The reward of the good life, is the good life itself all the sudden makes even more sense.
Picturing now J Edgar Hoover and LBJ laughing over secret files on every member of Congress
at the time. You do not exaggerate, walrus.
But how can we prevent this being only one-way Democrat street? Their manipulation of
language, repetition of talking points, media exclusives and ginned-up events have stunned me
of late. Luckily there in fact is more media transparency only because of the open internet.
Which is also closing in.
I have long wondered why MSM wanted to go to bed with the Democrats so eagerly - most
likely because the one-way street of inside gossip only flows from loose Democrat lips. .
Recent media interview with Jordan, who lambasted the ABC reporter who tried to box him
into a corner over a "secret hearing" transcript that had not been made public -and the
hearing was less than 24 hours prior. Democrat loose lips gave someone a free scoop for some
reason and luckily Jordan swatted this breach right back at her.
Quite honestly female reporters need gynocological swab testing before they go live with
any breaking news stories from now on. What did they do to get that story first.
What was done to Justice Gorsuch was politics by the left meant to keep him off the
supreme court, warn the republicans not to support others like him, and warn the rest of us
to stfu and do what we are told. Brennan and company are worse and may also include Obama and
a number of his backers in and out of his administration. And Epstein didn't kill
himself.
From RedState - DECEMBER 11 - MARK YOUR CALENDAR: The Senate Judiciary Committee will hold a
hearing on Dec. 11 to examine the findings from a Justice Department inspector general's
investigation into the FBI's alleged abuse of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court
during the Trump investigation, the committee said Monday.
Huber apparently has been assigned to investigate the Clinton Foundation- a report due
shortly too (which is badly bleeding red ink several years in a row after Clinton lost).
No wonder Clinton is hinting she will run again - anything to goose up re-newed donations
for her influence peddling scheme. No wonder she is in fact this time pimping out her
daughter in her latest book tour - the money will be safe with us, folks. Even if I get sent
to the slammer, Chelsea knows enough to carry on the family traditions.
Factotum mentioned Crowdstrike. Many are under the impression that the crowdstrike "server"
Trump mentioned in his typical fragmentary, herky-jerky style in the Zelensky call, must mean
the DNC email server. But I've heard it suggested he was actually referring to a different
Ukrainian server, also managed by Crowdstrike, related to another hokey Russian
hacking claim: a Ukrainian army missile system that was allegedly hacked by the Russians. See
"Fancy Bear" artillery hack. Not sure if that really was what Trump was talking about but
others out there might know.
No, colonel, not a'tall. Don't have a lazy bone in my body. BUT - I do have Extreme
challenges of the body, but less of the mind, (much, much slower organizing thoughts etc.)
but NO challenge regarding Spirit... it's not the dog in the fight, but the fight in the
dog.
No, I'm not a DAV, but I do consider myself a 'DAP' (disabled American Patriot - without
pay - but Cost aplenty) Quite like (but not There Yet) the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier... so
to speak.
I have sixty five years of Active Service... starting a the age of ten in Bristol, PA ...
and [it] will NOT end before I'm dead, down in the woods of central MS.
Alison Weir says "If Americans only Knew"... doesn't know the half of [it].
Don't drink the cool-aid and fo sho DON'T Breathe the Fort Detrick Bio-cocktail.
Thomas Paine could have put out several pamphlets in the time it took me to reply.
Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Semyon Vindman (né Aleksandr Semyonovich Vindman) and his
identical twin brother, Yevgeny, were born to a Jewish family in the Ukrainian Soviet
Socialist Republic, Soviet Union. After the death of their mother, the three-year-old twins
and their older brother, Leonid, were brought to New York in December 1979 by their father,
Semyon (Simon). They grew up in Brooklyn's 'Little-Odessa' neighborhood. The twins appear
briefly with their maternal grandmother in the Ken Burns documentary The Statue of Liberty.
Vindman speaks fluent Russian, Ukrainian (& probably Hebrew).
I will posit that Vindman holds citizenship in: Ukraine, USA, & Israel. Dual-Citizens
violate US Law, to wit the 1940s Nationality Act. I will NOT delve into the tangled
loyalties, ambitions and/or 'greatness' expectations of Colonel Vindman in this post.
Beginning in 2008, Vindman became a Foreign Area Officer specializing in Eurasia. In this
capacity he served in the U.S. embassies in Kiev, Ukraine, and Moscow, Russia. Returning to
Washington, D.C. he was then a politico-military affairs officer focused on Russia for the
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Vindman served on the Joint Staff at the Pentagon from
September 2015 to July 2018.
The Honorable Gordon David Sondland, United States Ambassador to the European Union, is
probably ending his stint, today.
Ambassador Sondland was born to a Jewish family in Seattle, Washington, the son of Frieda
(Piepsch) and Gunther Sondland. His mother fled Europe before the Second World War to
Uruguay, where after the war she reunited with his father, who had served in the French
Foreign Legion. In 1953, the Sondlands relocated to Seattle where they opened a dry-cleaning
business. Sondland has a sister 18 years his senior. He attended the University of Washington
but dropped out and became a commercial real estate salesman.
Does Ambassador Sondland hold dual-citizenship? Dual citizenship violates the 1940
Nationalities Act.
@Arioch Germans will likely be fleeing Germany in fairly large numbers as the Islamic /
African takeover picks up steam. Same for Swedes from Sweden (soonest), French from France,
English from England.
Ukraine is emptying out and has cheap land and space for new housing to be built, or old
houses to be replaced or thoroughly renovated. The Western Europeans need somewhere safer and
more civilized to run now that they have invited hostile invaders into their countries. It
could be a match made in heaven.
Ukraine could offer only permanent residency, not citizenship, and it could require that
white euro refugees pay in advance for a year or two years of good private medical and dental
insurance so that they don't burden the already-broke Ukrainian treasury.
Let the Germans and other euro reinvigorate the Ukrainian economy -- possibly for a steady
two decades or more -- by buying supplies and hiring workers and machinery to build or
renovate several million houses. They have savings and pensions and can afford a lot in
Ukraine. The Ukrainian treasury would take in massive receipts in VAT and other taxes paid by
the euro permanent residents and by newly employed Ukrainians working on the refugees' new
homes.
Ukrainian hospitals and dental offices could upgrade their equipment, staff, training, and
capabilities enormously with the ongoing infusion of western euro refugee funds.
The euro refugees needn't change the demographic and cultural composition of Ukraine much
longer-term, because they will, at least at first, mostly be people age 55-60 and up who can
afford to retire and give up their careers in their home countries to flee East. They'll be
beyond their childbearing/raising years. And, if the Ukrainians are wise, the western euros
will never be eligible for citizenship (I.e. they will never be able to vote the same suicide
for Ukraine as many of them allowed in their home countries).
Far, far better for Ukrainians to (1) have their own children and (2) stop antagonizing
russia and work out favorable energy and other trade deals. But since neither of those is
happening or seems likely in the near future, Ukraine should seek a steady infusion of
peaceful, reasonably intelligent, culturally compatible white Europeans to help occupy the
territory (instead of hostile aliens, the alternative) and spend billions of Euros from
Ukrainian businesses and shops.
Odious debt, also known as illegitimate debt, is when a country's government
misappropriates money it has borrowed from another country. A nation's debt is considered
odious debt when government leaders use borrowed funds in ways that do not benefit its
citizens, and to the contrary, often oppress them. Many believe individuals or countries
doing the lending must have known, or should have known, of the oppressive conditions upon
offering the credit.
@RadicalCenter Putin would be too old in ten years. What Russia needs is a decent
successor, as intelligent and far-sighted as Putin, who would be interested in the country
more than in his pocket, like Putin. While traitorous scum like Gorby or Yeltsin has no
chance, the greatest danger is that someone nationalistic but not particularly smart rises to
the top.
Putin understands the key thing: Russia does not need to do anything about the Empire or
its EU vassals, they are their own worst enemy. As the saying goes, when you see your enemy
committing suicide, do not interfere.
As far as Baltic vaudeville states are concerned, to the best of my knowledge (which might
be faulty: I only visited Russia three times in the last 28 years, spending less than two
months total there), most Russian residents are not interested in the Baltics.
Now that the port at Ust-Luga works at almost full capacity, Baltics aren't even useful
economically: Russian exports mostly bypass them. Besides, placing NATO troops into these
"countries" creates a significant financial and military burden on NATO, which is in the best
Russian interests.
So, from Russian perspective, the same rule applies to Baltics and Ukraine (whatever
remains of it in 5-10 years): "you broke it – you own it". So, the West would have to
do something about those territories. Considering current policies of the EU, they will be
populated by Muslims and Africans. Russian attitudes changed a lot in the last decades
regarding Baltics and in the last five years regarding Ukraine: a lot of Russians believe
that even Muslims and Africans are smarter than aborigines of those wannabe countries, so
would make more sensible neighbors.
@Malacaay "Ukrainian Republic" in 1914 ??? With presidents, parliaments, elections, sure,
sure.
And having western borders in 1914 exactly by the line draw by Georgian dictator
Jugashvili-Stalin 25 years later?
With Lwow being in 1914 city not of Poland (independent Poland in 1914 is yet another gem)
but of the said Ukrainian Republic? And Transcarpatian Ruthenia too?
Wow, so in 1939 Jugashvili-Stalin just restored well known internationally borderlines of
the glorious 1914 Ukrainian Republic, right?
@Arioch You consider Ukraine to be irrelevant, so why spend so much time on it??? Odd
isn't it. Methinks you protesteth too much. You haven't proven Ukrainians can't do science,
that they don't have a technical culture, and you haven't shown that grain production is
irrelevant. You're just insulting farmers, and basic industry. Insult your own stomach. Don't
eat bread. Food is power. All industrial economies are based on agriculture. You dismissing
it is just sour grapes.
Pretend the Ukraine is dead. That's your business. Ukraine hasn't lost the ability to do
science, engineering, etc. What do you think they do in universities there? Is there no
higher education there? I'm not going to believe that. You're just spinning. Spin away. It's
obvious you're just dismissing real activity there.
The finality with which you dismiss the logistics possibilities of the Ukraine is odd. It
is a valuable resource. The country can take up the logistics possibilities in the future.
They haven't disappeared. And that is what your argument is based on. Pretending that
something can never ever be operational again ever, for any reason, even when the
possibilities are obviously still there. Germany bounced back after the war. Russia bounced
back after the 90s. But Ukraine? According to you, Ukrainians can't ever have any future
possibilities. You dismiss the real activity that is there, and you dismiss future
possibilities. So you can read the future? Do you also pretend to have super human ability to
know the future? You don't like facts, just theatrics. Lots of arm waving and shouting and
gesticulating. No proofs. If it is dead in your books, why are you wasting so much effort to
prove it, without actually giving any proof? You really do protest too much.
@Mr. Hack Why would I be disappointed in seeing your puppet master Kolomoisky, the
'Zhidobandera', and his puppet playing the presidents, Zelenski admitting (grudgingly) that
"They're stronger anyway. We have to improve our relations"?
K: "People want peace, a good life, they don't want to be at war. And you [the U.S.] are
forcing us to be at war, and not even giving us the money for it."
And begging for money from Russia?
@Anon First, participation or results of International Mathematical Olympiad that both of
your links deal with do not necessarily reflect the state of science in the country. First,
math is only one of the real sciences (others include physics, chemistry, biology, etc.).
Second, the results of kids reflect the potential of young people, not the state of
scientific research in the country. Remaining scientists in Ukraine (there aren't many of
them left, unless you count bullshitters like Vyatrovich as scientists) bitterly complain
that the government does not fund science at the level that can help it survive.
BTW, many branches of Russian science (e.g., biochemistry and cell biology that I know
best) do not perform at the level that would put them on the map. There are very few
world-class biochemical or cell biological labs in Russia today, even fewer than in Soviet
times. In Ukraine today there are none, zero, zilch, nada. There used to be some decent labs
in Ukraine before 1991, but they either died out or the quality of their research went way
down. Those who awarded PhD to the girl I mentioned above are not scientists, at least not
the honest ones. They are qualified to sweep floors in college, at best.
@AnonFromTN More protesteth too much. More slurs, insults, hearsay, flailing away with no
data of any kind.
Those kids have real capabilities. Not simply 'potential of young people'. dismissing them
won't make them go away. 'Out damn'd spot'. Too bad the facts won't go away. To have kids
with strong math ability means you have to have institutions and teachers with strong
education capability. They don't learn to cut it in math by playing in the streets. Obviously
they will have no difficulty doing engineering calculations, and doing computer science and
physical sciences.
Making comparisons to the former SU is not valid for me. Comparison to other similar sized
economies makes more sense. Ukraine population is similar to Colombia, Spain, Argentina,
Uganda, Algeria, Sudan, Iraq. Looking at those countries, the capabilities of Ukraine don't
look too bad. Certainly not looking like Ukraine is dead.
Why would any one think that Ukraine must be compared to much larger economies??? The
other guy was doing that too. saker is way off to make such comparisons.
Comparing Ukraine to US, China, Russia, or prior SU or UkrainianSSR for me is not a valid
comparison. The economics are too different.
It's obvious what is going on is simply a political, prejudicial smear and dismissal of the
Ukraine and Ukrainians rather than any kind of balanced assessment of capabilities and
reality
@Anon Yes, those kids certainly had good teachers. It is quite likely that their math
teachers were educated in the Ukrainian SSR. I hear from a lot of people in Russia that the
quality of the teachers who graduated in Soviet times tends to be better than of those who
graduated later. I got my school education in Ukrainian SSR and can't complain about it.
Today Lugansk, where I went to school, is in Lugansk People's Republic, and judging by recent
polling of the population, its chances or returning to Ukraine are about as great as my
chances of living 500 years. Ukrainian bomb hit the school I went to, and Ukrainian shell hit
the library where I used to borrow books when I went to school. Luckily, a few years ago
Ukrainian troops were pushed by freedom fighters far enough from Lugansk, so they can't shell
it any more.
Comparing Ukraine to US, China, Russia, or prior SU or UkrainianSSR for me is not a
valid comparison.
Sorry, but Ukraine started by Ukrainian SSR becoming independent. It had what it had, and
lost what it lost, including a big chunk of the population and economy.
You are welcome to believe anything you want. People have a long history of believing the
most preposterous things. However, even fervent beliefs don't change the reality. That's why
all societies have lunatic asylums.
We in Ukraine?
Historically and even today, Russia has much in common with Ukraine -- the United States, almost nothing.
Stephen F. Cohen
November 14, 2019
500 Words
51 Comments
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For centuries and still today, Russia and
large parts of Ukraine have had much in common -- a long territorial border; a shared history; ethnic,
linguistic, and other cultural affinities; intimate personal relations; substantial economic trade; and
more. Even after the years of escalating conflict between Kiev and Moscow since 2014, many Russians and
Ukrainians still think of themselves in familial ways. The United States has almost none of these
commonalities with Ukraine.
Which is also to say that Ukraine is not
"a vital US national interest," as most leaders of both parties, Republican and Democrat alike, and much of
the US media now declare. On the other hand, Ukraine is a vital Russian interest by any geopolitical or
simply human reckoning.
Why, then, is Washington so deeply
involved in Ukraine? (The proposed nearly $400 million in US military aid to Kiev would mean, of course,
even more intrusive involvement.) And why is Ukraine so deeply involved in Washington, in a different way,
that it has become a pretext for attempts to impeach President Donald Trump?
The short but essential answer is
Washington's decision, taken by President Bill Clinton in the 1990s, to expand NATO eastward from Germany
and eventually to Ukraine itself. Ever since, both Democrats and Republicans have insisted that Ukraine is a
"vital US national interest." Those of us who opposed that folly warned it would lead to dangerous conflicts
with Moscow, conceivably even war. Imagine Washington's reaction, we pointed out, if Russian military bases
began to appear on Canada's or Mexico's borders with America. We were not wrong: An estimated 13,000 souls
have already died in the Ukrainian-Russian war in the Donbass and some 2 million people have been displaced.
Things are likely to get worse.
Democrats are sharply criticizing Trump for withholding large-scale military aid to Kiev (even though
President Obama, despite strong pressure, wisely did so). Ukraine's recently elected President Volodymyr
Zelensky, having been drawn into the Washington scandal, is no longer as free to negotiate peace with
Russian leader Vladimir Putin as he hoped and promised during his campaign. And candidates for the 2020 US
Democratic presidential nomination, with the exception of Tulsi Gabbard, are likely to compete for the role
of Kiev's biggest military booster. Here, as generally in US-Russian relations, Democrats are becoming a war
party.
Meanwhile, as I have reported before,
Russian leader Vladimir Putin continues to be accused by hard-liners in Moscow of passivity in the face of
"American aggression in Ukraine." Is it irony or tragedy that the often-maligned Trump and Putin may stand
between us and something much worse -- between a fragile Cold War peace and the war parties in their respective
countries?
The short but essential answer is Washington's decision, taken by President Bill Clinton in the 1990s,
to expand NATO eastward from Germany and eventually to Ukraine itself.
The problem, however, is with the fact that the United States has neither resources nor status anymore to
do either:
Kissinger: If we treat Russia seriously as a great power, we need at an early stage to determine
whether their concerns can be reconciled with our necessities. We should explore the possibilities of a
status of nonmilitary grouping on the territory between Russia and the existing frontiers of NATO.
That's the danger, remove last remaining military and intelligence professionals and you have ignorant,
grossly incompetent American political class which thinks that it is 1995.
The fact that both Trump and Putin have managed to keep the peace is laudable and somewhat surprising,
particularly on our side given the comparative pressure the Israel lobby can exert on Trump politically and
personally vs. Putin.
Thanks to Ron & the many anti-US-Russia-Ukraine war writers here at Unz over the years including Pat
Buchanan, Paul Craig Roberts, Ron Paul, Phil Giraldi, Caitlyn Johnstone, C.J. Hopkins and The Saker, among
others.
Russia is the only nation on Earth with the undisputable power to permanently cripple the United States
with nuclear weapons. A nuclear exchange between these nations would do serious damage to the world
ecosphere for decades if not centuries.
Short of defending against a full-scale invasion of United States territory the United States has no
justified interest in provoking or engaging in such an exchange.
The entire Ukraine is not worth the bones of one American infantryman.
The people in Washington and Tel Aviv who are playing these games with potentially millions of American &
Russian lives are psychopaths who in a sane world would be tried for war crimes for the acts they have
already committed, much less those they contemplate or risk setting in motion.
The problem, however, is with the fact that the United States has neither resources nor status anymore
to do either:
I would add that if Russia were broken up, then very likely China and not the United States would capture
the mineral wealth of Siberia. This would be a geopolitical blunder of biblical proportions, comparable to
Germany's decision to sponsor Lenin's sealed train voyage.
[Digression: Andrei, I read your blog and I agree about Russian Math and Physics cirriculum. I followed a
similar cirriculum in Poland and I got into MIT easily. Я согласен]
Guessing it's because that dastardly Putin wanted Russia's share of tax receipts from the looting oligarchs
and their western backers during the pillaging 90s. Bankers and financiers lives matter more then the common
good. So does the Clinton slush fund So Hillary got her vengeance on Vlad by doing an Ukrainian coup, and
sending her best like Brett Kimberlin, Victoria Nuland, and Jonathan Winer. Unfortunately the sneaky Putin
kept Crimea and its port on the Black Sea.
The gall of it all. With all the Hong Kong real estate woes, HSBC needs Russian money laundering moolah.
More are becoming aware of Bill Browder's Magnitsky Act con. Plus Hillary's appetite for payoffs is
insatiable. Basically no clue why we're in the Ukraine other than the Clintons. Trump really should have at
least one of them up. Instead he's facing a bogus impeachment. Good news is we might be geting rid of Joe
Biden, and the nuke weapon makers are getting richer. Wonder where that missing 1998 4.8 billion
dollarFederal Reserve/ IMF loan to Russia ever got too?
comparable to Germany's decision to sponsor Lenin's sealed train voyage.
While I disagree with this assessment–it was just an episode against the background of a complete
collapse of Russia, even none other than Solzhenitsyn admits that Bolsheviks merely picked the power up from
the street where it was laying because nobody realistically wanted it, I have to say that in terms of
consequences of Russia breaking up, you are absolutely spot on. In such a scenario the main beneficiary will
be China and it will be easy for it.
Andrei, I read your blog and I agree about Russian Math and Physics cirriculum. I followed a similar
cirriculum in Poland
In general what is known as Socialist Camp–STEM education was extremely good, I know Germans, Poles and
Czechs, among others, who also were the "products" of this education and yes, they had no problems
navigating US higher-ed.
Pitting the Christian (Protestant) U.S. against Christian
(Orthodox) Russia serves the needs of
Dhimmi
Globalism. Both sides are limited in their ability to
resist Muslim efforts at replacing Christians if they cannot unify against the IslamoGlobalist invaders.
The Biden family, Kerry family, and
Dhimmi
Soros family all have business investments in Ukraine
that will only make money if they are able to keep responsible Christians out of office. If Trump can clear
the
Dhimmi
Deep State hurdles, investigations and impeachment, hopefully this flow of money to
suppress Ukrainian Christians will be shut off.
Not really, just out of focus. NATO is Israel's bitch/attack dog. Israel is owned by the Rothschilds, The
Rothschilds got tossed from the USSR. They regained Russia through Yeltsin. Putin pushed back against the
Rothschild front oligarchs, and now they want it back.
Guys, guys what's going on?! You are, recently, slipping hard here. C'mon we aren't THAT dumb.
So far you've done sterling work in the real world; keeping "normies" in check on the Internet too.
But the crew here is ..slipping.
Two options:
1. You really take us here for dumb fucks. While there is some merit there, still I mean, Soros as
dhimmi?!?
2. The team here has kept the same handles but the real people behind them are different guys. Temps hired
for peanuts. So, if that, where have the real guys gone? And, more importantly, why?
If I can venture an opinion I guess on focusing the effort on normies in the runup to the election.
Anyway, please, tone that idiocy down. It's bad form, really.
It looks as if at least one Ukrainian "player" has taken a look at the smoking ruins of the Middle East and
concluded that "friendly ouvertures" by US are just the on-ramp to a scenario where there will be much
pissing on your robbed grave in a decade or so. A trial balloon to start a de-escalation vis-à-vis of Russia
may have been launched.
In general what is known as Socialist Camp–STEM education was extremely good, I know Germans, Poles
and Czechs, among others, who also were the "products" of this education and yes, they had no problems
navigating US higher-ed.
And then they all flee to the U.S. to design and build computers, airplanes, missiles, etc., while their
native lands try to remain barely 2nd world in STEM.
Another important piece of the puzzle is NATO's Strategic Concept, approved at the 1999 Washington Summit.
It included for the first time "possibility of conducting non-Article 5 crisis response operations." Since
Article 5 refers to a response to a military attack against a member country, this single phrase changed
NATO from a defensive alliance to an offensive one.
This created a loophole. First, sponsor a separatist
insurgency in a country you don't like. When the government responds, claim that civilians are suffering.
Mobilize the public opinion using photos of crying women (less than ten is enough, just show them
frequently.) Follow up with accusations of "humanitarian crisis." Claim that "genocide is unfolding" (this
quote and the bogus claim of 100,000 dead Albanians was used in 1999). Frequently use the phrase
"International Community". Invade.
This scenario was implemented against Yugoslavia and Libya. Had Al Gore won in 2000, Richard Holbroooke
would become Secretary of State and he would use Chechnya as a pretext for intervention in Russia. It almost
happened – Madeleine Albright asked Russia to permit presence of "observers" in Chechnya. Putin wisely
refused, perhaps because he knew that "observers" in Kosovo were used to provide a pretext for war against
Yugoslavia.
Albright's request happened soon after Nato permitted "non-Article 5 crisis response operations."
Few people realize how close we were to a repeat of Yugoslavia-style scenario being used to break up Russia.
@Curmudgeon
You believe it's "The Rothschilds".
I believe it's a
BIT
more complicated than that.
I suggest we skip
that
debate here.
At the moment the pressure is in three spots: Syria, Ukraine and Balkans.
Or, why are "we" in Syria and Balkans, for example? Dumb question, of course.
As why "we" are in Iraq, Afghanistan. Or Bulgaria. Or Japan. Or Italy. Or whatever.
Boring, in fact.
Changing that fact, somehow, could be an interesting conversation. Granted, wouldn't attract much traffic
around here. One day, perhaps.
The question should be : Is there any little speck of land on the entire planet that isn't of "strategic
importance" to the fools that control the USG??
@Exile
Exactly! The fact is that the Democratic establishment have lost any credibility with the Russia Scam so
they are now working on the Ukraine angle an angle that is fraught with danger for them if it all comes out
in the wash.
@peterAUS
The IslamoSoros is an ex-Jew, now totally dedicated to Islam and Jew extermination. That is why he is so
dedicated to the genocidal BDS movement: (1)
Israel released a list of 20 BDS-supporting organizations whose members will be banned from entering
Israel due to their BDS activism, prominently featuring six American groups. At least four of the six
BDS-promoting U.S. groups receive funding tied to Soros. Scores of other U.S. organizations that support
the BDS movement are financed by Soros.
The American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) is a central proponent of anti-Israel BDS activism on
college campuses and in churches
Globalism is against the Judeo-Christian God and his values. Which is why the IslamoSoros and Globalism
go together so well.
@Undocumented Shopper
"This would be a geopolitical blunder of biblical proportions, comparable to Germany's decision to sponsor
Lenin's sealed train voyage."
Exactly. The reason they did that was because they feared Russia would open
up a second front. A short sighted objective in the end because the Zionists managed to sucker America into
fighting on the side of the Allies for the promise of their "promised land" in Palestine.
Same with America embracing Ukraine since Putin isn't going to follow the conventional rules of
engagement since he doesn't have to thanks to the US abrogating the treaty on Medium range nukes. If NATO
makes its advance through Ukraine he'll launch a nuclear counterstrike using tactical nukes.
The people in Washington and Tel Aviv who are playing these games
Don't you mean to say Jaffa? Or Jerusalem? Then again it's actually neither, so may as well.
Russia is the only nation on Earth with the undisputable power to permanently cripple the United
States with nuclear weapons.
Say it ain't so. It's almost as if Israel is not the only one with a Samson(ov) Option? But I'm sure
you'll find a way to blame it on people in the wrong (((Capital))) Anyway.
Israel's nukes are a reason to take them away?
Russia's nukes are a reason to grab your ankles and hope for the best?
I am not in Ukraine. Imperial Washington is in Ukraine as part of it's project to rule the world by force of
arms. I am in Texas minding my own business.
@Gall
I see what you mean. But perhaps the Dems, or the powers behind them, are just concerned with getting rid of
Trump and don't mind if the scandal envelops Joe Biden too.
They'd just be getting rid of the old
"moderate" white guy and giving the nomination instead to a woman.
They would have Warren or whoever's baggage, and she's not young either -- but they wouldn't have to
suffer Creepy Joe's more advanced age and apparent mental decline, his open touching of young girls, and his
constant gaffes and lies/exaggerations.
@Exile
'The fact that both Trump and Putin have managed to keep the peace is laudable and somewhat surprising,
particularly on our side given the comparative pressure the Israel lobby can exert on Trump politically and
personally vs. Putin '
Get the feeling that maybe you're solving this puzzle?
What happens to the interest of US politicians in the Ukraine if Russia agrees to dump Syria?
Yes, but the long answer is that a majority of Jews (with exception to the author perhaps and some others)
now have a dog in this fight (or rather, many). It's hard to believe, but 80 years after playing the leading
role in having millions of Ukrainians murdered in the 1930's, after founding the Soviet Union, Jews now
dominate Ukraine, not just with oligarchs but with politicians elected to the highest office(s) in the land.
They now have their second Jewsh president in a row, the first being part Jewish. The top positions of the
gov't are dominated by Jews and I believe they control most of the media, just as they do in the US. By
contrast, Russia has an ethnic Russian that leads the country and by some counts is undergoing a big return
to Christanisty. Ths is like a horror movie to Jews who never stop indoctrinating Amercans with talk of the
"pogroms" from 120 years ago or longer.
I can sum up the differences based on a personal experience. In
2002 I visted Saint Petersburg and met a young woman there. Durng the time we spent together the subject of
the Jews came up and she said "Russians and Jews don't get along well". I don't recall the exact words of
her sentence, but that is precisely the sentiment she related. It was rather refreshing. She wasn't
criticnzing either side, just stating a fact. And she wasn't apologizing. She appeared to be a proud
Russian. By contrast, when I was in Lviv last year, what had been the heart of Ukrainian nationalism, I met
a young woman completely beholden to the Jews. She had visited Israel several times, she spoke of Jewish
briliance, she made a comment about the bad Palestinians, she called me an anti-semite for telling her Jews
dominated the USSR and were in charge when millions of Ukrainians were killed. She hated Germans, and hated
me. She told me how brilliant Einsten was and how awful Germans were. No doubt, she would be a very loyal
American.
That is what is at stake for the Jews. They now have one more country they dominate, and maybe this one
more than any other. And this is the same country they blasted for many decades as "anti-semitc", portraying
Ukrainians as evil "anti-semites" in movies and deporting Ukrainains from the USA so they could be tried on
trumped up charges in Israel (John Demjanjuk).
Anyone that doesn't think Adam Schiff, Jerrold Nadler and the Jewish dominated mainstream medis are not
acting in their own interest (Jewish interests) are just dumb.
@Andrei Martyanov
"The problem, however, is with the fact that the United States has neither resources nor status anymore to
do either:"
Yes -- but
The US would hope it can pull another Indonesia, Ukraine, Hondurous, & now Bolivia etc, etc,
etc on Russia. Another colour revolution, by those humanitarians in the NED.
@A123
"Globalism is against the Judeo-Christian God and his values. Which is why the IslamoSoros and Globalism go
together so well."
I can't believe your claims never mind your logic.
So called "globalists" give not a damn about any religion, any race, any culture, & (probably) any ideology.
They care about Power & Money -- that-is-it.
@A123
What religion does Soros profess? Is he a member of an established racial and/or religious group? Just
wondering. Ann Coulter says he's a "pompous American billionaire." But I felt that description was somehow
incomplete.
And where does it mention that Jews compose 90% of the current government of Ukraine? And of the previous
governments ever since the Putsch?
And that in a country almost devoid of Jews.
Most of the oligarchs were created by the Americans using the World Bank and International Finance
Organization and a string of private banks. These oligarchs are again almost all Jewish.
Any article or video about Ukraine that leaves the role of International Jewery out is a work of fiction.
Why, then, is Washington so deeply involved in Ukraine?
Because once you secure the old border by making an ally of the country on it, their border becomes the
new insecure border and so you have to bring yet another country on the far side of the new ally within your
alliance. There is no end to it.
I think it is as simple as it looks. Ukraine is "vital to American interests" inasmuch as those interests
are:
1- Keeping a heel on Russia to serve whatever existing financial interests there are in that status
quo, or simply to remain dominant geopolitically, power being an end in itself
2- The venality of American politicians in using Ukraine as a financial playground, very much as
Ukrainian and Russian politicians have done.
There's no real mystery in a small "border" nation that exists as a conduit for a vital commodity being
the pawn of bigger powers, is there?
@Anonymous
I find it odd how Eastern Europeans boast that they're much more intelligent and capable than Westerners,
yet it seems to me that those of them with any intelligence and capability move to Western countries as soon
as possible.
If they're so wonderful shouldn't it be the other way round? Of course, they always blame it
on "Communism" but that seems to be rather like the "Colonialism" excuse for why India and Africa is third
world, how long is that excuse credible?
@Anonymous
"And then they all flee to the U.S. to design and build computers, airplanes, missiles, etc., while their
native lands try to remain barely 2nd world in STEM".
Computers like the fundamentally insecure Intel
processor chips? Besides, most "American" computers are manufactured in Asia. The American "executives" just
skim off the profits. Any time now the people who actually make the microprocessors, RAM, hard drives, SSDs,
network chips, etc. will realise that all they have to do is initiate a "buyout" and it will all be theirs.
Airplanes yeah, like the F-35? No honest comparison of the F-35 with any of the recent MiGs or Sukhois
could come to any conclusion but that the Russian planes are vastly superior. And, of course, vastly cheaper
– not only to buy, but to maintain and upgrade. Besides, the price of a Russian jet fighter includes the
engines (unlike some F-35 quotations I have seen).
Missiles you really have got to be joking even to bring missiles into it. Turkey, India and many other
nations are well aware that the Russian anti-aircraft missiles are far, far better than any US products. Not
only that – they are also much cheaper! If you are talking about offensive missiles, the picture becomes
even more one-sided.
To correct your wording, the people you speak of "flee to the US" not to design and build anything
useful, but mainly to scoop up all the gold with which the streets are lined, and drink all the milk and
honey that flows there.
They quickly find out that it's not gold that lines the sidewalks, but something much nastier and
smellier.
@RadicalCenter
"A map is useful for ascertaining which countries border Russia. Yes, there are many".
Whereas the USA has
borders with two (very weak) nations: Canada and Mexico. As Jules Jusserand, French Ambassador to the US,
remarked in 1910:
"The United States was blessed among nations. On the north, she had a weak neighbour; on the south,
another weak neighbour; on the east, fish; and on the west, fish".
Nothing has changed since then.
So the USA, with only two relatively weak and unthreatening neighbours, should need very minimal armed
forces and should spend very little on armaments; while Russia, with many neighbours (including some very
powerful ones) is justified in spending far more on its armed forces.
Precisely the opposite of what we see; in reality, the USA spends ten times as much on armaments as
Russia does.
Of course, the convenient Wikipedia article is heavily biased toward the neocon view that Ukraine is no
part of Russia and has always been independent.
Kievan Rus was roughly contemporary with King Alfred's Wessex – the nation that rapidly expanded to
become England. And Kiev was the capital of the very first Russian state, just as Winchester was the capital
of King Alfred's Wessex. (All of this happened over 800 years before the American Revolution).
If someone were to tell me today that Hampshire (the county in which Winchester is situated) is not part
of England, but belongs to some weird country called "Borderland" – the literal meaning of "Ukraine" – I
would laugh out loud. Russians would be quite as justified in claiming that Kiev has always been a Russian
city, and still is today.
However the Russians are peaceable, tolerant people and prefer to let their "erring sisters" go their own
way unhindered. (Unlike Abraham Lincoln's USA, which reacted to the perfectly justified secession of the
Confederate States by launching a war that killed nearly a million people).
" .I've often quoted Randolph Bourne as saying, "War is the
health of the state." He was quite correct. The larger the nation, the greater the need political leaders
have for warfare. ..Since the end of World War II, the US military-industrial complex has been
displeased with the fact that peacetime means diminished revenue for them. Increasingly, they've contributed
heavily to election campaigns for both major parties in every election.
The repayment for those contributions has always been the same – the political class must find excuses to
create a new conflict as soon as another one ends, ensuring the continued revenue of the complex.
This has resulted in the US becoming the first and only country that's in a consciously created state of
perpetual warfare. The cost of this, in 2018, was roughly $600 billion – 54% of all federal discretionary
spending ":
"Because they are all ultimately funded via both direct and indirect theft [taxes], and counterfeiting
[via central bank monopolies], all governments are essentially, at their very cores, 100% corrupt criminal
scams which cannot be "reformed","improved", simply because of their innate, unchangeble criminal nature."
onebornfree
"Taking the State wherever found, striking into its history at any point, one sees no way to
differentiate the activities of its founders, administrators and beneficiaries from those of a
professional-criminal class." Albert J. Nock
– Without the unequivocally Russian parts (to include Dniepropetrowsk and Odessa oblasts) Ukraine is a
landlocked sunflower field chemically pure of strategic value (thanks to Nord Stream 2).
It was a private venture of the Tribe to provide a safe space more conveniently located than London or
Cyprus.
– The Banderists are a wild card it took a special kind of idiocy to wake up that particular dog; they are
not forever going to believe it was the Big Bad Russians who massacred their brothers.
From the other side
of the grand chessboard (always assuming there still is such a thing as an independent US geostrategy) the
situation is simple – there are two Archimedean points, the loss either of which will mean the end of the
empire:
– Germany: NATO´s eastward expansion is not so much aimed at Mother Russia as on preempting
Tauroggen/Rapallo 3.0 . Brexit doesn´t help either.
– the Gulf: there is a reason it is called "Persian" and not "Lake Monroe"; contrary to popular belief
the US do not need the oil, but without the ability to deny it to others the $$$ would collapse, rendering
untenable the worldwide strategic posture (and prolly unleashing a groid uprising back home).
Classic empire in overstretch – the only question is how much damage they will do on the way down.
@Kolya Krassotkin
Yes.
The Neocon foreign policy has been swallowed up by most of the Dumbo-crats because of TDS (Trump Derangement
Syndrome). Thank God for Tulsi. The Republi-tards are even more rabidly Neocoonish than the Demokratz. Thank
The Lord for Rand Paul. So 'they', The Cabal, the Neocons, whatever you want to call them, basically run our
foreign policy.
Now 'they' have a special hatred for Putin because he reestablished Christian Orthodoxy into Mother Russia.
You have to admire Trump's intestinal fortitude to push back against Christian Zionists, Neocons, derranged
Democrats and stupid politicians in general and that's just in his own family!
@Anonymous
You probably live under some stone. If you were following Russia military developments you would clearly
understand that STEM so far at least math physics part is doing ok and considerably better than in USA.
@Andrei Martyanov
At least Germans once in a while did something good for Russia, while doing really long term disservice to
themselves as history shown.
Basically ukraine and belorussia is Russia safe few parts. The whole madness of this situation that
basically russian people were led to believe that they are not russians . Sooner or later this anomaly will
have to be addressed and I disagree with those who consider ukraine a lost cause. Everything in due time. In
this regard chinese are behaving rightfully not allowing no piece of china go. Once one start retreating in
this regard there is no knowing how much can be lost. For now I think russia is doing right thing. But
eventually both Ukraine and belorussia will have to be reintegrated. On their own they are not viable
anyway.
Sputnik is reporting that the US has spent $6.4 Trillion fighting wars that have killed
800,000 since Sept 11/01, that number is unbelievable, at least 1,500,000 dead in Iraq,
250,000 in Afghanistan, 750,000 in Syria.
The US military budget alone has averaged about 650 billion since then, plus the wars in
Iraq and Afghanistan were funded separately (around 200 million a year), plus CIA/ blackbook
projects - 7 or 8 trillion is a more likely number.
When things get blown up, no one really knows what was actually bought and existed and
what was just a phantom piece of equipment War has always been the ideal cover for
corruption
"DNC Announces 10 Candidates in Atlanta Democratic Debate" [
Bloomberg ]. Joe Biden, Cory Booker, Pete Buttigieg, Tulsi Gabbard, Kamala Harris, Amy
Klobuchar, Bernie Sanders, Tom Steyer, Elizabeth Warren and Andrew Yang. And not Julian Castro,
sadly. "The forum will be co-hosted by the Washington Post and MSNBC. Candidates will be
questioned by four female moderators: Rachel Maddow, Andrea Mitchell and Kristen Welker from
the network, and Ashley Parker from the Post. The two-hour event had a higher bar to qualify
than previous debates. Candidates must have contributions from 165,000 donors, up from 135,000.
And the donors must be geographically dispersed, with a minimum of 600 per state in at least 20
states. In addition, participants must either show 3% support in four qualifying national or
single-state polls, or have at least 5% support in two qualifying single-state polls released
between Sept. 13 and Nov. 13 in the early nominating states of Iowa, New Hampshire, South
Carolina or Nevada."
China Communist Party to the extent it is a theocratic state generates its special flavor of corruption typical for theocratic states
where high priests of the cult enjoy virtual impunity. It is the same type of corruption that doomed the USSR. So it is institutional
Notable quotes:
"... In China, there is an additional emphasis of the moral aspect and it is less constrained by laws. An immoral action, even if it is legal, may still be considered a corruption by the Chinese society. For example, if a relative of Xi would to give a speech, and then received an exorbitant fee, it probably would be considered a corruption in China. However, in US, this is perfectly legal (and a reason many ex-politicians and ex-government employees become very rich) and it won't be considered a corruption. ..."
"... In case you hadn't noticed from prior postings, "Godfree Roberts" is a fake name for a CCP propaganda writer who scours the Internet for things to promote official views for, such as this absurd piece. ..."
"... The CCP knows corruption/graft, etc. is poison to their authoritarian one party state dictatorship. It is endemic in all such states. So periodically there are huge purges, trials, executions, etc. and a new set of stooges are risen up. Some get the message, most just bow humbly and wait for the storm to pass. It is as old as China. Of course government corruption is hardly unique to China. But in places where party leaders can be voted out (not merely a few shot for effect) it can be cleaned out periodically. Chinese are wisely quiet and cynical about this. ..."
"... What mechanisms are in place to keep this from going too far? That is, accusing someone for personal reasons, for example, to further one's own career. ..."
"... I have viewed Xi Jinping with more suspicion because his family has a lot of wealth and he sent his daughter to Harvard. He also did not agitate for rehabilitating the cultural revolution when it would have been more politically risky for him to have done so, like Bo Xilai did. ..."
"... I wonder if the Government would have something to say if he spoke out against the party and against Xi? Considering that people have received jail sentences (of years) for calling Xi a steamed bun, and that Winnie the Pooh is banned because poor Xi can't handle light hearted criticism I think we all know the answers here ..."
"... This is the ultimate corruption that a society faces – the inability to communicate freely and to criticise those accountable. Every Chinese citizen is under the CCP Yoke regardless of how this CCP shill wants to spin it. ..."
"... Corruption exists everywhere. It's just that it depends on what level it occurs. Heck, in the West, it's legal! Lobbying, they call it You can't bribe a cop to forgive a ticket, but goddamn you can bribe a politician to drive the country into the ground. ..."
"... If you want accurate information about China, stilted prose is inevitable. Real writers, professionals, are paid to lie about China. Anyone who tries to tell the truth is shunned, not only by our mainstream media, but by the PRC, which prefers to let its accomplishments speak for themselves. ..."
"... Udo Ulfkotte[3], Editor of Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, says that no significant European journalist, including himself, was free of CIA influence. Singapore's Lee Kwan Yew[4] outlined the consequences: ..."
"... The first is to do what Confucian states are always supposed to do: recruit your brightest sparks, promote the most honest, competent of them until the topmost are the very best you've got. As its track record demonstrates, the current dynasty has earned everyone's trust by doing that consistently. ..."
"... At this stage, any one who still believes in the western propaganda about China is simply too brain-washed and not too smart for any cure. Excuse me, I should say "too dumb for any cure". ..."
"... For example, Nathan Rich's recent video shows how media biased reporting of Hong Kong compare with Ukraine riots. The contrast can't be anymore stark: ..."
"... People view the world through narratives, and the value of a narrative lies only in how closely it follows and "explains" the widest possible array of empirical facts. ..."
"... Corrupt Chinese have practically taken over the US West Coast and Northeast. There isn't anywhere you could go in LA, Bay Area or Seattle without encountering mandarin speaking people. 99.9% Chinese nationals in the US are corrupt. With a nominal per capita GDP of $8,600, the only people who could afford to emigrate or send their children abroad for education are the rich, and China is so corrupt, no one can get rich without being corrupt, either by taking bribes or giving them. These are the corrupt factory owners who leave behind polluted rivers and air for their countrymen to die from while they escape to greener pastures with their family, and the government officials they bribed to pollute at will. ..."
"... This country is destroyed by (((lawyers))). As Niall Ferguson said, we no longer have the rule of law, we have the rule of (((lawyers))). ..."
The men of Qi presented the government of Lu with a troupe of singing girls. Ji Huanzi accepted them and for three days
failed to appear at court. Confucius left the state . Analects
Everywhere, since ancient times, peole have feared government corruption for, unlike war or fraud, corrupt policies cripple nations
for centuries. No society has suffered more grievously from–nor waged more protracted war against–official corruption than the Chinese.
Today however, though the story not over, it is nearing a goal that could make them the envy of the world and, like most Chinese
stories, theirs is a long one.
Corruption–nepotistic, pecuniary, blatant, discreet, major and minor–has been subverting governments since governments were invented.
Roman politicians were scandalously corrupt, Christianity failed to improve them, and their legacy of official impunity, bribery,
influence peddling, patronage, nepotism and cronyism, electoral fraud, embezzlement, kickbacks, unholy alliances, and involvement
with organized crime afflicts us today and we have become numb to it.
Had I thoroughly eradicated corrupt officials in addition to those already imprisoned I would have been dealing with two thousand
men from just two prefectures, men with no useful occupation who used my prestige to oppress people. No-one outside government
knew how wicked they were, so everyone said my punishments were harsh, for they saw only the severity of the law and didn't know
that these villains had used the government's good name to engage in evil practices. In the morning I punished a few and, by evening,
others had committed the same crimes. I punished those in the evening and next morning there were more violations! Although the
corpses of the first had not been removed others were already lined up to follow in their path, day and night! The harsher the
punishment, the more violations. I didn't know what to do, but I couldn't rest. If I was lenient the law became ineffectual, order
deteriorated, people thought me weak and engaged in still more evil practices. If I punished them, others regarded me as a tyrant.
How could anyone lead a peaceful life in such circumstances? Really, my situation was dreadful.
Confucians fought corruption more effectively than the Romans, partly because of public participation. The people retained the
right to withdraw the Mandate of Heaven–and, according to the constitution, still do–and many governments met grisly ends when they
failed to honor the Four Principles–propriety, justice, honesty, and honor–or their officials lacked the Eight Virtues–loyalty, filial
piety, benevolence, love, integrity, righteousness, harmony and peace.
From the earliest days, officials transferred to provinces were forbidden to bring their parents lest their needs conflict with
the Emperor's. They were rotated every three years and, after each rotation, their successors were encouraged to report discrepancies
for fear that they be blamed for them. Palace officials were regularly moved between departments and the seriously corrupt were strangled
and their families sold into slavery.
Every Chinese, from humble farmers to eminent politicians, knows this history and understands that promoting honest men to leadership
is the way to prevent corruption. Many still living saw how a century of chaos devastated public morality, as Mao observed during
a 1950 anti-corruption drive, "Today, you can buy a branch secretary for a few packs of cigarettes, not to mention marrying a daughter
to him." Mao's slogan, "The masses have sharp eyes," encouraged people to report wrongdoing and corruption fell dramatically. His
insistence on merely shaming corrupt officials worked because, says Sydney Rittenberg
[3] An old friend of the party assesses China's
new leaders. Rob Schmitz. Marketplace. November 19, 2012 . "Nobody locked their doors. The banks–there was a local bank branch
on many, many corners–the door was wide open, the currency was stacked up on the table in plain sight of the door, there were no
guards and they never had a bank robbery, ever."
As its accomplishments demonstrate, postwar China was free of corruption at the policy-making level but, especially during the
forty year Reform and Opening, lower level corruption flourished. Anticipating this in 1980, planners redesigned officials' incentives
so that bribers would effectively be rewarding them for expediting the plan, says Yukon Huang
[4] Yukon Huang was the World Bank's Director
for China. The Diplomat , "The system countered the growth‐inhibiting aspects of corruption by setting investment and production
targets that gave local officials incentives to promote expansion. It fostered a unity of purpose so that, even when corruption flourished,
the collaborators still made growth the guiding principle of their actions. This was reinforced by competition between localities
to meet targets and support productivity‐enhancing economic reforms. The competitive element helped curb waste and ensured a modicum
of efficiency despite the high degree of state intervention in commercial activities." Sometimes though, as throughout Chinese history,
things got out of hand.
Acting on a tipoff about smuggling, Beijing secretly sent detectives to Xiamen Port in 1999 but the smugglers, tipped off, set
fire to the investigators' hotel and killed them as they slept. On national television the next day, Premier Zhu Rongji declared
war and ordered a hundred coffins, "Ninety-nine for the crooks and one for me." Detectives from across the country converged on the
city and what they found staggered them: four million tons of imported diesel fuel had bypassed customs in just two years. They tracked
hundreds of suspects, locked escapees in a local hotel with armed guards on each floor, and spent three years unravelling a case
so complex that the customs files alone would be higher than a ten-story building. The gang had bribed the vice-minister of Public
Security, Li Jizhou, through his wife and daughter, and Li and thirteen others were sentenced to death, his wife to thirty months
in prison and three hundred officials were tried for aiding or abetting the criminals. The ringleader, farmer-turned-smuggler Lai
Changxing, fled to Canada, was extradited, and jailed for life in 2009.
In 1985 Bo Xilai, son of a Revolutionary Immortal and Xi Jinping's schoolmate, had ignored his father's pleas to stay out of politics,
"You know nothing of the sufferings of ordinary people and just want to capitalize on my name." Xilai cultivated a charismatic image,
was named one of Time's Most Influential People, rose rapidly to provincial governor and publicly campaigned for a cabinet position.
But, as conservative scholar Cheng Li said at the time, "Nobody really trusts him. A lot of people are scared of him, including several
princelings who are supposed to be his power base." Michael Wines wrote that, though he possessed prodigious charisma and deep intelligence,
"He possessed a studied indifference to the wrecked lives that littered his path to power Mr. Bo's ruthlessness stood out." With
the help of Justice Minister Zhou Yongkang, Bo had even wiretapped President Hu.
Despite considerable internal resistance, Vice Premier Wu Yi, the nation's highest woman official, demanded an open investigation
and a 2012 trial revealed that Bo owned expensive properties around the world and that his wife had murdered a British agent. They
were jailed for life and joined a long line of disgraced elites like the grandson of China's Head of State and founder of the Red
Army, Zhu De, who was executed for rape, and Yan Jianhong, wife of Guizhou's powerful Party Secretary, who was executed for corruption.
With prosperity assured, and elite corruption confronted, Congress anointed Xi Jinping, the most honest, competent official of
his generation, to succeed President Hu. In its first year, Xi's anti-corruption campaign saw ten thousand officials passed over
for promotion for concealing information and one-hundred thirty-thousand demoted or disciplined for making false declarations. By
2016, prosecutors had charged sixty-three senior officials and ministers with corruption, released confessions from fifty-seven thousand
Party members who made restitution and accepted demotions and seen Yunnan's corrupt Party Secretary, Bai Enpei, sentenced to death.
By 2018, anti-corruption squads had investigated 1.3 million bureaucrats, filed a million court cases, issued one hundred thousand
indictments, captured thousands of overseas fugitives and jailed or executed one-hundred twenty high-ranking officials–including
five national leaders, twelve generals, a dozen CEOs and Sun Zhengcai, former Chongqing Party chief, who was sentenced to life in
prison for taking huge bribes. After a 2019 industrial explosion in Tianjin killed one-hundred sixty-five people, the magistrate
found that petty bribery had led to weak code enforcement, sentenced the responsible official to death, and jailed forty-nine of
his colleagues.
Graft investigators unannounced inspections now resemble elite athletes' doping tests. An Anhui inspection team telephoned an
official four times between 7:31-7:35 one evening about his poverty alleviation efforts. He was showering and, when he failed to
answer, they reported him for obstruction and moved to dismiss him. Happily, through social media, the public came to his defense
and he was exonerated.
Knowing that that ten percent of their statements will be audited, even deputy county officials now report their marital status,
overseas travel, criminal record, wages, other earnings, family properties, stocks, funds, insurance and investments. If they refuse
to answer questions, or collude with, or protect accomplices, they are detained immediately.
Bureaucrats–especially those with leadership ambitions–endure increasing scrutiny as they advance, says Zhao Bing Bing
[6] Daniel Bell and Zhao Bing Bing, The China
Model. , "The selection criteria are: a person must have 'both ability and moral integrity and the latter should be prioritized
[7] The same wording as the Chief Censor used
in the Tang Dynasty. .'" Midlevel officials must report their own assets and those of their parents, wives, children, children's
spouses and cousins, children from previous marriages, children born out of wedlock and foster children. They must report their income,
savings, real estate, stock portfolios, insurance policies, unit trusts, bonds, assets in overseas accounts and, "Income shall include
salary and various bonuses, allowances, subsidies, and payment you receive from lectures, writing, consultation, reviewing, painting
and calligraphy." Says a scion of a prominent family:
I am a Party Member in China and all my family are Party members. What I think of Xi is that the life is really changing after
he came to power. A relative of mine works for the government as a vital governor in my city Chengdu (which is a big city like
BeiJing or ShangHai), then all my family people are like in the hierarchy of privilege. We pay nothing when go out for dinner,
the Party pays. We pay nothing for filling in oil, the Party pays. It seems like we don't need to pay for anything with our salaries,
cause either the Party pays, or someone will pay for us (who wants to flatter us). I smoke the best, I drink the best, sometimes
I even drive without license when drunk, because I fear no one.
In past times, yes we did have privilege everywhere, I felt so arrogant to be superior to others that's also true. But the
problem is, there is a tradeoff. We drank quite a lot of alcohol to show respect to others, we had to accept bribes even we know
it's risky, cause we have to consider about our clan (like the interest of my boss). We had to do some many things we don't want
to do, that's the rule of living in Party, care about the interest of Clan more than your own. That's how we united. We have to
fear a lot of threats from ordinary people, colleagues, and bosses. We cannot keep our own passports, Party keeps it in case of
we flee.
But life changed after Xi came to power, he did real things on anti-corruption. No one dare to present gifts to governors and
the abuse of public funds is strictly monitored. The Party took back the public cars from my family and even we have to pay for
the parking fee now! But..my family and I are actually happy with this, we are thankful to President Xi. Cause he seems like dragging
China to a healthier future. My relatives don't need to go out for dinner with other governors as social intercourse daily, they
don't need to drink so much on the table. And they start to learn to pay for the bill by turns, cause the Party will no longer
do this for them. They start to learn how to take bus or metro. That's good, actually. People start to think about what kind of
lifestyle is called 'healthy,' they are more like human now, no longer some conceited stupid with expanding power. That's how
our life changed after Xi came.
Senior ministers' lives have become excruciatingly transparent. Their private activities are scrutinized and their children must
adopt assumed names to avoid influence-seekers. Their meetings must have third-party observers as one-on-one appointments are taken
as evidence of impropriety. A record of excessive, or poor quality, government debts is treated as prima facie evidence of corruption
and automatically investigated. Senior officials are audited annually after retirement, remain responsible for the consequences of
all their decisions until the day they die and, even then, clawback provisions apply.
Xi invited amateur corruption fighters to join the campaign and Beijing publishes a monthly scoresheet. Citizens text tips and
complaints to the Rules and Discipline Committee (founded in the Tang Dynasty) at #12388 and often post accusations and photographs
of evidence on social media and request additional witnesses. Social media have made the masses' eyes sharper. Netizens scrutinizing
a news photograph noticed the work safety boss of Shaanxi province grinning broadly as he assessed the twisted wreckage of a bus
and a methanol tanker following an accident that left 36 people dead. They spotted his expensive timepiece and their tipoff and subsequent
investigation sent Yang Dacai, Brother Watch, to jail for fourteen years for taking a million dollars in bribes.
Today visitors burn incense at the shrines of great corruption fighters, the battle with official corruption still accounts for
half of all Chinese dramas, and millions watch TV dramas about 'Justice Bao' Zheng, the incorruptible Prefect of the Capital in 1000
AD. A popular TV series, 'In the Name of People,' depicts current-day intra-Party power struggles in the fictional city of Jingzhou.
There a prosecutor and a handful of honest local officials help laid-off workers protest a corrupt land deal, foil corrupt bureaucrats
sabotaging an arrest warrant, and stop fake police bulldozing honest citizens' homes. The show's writers say they have no shortage
of material.
Until 2018, anti-corruption work was shared by the National Bureau of Corruption Prevention, which recommended anti-corruption
policies and handled international anti-corruption coordination. The Supreme People's Procuratorate investigated various kinds of
malfeasance. The Central Commission for Discipline Inspection enforced party loyalty, anti-graft, ethical and Party lifestyle requirements
among civil servants and leading officials who are Party members, but turned criminal evidence over to the state for prosecution.
The Ministry of Supervision, MOS, supervised civil servants who were non-Party members, investigated graft, misappropriation of public
funds and other duty-related violations.
The Commission subsumes their functions into an independent, fourth arm of government that ranks with the Supreme Court and the
Department of Justice. As the most powerful such agency on earth, it employs legislation, digital technology (including face recognition
and AI), the sharp eyes of the people, and great investigative powers. With the goal of making corruption impossible, it centralizes
all anti-corruption processes and exercises authority over all civil servants within and outside the Party, the government, the People's
Congresses, the local supervisory commissions, the people's courts and procuracy, the People's Congresses, the eight democratic parties,
federations of industry and commerce, and everyone who works in, or consults for, organizations managing public affairs. With extensive
powers to interrogate, search, wiretap, detain suspects and freeze their assets, its writ extends to managers of state owned enterprises,
state educational, scientific, research, cultural, health care, sports, and similar agencies, think tanks, village and urban residents
committees, and 'all other personnel who perform public duties' and oversees provincial, city, and county level anti-corruption agencies.
Congress appoints the Commission's senior staff and Yang Xiaodu, its first director was, like Xi, a sent-down youth who performed
manual labour in Anhui province during the Cultural Revolution. Staff need not be Party members but they can never work in another
arm of government for the rest of their lives. The Commission is a political, not administrative body, and is exempt from the extensive
procedural and substantive constraints on administrative organs like the police. Though the law requires staff to pay compensation
'in accordance with law' for infringing people's lawful rights and interests, it does not provide a right of further recourse through
the courts, but does permit targets to appeal to higher-level organs for re-examination of the Commission's decisions and to challenge
unlawful conduct like prolonged detention.
If the Commission comes even close to its goal of making corruption impossible, grateful citizens will credit Confucius and the
First Emperor for limiting political power to a single lifetime and confining it to those who demonstrate both honesty and intelligence.
They will credit the present dynasty for testing officials in the wilderness and imposing extraordinary transparency, themselves
for their unwillingness to tolerate corruption, and Xi Jinping for creating the most powerful corruption-fighting agency in history.
Looking back only ten years, it is difficult to believe that corruption in China is on track to rival Singapore's by 2021.
* Corruption in Eighteenth-Century China. Nancy E. Park. The Journal of Asian Studies, vol. 56, no. 4, 1997.
Notes
[1] Qu Yuan, 340-278 BC, was a Chu
kingdom official and government minister who wrote some of the greatest poetry in Chinese history.
[2] From Huáng-Míng Zǔxùn (Instructions
of the Ancestor of the August Ming), admonitions left to his descendants by the Hongwu Emperor Zhu Yuanzhang, founder of the Ming
dynasty (1368 to 1644).
[3] An old friend of the party assesses
China's new leaders. Rob Schmitz. Marketplace. November 19, 2012
[4] Yukon Huang was the World Bank's
Director for China. The Diplomat
[5] China's Meritocratic Examinations
and the Ideal of Virtuous Talents. Xiao, H., & Li, C. (2013). In D. Bell & C. Li (Eds.), The East Asian Challenge for Democracy:
Political Meritocracy in Comparative Perspective: Cambridge University Press.
[6] Daniel Bell and Zhao Bing Bing,
The China Model.
[7] The same wording as the Chief
Censor used in the Tang Dynasty.
[8] The National Supervision Commission was
formed at the first session of the 13th National People's Congress in 2018 and absorbed the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection
of the Communist Party of China.
One salient difference between the Chinese and the Western concept of corruption is the role of laws. For people in the west,
the definition of corruption is strongly tied to, and in fact mostly defined through laws. To put it very crudely: anything legal
is not corruption, and vice versa (i.e. all corruption is illegal).
In China, there is an additional emphasis of the moral aspect and it is less constrained by laws. An immoral action, even
if it is legal, may still be considered a corruption by the Chinese society. For example, if a relative of Xi would to give a
speech, and then received an exorbitant fee, it probably would be considered a corruption in China. However, in US, this is perfectly
legal (and a reason many ex-politicians and ex-government employees become very rich) and it won't be considered a corruption.
There is really no right or wrong in either approaches. Both contains their pros and cons. The Western way has the advantage
of transparency that make it easier to follow. But it favors the rich and powerful people who can find loopholes and workarounds
to the laws. It also has the disadvantage of difficulty in keeping abreast with advances and changes of society and technologies
. The Chinese way has the advantage of flexibility to meeting the moral standard and demands from the people, but may become confusing
and uncertain for many people like businessmen or foreigners.
In case you hadn't noticed from prior postings, "Godfree Roberts" is a fake name for a CCP propaganda writer who scours the
Internet for things to promote official views for, such as this absurd piece.
The stilted prose and logic is evident. His stuff is full of charts and graphs which magically appear on his computer, unlike
yours or mine. Much of that might be "true" in the sense of basic historical writings, but selectively edited. Current Chinese
leader Xi here is extolled as chasing "corruption" away. Ha!
The CCP knows corruption/graft, etc. is poison to their authoritarian one party state dictatorship. It is endemic in all
such states. So periodically there are huge purges, trials, executions, etc. and a new set of stooges are risen up. Some get the
message, most just bow humbly and wait for the storm to pass. It is as old as China. Of course government corruption is hardly
unique to China. But in places where party leaders can be voted out (not merely a few shot for effect) it can be cleaned out periodically.
Chinese are wisely quiet and cynical about this.
Meanwhile Mr. "Roberts" probably earns a very nice salary doing this work. Maybe even teaches English and propaganda messaging
part time. Billions are spent censoring the Internet there and creating rosy statistics. Some gullible foreigners buy into that.
Fair enough. Every State has its hired liars and propaganda artists. But China has really set the mark for its effort.
Just avoid going there and saying anything negative. Their prisons are not like ours.
What mechanisms are in place to keep this from going too far? That is, accusing someone for personal reasons, for example,
to further one's own career.
I thought Bo Xilai was a maoist and so was Zhou Yongkang, both also had countryside experiences similar to Xi Jinping, and Bo
Xilai as mayor of Chongqing was very much aligned with Maoists and worked on rehabilitating the memory of the cultural revolution.
I have viewed Xi Jinping with more suspicion because his family has a lot of wealth and he sent his daughter to Harvard.
He also did not agitate for rehabilitating the cultural revolution when it would have been more politically risky for him to have
done so, like Bo Xilai did.
Xi Jinping isn't anywhere near the leftist Bo Xilai was.
Godfree did you communicate with Chinese who lived in Chongqing under Bo Xilai's mayorship, what did they say then? I recall
the corrupt wealthy hating him and the poor loving him. let's not forget Bo Xilai also had anti-corruption anti-gang campaigns.
I am a Party Member in China and all my family are Party members. What I think of Xi is that the life is really changing
after he came to power
I wonder if the Government would have something to say if he spoke out against the party and against Xi? Considering that
people have received jail sentences (of years) for calling Xi a steamed bun, and that Winnie the Pooh is banned because poor Xi
can't handle light hearted criticism I think we all know the answers here.
This is the ultimate corruption that a society faces – the inability to communicate freely and to criticise those accountable.
Every Chinese citizen is under the CCP Yoke regardless of how this CCP shill wants to spin it.
Corruption exists everywhere. It's just that it depends on what level it occurs. Heck, in the West, it's legal! Lobbying,
they call it You can't bribe a cop to forgive a ticket, but goddamn you can bribe a politician to drive the country into the ground.
@Muggles I am a US expat, and happen
to live in the China Mainland, and my impression is that most Chinese believe Xi Jinping is doing a great job. What do you care
really? Do you have any dogs in this race?
Talk about propaganda. Tell me then whom are the following:
Falun Gong
Shen Yun
Epoch Times
New Tang Dynasty
China Uncensored
There is no doubt in my mind China is a threat to the hegemony of the West. I definitely prefer Western civilization. But if
forced to choose between Chung Kuo and Babel 2.0, I'll take the former every time.
@Muggles It's not often someone
gets so many things wrong in such a tight space. Congratulations.
I've published at least six books, none about China, my bio is all over the place, and I run a business in under my own name.
If you want accurate information about China, stilted prose is inevitable. Real writers, professionals, are paid to lie
about China. Anyone who tries to tell the truth is shunned, not only by our mainstream media, but by the PRC, which prefers to
let its accomplishments speak for themselves.
I estimate that, since 1950, we taxpayers have spent $100 billion creating and disseminating lies about China–$1.5 billion
annually. Money well spent, if you're in the top 1%, because it convinces the masses that, in Margaret Thatcher's words, there
is no alternative to our failing system.
CIA Director William Casey[1] confirmed this when he told President Reagan in 1981, "We'll know our disinformation campaign
has worked when everything the American public believes is false." Carl Bernstein[2], of Watergate fame, revealed that four hundred
journalists had 'secretly carried out assignments for the Central Intelligence Agency.' All major US media outlets cooperated,
he said, including ABC, NBC, AP, UPI, Reuters, Newsweek, Hearst, the Miami Herald, and the New York Herald‑Tribune.
Udo Ulfkotte[3], Editor of Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, says that no significant European journalist, including himself,
was free of CIA influence. Singapore's Lee Kwan Yew[4] outlined the consequences:
The Philippines press enjoys all the freedoms of the US system but fails the people: a wildly partisan press helped Philippines
politicians flood the marketplace of ideas with junk and confuse and befuddle the people so that they could not see what their
vital interests were in a developing country. And, because vital issues like economic growth and equitable distribution were
seldom discussed, they were never tackled and the democratic system malfunctioned. Look at Taiwan and South Korea: their free
press runs rampant and corruption runs riot. The critic itself is corrupt yet the theory is, if you have a free press, corruption
disappears. Now I'm telling you, that's not true. Freedom of the press, freedom of news critics, must be subordinated to the
overriding needs of the integrity of Singapore and to the primacy of purpose of an elected government.
Says Ann Lee[5], "
A reporter and friend of Michael Massing[6] who worked at the Beijing office of The Wall Street Journal told him that the
editors in Washington regularly changed material information and opinions in his articles. Given the twelve-hour time difference,
by the time his stories went to press in the West, the editors had replaced all the Chinese interviews with statements from
American talking heads who work at think tanks promoting anti-China perspectives."
The weird result of this enormous, expensive effort is that, while we were busy lying to ourselves about China, the Chinese
were busy eating our lunch, and now it's too late. By 2021 every Chinese will have a home, a job, plenty of food, education, safe
streets, health- and old age care. 300,000,000 urban Chinese will have more net worth and disposable income than the average American,
their mothers and infants will be less likely to die in childbirth, their children will graduate from high school three years
ahead of American kids and live longer, healthier lives and there will be more drug addicts, suicides and executions, more homeless,
poor, hungry and imprisoned people in America than in China.
What's more, they'll be ahead of us in science and technology–they're already ahead in math, chemistry, engineering and computer
science–because they have 10x more geniuses and spend 3x more on R&D than we do.
They pulled it off because rubes like you believed the bs you read in our media and insulted anyone who tried to tell you the
truth. Congratulations.
____________________________________________________________
[1] A direct quote, provided and authenticated by Barbara Honegger, White House Policy Analyst and Special Assistant to the Assistant
to the President for Domestic Policy in the first Reagan Administration, 1981–83, who was present at the briefing and confirmed
it with other witnesses.
[2] "The CIA and the Media: How America's Most Powerful News Media Worked Hand in Glove with the Central Intelligence Agency and
Why the Church Committee Covered It Up." Carl Bernstein. Rolling Stone, 1977.
[3] Gekaufte Journalisten (Bought Journalists), Udo Ulfkotte. Kopp Verlag. 2014. The English language edition, Journalists For
Hire: How The CIA Buys The News, has been suppressed.
[4] A Third World Perspective on the Press. RH Lee Kwan Yew, Prime Minister of Singapore. C-SPAN, APRIL 14, 1988
[5] What the U.S. Can Learn from China: An Open-Minded Guide to Treating Our Greatest Competitor as Our Greatest Teacher, by Ann
Lee, 2012
[6] Editor of The Columbia Journalism Review.
The first is to do what Confucian states are always supposed to do: recruit your brightest sparks, promote the most honest,
competent of them until the topmost are the very best you've got. As its track record demonstrates, the current dynasty has earned
everyone's trust by doing that consistently.
The next step is making the process transparent: publish the rules, put an accountable person in charge of the process–someone
with a great deal to lose if they're perceived as being unfair or dishonest (interestingly, Rome's Chief Censor was also such
a person) and China's current censor is one of the most admired people in the country.
Then, have a transparent appeals process so that everyone can watch issues being thrashed out.
It's a human and therefore, imperfect, process but people don't expect perfection of their leaders, just best efforts–and that's
what the PRC delivers.
@Anonymous Bo was very popular in
Chongqing and people still point to the trees he planted and to the rapid progress they made under his administration.
But that is a sine qua non in Chinese government. Even someone as high born as Bo can only hope for advancement if they
show dramatic, tangible progress in their area of responsibility.
I suspect from his profile that Bo was a high functioning sociopath whose birth allowed him to bypass many of the filters in
the system.
He is often spoken of as a 'rival' of Xi Jinping, but that is simply a Western projection. China's elite knew about Bo's liabilities
for decades and one of the reasons Xi got the nod was that he ranked as high as Bo socially. Do you remember how Xi 'disappeared'
for ten days following his promotion to the Peacock Throne? He was meeting with his and Bo's peers–their age cohort–to get their
blessing on the cleanup he had planned.
@Tusk Nobody has suffered from calling
Xi a steamed bun.
However, Chinese don't call their leaders names because their relationship to officials is entirely different from our (Roman)
relationship. Martin Jacques explains it well:
The Chinese state enjoys much greater legitimacy than any Western state. The Chinese treat the state with a reverence and
respect that is more or less unknown in the West; and the reason clearly has nothing to do with democracy. In other words,
a state's legitimacy cannot be reduced to the existence or otherwise of democracy: on the contrary, democracy is not necessarily
the most important factor in a state's legitimacy and may, as in the case of China, be relatively unimportant. The underlying
reason for the legitimacy of the Chinese state is that, as discussed earlier, it is seen by the people as the embodiment and
guardian of Chinese civilization, enjoying, as a consequence, something akin to a spiritual significance. It follows that what
would undermine the legitimacy of a government, the present one included, is a threat to the country's unity. The attitude
of the Chinese towards the state, thus, is very different to that of Westerners. For the latter, the state is an outsider,
a stranger, even an interloper, whose presence should, as far as possible, be limited and confined. This is most obviously
the case in the United States, with those who identify with the Tea Party, for example, regarding the state as an alien body,
but even in Europe it is viewed with varying degrees of suspicion. In China, in contrast, the state and society are seen as
on the same side and part of the same endeavour: the state enjoys the status of an intimate and is treated like a member of
the family, not just any member but the head of the family – the patriarch himself. We can only understand the immense authority
of the Chinese state in these terms, an authority which has been reinforced by the fact that, unlike in the West, it has had
no serious rivals for over a millennium.
"The weird result of this enormous, expensive effort is that, while we were busy lying to ourselves about China "
At this stage, any one who still believes in the western propaganda about China is simply too brain-washed and not too
smart for any cure. Excuse me, I should say "too dumb for any cure".
For example, Nathan Rich's recent video shows how media biased reporting of Hong Kong compare with Ukraine riots. The contrast
can't be anymore stark:
@Godfree Roberts Here is a good
analysis of how the main stream media (MSM) gang up to give propaganda, and how I wish they have objective comments about China
or any country they do not like.
All these so-called anti communist slant against countries, I suspect, have its origins in the Vatican. People seem to forget
that they should bear false witness
Are you sharing the 10′ of 1″ pipe through which you view the world with Muggles? Are you aware that Muggles did nothing but
add a few more feet to it?
People view the world through narratives, and the value of a narrative lies only in how closely it follows and "explains"
the widest possible array of empirical facts. Muggles' ignores the vast majority – perhaps even all – of the facts.
Ergo, it renders neither yourself nor your readers any value to champion it. Why make the effort to propagate such an obvious
failure? Have you never wondered why you lack the dignity and common sense to desist from promoting something whereof you would
more usefully remain silent? Are you even aware of the shortfall?
Corrupt Chinese have practically taken over the US West Coast and Northeast. There isn't anywhere you could go in LA, Bay
Area or Seattle without encountering mandarin speaking people. 99.9% Chinese nationals in the US are corrupt. With a nominal per
capita GDP of $8,600, the only people who could afford to emigrate or send their children abroad for education are the rich, and
China is so corrupt, no one can get rich without being corrupt, either by taking bribes or giving them. These are the corrupt
factory owners who leave behind polluted rivers and air for their countrymen to die from while they escape to greener pastures
with their family, and the government officials they bribed to pollute at will.
They are bribing the US congress to end the per country cap on EB5 visas, where 80% of applicants are corrupt Chinese. The
House passed the HR 1044 bill a few months ago scrapping the H1b cap for India and EB5 cap for China. Now Senator Mike Lee (R-UT)
is trying to get the same bill passed in the Senate. Chuck Grassley and Diane Feinstein tried to kill off the EB5 a few times,
but Trump and SIL wouldn't let them. The Kushner family relies on EB5 money for their real estate development.
EB5 is the #1 get out of jail on the cheap card for corrupt Chinese. Many are now buying homes in the US and letting their
high school and college age children live in those houses, sometimes 16 year olds who could barely speak English living in million
dollar homes by themselves, attending our local high schools for free.
I know of a woman from China in my area who works for JP Morgan, who handles all rich clients from China. It wouldn't surprise
me one bit if the FBI shows up at her house one day and walks her out in handcuffs, for helping rich Chinese launder their money
in the US. The US needs to deport every single last one of these disgusting corrupt pigs to let them go back to China and face
trial.
Curious to see the author responding 6 times now (in only 20 posts) to commentors. Aren't the new site rules against this? It's
a little off-putting to see an article author respond at all, not to mention that it buttresses Muggles's assertions.
I have no reason to doubt Roberts.
Years ago I read a news report on the execution of a Chinese manufacturing official who was bribed into buying some cheaper ingredient,
I think it was, that turned out to sicken or poison people.
Maybe Roberts remembers that.
Some executions or long prison terms for the corrupt in the US would be a good thing.
@d dan You are right the US is also
very corrupt. The book Tailspin – The People and Forces Behind America's Fifty Year Fall by Steven Brill is a great read.
America is destroyed by its effed up laws, mostly crafted by Jewish lawyers, who basically built corruption into laws sanctioned
by the Supreme Court through cases like Citizens United and Super PAC.
This country is destroyed by (((lawyers))). As Niall Ferguson said, we no longer have the rule of law, we have the rule
of (((lawyers))).
Germany and the Scandinavian countries would consider our campaign financing and lobbying industry as corruption on a mass
scale. Hitler lost the battle of WWII but won the war for Germany by ridding them of the Jews, until Merkel the idiot came along
but that's another story.
United Front Work Department of the Chinese Communist Party, that is.
As
.The United Front, which is supported by considerable resources and a vast bureaucratic operation, was called one of his
"magical weapons" by Chinese President Xi Jinping in September 2014. One of the objectives is to co-opt ethnic Chinese individuals
and organizations in foreign countries
and
.Xi has delivered multiple speeches and made it formal policy to demand loyalty and commitment from diasporas who the Party
refers to as the "sons and daughters" of China. The United Front is the apparatus of choice.
and
.In Australia, the majority of Chinese-language press are owned by entities with at least partial links to Beijing.
Now, that line of thought could go even further in this pub . but, let's skip that, for the moment.
I had a roommate in college who was from China. He pretty much said that if you know people in the government or have money you
could get away with a lot. One of his parents was a customs official, and so he would talk about different things he planned on
smuggling to China when he returned with no worries. This was in the late 90's, though.
At this stage, any one who still believes in the western propaganda about China is simply too brain-washed and not too smart
for any cure. Excuse me, I should say "too dumb for any cure".
Exactly right.
And speaking of media bias, Gordon Chang is one of the worst US anti-China propagandist there is he is never right.
The naivete displayed in this article concerning the unavoidable, true, core, fundamental nature of all governments everywhere,[past
present, or future], is, sadly, very, very common in both East, West and all points between.
Reality fact: All governments are 100% corrupt, all the time.
Its impossible for them to be anything else, given the sources of their entirely unearned income.[see first quote below].
To make an exception in the case of modern China succeeds only in highlighting the extreme naivete and gullibility of the articles
author. Either that [naivete/gullibility], or the author is just another communist party hack who has no idea [or doesn't care]
about the extreme danger to all humanity that the communist "ideology" represents, and in particular, has zero idea about how
centralized, top down economic systems all inevitably must "work", and what inevitably must/will happen to majority of the population
in a country that enforces the idiotic, anti- free market, top-down economic policies of any of the various brands of collectivism,
be those policies be labelled "communism", "fascism" ,"nationalism", "democratic socialism", or whatever. Hint: it's called "extreme
poverty and enslavement".
Even the historical record of the 20th century vis a vis all forms of collectivism, [including that of Chinas' "great leap
forward", is consistently ignored/ covered up.[ "That was then, this is now"!]
In "defense" of this author, I'll just remind myself that the very same false assumptions concerning the true nature of all
governments are at the core of almost every Unz.com article I've read here in the last 6 months since I started reading this site.
Indeed, the exact same false assumptions concerning the true nature of all governments are consistently evident in the articles
by the sites owner, Ron Unz. Recently, I even experienced the pleasure of being banned by one author here [A. Karlin], for pointing
out that his own revered "nationalism" was just another brand of socialism.
And so it goes .. :
"Because they are all ultimately funded via both direct and indirect theft [taxes], and counterfeiting [via central bank
monopolies], all governments are essentially, at their very cores, 100% corrupt criminal scams which cannot be "reformed","improved",
nor "limited" in scope, simply because of their innate criminal nature." onebornfree
"Taking the State wherever found, striking into its history at any point, one sees no way to differentiate the activities
of its founders, administrators and beneficiaries from those of a professional-criminal class." Albert J. Nock
"Why should any self-respecting citizen endorse an institution grounded on thievery? For that is what one does when one votes.
If it be argued that we must let bygones be bygones, see what can be done toward cleaning up the institution of the State so that
it might be useful in the maintenance of orderly existence, the answer is that it cannot be done; you cannot clean up a brothel
and yet leave the business intact. We have been voting for one "good government" after another, and what have we got?" Frank
Chodorov, Out of Step (1962)
"Government is a disease masquerading as its own cure." Robert LeFevre
@d dan " ..media biased Hong Kong
reporting ."
How would American cops react to punks tossing Molotov Cocktails at them? Arson is a felony but there would be no need for a trial
just a coroner.
@Godfree Robertson, What do you think the Chinese diaspora especially in Canada, U.S., and Australia do? The ones that hold foreign
passports I mean. And my experience with Chinese people is they largely dislike the government, but have an extreme aggressive
nationalism for their country which only manifests when a 外国人 says something. Because as far as I can tell Chinese rush to get
out of China and you yourself don't seem to live there either. I personally don't doubt your claims that China will be better
off than America, but why is there still a lot of emigration? Another question are you aware of any attempts or plans to fix the
massive pollution problem? look forward from hearing back from you.
My former employer had no use for corruption, even a paperclip was accounted for due to the office spy. We had only 20 employees
and nobody dared badmouth the boss. My job was terminated when the office spy reported me taking home paper cups from the water
fountain. My boss received his jobs from the local government by bribing a few politicians. But he demanded honesty from his staff.
@onebornfree Reality fact: All you
(((LoLbertarians))) are 100% pedo, all the time.
"In short, we must face the fact that the purely free society will have a flourishing free market in children ." -Murray
Rothbard (1926-1995) was the dean of the Austrian School of economics, a founder of lolbertarianism
@Tusk If propaganda is information,
especially of a biased or misleading nature, used to promote or publicize a particular political cause or point of view ,
then the PRC doesn't put much out. 80% of Chinese trust it, compared to the 30% of us who trust our media.
And remember, the Chinese are smarter, better educated and more widely traveled than us.
@FatPanda "What do you care really?
Do you have any dogs in this race?"
He is offering thoughts on an article posted on an American website. Perhaps as an expat living in China you've become too
accustomed to only viewing "approved" opinions.
Another drawn out piece from the guy who could not get rich in the capitalist usa and lives the good life in bang-cock thailand
on social. But, whatever, china is for the Chinese and not for the anglo saxons; he is not allowed in but worships from afar.
My 77 years as a participant observer tell me that corruption and criminality are endemic to any large human society so, therefore,
utopianism is a pipe dream.
If AMLO were to invite the Americans into Mexico, he would be lynched. Few Americans are
aware of how much the United States is hated in Latin America, and for that matter in most of
the world. They don't know of the long series of military interventions, brutal dictators
imposed and supported, and economic rapine. Somoza, Pinochet, the Mexican-American War,
detachment of Panama from Colombia, bombardment of Veracruz, Patton's incursion–the list
could go on for pages. The Mexican public would look upon American troops not as saviors but as
invaders. Which they would be.
The incursion would not defeat the cartels, for several reasons that trump would do well to
ponder. To begin with, America starts its wars by overestimating its own powers,
underestimating the enemy, and misunderstanding the kind of war on which it is embarking. The
is exactly what Trump seems to be doing.
He probably thinks of Mexicans as just gardeners and rapists and we have all these beautiful
advanced weapons and beautiful drones and things with blinking lights. A pack of rapists armed
with garden trowels couldn't possibly be difficult to defeat by the US. I mean, get serious:
Dope dealers against the Marines? A cakewalk.
You know, like Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria. That sort of cakewalk.
Let's think what an expedition against the narcos would entail, what it would face.
To begin with, Mexico is a huge country of 127 million souls with the narcos spread unevenly
across it. You can't police a nation that size with a small force, or even with a large force.
A (preposterous) million soldiers would be well under one percent of the population. Success
would be impossible even if that population helped you. Which it wouldn't.
Trump's biggest weakness is that he appears incapable of friendships with other adult males
because he trusts no one. This is probably partially the result of his dealing in the
absolutely cut throat New York real estate industry along with his own relentless and long
time need for publicity no matter how outrageous this publicity is? (Remember Trump's forays
into professional wrestling?)
Trump decided to hang out with the dogs and, no surprise, ended up getting fleas.
His continual purging of his cabinet members and his bad mouthing of them afterwards has
probably made his White House staff paranoid about challenging anything that comes out of his
mouth no matter how outrageous it is.
Along with all this self promotion has come an increasing inability to accept any sort of
criticism whatsoever. To claim he is slightly "prickly" is a gross understatement.
Where is Trump's James Baker, or better yet, his Sergey Lavrov. to moderate and control
his goofier instincts
@steinbergfeldwitzcohen
If Trump is smart enough and wants History to write his name with Golden Letters, he has to
order a new and true investigation on 9/11 in his second term.
If anything good can come from the Democrat's incessant efforts to impeach Donald Trump it will be the outgrowth, from the nurturing
'mother of necessity,' of a more inclusive political system that acknowledges more than just a compromised duopoly as the voice of
the American people.
With complete disregard for the consequences of their actions, the Democrat House Intelligence Committee under Adam Schiff has
abandoned all pretense of democratic procedure in their effort to remove the 45th President of the United States from office.
Indeed, the Democrats have provided the Republicans with a Machiavellian crash course on the subtle art of decadent behavior for
getting what you want , which of course is ultimate political power, and to hell in a proverbial hand basket with the consequences.
The Republicans have been snoozing through a game of 2D checkers, holding out hope that Sheriff Billy Barr and his deputy John Durham
will
round
up the real criminals, while the Democrats have been playing mortal combat.
The dark prince in this Gothic tale of diabolical, dare I say biblical, proportions is none other than Adam 'Shifty' Schiff, who,
like Dracula in his castle dungeon, has contorted every House rule to fit the square peg of a Trump telephone call into the bolt
hole of a full-blown impeachment proceeding. Niccolò Machiavelli would have been proud of his modern-day protégé.
As if to mock the very notion of Democratic due process, whatever that means, Schiff and his torch-carrying lynch mob took their
deliberations down into the dank basement, yes, the basement, of the US Capital where they have been holding secretive depositions
in an effort to get some new twist on the now famous phone call between Trump and Ukrainian President Zelensky back in June. But
why all the cloak and dagger theatrics when the transcript has long been available for public consumption?
At one point, the frazzled Republicans bared a little backbone against this bunker mentality when they
crashed the basement meetings for some really outstanding optics. Schiff, betraying a lack of foresight, could not defenestrate
the well-dressed hooligans since the meetings, as mentioned, are being held inside of a windowless dungeon. The Republican troublemakers
were ushered back up the stairs instead.
Considering what Prince Schiff has managed to pull off over the course of this not-made for television impeachment process is
astounding, and could not have happened without the drooling complicity of the lapdog media corporations. Schiff got the ball bouncing
when he performed a Saturday Night Live skit of the Trump-Zelensky phone call on the hallowed floor of Congress. The imaginary voices
in Schiff's head made the president sound like a mafia boss speaking to one of his lackeys.
Not only did Schiff survive that stunt, it was revealed that he blatantly lied, not once but several times, about his affiliation
with the White House insider, reportedly a CIA officer, who, without ever hearing the Trump-Zelensky phone call firsthand, blew the
whistle anyways. The Democrats claim Trump was looking for some 'quid pro quo' with Kiev, which would dig up the dirt on Joe Biden
and his son Hunter in exchange for the release of $400 million in military aid. The transcript, however, points to no such coercion,
while Zelensky himself denies that he was pressured by Trump.
Meanwhile, Schiff has taken great efforts to keep the identity of the whistleblower a 'secret' out of "safety concerns." The Republicans
in the House said they will subpoena the whistleblower for the public impeachment that starts next week, Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio)
told reporters. Yet Schiff has awarded himself the power to reject any witnesses the Republicans may wish to grill.
"We'll see if he gives us any of our witnesses," Jordan said.
A person need not feel any particular fondness for Donald Trump to find these circumstances surrounding the impeachment show trial
as disgraceful, dishonorable and beneath the dignity of the American people. And whether they want it or not, the fallout from Schiff's
shenanigans will have repercussions long into the future of the US political system, which is groaning under the weight of corruption
and deceit.
It is doubtful the Republicans will soon forgive and forget what the Democrats have put them through ever since Trump entered
office in 2016. From Russiagate to Ukrainegate, the Trump White House has been held hostage by a non-stop, media-endorsed hate campaign
to oust a democratically elected POTUS. Although it would be difficult for the Republicans, who lack the support of the media, an
overwhelmingly left-leaning propaganda machine, to exact an equal amount of revenge on the Democrats when the latter have one of
their own in the White House, they will certainly try. This will lead the Republic into an inescapable vortex of infighting where
the sole function of the political system will be based on that of vengeance and 'pay backs' and more waste of time and money as
the parties investigate the crimes of the other side.
The public, which is slowly awakening to the problem, will ultimately demand new leadership to break the current two-party internecine
struggle. Thus, talk of a civil war in the United States, while possible, is being overplayed. The truth will be much simpler and
far less violent.
Out of the dust and ashes of the defunct duopoly that is now at war with itself, the American people will soon demand fresh political
blood in Washington and this will bring to the forefront capable political forces that are committed to the primary purpose of politics:
representing the needs of the people, once again. Tags Politics
As it turns out the once apathetic and flustered American woke up pissed off, in large numbers I might add. They sensed that
someone was starting to mess with their happy blind relationship to the materialistic free market American dream. In other words,
they are broke for the most part or are working like a beast to stay even. I get it.
"Apathy does not make us stupid. On the contrary, a great deal of energy is used to offset the world and hibernate in an
apathetic state of existence. Apathy requires an acute awareness of the obvious. It is what drives some to having a broken "give
a damn". Many can only cope with the influence of the pressure of reality by excusing themselves from it and gathering in flocks
for comfort. They yearn for a sheep dog."
And now they are awake, angry and wanting revenge against whomever shattered their illusion of American integrity. In most
respects some have herded together and really are angry political mobs.
So why hasn't Graham started a senate investigation into this whole Ukrainian affair? Why hasn't he called all of Adam Schiff's
witnesses into one of his own investigations of this thing and gotten the truth out of them under penalty of perjury should they
not come clean?
Republicans are as usual cowering in the corner hoping this will all pass by without harming their re-election chances. There
are precious few that really care and the bug eyed liar has them shut down totally. If they were playing chess, the Dems would
have the Republicans in a constant state of Check (thanks to the unwavering support of their media lap dogs). The Republicans
would be sitting at the table hoping time would run out while wetting their pants in fear that they would be discovered to be
the weak kneed mamas boys in suits who just had their lunch money stolen AGAIN by the big bad Dem boys & girls.
The Democratic Socialists will absorb the butthurt left, and Pelosi, Waters, Schiff and the rest will die naturally soon enough.
This is a result of Democrats' identity politics, and radicalizing of the left.
The Republicans will likely move farther right. Both parties will continue to spend too much - just on different causes. But
when the DS get rolling, probably with someone like AOC at the helm, it will be Kristallnacht all over again.
Except this time it will be Christians and conservatives.
I would say that a 3rd and 4th party are not only inevitable but the next organic evolution of party. This will help explain
why --> The Altered States
of America.
If there is one thing that truly illustrates the psychotic break with reality the Democrats, DC Deep State Establishment, and
their *useless* idiots in the MSM have suffered, it has to be the bizarre situation with the identity of the *whistleblower* that
EVERYONE on the planet knows but that somehow THEY think they have kept *secret*.
Cue the Twilight Zone music, America, because THAT takes a special kind of crazy! Lol! 25th Amendment for every Democrat in
the House??
On top of THAT craziness, Sen. Lindsay Graham has made it clear to Dems that if ERIC C*a*Amella (You literally cannot post
comments with his name! Hysterical! lol) does not publicly testify, their show trial is DOA in the Senate. So I hope they have
fun with their impeachment coup to nowhere as ERIC C*A*a*ell* sits like some bloated political elephant in the room for the next
two weeks!
On the upside, it will be loads of fun watching a bunch of crazy people have their mental breakdown on national T.V. so, by
all means, Dems, PLEASE carry on!
The political system is dead. You cannot run this freak show before people in the age of Internet. Most of deplorables are
more online savvy than their ruling political class.
Schiff has connections to sex trafficking and pedophilia. He has a lot to do with well know activities in the Standard Hotel
(west Pedowood) involving minors and powerful people in that filthy city which include politicians and business people. You easily
start with Ed Buck which the media has buried quickly.
This is an excellent example of Orwellian cognitive dissonance.
Everyone knows that almost all, if not all, politicians are bought off to the highest bidder.
Everyone knows that the people who control the money system have the most money.
But very few will logically assemble those two data points and conclude what exists in reality - that the Money Power Monopolists
CONTROL BOTH PARTIES!
Schitt and his cult of DemonRats represents the darkest elements of society. So without writing a long list you already know,
here's what you should prepare yourself for.
Buy guns, ammo, cameras and survival supplies to last a few months.
Civil War 2.0 is coming.
We didn't start this war, but we sure as hell will finish it.
The time has come to take this country back from an elite permanent political class who doesn't give a damn about you, your
family, your future.
Lock and load, the San Fransicko **** has already hit the fan.
The public is in a mood to vote out RINO Republicans and most Democrats, and vote in MAGA Republicans. The Democrats will all
but disappear from sight for awhile. After they reorganize and dump their radicals and after their corrupt ones go to jail, and
after the MSM completely falls apart -- they will then come back, but probably not till 2024 or 2026
The two party political system was never much of a democratic system at all. It's been with us since 1854, and has polarized
the country more than once, the first time being the Civil War. In 2003, the MIT professor Noam Chomsky said, "In the US, there
is basically one party - the business party. It has two factions, called Democrats and Republicans, which are somewhat different
but carry out variations on the same policies".
The two party system should be ended, and the Voter Access laws be repealed, and Gerrymandering districts be prohibited. Even
your own vote means nothing, since it is only designed to ratify a selection someone else made for you. The only selection you
can make is choosing personalities, but never on issues or money. You are never allowed to be a participant in the American political
system, but rather, just a "consumer". Why? Because the American society is ruled by an Oligarchy! Why would they want to allow
you to share power with them? None of this is what is practiced in a true democracy. The entire system needs to undergo some major
changes.
Trump will leave power, but these self-aggrandizing intelligence agencies will
remain.
Something the stupid voters never seem to realize – the permanent government doesn't
give a rats ass about democracy, freedom, human rights, security, your dog, your property,
and most of all – your integrity. "Fuck you stupid voters – now go elect another moron – we've got governments
to overthrow"
" The Democratic establishment is deeply and widely imbued with rancid Russophobic
attitudes."
As are the Republican establishment and even such faux dissidents as Andrew Napolitano and
Patrick Buchanan in columns easily found here on The Unz Review.
Exceptionalia needs enemies to keep the sheep herded when the Red v Blue politics and
increasingly absurd culture skirmishes aren't sufficiently distracting.
Excellent summation of the current predicament involving Trump and his ruthless foes. The
greatest and most ridiculous 'conspiracy theory' of all is Russiagate itself–yet this
politicized hoax is not being allowed to die a natural death; thus the Demorat impeachment
inquiry.
So now we have entered Stage Two of this toxic and unnecessary melodrama. We can thank the
partisan, biased and subversive 'mainstream' media for this downward step.
Ironically, the media's rank dishonesty is turning Trump into a heroic figure. This is
poetic justice.
Haven't our media overlords heard?–the Soviet Union is dead.
In its place is Christian Russia. So why the enmity?
Might these lingering tensions have more than a little to do with Putin's stubborn
alliance with Syria and Iran? It sure looks that way.
It must be noted that Israel remains deeply disturbed over the Russia-Iran-Syria
federation. But that's Israel's problem. America is not burdened by those historic
antagonisms, regional rivalries, or security concerns. Americans should therefore be
relieved. Only we're not allowed to be.
The Zionist state has deviously entwined its security interests with America's. Israel and
Zio-America have been artificially conjoined at the political hip. Didn't you hear?
This political union is good for the Jews. The Americans?–less so. Far less.
Unless we can extricate ourselves, this unnatural 'partnership' may end in a cataclysm
Something the stupid voters never seem to realize – the permanent government
doesn't give a rats ass about democracy, freedom, human rights, security, your dog, your
property, and most of all – your integrity.
The Deep State doesn't care about the unimportant internecine squabbles of the 'two
parties' as long as their important issues are maintained. As a matter of fact it strengthens
the false perception that there is a choice when voting.
Trump and the Deep State do not care what the American people want. They know that most
American people are inane fools and will believe anything. Most Americans would rather watch
America's Got Talent or Dancing With The Stars than be informed about important issues.
I think if President Trump was faced with a Cuban Missile Crisis situation the outcome could
be very different to the first time. On that occasion the two superpowers, despite coming
close to open war, were able to contain and de-escalate. The conditions are very different
today. As Professor Cohen says," The current state of US-Russian relations is unprecedentedly
dangerous, not only due to reasons cited here -- a new Cold War fraught with the possibility
of hot war." In this context it is essential the president is "fully empowered to cope with
the multiple possibilities of a US-Russian military confrontation."
One problem is that the original Cold War was the peace, a post-world war environment: today
we are in pre-world war environment. There is a dangerous misconception that a Cold War
sequel will have the same peaceful ending. The world has experienced periods of peace (or
relative peace) throughout history. The Thirty Years Peace between the two Peloponnesian
Wars, Pax Romana, Europe in the 19th century after the Congress of Vienna, to name a few. The
Congress System finally collapsed in 1914 with the start of World War One. That conflict was
followed by the League of Nations. It did not stop World War Two. That was followed by the
United Nations and other post-war institutions. But all the indications are they will not
prevent a third world war. https://www.ghostsofhistory.wordpress.com/
"The New York Times seem eager to delegitimize the investigation by Attorney General William
Barr and his appointed special investigator John Durham."
Ya know, the investigation would be a lot harder to delegitimize if it the guys doing it
didn't whitewash Iran/Contra, like Barr, or systematic and widespread CIA torture, like
Durham. You put lifelong CIA whores hot on the trail of illegal CIA domestic operations
against political enemies? Come on. Nobody with a 3-digit IQ can keep a straight face.
You want this shit to stop? Then do to Langley what the Germans did to their Stasi. CIA
investigation of CIA crimes do not pass the laff test anymore.
Trump's problem was described in simple terms by John Connelly when talking with Henry
Kissinger. "Henry", he said, "In Washington you are judged by the men you've destroyed".
Trump has not destroyed anyone, not Comey, not Brennan, not Clapper. So he is viewed as weak,
an easy target. So they just keep piling on. Attacking Trump is viewed as a "penalty-free
activity
Russia's new "hyper-sonic" missiles, which can elude US missile-defense systems, make
new nuclear arms negotiations with Moscow imperative and urgent. If only for the sake of
his legacy, Trump is likely to want to do so
This makes little sense. Russia and the U.S. are not enemies, and are potentially allies.
Why would a U.S.-Russia treaty be desirable? The U.S. wants to help Russia defend its South
western border against dangerous nations, such as Turkey & Iran.
A U.S.-China treaty would be helpful, but China is unlikely to accept anything that might
interfere with their colonial ambitions.
____
Also, the author is likely overestimating Russia's technical prowess. Does anyone remember
the recent incident the Russians had with their nuclear powered "Skyfall" cruise missile?
(1)
The mysterious explosion on August 8 at the Russian navy's range in Nyonoksa killed
seven and spurred fears that Russia was testing its nuclear-powered Burevestnik missile,
also known by the NATO codename 'Skyfall.' But U.S. intelligence indicates the fatal
explosion occurred as Russia attempted to salvage a downed Skyfall missile from the ocean
floor,
Russia has reportedly conducted five unsuccessful tests of Skyfall since November 2017,
all resulting in loss of control and crashes. The longest test lasted for two minutes with
the missile flying 22 miles, and the shortest lasted four seconds and five miles.
@Giuseppe I'm a huge fan
of Stephen Cohen's, but, with bi-partisanship dead, his calling for a new Church commission
is pie-in-the-sky. Nothing good can happen until this impeachment farce is over.
In fact, I'd say that Barr and Durham better hurry up and indict someone. There is less
than a year left before the next election, which only leaves a few weeks this year, and the
first few months in 2020. Once there's like 3-4 months to go before the election it will be
too late. And, BTW, where is the long-awaited IG Horowitz's report? Tick Tock guys.
We've been hearing that for a long time, but one thing to remember is: Islam is a
foreign(ers')-identity in Russia. It won't be taking over the political center in Russia
anytime soon, nor getting any European-Russian converts.
@Dan
Hayes Russia hadn't seized anything. The Black Sea Fleet had always been stationed there.
After the Ukrainian government proposed outlawing the Russian language and ethnic Ukrainians
attacked the Crimean parliament, Crimeans, the vast majority of whom are ethnic Russians,
moved to hold a referendum.
As I have also argued repeatedly, a new Church Committee is urgently needed. It's time
for honorable members of the Senate of both parties to do their duty.
The CIA activities restricted by the Church Committee never stopped. They continued "off
the books", financed by drug trafficking, illegal arms sales, and (especially) by kickbacks
from legitimate but overpriced arms contracts with Saudi Arabia. The close relationship with
the Saudi royal family raises awkward questions about who this part of the CIA is really
working for.
A new Church Committee would only be able to investigate the parts of the CIA that it can
see. It is probably impossible for the US government to control the "off-books" parts of the
CIA.
Here too there is an inconvenient truth: To the extent that Democrats any longer
seriously discuss national security in the context of US-Russian relations, it mostly
involves vilifying both Trump and Russian leader Vladimir Putin. (Recall also that previous
presidents were free to negotiate with Russia's Soviet communist leaders, even encouraged
to do so, whereas the demonized Putin is an anti-communist, post-Soviet leader.)
Maybe, the fallacy is to think that Democrats were ever opposed to communism. As one can
learn around here, WWII was the joint venture to destroy european national cultures and force
them under globalist domination. The Roosevelt administration did about everything to
strengthen communism. The current Russian leadership is as sanely nationalist as it gets.
Possibly, that is the problem?
What struck me first, before I woke up, was that the ultimate accusation against Russia
– before the Ukraine affair started – was that they were said to be homophopbic.
While this can be a fault in the eyes of a dedicated liberal, to anyone who has lived through
the Cold War, that accusation was outlandishly irrelevant.
The problem that liberal globalists have with Russia is exactly their sanity. Saying this, I
do not want to insinuate that Republicans are sane, just for the record. They are the other
side of the coin in the big charade.
The Bolsheviks in Russia told everyone that they were a Political Party – just like the
Communists Party etc. The Democrats and Republicans say the same thing , but they are more
Bolshevik than any American wants to admit. The Wars, the Police state, the original
European, African, Native American societies being destroyed is not the best example –
if you are pushing for a NWO. It has failed but they are taking down as many as they can
– along with their evil Order. This should one of the highest priority, of most writers
today. Thanks Unz Rev.
@Dan
Hayes From which entity? The country – existing as a unity upon the foundation of a
constitution, known as Ukraine – stopped being that entity when a bunch of people
toppled a constitutionally mandated government with an unconstitutional coup.
You demand peoples and regions of the former Ukraine remain united? Under what unifying
law? The constitution? But the Maidan people tore it apart to get into power. Why would those
that take the other side of the debate agree to be governed by law they know their opposition
has already, and will again, trod on?
Practically speaking, Ukraine after Maidan is not the same entity as Ukraine before, as
there is no social contract left that everyone is willing to be bound by.
Crimea being autonomous, had more freedom than the rest to jump ship, and so they did. But
any region can now go, because anyone saying 'but the Constitution bans secession', forget
that the people who speak this within Ukraine are those exact same people who tore the
Constitution apart.
But don't think it'a just political entities such as Crimea that migrated to Russia of
their own wills (as the UN Charter demands), millions of labourers have left for Russia from
the remaining entity too, and there was no Putin there at each of their houses, giving
personal pep talks over tea about how Russia is better, and how they should migrate accross
the border. People chose with their own feet.
Here's a question – if tomorrow a bunch of gunmen threw out congress, the judiciary,
and the executive from Washington DC, and replaced them with their own – would you
consider that the individual states were then still bound to the federal government through
the Constitution? Would you demand honour from one side, knowing fullwell that the other side
is dishonourable?
Most telling was (and remains) a core "Russiagate" allegation that "Russia attacked
American democracy during the 2016 presidential election" on Trump's behalf -- an "attack"
so nefarious it has often been equated with Pearl Harbor.
What's seemingly bizarre is that these modern day Dems with their 'Russiagate' obsession
are the very same people who not so many years back would eat up a 1966 movie like 'The
Russians Are Coming, the Russians are Coming', with it's message that the Soviet Union along
with its Communism was perfectly innocuous (just a laugh really), and the Cold War itself was
all a big joke, and pay to see it multiple times.
It's not so bizarre, though, as there is an underlining continuity in all this, then and
now.
They hate the organic Russian people and their culture, then and now. That hasn't
changed.
A USSR of the past with the Russian people safely subjugated/crushed under Soviet
Communism, they like and are okay with.
A Russian Federation where the Russian people appear to have moved away from Communism
they don't like. That's dangerous.
Russians shouldn't necessarily feel too bad though about this as they are not the only
people so hated. These sorts hate most peoples which attempt to express their physical and
cultural identity, often even their own at times.
There's a hatred for most all of humanity there which stems from an underlying self hatred
with these types.
Trump will leave power, but these self-aggrandizing intelligence agencies will
remain.
Something the stupid voters never seem to realize – the permanent government doesn't
give a rats ass about democracy, freedom, human rights, security, your dog, your property,
and most of all – your integrity. "Fuck you stupid voters – now go elect another moron – we've got governments
to overthrow"
" The Democratic establishment is deeply and widely imbued with rancid Russophobic
attitudes."
As are the Republican establishment and even such faux dissidents as Andrew Napolitano and
Patrick Buchanan in columns easily found here on The Unz Review.
Exceptionalia needs enemies to keep the sheep herded when the Red v Blue politics and
increasingly absurd culture skirmishes aren't sufficiently distracting.
Excellent summation of the current predicament involving Trump and his ruthless foes. The
greatest and most ridiculous 'conspiracy theory' of all is Russiagate itself–yet this
politicized hoax is not being allowed to die a natural death; thus the Demorat impeachment
inquiry.
So now we have entered Stage Two of this toxic and unnecessary melodrama. We can thank the
partisan, biased and subversive 'mainstream' media for this downward step.
Ironically, the media's rank dishonesty is turning Trump into a heroic figure. This is
poetic justice.
Haven't our media overlords heard?–the Soviet Union is dead.
In its place is Christian Russia. So why the enmity?
Might these lingering tensions have more than a little to do with Putin's stubborn
alliance with Syria and Iran? It sure looks that way.
It must be noted that Israel remains deeply disturbed over the Russia-Iran-Syria
federation. But that's Israel's problem. America is not burdened by those historic
antagonisms, regional rivalries, or security concerns. Americans should therefore be
relieved. Only we're not allowed to be.
The Zionist state has deviously entwined its security interests with America's. Israel and
Zio-America have been artificially conjoined at the political hip. Didn't you hear?
This political union is good for the Jews. The Americans?–less so. Far less.
Unless we can extricate ourselves, this unnatural 'partnership' may end in a cataclysm
Something the stupid voters never seem to realize – the permanent government
doesn't give a rats ass about democracy, freedom, human rights, security, your dog, your
property, and most of all – your integrity.
The Deep State doesn't care about the unimportant internecine squabbles of the 'two
parties' as long as their important issues are maintained. As a matter of fact it strengthens
the false perception that there is a choice when voting.
Trump and the Deep State do not care what the American people want. They know that most
American people are inane fools and will believe anything. Most Americans would rather watch
America's Got Talent or Dancing With The Stars than be informed about important issues.
I think if President Trump was faced with a Cuban Missile Crisis situation the outcome could
be very different to the first time. On that occasion the two superpowers, despite coming
close to open war, were able to contain and de-escalate. The conditions are very different
today. As Professor Cohen says," The current state of US-Russian relations is unprecedentedly
dangerous, not only due to reasons cited here -- a new Cold War fraught with the possibility
of hot war." In this context it is essential the president is "fully empowered to cope with
the multiple possibilities of a US-Russian military confrontation."
One problem is that the original Cold War was the peace, a post-world war environment: today
we are in pre-world war environment. There is a dangerous misconception that a Cold War
sequel will have the same peaceful ending. The world has experienced periods of peace (or
relative peace) throughout history. The Thirty Years Peace between the two Peloponnesian
Wars, Pax Romana, Europe in the 19th century after the Congress of Vienna, to name a few. The
Congress System finally collapsed in 1914 with the start of World War One. That conflict was
followed by the League of Nations. It did not stop World War Two. That was followed by the
United Nations and other post-war institutions. But all the indications are they will not
prevent a third world war. https://www.ghostsofhistory.wordpress.com/
"The New York Times seem eager to delegitimize the investigation by Attorney General William
Barr and his appointed special investigator John Durham."
Ya know, the investigation would be a lot harder to delegitimize if it the guys doing it
didn't whitewash Iran/Contra, like Barr, or systematic and widespread CIA torture, like
Durham. You put lifelong CIA whores hot on the trail of illegal CIA domestic operations
against political enemies? Come on. Nobody with a 3-digit IQ can keep a straight face.
You want this shit to stop? Then do to Langley what the Germans did to their Stasi. CIA
investigation of CIA crimes do not pass the laff test anymore.
Trump's problem was described in simple terms by John Connelly when talking with Henry
Kissinger. "Henry", he said, "In Washington you are judged by the men you've destroyed".
Trump has not destroyed anyone, not Comey, not Brennan, not Clapper. So he is viewed as weak,
an easy target. So they just keep piling on. Attacking Trump is viewed as a "penalty-free
activity
Russia's new "hyper-sonic" missiles, which can elude US missile-defense systems, make
new nuclear arms negotiations with Moscow imperative and urgent. If only for the sake of
his legacy, Trump is likely to want to do so
This makes little sense. Russia and the U.S. are not enemies, and are potentially allies.
Why would a U.S.-Russia treaty be desirable? The U.S. wants to help Russia defend its South
western border against dangerous nations, such as Turkey & Iran.
A U.S.-China treaty would be helpful, but China is unlikely to accept anything that might
interfere with their colonial ambitions.
____
Also, the author is likely overestimating Russia's technical prowess. Does anyone remember
the recent incident the Russians had with their nuclear powered "Skyfall" cruise missile?
(1)
The mysterious explosion on August 8 at the Russian navy's range in Nyonoksa killed
seven and spurred fears that Russia was testing its nuclear-powered Burevestnik missile,
also known by the NATO codename 'Skyfall.' But U.S. intelligence indicates the fatal
explosion occurred as Russia attempted to salvage a downed Skyfall missile from the ocean
floor,
Russia has reportedly conducted five unsuccessful tests of Skyfall since November 2017,
all resulting in loss of control and crashes. The longest test lasted for two minutes with
the missile flying 22 miles, and the shortest lasted four seconds and five miles.
@Giuseppe I'm a huge fan
of Stephen Cohen's, but, with bi-partisanship dead, his calling for a new Church commission
is pie-in-the-sky. Nothing good can happen until this impeachment farce is over.
In fact, I'd say that Barr and Durham better hurry up and indict someone. There is less
than a year left before the next election, which only leaves a few weeks this year, and the
first few months in 2020. Once there's like 3-4 months to go before the election it will be
too late. And, BTW, where is the long-awaited IG Horowitz's report? Tick Tock guys.
We've been hearing that for a long time, but one thing to remember is: Islam is a
foreign(ers')-identity in Russia. It won't be taking over the political center in Russia
anytime soon, nor getting any European-Russian converts.
@Dan
Hayes Russia hadn't seized anything. The Black Sea Fleet had always been stationed there.
After the Ukrainian government proposed outlawing the Russian language and ethnic Ukrainians
attacked the Crimean parliament, Crimeans, the vast majority of whom are ethnic Russians,
moved to hold a referendum.
As I have also argued repeatedly, a new Church Committee is urgently needed. It's time
for honorable members of the Senate of both parties to do their duty.
The CIA activities restricted by the Church Committee never stopped. They continued "off
the books", financed by drug trafficking, illegal arms sales, and (especially) by kickbacks
from legitimate but overpriced arms contracts with Saudi Arabia. The close relationship with
the Saudi royal family raises awkward questions about who this part of the CIA is really
working for.
A new Church Committee would only be able to investigate the parts of the CIA that it can
see. It is probably impossible for the US government to control the "off-books" parts of the
CIA.
Here too there is an inconvenient truth: To the extent that Democrats any longer
seriously discuss national security in the context of US-Russian relations, it mostly
involves vilifying both Trump and Russian leader Vladimir Putin. (Recall also that previous
presidents were free to negotiate with Russia's Soviet communist leaders, even encouraged
to do so, whereas the demonized Putin is an anti-communist, post-Soviet leader.)
Maybe, the fallacy is to think that Democrats were ever opposed to communism. As one can
learn around here, WWII was the joint venture to destroy european national cultures and force
them under globalist domination. The Roosevelt administration did about everything to
strengthen communism. The current Russian leadership is as sanely nationalist as it gets.
Possibly, that is the problem?
What struck me first, before I woke up, was that the ultimate accusation against Russia
– before the Ukraine affair started – was that they were said to be homophopbic.
While this can be a fault in the eyes of a dedicated liberal, to anyone who has lived through
the Cold War, that accusation was outlandishly irrelevant.
The problem that liberal globalists have with Russia is exactly their sanity. Saying this, I
do not want to insinuate that Republicans are sane, just for the record. They are the other
side of the coin in the big charade.
The Bolsheviks in Russia told everyone that they were a Political Party – just like the
Communists Party etc. The Democrats and Republicans say the same thing , but they are more
Bolshevik than any American wants to admit. The Wars, the Police state, the original
European, African, Native American societies being destroyed is not the best example –
if you are pushing for a NWO. It has failed but they are taking down as many as they can
– along with their evil Order. This should one of the highest priority, of most writers
today. Thanks Unz Rev.
@Dan
Hayes From which entity? The country – existing as a unity upon the foundation of a
constitution, known as Ukraine – stopped being that entity when a bunch of people
toppled a constitutionally mandated government with an unconstitutional coup.
You demand peoples and regions of the former Ukraine remain united? Under what unifying
law? The constitution? But the Maidan people tore it apart to get into power. Why would those
that take the other side of the debate agree to be governed by law they know their opposition
has already, and will again, trod on?
Practically speaking, Ukraine after Maidan is not the same entity as Ukraine before, as
there is no social contract left that everyone is willing to be bound by.
Crimea being autonomous, had more freedom than the rest to jump ship, and so they did. But
any region can now go, because anyone saying 'but the Constitution bans secession', forget
that the people who speak this within Ukraine are those exact same people who tore the
Constitution apart.
But don't think it'a just political entities such as Crimea that migrated to Russia of
their own wills (as the UN Charter demands), millions of labourers have left for Russia from
the remaining entity too, and there was no Putin there at each of their houses, giving
personal pep talks over tea about how Russia is better, and how they should migrate accross
the border. People chose with their own feet.
Here's a question – if tomorrow a bunch of gunmen threw out congress, the judiciary,
and the executive from Washington DC, and replaced them with their own – would you
consider that the individual states were then still bound to the federal government through
the Constitution? Would you demand honour from one side, knowing fullwell that the other side
is dishonourable?
Most telling was (and remains) a core "Russiagate" allegation that "Russia attacked
American democracy during the 2016 presidential election" on Trump's behalf -- an "attack"
so nefarious it has often been equated with Pearl Harbor.
What's seemingly bizarre is that these modern day Dems with their 'Russiagate' obsession
are the very same people who not so many years back would eat up a 1966 movie like 'The
Russians Are Coming, the Russians are Coming', with it's message that the Soviet Union along
with its Communism was perfectly innocuous (just a laugh really), and the Cold War itself was
all a big joke, and pay to see it multiple times.
It's not so bizarre, though, as there is an underlining continuity in all this, then and
now.
They hate the organic Russian people and their culture, then and now. That hasn't
changed.
A USSR of the past with the Russian people safely subjugated/crushed under Soviet
Communism, they like and are okay with.
A Russian Federation where the Russian people appear to have moved away from Communism
they don't like. That's dangerous.
Russians shouldn't necessarily feel too bad though about this as they are not the only
people so hated. These sorts hate most peoples which attempt to express their physical and
cultural identity, often even their own at times.
There's a hatred for most all of humanity there which stems from an underlying self hatred
with these types.
"... Trump's surprising victory forced a pivot, with Clapper, Brennan and Comey adjusting the narrative to make it appear that Trump the traitor may have captured the White House due to help from the Kremlin, making him a latter-day Manchurian Candidate. The lesser allegations of Russian meddling were quickly elevated to devastating assertions that the Republican had only won with Putin's assistance. ..."
"... The national security team acted to protect their candidate Hillary Clinton, who represented America's Deep State. In spite of considerable naysaying, the Deep State is real, not just a wild conspiracy theory. Many Americans nevertheless do not believe that the Deep State exists, that it is a politically driven media creation much like Russiagate itself was, but if one changes the wording a bit and describes the Deep State as the Establishment, with its political power focused in Washington and its financial center in New York City, the argument that there exists a cohesive group of power brokers who really run the country becomes much more plausible. ..."
"... It is now known that President Barack Obama's CIA Director John Brennan created a Trump Task Force in early 2016. Rather than working against genuine foreign threats, this Task Force played a critical role in creating and feeding the meme that Donald Trump was a tool of the Russians and a puppet of President Vladimir Putin, a claim that still surfaces regularly to this day. Working with James Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence, Brennan fabricated the narrative that "Russia had interfered in the 2016 election." Brennan and Clapper promoted that tale even though they knew very well that Russia and the United States have carried out a broad array of covert actions against each other, including information operations, for the past seventy years, but they pretended that what happened in 2016 was qualitatively and substantively different even though the "evidence" produced to support that claim was and still is weak to nonexistent. ..."
"... With the help of the Establishment media, Clapper and Brennan were able to pretend that the ICA had been approved by "all 17 intelligence agencies" (as first claimed by Hillary Clinton). After several months, however Clapper revealed that the preparers of the ICA were "handpicked analysts" from only the FBI, CIA, and NSA. He explained rather unconvincingly during an interview on May 28, 2017, that "the historical practices of the Russians, who typically, are almost genetically driven to co-opt, penetrate, gain favor, whatever, which is a typical Russian technique," adding later that "It's in their DNA." ..."
"... And this was not a CIA-only operation. Personnel from the FBI also were assigned to the Task Force with the approval of then Director James Comey. Former MI-6 agent Christopher Steele's FBI handler, Michael Gaeta, may have been one of those detailed to the Trump Task Force. Steele, of course, prepared the notorious dossier that was surfaced shortly before Donald Trump took office. It included considerable material intended to tie Trump to Russia, information that was in many cases fabricated or unsourced. ..."
"... The case officers would work with foreign intelligence services such as MI-6, the Italians, the Ukrainians and the Australians on identifying intelligence collection priorities that would implicate Trump and his associates in illegal activity. And there is evidence that John Brennan himself would contact his counterparts in allied intelligence services to obtain their discreet cooperation, something they would be inclined to do in collegial fashion, ignoring whatever reservations they might have about spying on a possible American presidential candidate. ..."
"... e Task Force also could carry out other covert actions, sometimes using press or social media placements to disseminate fabrications about Trump and his associates. Information operations is a benign-sounding euphemism for propaganda fed through the Agency's friends in the media, and computer network operations can be used to create false linkages and misdirect inquiries. There has been some informed speculation that Guccifer 2.0 may have been a creation of this Task Force. ..."
"... In light of what has been learned about the alleged CIA whistleblower there should be a serious investigation to determine if he was a part of this Task Force or, at minimum, reporting to them secretly after he was seconded to the National Security Council. All the CIA and FBI officers involved in the Task Force had sworn an oath to uphold the Constitution of the United States, but nevertheless were involved in a conspiracy to first denigrate and then possibly bring down a legally elected president. That effort continues with repeated assertions regarding Moscow's malevolent intentions for the 2020 national elections. Some might reasonably regard the whole Brennan affair, to include its spear carriers among the current and retired national security state leadership, as a case of institutionalized treason, and it inevitably leads to the question "What did Obama know?" ..."
"... Obama orchestrated the destruction of a political rival and he will get away scott free .because he's an oppressed and downtrodden dindu. ..."
"... But in fact Obama too is CIA nomenklatura, with the same depth of dynastic ties as GW Bush, albeit not at the same lofty level. ..."
"... This past election was CIA office politics, nothing more. Russigate is simply CIA eminence Hillary, the Queen of Mena, ratfucking a bumptious queue-jumper. She outranks Trump, who was merely a junior money-launderer for the CIA agents who looted the Soviet Union. It was her turn to take the figurehead head-of-state sinecure. She and Bill earned it with their lucrative Clinton Foundation covert-ops slush fund. ..."
"... And has been since the early 1950s when the Allen Dulles-Frank Wisner-James Jesus Angleton crew got rolling. They managed to thoroughly penetrate federal and state bureaucracies, the court systems, major corporations, the financial sector, and the mockingbird media. ..."
"... Clapper revealed that the preparers of the ICA were "handpicked analysts" from only the FBI, CIA, and NSA. He explained rather unconvincingly during an interview on May 28, 2017, that "the historical practices of the Russians, who typically, are almost genetically driven to co-opt, penetrate, gain favor, whatever, which is a typical Russian technique," adding later that "It's in their DNA." ..."
There is considerable evidence that the American system of government may have been
victimized by an illegal covert operation organized and executed by the U.S. intelligence and
national security community. Former Director of National Intelligence Jim Clapper, former CIA
Director John Brennan and former FBI Director Jim Comey appear to have played critical
leadership roles in carrying out this conspiracy and they may not have operated on their own.
Almost certainly what they may have done would have been explicitly authorized by the former
President of the United States, Barack Obama, and his national security team.
It must have seemed a simple operation for the experienced CIA covert action operatives. To
prevent the unreliable and unpredictable political upstart Donald Trump from being nominated as
the GOP presidential candidate or even elected it would be necessary to create suspicion that
he was the tool of a resurgent Russia, acting under direct orders from Vladimir Putin to
empower Trump and damage the campaign of Hillary Clinton. Even though none of the alleged
Kremlin plotters would have expected Trump to actually beat Hillary, it was plausible to
maintain that they would have hoped that a weakened Clinton would be less able to implement the
anti-Russian agenda that she had been promoting. Many observers in both Russia and the U.S.
believed that if she had been elected armed conflict with Moscow would have been inevitable,
particularly if she moved to follow her husband's example and push to have both Georgia and
Ukraine join NATO, which Russia would have regarded as an existential threat.
Trump's surprising victory forced a pivot, with Clapper, Brennan and Comey adjusting the
narrative to make it appear that Trump the traitor may have captured the White House due to
help from the Kremlin, making him a latter-day Manchurian Candidate. The lesser allegations of
Russian meddling were quickly elevated to devastating assertions that the Republican had only
won with Putin's assistance.
No substantive evidence for the claim of serious Russian meddling has ever been produced in
spite of years of investigation, but the real objective was to plant the story that would
plausibly convince a majority of Americans that the election of Donald Trump was somehow
illegitimate.
The national security team acted to protect their candidate Hillary Clinton, who represented
America's Deep State. In spite of considerable naysaying, the Deep State is real, not just a
wild conspiracy theory. Many Americans nevertheless do not believe that the Deep State exists,
that it is a politically driven media creation much like Russiagate itself was, but if one
changes the wording a bit and describes the Deep State as the Establishment, with its political
power focused in Washington and its financial center in New York City, the argument that there
exists a cohesive group of power brokers who really run the country becomes much more
plausible.
The danger posed by the Deep State, or, if you choose, the Establishment, is that it wields
immense power but is unelected and unaccountable. It also operates through relationships that
are not transparent and as the media is part of it, there is little chance that its activity
will be exposed.
Nevertheless, some might even argue that having a Deep State is a healthy part of American
democracy, that it serves as a check or corrective element on a political system that has
largely been corrupted and which no longer serves national interests. But that assessment
surely might have been made before it became clear that many of the leaders of the nation's
intelligence and security agencies are no longer the people's honorable servants they pretend
to be. They have been heavily politicized since at least the time of Ronald Reagan and have
frequently succumbed to the lure of wealth and power while identifying with and promoting the
interests of the Deep State.
Indeed, a number of former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Directors have implicitly or
even directly admitted to the existence of a Deep State that has as one of its roles keeping
presidents like Donald Trump in check. Most recently, John McLaughlin, responding to a question
about Donald Trump's concern over Deep State involvement in the ongoing impeachment process,
said unambiguously "Well, you know, thank God for the 'deep state' With all of the people who
knew what was going on here, it took an intelligence officer to step forward and say something
about it, which was the trigger that then unleashed everything else. This is the institution
within the U.S. government is institutionally committed to objectivity and telling the truth.
It is one of the few institutions in Washington that is not in a chain of command that makes or
implements policy. Its whole job is to speak the truth -- it's engraved in marble in the
lobby."
Well, John's dedication to truth is exemplary but how does he explain his own role in
support of the lies being promoted by his boss George "slam dunk" Tenet that led to the war
against Iraq, the greatest foreign policy disaster ever experienced by the United States? Or
Tenet's sitting in the U.N. directly behind Secretary of State Colin Powell in the debate over
Iraq, providing cover and credibility for what everyone inside the system knew to be a bundle
of lies? Or his close friend and colleague Michael Morell's description of Trump
as a Russian agent , a claim that was supported by zero evidence and which was given
credibility only by Morell's boast that "I ran the CIA."
Beyond that, more details have been revealed demonstrating exactly how Deep State associates
have attempted, with considerable success, to subvert the actual functioning of American
democracy. Words are one thing, but acting to interfere in an electoral process or to undermine
a serving president is a rather more serious matter.
It is
now known that President Barack Obama's CIA Director John Brennan created a Trump Task
Force in early 2016. Rather than working against genuine foreign threats, this Task Force
played a critical role in creating and feeding the meme that Donald Trump was a tool of the
Russians and a puppet of President Vladimir Putin, a claim that still surfaces regularly to
this day. Working with James Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence, Brennan fabricated
the narrative that "Russia had interfered in the 2016 election." Brennan and Clapper promoted
that tale even though they knew very well that Russia and the United States have carried out a
broad array of covert actions against each other, including information operations, for the
past seventy years, but they pretended that what happened in 2016 was qualitatively and
substantively different even though the "evidence" produced to support that claim was and still
is weak to nonexistent.
The Russian "election interference" narrative went on steroids on January 6, 2017, shortly
before Trump was inaugurated, when an "Intelligence Community Assessment" (ICA) orchestrated by
Clapper and Brennan was published. The banner headline atop The New York Times, itself an
integral part of the Deep State, on the following day set the tone for what was to follow:
"Putin Led Scheme to Aid Trump, Report Says."
With the help of the Establishment media, Clapper and Brennan were able to pretend that the
ICA had been approved by "all 17 intelligence agencies" (as first claimed by Hillary Clinton).
After several months, however Clapper revealed that the preparers of the ICA were "handpicked
analysts" from only the FBI, CIA, and NSA. He explained rather
unconvincingly during an interview on May 28, 2017, that "the historical practices of the
Russians, who typically, are almost genetically driven to co-opt, penetrate, gain favor,
whatever, which is a typical Russian technique," adding later that "It's in their DNA."
Task Force Trump was kept secret within the Agency itself because the CIA is not supposed to
spy on Americans. Its staff was pulled together by invitation-only. Specific case officers
(i.e., men and women who recruit and handle spies overseas), analysts and administrative
personnel were recruited, presumably based on their political reliability. Not everyone invited
accepted the offer. But many did because it came with promises of promotion and other
rewards.
And this was not a CIA-only operation. Personnel from the FBI also were assigned to the Task
Force with the approval of then Director James Comey. Former MI-6 agent Christopher Steele's
FBI handler, Michael Gaeta, may have been one of those detailed to the Trump Task Force.
Steele, of course, prepared the notorious dossier that was surfaced shortly before Donald Trump
took office. It included considerable material intended to tie Trump to Russia, information
that was in many cases fabricated or unsourced.
So, what kind of things would this Task Force do? The case officers would work with foreign
intelligence services such as MI-6, the Italians, the Ukrainians and the Australians on
identifying intelligence collection priorities that would implicate Trump and his associates in
illegal activity. And there is evidence that John Brennan himself would contact his
counterparts in allied intelligence services to obtain their discreet cooperation, something
they would be inclined to do in collegial fashion, ignoring whatever reservations they might
have about spying on a possible American presidential candidate.
Trump Task Force members could have also tasked the National Security Agency (NSA) to do
targeted collection. They also would have the ability to engage in complicated covert actions
that would further set up and entrap Trump and his staff in questionable activity, such as the
targeting of associate George Papadopoulos. If he is ever properly interviewed, Maltese
citizen Joseph Mifsud may be able to shed light on the CIA officers who met with him, briefed
him on operational objectives regarding Papadopoulos and helped arrange monitored meetings. It
is highly likely that Azra Turk, the woman who met with George Papadopoulos, was part of the
CIA Trump Task Force.
The Task Force also could carry out other covert actions, sometimes using press or social
media placements to disseminate fabrications about Trump and his associates. Information
operations is a benign-sounding euphemism for propaganda fed through the Agency's friends in
the media, and computer network operations can be used to create false linkages and misdirect
inquiries. There has been some informed speculation that Guccifer 2.0 may have been a creation
of this Task Force.
In light of what has been learned about the alleged CIA whistleblower there should be a
serious investigation to determine if he was a part of this Task Force or, at minimum,
reporting to them secretly after he was seconded to the National Security Council. All the CIA
and FBI officers involved in the Task Force had sworn an oath to uphold the Constitution of the
United States, but nevertheless were involved in a conspiracy to first denigrate and then
possibly bring down a legally elected president. That effort continues with repeated assertions
regarding Moscow's malevolent intentions for the 2020 national elections. Some might reasonably
regard the whole Brennan affair, to include its spear carriers among the current and retired
national security state leadership, as a case of institutionalized treason, and it inevitably
leads to the question "What did Obama know?"
Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest,
a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a
more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is
councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its
email is[email protected] .
The entire FISA court process has been exposed as an insane sham.
"The Secret Team" just took the absurdity of the process and raised it to the next
level–injecting it into a political campaign.
It would be wonderful if they could fill a jail with every empty suit who touched those
warrants–but I would be stunned if even one of them gets paraded around in the orange
jump-suit they so richly deserve. Read More Replies:
@Moi
Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All
Comments
Looking on at this affair from outside the USA, it is clear that the power and influence of
the USA is waning a lot faster than most people expected.
The replacement of the US military by mercenaries who are called other names was a first
step. The sanctioning and punishing of allies for stepping out of line is the second step.
BTW, it is notable how Japan and Australia are very keen to stay in line but the Europeans
less so.
I suspect the third step will be to encourage a collapse of the Euro – so as to make
wealthy Europeans shift their money to the USA in a panic.
It seems to me that the US public will be the last to learn of what is really happening.
Even on this website there are sometimes letters or articles that mention 9/11 as a
"terrorist" or "Saudi" act. How can one take anything such a person writes seriously?
The control of media and the internet seems to be the last part of the collapse. They will
hang on to that to the very last moment.
John Brennan's CIA Trump Task Force
Could it become Obamagate?
Perhaps, but what is the point? All this bullshit is engineered to make dumbass Americans
think justice is being served. Nothing will come of it no one will go to prison.
As if Trump weren't part and parcel of the Deep State.
His actions in Syria, Bolivia, Hong Kong, Iraq, Afghanistan, Israel, etc. all prove
incontrovertibly that he is (and has always been) a member in fine standing of the Deep
State. If he is a Manchurian Candidate, he is the true puppet of the Deep State, not the
people or of Russia.
Exactly. I voted for Trump, but, as long ago as mid April 2017, I determined that he was a
Deep Stater his actions are just too obvious to ignore.
The Magic Negro cannot be touched and that is why nothing will be done about the biggest crime in the history of our nation
Obama orchestrated the destruction of a political rival and he will get away scott free .because he's an oppressed and downtrodden dindu.
There is considerable evidence that the American system of government may have been
victimized by an illegal covert operation organized and executed by the U.S.
Which one are you referring to, Iran 1953, Kennedy assassination 1963, Gulf of Tonkin 1964
or the other dozens of examples?
"And this was not a CIA-only operation. Personnel from the FBI also were assigned to the
Task Force "
This just in: both the CIA and FBI are unconstitutional, agencies.Get rid of them -and all
of the other unconstitutional alphabet-soup agencies[FDA,EPA,SEC etc.etc.etc.]. No
downsizing-trash them all- NOW!
This also just in: "Because they are all ultimately funded via both direct and indirect
theft [taxes], and counterfeiting [via central bank monopolies], all governments are
essentially, at their very cores, 100% corrupt criminal scams which cannot be
"reformed","improved", simply because of their innate, unchangeble criminal nature."
onebornfree
"Taking the State wherever found, striking into its history at any point, one sees no way
to differentiate the activities of its founders, administrators and beneficiaries from those
of a professional-criminal class." Albert J. Nock
@Alfred
Your point about 9/11 can't be made forcefully enough. We're going straight to hell unless
Israel and its American confederates are brought to justice, these wars ended, and order
restored. Clapper, Comey, Brennan, Mueller, Chertoff and the whole traitorous bunch are
probably guilty as principals but almost certainly they're at least complicit as accessories
before and after the fact. So naturally all we hear about is Russiagate.
The evidence overwhelmingly implicates Israel and not Saudi Arabia as you point out. That
Building 7 was brought down by explosives has been proved beyond doubt by Architects &
Engineers for 911 Truth, and as Dr. Alan Sobrosky put it, if Building 7 was brought down by
explosives, so too were the Twin Towers. The official NIST reports and all related government
narratives are preposterous. They're fairytales for fools inasmuch as the official mechanisms
rely on a suspension of the laws of physics more fanciful than Jack and the Beanstalk. The
story of the nineteen Arabs who couldn't handle Cessna 150s magically flying jetliners into
precise targets is more absurd than fairytale tropes about flying carpets.
Yet for Conservatism Inc and Fox News, which both claim to oppose the Deep State and its
narratives, there's no standard of evidence so low or preposterous that these cucks won't
cling to it to cover up what they must now know is Israel's guilt. We can assume it's
precisely because they're aware of Israel's guilt that they rule out the overwhelmingly
conclusive circumstantial evidence pointing to Israel on the grounds such evidence is
"anti-Semitic" and consequently false on apriori grounds. Moreover, any expert investigator
qualified in the relevant field who uncovers and presents evidence implicating Israel is cast
as the actual terrorist. It should go without saying they've reversed a millennium in the
development of Western thought regarding the connection between evidence and conclusion, and
they've done so for the basest of reasons. At least Conservatism Inc is being daily exposed
for the controlled opposition and worthless club of preppy snots it's always been.
Brilliant Article.
The question is when deep state will finally admit that Globalism after all that sacrifice
and evildoing are just sour grapes. As fox said in Ezops tale.
"the historical practices of the Russians, who typically, are almost genetically driven
to co-opt, penetrate, gain favor, whatever, which is a typical Russian technique," adding
later that "It's in their DNA."
Right, along with drinking vodka and eating borscht.
The one nation that did interfere in the 2016 election, and has inserted themselves
into other elections to get their candidate elected, Israel remains untouched by this (((Deep
State))).
There's plenty of evidence for the Zionists and Israeli-Firsters corrupting the election
process for their fav nation, Israel, but the Operation Mockingbird asshats in the MSM won't
go near that, not if they want to keep their cushy job, 5th Avenue penthouse and that
chauffeured limo.
Anytime AIPAC comes to town, Congress gets into a fight with each other, trying to be the
one that shows the most slavish loyalty to the nation that has attacked the USA numerous
times, spies constantly on us, stealing our military, business and industrial secrets, had a
hand in both murdering JFK, RFK and masterminded the 9/11 FF, and has an overwheling presence
on the FED, yet most Americans don't know that, because the MSM keeps reporting lies,
distortions and half-truths, and always presenting a boogeyman to hate, sometimes Russia,
most times Muslims.
But fear not, that will soon come to an end, for when those TBTF Wall Street
banks–in collusion with the FED–again crash the stock market and drag the economy
down with their greed, that coming crash will make the one of 1929 seem like a picnic.
When that happens, what's left won't be of any interest to Israel to steal or manipulate.
The Deep State murdered Kennedy.
He planned on destroying the Fed and the CIA.
The Deep State required a president that COLLABORATED, like LBJ.
Then they figured, "why not put our guy in?'
Thus Bush 1.
Then Clinton (Bush 1 was his 'mentor') a pervert stooge.
Then Bush 2, a gaymail stooge.
Then Obomber, the gay Kenyan C_A stooge.
Then America says 'Enough', rejects the Witch and elects Trump.
Now the Deep State wants to kill America.
I think it's time for America to kill its' Deep State.
It is, after all, self-defense. Besides, hasn't this gone on long enough?
The alternative is to end up as the modern parallel of Rome.
Clapper, Brennan and Comey " may not have operated on their own." Duh!
You just remember, a donkey won't carry a heavy burden unless it's fed regularly. Find out
who owns the beast and you will have the culprit!
Phil, you should offer your services to the Trump defense/attack team*. Just stay away from
Giuliani (grin). Good article and salvo against Brennan and the rest who deserve all the pain
thay can get.
*Hey money is good especially around Christmas time. (Grin)
This certainly explains the incessant attacks on Trump by the deep state.
You have no concept of a charade being perpetrated on the American people. You don't find
it a little strange that Trump keeps hiring the Deep State denizens he purports to be
fighting? You are incapable of detecting the friend/foe, psychological tactic used to
deceive?
@Anonymous
That's it. Your hearsay trumps thousands of eyewitnesses and conversations of the victims on
flight 93 and in the pentagon.. You must be a first responder too. Talk about easily
influenced–you are why the old media gets away with their corruption. Some anonymous
source writes, says it on TV, and the lemmings follow.
@Biff
As we write, Obama probably is banging away some groupie in a DC mansion basement while the
gorrila is frying chicken upstairs for Oprah.
And Bubba, most likely, is watching porn in the garage in Westchester and the wicked witch
is massaging mrs. Wiener.
But it's Dubya worth looking into because he is out in the cowshed, buck naked save the
cowboy boots and the ten-gallon hat, whipping himself silly for the "mission
accomplished!"
Or, Obama and the police agencies investigated a known organized crime stooge when it became
apparent the GOP could offer no other candidate. Ironically, this was the original intent of
the creation of the FBI.
Don't play into the "victim trump" brand, he needs no help with it.
Thanks much for the most comprehensive précis yet of this bungled CIA putsch. The
articles in sequence teasingly open Gina's kimono, giving us horripilating glimpses of her
bushy penetralia. The question of Obama's involvement is the next step. CIA bots have been
pushing a partisan perspective for some time. Those darn Democrats!
But in fact Obama too is CIA nomenklatura, with the same depth of dynastic ties as GW
Bush, albeit not at the same lofty level. Just look at the oppo research, the best of which
comes from sanitized glimpses of the errands candidates run for CIA. Obama's other passport
is not Kenyan but Indonesian. It facilitated the youngster's schooling during Mom's year of
living dangerously in Indonesia. Obama's dad and stepdad were CIA skins on the wall. Grandma
was not in fact a drunk – she laundered the money for forcible overthrow and genocide
in Indonesia at her bank job in Hawaii. Grandpa was a "furniture salesman," like Bibi,
travelling around Asia under the hoariest old chestnut of NOC cover.
Young Barack was groomed as carefully as Bush minor. His only real job was BIC, a sheepish
front perennially stuffed to bursting with NOCs. While he was still wet behind the ears he
sported at falconry with a future head of state of Pakistan, for chrissakes, at a time when
nobody could get in there. And he got out without getting his head sawed off. How? The
youthful promise of this sullen stoner was somewhat obscure at that time. His GF was the
Aussie daughter of Mike Barry's opposite number. And the Mockingbird unison of ecstatic
acclaim when he rose to public prominence out of nowhere is the proof. His empty suit belings
to CIA.
This past election was CIA office politics, nothing more. Russigate is simply CIA eminence
Hillary, the Queen of Mena, ratfucking a bumptious queue-jumper. She outranks Trump, who was
merely a junior money-launderer for the CIA agents who looted the Soviet Union. It was her
turn to take the figurehead head-of-state sinecure. She and Bill earned it with their
lucrative Clinton Foundation covert-ops slush fund.
@Rabbi
Zaius They sense the rumblings of White solidarity among "the forgotten men and women" of
Trump's base and they do not cotton to this one little bit. Solidarity is forbidden to
Whites. It is only for the coalition of the fringes, all of those groups whose alienation can
be stoked to weaponize them against the descendants of those who founded and built the United
States.
@Dave
Sullivan The FISA warrants had nothing to do with organized crime.
On second thought, that is not correct.
They _were_ organized crime.
(It is not necessary to defend Trump to understand this. FISA warrants based on known fake
"evidence" are a stunning abuse of power–even within the slime-pit of DC.)
Anyone at all familiar with Brennan knows that he was and remains the driver of the
conspiracy to destroy first candidate, then President -Elect, and then POTUS Trump.
The same cannot be said of Comey and Clapper (especially).
It literally makes me sick to my stomach whenever I think about what it says about this
great republic that seditious filth like him rose to such a powerful position. It's rather
obvious he was willing to do anything including, I would submit, gift Russia and God Knows
Who Else anything they wanted in return for helping him destroy our constitutional
republic.
As I'm sure most here know, long before his 2016 election malefactions he had brazenly
engaged in spying on Congress and, most despicably, had debased President Obama and the
Office of the President through NYT revelations that every week Obama picked from his list of
drone assassination targets.
. . . and it inevitably leads to the question "What did Obama know?"
Yes, though more important than that was what Obama was told (by Brennan) and what real
options did he have as president given that Brennan had him by the short hairs.
I've long considered anyone's efforts to prematurely direct liability to President Obama
as a bald attempt to protect Brennan. That worked for the purposes of a general, earlier on,
cover up. It won't at this stage because it isn't even a close call when it comes to
Democrats, elected and rank and file, choosing between the first black president and Brennan,
the American Beria.
And has been since the early 1950s when the Allen Dulles-Frank Wisner-James Jesus Angleton
crew got rolling. They managed to thoroughly penetrate federal and state bureaucracies, the
court systems, major corporations, the financial sector, and the mockingbird media.
So Phil, was there any cooperation/communication between the Trump Task Force and the DNC
dirt-diggers in Ukraine (Ali Chalupa et al), or were they completely independent actions?
it was plausible to maintain that [the Russians] would have hoped that a weakened
Clinton would be less able to implement the anti-Russian agenda that she had been
promoting.
Not sure I follow this line of reasoning. If the Russians had tried unsuccessfully to
throw the election to Trump and Hellary won anyway, how exactly would that leave her
"weakened"? And wouldn't she have that much more reason to go after Russia?
My theory is that Hellary and her deep-swamp creatures only messed with Trump because they
were certain he was going lose. And if they could then plausibly claim after the
election that the Russians had interfered (albeit unsuccessfull) in the election, Hell-bitch
could've used that as a pretext for well, I don't know. War? More sanctions? Inducting
Ukraine into NATO? Invading Syria?
Clapper revealed that the preparers of the ICA were "handpicked analysts" from only the
FBI, CIA, and NSA. He explained rather unconvincingly during an interview on May 28, 2017,
that "the historical practices of the Russians, who typically, are almost genetically
driven to co-opt, penetrate, gain favor, whatever, which is a typical Russian technique,"
adding later that "It's in their DNA."
I had no idea Clapper was into HBD. Damn, he's biased!
@NPleeze
There is a theater play going on, unending series, each episode catching some other
superficial drift. A-l-l actors in the public view, their dialogues and declamations are
scripted. Trump´s also. He is not the major character, just a single, temporary one.
All media opinion pieces, what is news, are prompt readings. Rectal extraction is close.
Why is this possible? The public is beyond understanding. The ones who do, at least part
of what is going on, being closer to some sectors of society where a whiff of the smell of
power is perceived at clouded times, are interested. The middle classes are scraping and
grabbing and bickering for the scraps of the table of the powerful. It takes them most of
their career to even get to under the table. They are happy dogs, and scraps comparing to
scraps makes them a diverse world of nothings.
It is hard work to come up with alternative policies, not rail into historical models
proven wrong as to long term interests and goals of society. A path not to venture into,
against instinct.
That makes for a fine world, while it lasts, and is upended by another cycle. The empty
drum feeling in the head of most is stuffed with images and sound-bites that makes for a life
behind a velvet curtain(Apple´s i-phone).
There is very little cognitive difference between the individuals at the top and the
glorious bottom undesirables, they both like the sniff of the glue.
Donald Trump's election (which was not supposed to be allowed to happen) forced into public
view, the existence of a Deep State that's been in existence for more than 75 years. Although
not widely recognized as such, JFK'S election accomplished the same thing, but to an even
greater extent. Leaving me puzzled as to why Trump has been allowed to remain in office as
long as he has without the Deep State subjecting him to a similar fate.
With one logical
explanation being that, at this point in time, it would become obvious, even to the brain
dead, who's actually in control of the US government.
"... Obama orchestrated the destruction of a political rival and he will get away scott free .because he's an oppressed and downtrodden dindu. ..."
"... But in fact Obama too is CIA nomenklatura, with the same depth of dynastic ties as GW Bush, albeit not at the same lofty level. ..."
"... This past election was CIA office politics, nothing more. Russigate is simply CIA eminence Hillary, the Queen of Mena, ratfucking a bumptious queue-jumper. She outranks Trump, who was merely a junior money-launderer for the CIA agents who looted the Soviet Union. It was her turn to take the figurehead head-of-state sinecure. She and Bill earned it with their lucrative Clinton Foundation covert-ops slush fund. ..."
"... And has been since the early 1950s when the Allen Dulles-Frank Wisner-James Jesus Angleton crew got rolling. They managed to thoroughly penetrate federal and state bureaucracies, the court systems, major corporations, the financial sector, and the mockingbird media. ..."
"... Clapper revealed that the preparers of the ICA were "handpicked analysts" from only the FBI, CIA, and NSA. He explained rather unconvincingly during an interview on May 28, 2017, that "the historical practices of the Russians, who typically, are almost genetically driven to co-opt, penetrate, gain favor, whatever, which is a typical Russian technique," adding later that "It's in their DNA." ..."
The entire FISA court process has been exposed as an insane sham.
"The Secret Team" just took the absurdity of the process and raised it to the next
level–injecting it into a political campaign.
It would be wonderful if they could fill a jail with every empty suit who touched those
warrants–but I would be stunned if even one of them gets paraded around in the orange
jump-suit they so richly deserve. Read More Replies:
@Moi
Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide Thread Display All
Comments
Looking on at this affair from outside the USA, it is clear that the power and influence of
the USA is waning a lot faster than most people expected.
The replacement of the US military by mercenaries who are called other names was a first
step. The sanctioning and punishing of allies for stepping out of line is the second step.
BTW, it is notable how Japan and Australia are very keen to stay in line but the Europeans
less so.
I suspect the third step will be to encourage a collapse of the Euro – so as to make
wealthy Europeans shift their money to the USA in a panic.
It seems to me that the US public will be the last to learn of what is really happening.
Even on this website there are sometimes letters or articles that mention 9/11 as a
"terrorist" or "Saudi" act. How can one take anything such a person writes seriously?
The control of media and the internet seems to be the last part of the collapse. They will
hang on to that to the very last moment.
John Brennan's CIA Trump Task Force
Could it become Obamagate?
Perhaps, but what is the point? All this bullshit is engineered to make dumbass Americans
think justice is being served. Nothing will come of it no one will go to prison.
As if Trump weren't part and parcel of the Deep State.
His actions in Syria, Bolivia, Hong Kong, Iraq, Afghanistan, Israel, etc. all prove
incontrovertibly that he is (and has always been) a member in fine standing of the Deep
State. If he is a Manchurian Candidate, he is the true puppet of the Deep State, not the
people or of Russia.
Exactly. I voted for Trump, but, as long ago as mid April 2017, I determined that he was a
Deep Stater his actions are just too obvious to ignore.
The Magic Negro cannot be touched and that is why nothing will be done about the biggest crime in the history of our nation
Obama orchestrated the destruction of a political rival and he will get away scott free .because he's an oppressed and downtrodden dindu.
There is considerable evidence that the American system of government may have been
victimized by an illegal covert operation organized and executed by the U.S.
Which one are you referring to, Iran 1953, Kennedy assassination 1963, Gulf of Tonkin 1964
or the other dozens of examples?
"And this was not a CIA-only operation. Personnel from the FBI also were assigned to the
Task Force "
This just in: both the CIA and FBI are unconstitutional, agencies.Get rid of them -and all
of the other unconstitutional alphabet-soup agencies[FDA,EPA,SEC etc.etc.etc.]. No
downsizing-trash them all- NOW!
This also just in: "Because they are all ultimately funded via both direct and indirect
theft [taxes], and counterfeiting [via central bank monopolies], all governments are
essentially, at their very cores, 100% corrupt criminal scams which cannot be
"reformed","improved", simply because of their innate, unchangeble criminal nature."
onebornfree
"Taking the State wherever found, striking into its history at any point, one sees no way
to differentiate the activities of its founders, administrators and beneficiaries from those
of a professional-criminal class." Albert J. Nock
@Alfred
Your point about 9/11 can't be made forcefully enough. We're going straight to hell unless
Israel and its American confederates are brought to justice, these wars ended, and order
restored. Clapper, Comey, Brennan, Mueller, Chertoff and the whole traitorous bunch are
probably guilty as principals but almost certainly they're at least complicit as accessories
before and after the fact. So naturally all we hear about is Russiagate.
The evidence overwhelmingly implicates Israel and not Saudi Arabia as you point out. That
Building 7 was brought down by explosives has been proved beyond doubt by Architects &
Engineers for 911 Truth, and as Dr. Alan Sobrosky put it, if Building 7 was brought down by
explosives, so too were the Twin Towers. The official NIST reports and all related government
narratives are preposterous. They're fairytales for fools inasmuch as the official mechanisms
rely on a suspension of the laws of physics more fanciful than Jack and the Beanstalk. The
story of the nineteen Arabs who couldn't handle Cessna 150s magically flying jetliners into
precise targets is more absurd than fairytale tropes about flying carpets.
Yet for Conservatism Inc and Fox News, which both claim to oppose the Deep State and its
narratives, there's no standard of evidence so low or preposterous that these cucks won't
cling to it to cover up what they must now know is Israel's guilt. We can assume it's
precisely because they're aware of Israel's guilt that they rule out the overwhelmingly
conclusive circumstantial evidence pointing to Israel on the grounds such evidence is
"anti-Semitic" and consequently false on apriori grounds. Moreover, any expert investigator
qualified in the relevant field who uncovers and presents evidence implicating Israel is cast
as the actual terrorist. It should go without saying they've reversed a millennium in the
development of Western thought regarding the connection between evidence and conclusion, and
they've done so for the basest of reasons. At least Conservatism Inc is being daily exposed
for the controlled opposition and worthless club of preppy snots it's always been.
Brilliant Article.
The question is when deep state will finally admit that Globalism after all that sacrifice
and evildoing are just sour grapes. As fox said in Ezops tale.
"the historical practices of the Russians, who typically, are almost genetically driven
to co-opt, penetrate, gain favor, whatever, which is a typical Russian technique," adding
later that "It's in their DNA."
Right, along with drinking vodka and eating borscht.
The one nation that did interfere in the 2016 election, and has inserted themselves
into other elections to get their candidate elected, Israel remains untouched by this (((Deep
State))).
There's plenty of evidence for the Zionists and Israeli-Firsters corrupting the election
process for their fav nation, Israel, but the Operation Mockingbird asshats in the MSM won't
go near that, not if they want to keep their cushy job, 5th Avenue penthouse and that
chauffeured limo.
Anytime AIPAC comes to town, Congress gets into a fight with each other, trying to be the
one that shows the most slavish loyalty to the nation that has attacked the USA numerous
times, spies constantly on us, stealing our military, business and industrial secrets, had a
hand in both murdering JFK, RFK and masterminded the 9/11 FF, and has an overwheling presence
on the FED, yet most Americans don't know that, because the MSM keeps reporting lies,
distortions and half-truths, and always presenting a boogeyman to hate, sometimes Russia,
most times Muslims.
But fear not, that will soon come to an end, for when those TBTF Wall Street
banks–in collusion with the FED–again crash the stock market and drag the economy
down with their greed, that coming crash will make the one of 1929 seem like a picnic.
When that happens, what's left won't be of any interest to Israel to steal or manipulate.
The Deep State murdered Kennedy.
He planned on destroying the Fed and the CIA.
The Deep State required a president that COLLABORATED, like LBJ.
Then they figured, "why not put our guy in?'
Thus Bush 1.
Then Clinton (Bush 1 was his 'mentor') a pervert stooge.
Then Bush 2, a gaymail stooge.
Then Obomber, the gay Kenyan C_A stooge.
Then America says 'Enough', rejects the Witch and elects Trump.
Now the Deep State wants to kill America.
I think it's time for America to kill its' Deep State.
It is, after all, self-defense. Besides, hasn't this gone on long enough?
The alternative is to end up as the modern parallel of Rome.
Clapper, Brennan and Comey " may not have operated on their own." Duh!
You just remember, a donkey won't carry a heavy burden unless it's fed regularly. Find out
who owns the beast and you will have the culprit!
Phil, you should offer your services to the Trump defense/attack team*. Just stay away from
Giuliani (grin). Good article and salvo against Brennan and the rest who deserve all the pain
thay can get.
*Hey money is good especially around Christmas time. (Grin)
This certainly explains the incessant attacks on Trump by the deep state.
You have no concept of a charade being perpetrated on the American people. You don't find
it a little strange that Trump keeps hiring the Deep State denizens he purports to be
fighting? You are incapable of detecting the friend/foe, psychological tactic used to
deceive?
@Anonymous
That's it. Your hearsay trumps thousands of eyewitnesses and conversations of the victims on
flight 93 and in the pentagon.. You must be a first responder too. Talk about easily
influenced–you are why the old media gets away with their corruption. Some anonymous
source writes, says it on TV, and the lemmings follow.
@Biff
As we write, Obama probably is banging away some groupie in a DC mansion basement while the
gorrila is frying chicken upstairs for Oprah.
And Bubba, most likely, is watching porn in the garage in Westchester and the wicked witch
is massaging mrs. Wiener.
But it's Dubya worth looking into because he is out in the cowshed, buck naked save the
cowboy boots and the ten-gallon hat, whipping himself silly for the "mission
accomplished!"
Or, Obama and the police agencies investigated a known organized crime stooge when it became
apparent the GOP could offer no other candidate. Ironically, this was the original intent of
the creation of the FBI.
Don't play into the "victim trump" brand, he needs no help with it.
Thanks much for the most comprehensive précis yet of this bungled CIA putsch. The
articles in sequence teasingly open Gina's kimono, giving us horripilating glimpses of her
bushy penetralia. The question of Obama's involvement is the next step. CIA bots have been
pushing a partisan perspective for some time. Those darn Democrats!
But in fact Obama too is CIA nomenklatura, with the same depth of dynastic ties as GW
Bush, albeit not at the same lofty level. Just look at the oppo research, the best of which
comes from sanitized glimpses of the errands candidates run for CIA. Obama's other passport
is not Kenyan but Indonesian. It facilitated the youngster's schooling during Mom's year of
living dangerously in Indonesia. Obama's dad and stepdad were CIA skins on the wall. Grandma
was not in fact a drunk – she laundered the money for forcible overthrow and genocide
in Indonesia at her bank job in Hawaii. Grandpa was a "furniture salesman," like Bibi,
travelling around Asia under the hoariest old chestnut of NOC cover.
Young Barack was groomed as carefully as Bush minor. His only real job was BIC, a sheepish
front perennially stuffed to bursting with NOCs. While he was still wet behind the ears he
sported at falconry with a future head of state of Pakistan, for chrissakes, at a time when
nobody could get in there. And he got out without getting his head sawed off. How? The
youthful promise of this sullen stoner was somewhat obscure at that time. His GF was the
Aussie daughter of Mike Barry's opposite number. And the Mockingbird unison of ecstatic
acclaim when he rose to public prominence out of nowhere is the proof. His empty suit belings
to CIA.
This past election was CIA office politics, nothing more. Russigate is simply CIA eminence
Hillary, the Queen of Mena, ratfucking a bumptious queue-jumper. She outranks Trump, who was
merely a junior money-launderer for the CIA agents who looted the Soviet Union. It was her
turn to take the figurehead head-of-state sinecure. She and Bill earned it with their
lucrative Clinton Foundation covert-ops slush fund.
@Rabbi
Zaius They sense the rumblings of White solidarity among "the forgotten men and women" of
Trump's base and they do not cotton to this one little bit. Solidarity is forbidden to
Whites. It is only for the coalition of the fringes, all of those groups whose alienation can
be stoked to weaponize them against the descendants of those who founded and built the United
States.
@Dave
Sullivan The FISA warrants had nothing to do with organized crime.
On second thought, that is not correct.
They _were_ organized crime.
(It is not necessary to defend Trump to understand this. FISA warrants based on known fake
"evidence" are a stunning abuse of power–even within the slime-pit of DC.)
Anyone at all familiar with Brennan knows that he was and remains the driver of the
conspiracy to destroy first candidate, then President -Elect, and then POTUS Trump.
The same cannot be said of Comey and Clapper (especially).
It literally makes me sick to my stomach whenever I think about what it says about this
great republic that seditious filth like him rose to such a powerful position. It's rather
obvious he was willing to do anything including, I would submit, gift Russia and God Knows
Who Else anything they wanted in return for helping him destroy our constitutional
republic.
As I'm sure most here know, long before his 2016 election malefactions he had brazenly
engaged in spying on Congress and, most despicably, had debased President Obama and the
Office of the President through NYT revelations that every week Obama picked from his list of
drone assassination targets.
. . . and it inevitably leads to the question "What did Obama know?"
Yes, though more important than that was what Obama was told (by Brennan) and what real
options did he have as president given that Brennan had him by the short hairs.
I've long considered anyone's efforts to prematurely direct liability to President Obama
as a bald attempt to protect Brennan. That worked for the purposes of a general, earlier on,
cover up. It won't at this stage because it isn't even a close call when it comes to
Democrats, elected and rank and file, choosing between the first black president and Brennan,
the American Beria.
And has been since the early 1950s when the Allen Dulles-Frank Wisner-James Jesus Angleton
crew got rolling. They managed to thoroughly penetrate federal and state bureaucracies, the
court systems, major corporations, the financial sector, and the mockingbird media.
So Phil, was there any cooperation/communication between the Trump Task Force and the DNC
dirt-diggers in Ukraine (Ali Chalupa et al), or were they completely independent actions?
it was plausible to maintain that [the Russians] would have hoped that a weakened
Clinton would be less able to implement the anti-Russian agenda that she had been
promoting.
Not sure I follow this line of reasoning. If the Russians had tried unsuccessfully to
throw the election to Trump and Hellary won anyway, how exactly would that leave her
"weakened"? And wouldn't she have that much more reason to go after Russia?
My theory is that Hellary and her deep-swamp creatures only messed with Trump because they
were certain he was going lose. And if they could then plausibly claim after the
election that the Russians had interfered (albeit unsuccessfull) in the election, Hell-bitch
could've used that as a pretext for well, I don't know. War? More sanctions? Inducting
Ukraine into NATO? Invading Syria?
Clapper revealed that the preparers of the ICA were "handpicked analysts" from only the
FBI, CIA, and NSA. He explained rather unconvincingly during an interview on May 28, 2017,
that "the historical practices of the Russians, who typically, are almost genetically
driven to co-opt, penetrate, gain favor, whatever, which is a typical Russian technique,"
adding later that "It's in their DNA."
I had no idea Clapper was into HBD. Damn, he's biased!
@NPleeze
There is a theater play going on, unending series, each episode catching some other
superficial drift. A-l-l actors in the public view, their dialogues and declamations are
scripted. Trump´s also. He is not the major character, just a single, temporary one.
All media opinion pieces, what is news, are prompt readings. Rectal extraction is close.
Why is this possible? The public is beyond understanding. The ones who do, at least part
of what is going on, being closer to some sectors of society where a whiff of the smell of
power is perceived at clouded times, are interested. The middle classes are scraping and
grabbing and bickering for the scraps of the table of the powerful. It takes them most of
their career to even get to under the table. They are happy dogs, and scraps comparing to
scraps makes them a diverse world of nothings.
It is hard work to come up with alternative policies, not rail into historical models
proven wrong as to long term interests and goals of society. A path not to venture into,
against instinct.
That makes for a fine world, while it lasts, and is upended by another cycle. The empty
drum feeling in the head of most is stuffed with images and sound-bites that makes for a life
behind a velvet curtain(Apple´s i-phone).
There is very little cognitive difference between the individuals at the top and the
glorious bottom undesirables, they both like the sniff of the glue.
Donald Trump's election (which was not supposed to be allowed to happen) forced into public
view, the existence of a Deep State that's been in existence for more than 75 years. Although
not widely recognized as such, JFK'S election accomplished the same thing, but to an even
greater extent. Leaving me puzzled as to why Trump has been allowed to remain in office as
long as he has without the Deep State subjecting him to a similar fate.
With one logical
explanation being that, at this point in time, it would become obvious, even to the brain
dead, who's actually in control of the US government.
"... The truth is that for the Clintonite-Bushite elite almost all Americans are 'deplorable'. What is fun for them is to play geopolitics – the elite version of corporate travel perks – just look at how shocked they are that Trump is not playing along. ..."
Recent class history of US is quite simple: the elite class first tried to shift the burden
of supporting the lower classes on the middle class with taxation. But as the lower class
became demographically distinct, partially via mass immigration, the elites decided to ally
with the ' underpriviledged ' via identity posturing and squeeze no longer needed
middle class out of existence.
What's left are government employees, a few corporate sinecures, NGO parasitic sector, and
old people. The rest will be melded into a few mutually antagonistic tribal groups providing
ever cheaper service labor. With an occasional lottery winner to showcase mobility. Actually
very similar to what happened in Latin America in the past few centuries.
The truth is that for the Clintonite-Bushite elite almost all Americans are
'deplorable'. What is fun for them is to play geopolitics – the elite version of
corporate travel perks – just look at how shocked they are that Trump is not playing
along.
Unlike the USA (under Neocon stewardship) China has not squandered twenty trillion dollars
of its national solvency bombing countries which never attacked it post 9-11.
China's leaders (unlike our own) never LIED its people into launching obscenely expensive,
illegal wars of aggression across the middle east. (WMD's, Mushroom clouds, Yellow Cake,
etc.)
China has used its wealth and resources to build up its infrastructure, build out its
capital markets, and turbo charge its high tech sectors. As a consequence, it has lifted
nearly half a billion people out of poverty. There has been an explosion in the growth of the
"middle class" in China. Hundreds of millions of Chinese are now living comfortable "upwardly
mobile" lives.
The USA, on the other hand, having been defrauded by its "ruling elites" into launching
and fighting endless illegal wars, is now 23 trillion dollars in catastrophic debt.
NOT ONE PENNY of this heinous "overspending" has been dedicated to building up OUR
infrastructure, or BUILDING OUT our middle class.
It has all gone into BLOWING UP countries which never (even) attacked us on 9-11.
As a consequence , the USA is fast becoming a failed nation, a nation where all its wealth
is being siphoned into the hands of its one percent "war pilfer-teers".
It is so sad to have grown up in such an amazing country , with such immense resources and
possibilities, and having to bear witness to it going down the tubes.
To watch all our sovereign wealth being vaporized by our "lie us into endless illegal war"
ruling elites is truly heartbreaking.
The white middle class is the only group that might effectively resist Globohomo's designs on
total power.
Blacks? Too dumb. Will be disposed of once Globohomo is finished the job.
Hispanics? Used to corrupt one party systems. Give them cerveza and Netflix and they're
good.
East Asians? Perfectly fine with living like bug people.
South Asians? Cowardly; will go with the flow.
The middle class is almost completely unique to white people.
Racial aliens cannot wrap their minds around being middle class. They think I'm crazy for
appreciating my 2009 Honda Accord. They literally cannot understand why somebody would want
to live a frugal and mundane life. They are desperate to be like Drake but most end up broke.
It will be very easy for GloboHomo to control a bucket of poor brown slop.
There IS a black middle class, but a big chunk of that works for governments of all
shapes and sizes.
Strictly speaking, there is no more "middle class" in the sense of the classical
economists: a person with just enough capital to live off the income if he works the capital
himself or herself. By this definition professionals (lawyers, dentists, physicians, small
store owners, even spinsters [1] and hand loom operators in a sense) were middle class. Upper
class had enough property to turn it over to managers, lower class had little or no property
and worked for others (servants and farm workers, for example). Paupers didn't earn enough
income per year to feed themselves and didn't live all that long, usually.
What we have is "middle income" people, almost all of whom work as an employee of some
organization -- people who would be considered "lower class" by the classical economists
because they don't have freedom of action and make no independent decisions about how the
capital of their organizations is spent. Today they are considered "intelligentsia", educated
government workers, or, by analogy, educated corporate workers. IMHO, intelligentsia is a
suicide job, and is responsible for the depressed fertility rate, but that's just me.
Back in the AD 1800s and pre-AD 1930 there were many black middle class people. usually
concentrating on selling to black clientele. Now there are effectively none outside of
criminal activities, usually petty criminal. And so it goes.
Of course, back then there were many white middle class people also, usually concentrating
on selling to white clientele. Now there are effectively none, except in some rural areas.
And so it goes.
Counterinsurgency
1] Cottagers who made their living spinning wool skeins into wool threads.
@unit472 A
lot of the middle class are Democrats but not particularly liberal. Many of them vote
Democrat only when they personally benefit. For example, my parents were suburban public
school teachers. They voted for Democrats at the state level because the Democrats supported
better pay and benefits for teachers but voted for Republicans like Goldwater and Reagan at
the national level because Republicans would keep their federal taxes lower. They had no
political philosophy. It was all about what left them financially better off. My parents also
got on well with their suburban neighbors. Suburbanites generally like their local school
system and its teachers and the suburban school systems are usually careful not to engage in
teaching anything controversial. A lot of the government employed white middle class would be
like my parents. Except in situations where specific Republicans talk about major cuts to
their pay and pensions they are perfectly willing to consider voting Republican. They are
generally social moderates, like the status quo, are fairly traditionalist and don't want any
radical changes. Since the Democrats seem be trending in a radical direction, this would put
off a lot of them. Trump would be more appealing as the status quo candidate. When running
the last time, he carefully avoided talking about any major cuts in government spending and
he's governed that way too. At the same time, his talk of cutting immigration, his lack of
enthusiasm for nonwhite affirmative action, and his more traditional views on social issues
is appealing to the white middle class.
The term middle class is used in the U.S. to mean middle income. It has nothing to do with
class. Why not just say what you mean? Most of the middle class that we say is disappearing
is really that rarest of phenomenons. A prosperous working class. The prosperous American
working class is no longer prosperous due to the Neoliberal agenda. Free trade, open borders
and the financialization of everything.
Americans know nothing of class dynamics. Not even the so called socialists. They don't
even see the economy. All they see is people with infinite need and government with infinite
wealth. In their world all of Central America can come to the U.S. and the government (if it
only wants to) can give them all homes, health care and education.
Lets stop saying class when we mean income. Not using the word class would be better than
abusing it.
Anyway. Yes. Middle Class denotes white people. The coalition of the fringes is neither
working, middle nor ruling class. They are black or brown. They are perverts or feminists. If
the workers among them identified as working class they would find common ground with the
Deplorables. We can't have that now can we.
Are we to the point where we've collectively resigned ourselves to the death of the
middle class?
In the neoliberal worldview, the middle class is illegitimate, existing only as a
consequence of artificial trade and immigration barriers. Anytime Americans are spied out
making a good living, there is a "shortage" that must be addressed with more visas. Or else
there is an "inefficiency" where other countries could provide said service or produce said
product for less because they have a "comparative advantage."
Anyway. Yes. Middle Class denotes white people. The coalition of the fringes is neither
working, middle nor ruling class. They are black or brown. They are perverts or feminists.
If the workers among them identified as working class they would find common ground with
the Deplorables. We can't have that now can we.
I don't know about that anymore. Increasingly, "middle class" means Asian, with Whiteness
being associated with the lower middle class (or perhaps "working class"). Sometimes the
media uses the term " noncollege Whites," which I think is actually very apt. They are the
ones who identify with Whiteness the most.
First the percentages of Americans who believe Russia interfered in the 2016 US presidential
election and then the percentages of Americans who think the US has ever interfered with
an election in any other country (
! ).
"... Until now, Iran has restrained itself despite constant aggression from Israel, but this could easily change. "The result could be a counterstrike by Iran, using cruise missiles that penetrate Israel's air defenses and smash into targets like the Kiryah, Tel Aviv's equivalent of the Pentagon. Israel would retaliate massively against Hezbollah's headquarters in Beirut as well as dozens of its emplacements along the Lebanese border. And then, after a day of large-scale exchanges, the real war would begin " ..."
In my 2011 book,
The Wandering Who
, I elaborated on the possible disastrous scenario in which Israel is the nucleus of a
global escalation over Iran's emerging nuclear capabilities. I concluded that Israel's PRE Traumatic Stress
Syndrome (PRE-TSS) would be central to such a development. "The Jewish state and the Jewish discourse in
general are completely foreign to the notion of temporality. Israel is blinded to the consequences of its
actions, it only thinks of its actions in terms of short-term pragmatism. Instead of temporality, Israel
thinks in terms of an extended present."
In 2011 Israel was still confident in
its military might, certain that with the help of America or at least its support, it could deliver a mortal
military blow to Iran. But this confidence has diminished, replaced by an existential anxiety that might
well be warranted. For the last few months, Israeli military analysts have had to come to terms with Iran's
spectacular strategic and technological abilities. The recent attack on a Saudi oil facility delivered a
clear message to the world, and in particular to Israel, that Iran is far ahead of Israel and the West. The
sanctions were counter effective: Iran independently developed its own technology.
Former Israeli ambassador to the US, and
prolific historian, Michael Oren, repeated my 2011 predictions this week in the
Atlantic
and described a horrific scenario for the next, and likely last, Israeli conflict.
Oren understands that a minor Israeli
miscalculation could lead to total war, one in which missiles and drones of all types would rain down on
Israel, overwhelm its defences and leave Israeli cities, its economy and its security in ruins.
Oren gives a detailed account of how a
conflict between Israel and Iran could rapidly descend into a massive "conflagration" that would devastate
Israel as well as its neighbours.
In Israel, the term
"The War Between the Wars
," refers to the targeted covert inter-war campaign waged by the Jewish State
with the purpose of postponing, while still preparing for, the next confrontation, presumably with Iran. In
the last few years Israel has carried out hundreds of 'war between the wars' strikes against Iran-linked
targets in Lebanon, Syria and Iraq. Oren speculates that a single miscalculation could easily lead to
retaliation by Iran. "Israel is girding for the worst and acting on the assumption that fighting could break
out at any time. And it's not hard to imagine how it might arrive. The conflagration, like so many in the
Middle East, could be ignited by a single spark."
Until now, Iran has restrained itself
despite constant aggression from Israel, but this could easily change. "The result could be a counterstrike
by Iran, using cruise missiles that penetrate Israel's air defenses and smash into targets like the Kiryah,
Tel Aviv's equivalent of the Pentagon. Israel would retaliate massively against Hezbollah's headquarters in
Beirut as well as dozens of its emplacements along the Lebanese border. And then, after a day of large-scale
exchanges, the real war would begin "
Oren predicts that rockets would "rain on
Israel" at a rate as high as 4,000 a day. The Iron Dome system would be overwhelmed by the vast simultaneous
attacks against civilian and military targets throughout the country. And, as if this weren't devastating
enough, Israel is totally unprepared to deal with precision-guided missiles that can accurately hit targets
all across Israel from 1000 miles away.
Ben Gurion International Airport would be
shut down and air traffic over Israel closed. The same could happen to Israel's ports. Israelis that would
seek refuge in far away lands would have to swim to safety
.
In this scenario, Palestinians and
Lebanese militias might join the conflagration and attack Jewish border communities on the ground while
long-range missiles from Syria, Iraq, Yemen and Iran land. Before long, Israel's economy would cease to
function, electrical grids severed and damaged factories and refineries would spew toxic chemicals into the
air.
In the Shoah scenario Oren describes,
"Millions of Israelis would huddle in bomb shelters. Hundreds of thousands would be evacuated from the
border areas as terrorists attempt to infiltrate them. Restaurants and hotels would empty, along with the
offices of the high-tech companies of the start-up nation. The hospitals, many of them resorting to
underground facilities, would quickly be overwhelmed, even before the skies darken with the toxic fumes of
blazing chemical factories and oil refineries."
Oren predicts that Israel's harsh
response to attack, including a violent put down of likely West Bank and Gaza protests, would result in
large scale civilian casualties and draw charges of war crimes.
As Oren states, he did not invent this
prediction, it is one of the similar scenarios anticipated by Israeli military and government officials.
If such events occur, the US will be
vital to the survival of the Jewish State by providing munitions, diplomatic, political, and legal support,
and after the war, in negotiating truces, withdrawals, prisoner exchanges and presumably 'peace agreements.'
However, the US under the Trump administration is somewhat unpredictable, especially in light of the current
impeachment proceedings against Trump.
In 1973 the US helped save Israel by
providing its military with the necessary munitions. Will the US do so again? Do the Americans have the
weapons capability to counter Iran's ballistics, precision missiles and drones? More crucially, what kind of
support could America provide that would lift the spirits of humiliated and exhausted Israelis after they
emerge from underground shelters having enduring four weeks without electricity or food and see their cities
completely shattered?
This leads us to the essential issue.
Zionism vowed to emancipate the Jews from their destiny by liberating the Jews from themselves. It vowed to
bring an end to Jewish self-destruction by creating a Jewish safe haven. How is it that just seven decades
after the founding of the Jewish state, the people who have suffered throughout their history have once
again managed to create the potential for their own disaster?
ORDER IT NOW
In The Wandering Who I provide a
possible answer: "Grasping the notion of temporality is the ability to accept that the past is shaped and
revised in the light of a search for meaning. History, and historical thinking, are the capacity to rethink
the past and the future." Accordingly,
revisionism
is the true essence of historical thinking. It
turns the past into a moral message, it turns the moral into an ethical act. Sadly this is exactly where the
Jewish State is severely lacking. Despite the Zionist promise to introduce introspection, morality and
universal thinking to the emerging Hebrew culture, the Jewish State has failed to break away from the Jewish
past because it doesn't really grasp the notion of the 'past' as a dynamic elastic ethical substance.
Everyone understands that a minor Iranian miscalculation could lead to total war. One in which nuclear bombs
would rain down on Iran leaving its cities, economy, and security in ruins.
The sociopath, Ayatollah
Khameni is detached from reality and may be willing to take such risks. However, there is no reason to
believe that The Iranian military or civilian population will embrace certain suicide. It is quite likely
that the IRGC would decide that it is time for another revolution and end the theocracy, rather than die
following the dubious commands of a deranged Ayatollah.
____
The whole theory about a prolonged conflict falls apart once accurate facts are applied to the situation.
Iranian al'Hezbollah has large numbers of Katyusha pattern rockets, but very few precision weapons. And to
provide human shields for these weapons, almost all of them are in a limited number of urban centers.
The facts are clear, even if Gilad chooses to ignore them in favor of his personal fantasies. Iranian
al'Hezbollah would lose badly in a total forces engagement. The nuclear incineration of their rear echelons
would leave forward forces totally defenseless against overwhelming Israeli air superiority.
-- Would there be Israeli civilian casulities? Certainly.
-- Would Lebanon become uninhabitable? Yes.
-- Would Ayatollah Khameni perish when Israeli nukes Tehran? Absolutely.
______
There is no possible scenario where Iran "wins" if they launch a substantial first strike. And, the
Iranian military understands this as fact.
@A123
It is really fun when Gilad gets off Epstein and rape stuff and ventures into wars and Israeli security. The
generals have kept Gilad up to date on the latest and the greatest.
He is so out to lunch in his desire to see Israel panic and loose the next war facing horrible casualties
because it makes his point about how the Jews are doomed unless they cease being Jews.
He really believes
that he can solve the problem and change our destiny if we all read "Wondering
Who"
In The Wandering Who I provide a possible answer: "Grasping the notion of temporality is the ability
to accept that the past is shaped and revised in the light of a search for meaning. History, and
historical thinking, are the capacity to rethink the past and the future." Accordingly, revisionism is
the true essence of historical thinking. It turns the past into a moral message, it turns the moral into
an ethical act. Sadly this is exactly where the Jewish State is severely lacking. Despite the Zionist
promise to introduce introspection, morality and universal thinking to the emerging Hebrew culture, the
Jewish State has failed to break away from the Jewish past because it doesn't really grasp the notion of
the 'past' as a dynamic elastic ethical substance.
I wonder what it is like to wish death and destruction on a people and a country to prove your point and
call yourself an unemotional Athenian.
@A123
As you may have noticed, in the Israeli apocalyptic scenarios the Jewish state doesn't put into play the
Samson option.. it is slightly less genocidal than yourself .. you may want to ask yourself why
Israel is making a terrible mistake. The oft touted "Sampson Option" is a bogus option as Bibi, Benny Gatz
and/or any other Israeli leader knows it will be suicide if they use this option. Because even if they
emerge from the bunkers days later after using nuclear bombs against Iran, Syria, Lebanon and other European
capitals (
Samson option targets Europe
) they will be greeted with hostility and will have no
sanctuary.
Three times in world history the Jews were rescued by the Persians.
Believe it or not.
However, the US under the Trump administration is somewhat unpredictable, especially in light of the
current impeachment proceedings against Trump.
Not at all unpredictable with regards to Israel. Trump and Congress would use the last cent of US
taxpayer's money and the last drop of Anglo blood to save the place. Trump is Israel's US Viceroy and
Congress is its Colonial Parliament.
Israel's real nightmare starts when US nationalists toss out the colonialists, and Israel has to find a
way live on its own resources.
I have to think that considering the failure of military intelligence agencies in the past that no one has
any real idea how close Iran is to getting the bomb. But even if they get numbers of them and have a means
to deliver them on target it simply would mean that Iran and Israel are in a standoff. I can understand how
Israel would not want Iran to have the bomb but in reality how much difference would it make? It would only
be relevant if the two countries had already blundered into war and things were entering a final disastrous
stage. Then it would simply mean both countries would be destroyed instead of just one.
Also, not being a military man am I naive in thinking Iran might be able to buy nuclear weapons on the black
market? From North Korea, perhaps? I have got to suspect Israel will be faced with two options. Either fight
Iran sooner, before they get nukes. Or they will simply have to accept that Iran is going to be a nuclear
power. It's pretty obvious that Israel has been trying to get America to fight their war for them. But Trump
has been reluctant to do so. No wonder the Jews are chomping at the bit to find some way to get rid of him.
2020 should prove to be an interesting year.
This analysis leaves out two very significant historic military facts:
1) The 2006 Israeli invasion of Lebanon aka the "33 Day War" where in:
"Hezbollah inflicted more Israeli casualties per Arab fighter in 2006 than did any of Israel's state
opponents in the 1956, 1967, 1973, or 1982 Arab-Israeli interstate wars, and is generally acknowledge that
Israel flat out lost that war and de facto sued for a cease fire.
(see: "U.S. Department of Defense. The 2006 Lebanon Campaign and the Future of Warfare: Implications for
Army and Defense Policy." Kindle Edition.)
2) The Syrian army is currently the only army in the world that has multi-front, contiguous multi-year
'combined arms' (i.e. army, armor, artillery and air force) combat experience .
Further, the leader of Hezbollah Hassan Nasrallah in a recent interview pointed out that Hezbollah
fighting along side of the Syrian Army these past five years, now has experience in offensive warfare. In
2006 they fought strictly defensively.
In short, if an Israeli war comes again, given the experience of the Syrian and Hezbollah armies and
Syria acquiring state of the art air defense system (S 300, etc), Iranian missiles may very well be the
least of Israel's worries.
Indeed, before Iran launches missiles, Hezbollah and Syria may move to take back Shebaa Farms and Golan
Heights.
To my mind: Israel and American militaries are "paper Tigers". Israel has never fought a combined arms
war for a sustained period of time against an equally matched military. And the US not since Korea. Their
victories have always been overwhelming an inferior force.
@AaronB
For me the fact that the Jewish state indulges itself in apocalyptic and genocidal fantasies is really a
glimpse into to tribal mind.. as far as I can tell this pre traumatic stress points at severe form of
projection .. Israeli politicians and commentators attribute their own symptoms to their neighbours ..
@Rev. Spooner
' Three times in world history the Jews were rescued by the Persians.
Believe it or not.'
The Persians more or less created 'the Jews.' At any rate, a religion recognizable
as Judaism first appeared in the wake of the Persian conquests.
However, when did the Persians 'rescue' the Jews?
They allowed the creation of an autonomous Jewish state in Palestine when they overran that place around
the beginning of the seventh century AD -- but that only lasted for about twenty years anyway.
@A123
If I may: I don't know for sure what G Atzmon meant by the Samson Option; but, I have come across this
express before and I took it to mean that Israel will go to nuclear war even if means the destruction of the
Jewish State. That is, like Samson who destroyed his enemies by killing himself; Israel nuec's Iran and Iran
nuce's Israel (kills enemies and itself).
This should not be taken lightly. While it would be totally irrational for most states to take the Samson
Option, it is to my mind a plausible option for Israel. For even if the Jewish State is destroyed, the
Jewish Nation i.e. the Jewish people around the world will survive and continue on as they have these
thousands of years. But, they will be free of what they perceive as their arch enemy i.e. Iran and other
Moslems. They survived the metaphoric Holocaust and they will survive a literal one. The Jewish State may be
destroyed but not the Jewish People.
This is something not enough people comment on. Israel's military is not a mini US military, it has serious
problems and takes losses and casualties in contexts that would be shocking for another Western country that
spends as much per capita for it's military.
This is why Israel having nuclear weapons irks me so much, the more it can't rely on it's conventional
military, the more they'll lean into their nuclear deterrent, increasing the probability of it's use. (Not
dissimilar to the situation with Pakistan vis-a-vis India, though in that case, India has nukes too)
@Tom Verso
The Samson Option
The Samson Option.jpg
Author Seymour Hersh
Country United States
Language English
Genre Non-fiction
Publisher Random House
Publication date
1991
Media type Print (Hardback)
Pages 362 pp
ISBN 0-394-57006-5
OCLC 24609770
Dewey Decimal
355.8/25119/095694 20
LC Class UA853.I8 H47 1991
The Samson Option: Israel's Nuclear Arsenal and American Foreign Policy is a 1991 book by Seymour Hersh. It
details the history of Israel's nuclear weapons program and its effects on Israel-American relations. The
"Samson Option" of the book's title refers to the nuclear strategy whereby Israel would launch a massive
nuclear retaliatory strike if the state itself was being overrun, just as the Biblical figure Samson is said
to have pushed apart the pillars of a Philistine temple, bringing down the roof and killing himself and
thousands of Philistines who had gathered to see him humiliated.
According to The New York Times, Hersh
relied on Ari Ben-Menashe, a former Israeli government employee who says he worked for Israeli intelligence,
for much of his information on the state of the Israeli nuclear program. However, Hersh confirmed all of
this information with at least one other source.[1] Hersh did not travel to Israel to conduct interviews for
the book, believing that he might have been subject to the Israeli Military Censor. Nevertheless, he did
interview Israelis in the United States and Europe during his three years of research.[1]
@Fran Taubman
' If you study it, can be pretty scary. It is not just Israel. Also who wants another North Korea
blackmail game?'
You mean something like the Samson option?
Anyway, the whole discussion is silly.
No nation
-- and that included Imperial Japan in 1945, when
the chips were down -- chooses self-immolation. They always give way. Iran isn't a threat to Israel because
Iran's not going to commit national suicide, and 'the Samson Option' is bullshit as well, because six
million Jews aren't going to commit national suicide either.
Zionists such as yourself only choose to think otherwise about Iran -- in spite of the absence of any
historical evidence at all -- because it justifies your own pathological aggression towards a nation that is
(a) a thousand miles away, and (b) poses no serious threat to Israel whatsoever.
Try not attacking literally everyone you can think of. That might help. I mean, fuck -- Israel is the only
state in modern history that has attacked literally
every single one
of her neighbors, and several
more besides. Since 1948, she's attacked Jordan, Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Iran, Tunisia, and even the
United States. What's up?
Despite the Zionist promise to introduce introspection, morality and universal thinking to the
emerging Hebrew culture, the Jewish State has failed to break away from the Jewish past because it
doesn't really grasp the notion of the 'past' as a dynamic elastic ethical substance.
The Jews are always long-term losers because they teach their children that they have always been and
will forever be victims of humanity. Jew children are traumatized at an immature young age – they are
mentally damaged by the thought that humanity wants to kill them and do them harm. This notion is inculcated
deep in the Jew child's psyche. These poor children can never escape what has been implanted. (For three
thousand years, generation after generation, Jew culture has been abusing their children with dreadful
thoughts.)
Nine out of ten adult Jews are triggered into thoughts of doom by any criticism of Israel – their
reactions are visceral, and a pure reflex coming out of their brainstem.
Jews cannot be introspective because of what elder Jews have implanted in them in their youth. Their
rational emotional systems have been short-circuited.
I have seen intelligent Jews on this forum flirt with empathy for Palestinians – only to fall back into
mindless reflexive support of whatever Israel does.
Jews Are Feeling Guilty: They Should Be. Their Influence Has Been Cancerous to America
Gilad Atzmon Wed, Nov 6, 2019
It has become an institutional Jewish habit to examine how much Jews are hated by their host nations
and how fearful Jews are of their neighbours. Jewish press outlets reported yesterday that "9 out of 10
US Jews worry about anti-Semitism."
. . .
As Haartez writer Ari Shavit wrote back in 2003: "The war in Iraq was conceived by 25 neoconservative
intellectuals, most of them Jewish " Maybe some Jews now understand that the Zionist shift from a
'promised land' to the Neocon 'promised planet' doesn't reflect well on the Jews as a group.
Any separation of one group from another is a tribe. Any identity whatsoever is a tribe – because
identity sets you apart. The moment you define yourself you are tribal, because definitions distinguish
one thing from another.
The issue is that some people are not particularly tribal (i.e. Westerners) and they are open to
multiculturalism – i.e. proposition nations. However, proposition nations are very much non-tribalist places
and need non-tribalism to survive.
If tribalists talk multiculturalism and proposition nations (i.e. use deception) while practicing
tribalism, they quickly overwhelm these societies – which is where the US is today with regards to Jewish
tribalists.
What does a Jewish tribalist elite do next? And what does a (subjected) majority do next?
Michael Oren, repeated my 2011 predictions this week in the Atlantic and described a horrific scenario
for the next, and likely last, Israeli conflict.
The purpose of Oren's Atlantic article was to create alarm in the DC political corridors .."warning' that
if the US doesnt 'soon help Israel' with its Iran enemy there will be chaos and dead bodies galore .
Its propaganda but 'true' propaganda 'if' Israel were to attack Iran on their own but they wont .they aren't
capable of it alone.
They are running this same propaganda articles/warnings in Europe, saying Europe needs to 'do something'
about Iran Now!
Its basically a blackmail and scare ploy because they don't think Trump will do it for them .and of course
if Israel starts a war it will be because Trump/US deserted them like he/we did the Kurds and they were
'forced' to try and defend the world against Iran 'all alone' and Israel isn't to blame for the mess lol.
What Israel will do is try to start a war on Hezbollah 'first, as Hezbollah would be their most immediate
and dangerous threat , severely crippling Israel right at the onset of any war with Iran.
They will claim that Iran directed attacks on Israel and so the US should step in because its an attack by
Iran.
If we had anyone in DC that wasn't bought off by Jewish 'benjamin's ' they would be laughing their asses
off at this typical Jewish tactic.
Everyone understands that a minor Iranian miscalculation could lead to total war. One in which nuclear
bombs would rain down on Iran leaving its cities, economy, and security in ruins.
The sociopath, Ayatollah Khameni is detached from reality and may be willing to take such risks.
However, there is no reason to believe that The Iranian military or civilian population will embrace
certain suicide. It is quite likely that the IRGC would decide that it is time for another revolution and
end the theocracy, rather than die following the dubious commands of a deranged Ayatollah.
Kristol, you're drunk. Turn off the computer and go to bed, you shmuck.
That was the goal.
Remember the Zios in Rumsfeld's pentagon stressing how the US must dump 'old Europe"?
Even a non genius like me could figure that out .old Europe might be too much of a 'restraining ' influence
on the US.
The Jews hate Europe anyway ..just like they hate Russia.
Some interesting things popped up this week .Vindman , main testifier against Trump on Ukraine is a
Ukraine Jew, Solderman,Trump's main man on Ukraine is a Jew, also has now testified against Trump, their
attorney is also a Jew ..they all have issued statements about how the plucky "little Ukraine is fighting
against Russia for the US and world" and needs our aid and so on. Exactly the same wording and bullshit spin
the Jews use about Israel "fighting Iran to protect the US and world interest".
Plain to me the Uber Jews are trying to set up the Ukraine as a Israel satellite and weight on Russia's
flank.
I read Vindman's testimony to congress ..something is very off about the guy. he sounded numerous times
like he lost his script. He's, in his own words, a fanatical supporter of Ukraine . I don't like Trump but I
think the Ukraine deal to impeach him is a set up ..and its not coming mainly from the CIA ,its coming from
the Nat Sec Council that Vindman works for.
It is terrifying to think that in the event Israel be run by psychopaths, they might sacrifice another "6
million", while securing themselves a new Zion.
On the other hand, a peaceful transfer of the occupation of Palestine to Patagonia (and elsewhere),
without the trigger of war, would be a possible path to peace in the Middle East (not so ideal for Patagonia
though).
What would it take for either outcome to pass? I fear the former is far more likely than the latter.
I don't like Trump but I think the Ukraine deal to impeach him is a set up ..and its not coming mainly
from the CIA ,its coming from the Nat Sec Council .
Wilberweld says: November 7, 2019
at 2:11 pm GMT 100 Words Trump's problem was described in simple terms by John Connelly
when talking with Henry Kissinger. "Henry", he said, "In Washington you are judged by the men
you've destroyed". Trump has not destroyed anyone, not Comey, not Brennan, not Klapper. So he
is viewed as weak, an easy target. So they just keep piling on. Attacking Trump is viewed as a
"penalty-free activity
If AMLO were to invite the Americans into Mexico, he would be lynched. Few Americans are
aware of how much the United States is hated in Latin America, and for that matter in most of
the world. They don't know of the long series of military interventions, brutal dictators
imposed and supported, and economic rapine. Somoza, Pinochet, the Mexican-American War,
detachment of Panama from Colombia, bombardment of Veracruz, Patton's incursion–the list
could go on for pages. The Mexican public would look upon American troops not as saviors but as
invaders. Which they would be.
The incursion would not defeat the cartels, for several reasons that trump would do well to
ponder. To begin with, America starts its wars by overestimating its own powers,
underestimating the enemy, and misunderstanding the kind of war on which it is embarking. The
is exactly what Trump seems to be doing.
He probably thinks of Mexicans as just gardeners and rapists and we have all these beautiful
advanced weapons and beautiful drones and things with blinking lights. A pack of rapists armed
with garden trowels couldn't possibly be difficult to defeat by the US. I mean, get serious:
Dope dealers against the Marines? A cakewalk.
You know, like Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria. That sort of cakewalk.
Let's think what an expedition against the narcos would entail, what it would face.
To begin with, Mexico is a huge country of 127 million souls with the narcos spread unevenly
across it. You can't police a nation that size with a small force, or even with a large force.
A (preposterous) million soldiers would be well under one percent of the population. Success
would be impossible even if that population helped you. Which it wouldn't.
Other problems exist. Many, many of them.
Let's consider terrain. Terrain is what militaries fight in. Start with the Sierra Madre,
which I suspect Trump doesn't know from Madre Teresa. This is the brutally inhospitable
mountain range in the northwest of Mexico, from which a great many of the narcos come.(Sinaloa
is next door.) Forestation is dense, slopes steep, communication only by narrow trails that the
natives know as well as you know how to find your bathroom. Nobody else knows them. American
infantry would be helpless here. The Narcos would be found only when they chose to be found,
which would not be at opportune moments.
The Sierra Madre Occidental, home of many of the drug traffickers. I have walked in these
mountains, or tried to. It is impossible for infantry, worse for armor, and airplanes can't see
through the trees.
The Tarahumara Indians live in the Sierra Madre. They frequent the trails, sometimes in
groups, and carry things not identifiable from the air. In frustration American forces would do
what they always do: start bombing, or launching Hellfires from drones, at what they think are,
or think may be, or hope might be, narcos. Frequently they would kill innocents having nothing
to do with drugs. This wouldn't bother the military, certainly not remote drone operators in
Colorado or somewhere. They get paid anyway. The Indians who just had their families turned
into science projects couldn't do anything about it.
Well, nothing but join the narcos, who might call this a "force multiplier."
Some other northern Mexican terrain. The Duarte Bridge between Sinaloa and Durango. A
company commander, looking at it, would would have PTSD in advance, just to get a start on
things.
Of the rest of Mexico, much consists of jungle, presenting the same problems as the Sierra
Madre, and of cities and villages. Here we encounter the problem that has proved disastrous for
US forces in war after war: there is no way to tell who is a narco and who isn't.
In cities and towns, narcos are indistinguishable from the general population.
How–precisely how, I want to know–would American troops, kitted out in body armor
and goggles and looking like idiots, fight the narcos in villages with which they were
unfamiliar? The narcos, well armed, would pick off GIs from windows, whereupon the Americans
would respond by firing at random, calling in air strikes, and otherwise killing locals. These
would now hate Americans. The narcos know this. They would use it.
Culiacan, Sinaloa, Chapo's home city. It has a high concentration of narcos. Suppose that
you are an infantry officer, sent to "fight the cartels." You have, say, twenty troops with
you, all with hi-tech equipment and things dangling. How do you propose to fight the cartels
here? Which of the people in the photo, if any, are narcos? You could ask them. That would
work.
Don't expect help from the locals. Most would much rather see you killed than the narcos.
And if they collaborated they and their families would be killed. This would discourage them.
Bright ideas?
Now a point that Schwarzehairdye in the White House has likely not grasped. The narcos are
Mexicans. So is the population. You know, brown, speak Spanish, that kind of thing. The
invaders would not be Mexicans. This matters. Villagers usually do not hate the narcos. These
provide jobs, buy their marijuana crops, often do Robin Hood things to help the locals. Pablo
Escobar did this, Al Capone, Chapo Guzman. There is a whole genre of popular music,
narcocorridos, celebrating the doings of the drug trade. (Corridos Prohibidos ,
by LosTigres del Norte, for example). Amazon has the CD.
Which means that they would side with the narcos instead of the already-hated soldiers,
putos gringos cabrones, que se chinguen sus putas madres.
Further, much of Mexico doesn't much like its government.
And of course the narcos will have the option of fading into the population and waiting for
the gringos to go home. This means that the invasion would become an occupation. The
invading forces would thus need bases, which would become permanent. Bases where? All over the
country, which is where the narcos are?
Getting the American military into one's country is much easier than getting it out. The
world knows this. Mexicans assuredly do. They know that America has wrecked country after
country in the Mideast, always to do something good about democracy and human rights. They know
that America is squeezing Venezuela to get control of its oil, squeezing Iran for the same
reason, attacked Iraq for the same reason, has troops in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait for the same
reason, and has just confiscated Syria's oil . Mexico has oil. So when Trump wants to send the
military to "help" fight drugs, what do you suppose the Mexicans suspect?
Another point: Roughly a million American expats live happily in Mexico. These would be
hostages, and they–we–are soft targets. The drones kill five narcos, and the narcos
kill five expats. Or ten, or fifty. What does Washington do now?
Finally, consider what happens when you bomb a country, make life dangerous, kill its
children, destroy the economy and impoverish its people? Answer: They go somewhere else. With
Mexico being made unlivable, Mexicans would have two choices of somewhere else, Guatemala and
.See whether you can fill in the blank. Maybe four or five million of them.
Nuff said. May God protect Mexico from Yanquis who would do it good, from advisers, and then
adviser creep, and then occupation, and then from badly led militaries who have no idea where
they are.
"... Journalist Glenn Greenwald summarized the testy exchange as Gabbard "responding with righteous rage but also great dignity to the disgusting smears of Democrats about her patriotism and loyalty." ..."
"... What a woman! Get Trump out and give the POTUS to Tulsi. Wonderful. I will definitely contribute to her campaign. ..."
"... What's funny about the whole thing is that the 'regular viewers' of the view are some of the most programmable 'useless' idiots that this (excuse for a country) has ever seen.... ..."
"... The View -- owned by Disney. Openly misandrist show -- in the shows more than 2 decades, having gone through dozens of hosts, the show has never had a male host. How's that for "inclusivity"? ..."
Democratic presidential candidate and Hawaii congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard faced the
increasingly nasty smears branding her a Russian asset and "traitor" head on during The View on
Wednesday, following the recent spat with Hillary Clinton who suggested the
Kremlin was "grooming" Gabbard to be a third-party candidate .
"Some of you have accused me of being a traitor to my country, a Russian asset, a Trojan
horse, or a useful idiot I think was the term that you used," Gabbard told the panel, after in
prior episodes Joy Behar especially had agreed with and aggressively amplified Hillary's
baseless claims. The panel had also previously called her a Trojan horse. Gabbard came out
swinging in her remarks: "It's offensive to me as a soldier, as an American, as a member of
Congress, as a veteran, and frankly as a woman, to be so demeaned in such a way."
"Well, useful," Behar said, referencing her previously labeling the Iraq war veteran
Moscow's 'useful idiot'. "But that's a Russian term, they use that," she added. "Are You
Calling Me Stupid?" Gabbard at one point angrily shoots back. And demonstrating just how low
and idiotic, and without substantive argument the "controversy" around Gabbard has become,
Behar at one point even offers as 'evidence' of the presidential candidate's supposed Russian
ties that she's appeared on FOX's Tucker Carlson Tonight on multiple occasions.
"I am a strong and intelligent woman of color, who has dedicated almost all of my adult life
to protecting the safety, security & liberty of Americans," Gabbard fired back.
She also schooled the panel on her distinguished military career and slammed Behar's
likening her to Putin's "useful idiot" -- explaining also that she joined the Army after the
9/11 attacks but that her country lied to her in invading Iraq.
"You are implying that I am too stupid, and too naive, and lack the intelligence to know
what I am doing," she further counter-attacked Behar with.
The full segment from Wednesday's The View appearance is below, with the fight over Behar's
"useful idiot" remarks beginning at the 1-min mark:
One astounding moment came when Gabbard reiterated her position that Hillary Clinton is a
"warmonger," at which point Behar actually asked, "What's your evidence of that?"
A perplexed Gabbard immediately shot back, "Are you serious?"
Journalist Glenn Greenwald summarized the testy exchange as Gabbard "responding with
righteous rage but also great dignity to the disgusting smears of Democrats about her
patriotism and loyalty."
What's funny about the whole thing is that the 'regular viewers' of the view are some of
the most programmable 'useless' idiots that this (excuse for a country) has ever seen....
The View -- owned by Disney. Openly misandrist show -- in the shows more than 2 decades, having gone through dozens of
hosts, the show has never had a male host. How's that for "inclusivity"?
Next time you take the kids to the movies or to a themepark, think twice about patronizing
Disney.
I am fearful the Republic for which We Stand, is falling, right before our eyes. I guess
we disengaged at some point, sad. We are all Americans, what happened to the common ground?
It is disappearing...
Joy Behar is a so fugly. She's a loudmouth ******, who is even uglier than the fat negress
with the stupid looking blonde dregs. ****, what a hideous show. Anyone who watches that POS
show is a ******* low IQ moron .
it took Eastern Europe a decade (1990-2000) to undo 45 years of communism, and regain
functional normality by local terms.
And it will only take slightly longer for neoliberalism, open borders ideology and
globo-decadence to utterly destroy Eastern Europe. At which time they'll be wishing they
still had the communists in power.
Kirk ludicrously believes that, the Israeli attempt to sink the USS Liberty, is a conspiracy
theory. He's a privileged brat, and he needs a spanking. Now all we have to do is find his
his father. But to give him any sort of acknowledgement is plain stupid. No offense intended.
@bevin | Nov 8 2019 18:29 utc | 12
Exactly, and thanks.
Question: Could Bloomberg change the equation, the equation being that neither Sanders nor
Warren not Biden have what it takes to defeat Trump?
And thank you Tulsi Gabbard for speaking out against the war machine and the penal gulag.
With all the vitriol being leveled against Tulsi to paint her as a Russian plant or useful
idiot or whatever, whether from Hillary or the worthless females on the view, a daytime
television show aimed at influencing the political opinion of stay-at-home middlebrow moms
and retirees (Including low energy males), I think my earlier thought that without the Djt
phenomenon, there would be no Tulsi, is proven more and more correct with each passing day.
And for those suffering from such a quickening case of tds, unable to point out that
before the current potus, the tpp was a thing, fake news was as of yet unexposed, Syria was a
powderkeg with the potential of a Russophobic true believer ready to command and chief, and
where immigration as a national question had not been brought to bear on a people that had
been for decades suffering the effect of the evil of cheap, exploitative labor, your case
against the man is extremely misguided and, dare I say, you are the useful idiot here.
Perhaps
one reason Gabbard's political career will continue to be successful:
"I go on Tucker Carlson, I go on Bret Baier, I go on Sean Hannity, I go on MSNBC, I go on
CNN -- I am here to speak to every single American in this country about the unifying
leadership that I want to bring as president, not just speak to those who agree with me."
IIRC, Sanders is the only other candidate who consistently says we need to do this (Change
America) together. IMO, there's only one way Gabbard and Sanders will be nominated next year
in Milwaukee: That's because We the People hijack the Convention, driving out the
Clintonistas, DNC pukes, and their Super Delegates and nominate them via proclamation. All
that's lacking to attain such an outcome is the effort, the will, the realization that
nothing good's going to happen for We the People unless We do it Ourselves.
Ordinary people accept uncritically and uncomplainingly the laws of nature and the
fundamental and insurmountable limitations they set to the human condition. For liberals, who
have agreed with Francis Bacon since the 17th century that nature is an enemy to be subjugated,
exploited, and ultimately transcended, the program of mobilized rationalism this ambition
requires is reasonable and acceptable. But it is irrational and intolerable to non-liberals,
especially as they are the same people whom liberals, obsessed with psychology and
psychological health, view as anti-social individuals in need of therapeutic treatment and
reeducation to convert them to liberalism. One of the most famous liberals of the 20th century,
John Maynard Keynes, was in this respect a distinguished exception. "[The] pseudo-rational view
of human nature [before 1914]," he believed, "led to a thinness, a superficiality not only of
judgment but of feeling .The attribution of rationality to human nature, instead of enriching
it, now seems to me to have impoverished it."
Keynes identified this grave intellectual error as having been a major cause of the Great
War when he likened his generation to "water-spiders, gracefully skimming, as light and
reasonable as air, the surface of a stream without any contact at all with the eddies and
currents below." John Gray, writing recently in The New Statesman , compared this
sublime naivete in the years immediately preceding the war to the utter inability of
contemporary British elites to comprehend the meaning of the results of the national referendum
three years ago on whether the United Kingdom should remain within the European Union or
withdraw from it. Liberals today, he asserted, cannot grasp the fact that the post-Cold War era
is over and done. "If a majority in Sunderland continues to support Brexit despite the threat
it poses to Nissan [which operates a plant in the vicinity] the reason can only be [in the eyes
of liberals] that they are irrational and stupid. The possibility that they and millions of
others value some things more than economic gain is not considered." Gray added, "Persistently
denying respect to Leave voters in this way can only bring to Britain the dangerous populism
that is steadily marching across the European continent [and that Remainers insist on ignoring,
seeing the EU as a noble dream of mankind]."
Since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, liberals have been insisting that liberalism is
the future of democracy. Francis Fukuyama even famously argued that liberal-democratic
capitalism represents the end of history. Alain de Benoist, the French political philosopher,
says the opposite. Liberalism and democracy, he thinks, in fact are incompatible, as the first
endows the second with an agenda that commits democracy to a mission having nothing to do with
the restricted practical task it was designed for. Modern liberalism is not a creation of
political philosophy. It is a religion that has developed a body of religious law that elevates
administration over politics, an inversion that another French scholar, Pierre Manent, has also
noted. Since democratic politics is a matter of popular involvement, while administration is
the business of trained specialists, it is unsurprising that the end, or eclipse, of politics
should be a major contributing cause of "populist" rebellion. This movement away from politics
does not end there. As political activity diminishes and the administrative sphere expands ,
the rule of law -- of lawyers and judges -- takes its place. Lawyers and judges are human
beings. The most successful of them, in liberal societies, are liberals as well. And because so
much of law has become discretionary, in liberal societies the law is chiefly liberal law. In
point of fact it isn't really law at all but, as Joseph Sobran remarked decades ago, only bad
philosophy by which judges discover "penumbras" of meaning in legal documents and the
inalienable right of individuals to determine their own reality for themselves -- and afterward
impose it on society at large through the courts.
So politics is replaced by administration; administration reinforced or displaced by law;
and law succeeded by bad law based on personal whim. The result is that an increasingly narrow
space remains in public life for ordinary citizens, often aggrieved ones -- the "populists" --
to play a part in the res publica. Their absence, of course, is conspicuously
unregretted by "egalitarian" liberals. Significantly, the single demand liberals never make on
behalf of "inclusiveness" is that uneducated people be represented proportionately at the
higher levels of society with educated ones, the stupid along with the clever. Yet competency
in politics has never been dependent on technical expertise. Many highly effective, brilliant,
even great politicians have been uneducated people or persons of mediocre intelligence for
which they compensated by talent and innate shrewdness.
Benoist, a brilliant writer insufficiently known in the English-speaking world, attributes
the prevalence of "expertocracy" in part to the idea that many "negative phenomena" are also
inevitable ones. Among these are undesirable and destructive advances in technology, which (it
is argued) answers only to a logic of its own, and global migration, considered by Western
technocrats and political "experts" to be unstoppable and irresistible. These things, Benoist
says, "have been decreed inevitable because we have lost the habit of asking ourselves about
goals, and because we are accustomed to the idea that it is no longer possible to defend a
decision (which is effectively more and more the case)." Whence comes this negativity, this
defeatism?
The answer seems clear enough. The "elites," as the upper directing (and owning) strata of
the Western world are known, have not lost their will. That is confirmed by their insistent
unflagging pursuit of their globalist-technocratic project and by their relentless
determination to impose it on all and sundry who disagree with it. What they have lost
is faith in themselves; not of course as the ruthless omnicompetent titans of their imagination
but as descendants of the greatest civilization known to history, of the tradition that
nourished this civilization and allowed it to develop, and of the religion that formed the
basis of that tradition. They have lost their faith in the God Who is left no place in their
system, as the decision made by the European Union to exclude any reference in its founding
documents to Europe's Christian origins and traditions makes agonizingly plain. Nevertheless
human nature is naturally conservative; and while a large proportion of the comfortable Western
peoples have doubtless grown lazy, fat, materialistic, careless, conformist, and cowardly, the
fact remains that in order truly to disbelieve one needs to deny belief explicitly and
affirmatively, and this the majority of Christians in the West have not done. They are lapsed,
not apostatized, from their faith. Similarly, polls that claim to show that such-and-such a
percentage of the population have no religion, no church, and no belief in God cannot determine
the number of those who "feel" in some vague and indeterminate way, even if they do not
"believe." Nor can they assess in what proportion the popular classes have retained their
acceptance of the world as God made it, and of the natural law that men may deny and defy, but
not alter. What the common people lack in the way of formal knowledge they make up for by
common sense, aided by unreflective experience. Unlike Bishop Berkeley, but exactly like Dr.
Johnson, they test and affirm reality by kicking the rock in their path. Unlike Christoper
Hitchens too, but just like T.S. Eliot, they have become conscious of the stony rubbish, the
dead trees, and the dry stones that comprise the environment of the barren world -- a world in
its unmaking -- that surrounds them. They may not be able to express this consciousness in
poetry but they feel it much as the poets do, though perhaps less keenly than a developed
intellect allows for.
Populism is not, as a contemporary French lumiere has opined, the victory "of ill-educated
people over the well-educated," nor, in the estimation of another representative of the Second
Age of Enlightenment, "a denial of progress itself." It is something just as simple, but
infinitely more basic and healthy. It is the unlettered but true apprehension that the old
familiar world is being turned upside down, roundabout, and inside-out by the people who have
seized control of it and are beavering away at their task of destruction; a process that in
their minds is rather one of reimagination to be succeeded by the glorious recreation of the
original inferior thing.
Chilton Williamson Jr. is the former editor of Chronicles: A Magazine of American
Culture and the author of many books, including fiction and nonfiction. His latest
novel, The Last Westerner, is due soon from Perkunas Press .
If you think this is some kind of 'gotcha' question you don't know the good folks at Unz.
Speaking only for myself, I don't want non-Europeans here in any significant numbers, 100
years ago we got all the diversity we could eat from Europe alone, diversity that could and
did assimilate, unlike today when assimilation is actually fought against.
Whites were the first to build habitable buildings more than four storeys high, the first to
construct bridges to carry the weight of steam trains, which we also invented, and the safe and
secure mines that produced the coal that smelted the metal that formed the engines that powered
the trains with the coal we mined.
We are -- in a word -- astonishing. In invention and innovation we are elves and everyone
else are orcs, and the orcs despise us for it all whilst coveting the things we have
created.
Technology is our culture, and art and music and beautiful soaring cathedrals, penicillin
and botany, flushing toilets and refrigeration and general anesthesia and Shakespeare.
Congratulations to James Kirkpatrick for an excellent article.
Such nonsense is irrelevant to the lived experience of young (and mostly white) campus
conservatives, who are confronted with radical anti-white politics, corporate censorship,
and the ruinous cost of family formation.
Yes, Patriotism, the Nationalist desire to rescue America, and Restore our Democratic
Republic, rests in the hearts of all true Citizens. The so-called 'Right & Left' politics
is making way for a politics defined by Patriotism, Nationalism, Economic control &
policies that benefit all our citizens, not just the rich.
The truth of this observation lies in Kirkpatricks fine essay, complete with
numerous visual supports.
Congrats to Prison Planet for not completely burying the story (as the rest of the
Mainstream Media has done).
Why are they (the Zionist owned & controlled Mainstream media), not asking -the
whereabouts of Ms. Maxwell? Is she with Epstein? In the Entity, Monte Carlo, Switzerland, the
Baleares, Caribbean, on one of the Rothschild's Estates?
Upcoming announcement: Hollywood's Oligarch owners & controllers are producing
a Film about the lives of Epstein/Maxwell. The Film will not mention MOSSAD, but might
misdirect by including reference to "bad elements within the CIA." Film will also have a
brief flash of Casino Trump with Epstein, but no mention of Bill Clinton (in a blue dress),
or former Entity Prime minister, Ehud Barak. Instead of Ethnic Cleansing the Palestinian
People, Hollywood's Traitor Moguls will continue their Brain Cleansing/Washing of the
American People.
Title of the Film will be: The Chosen Ones – Their Private Encounters with little
Girls, Boys, and Owned Americans.
Dave Reilly, who asked Charlie Kirk "how does anal sex help us win the culture war" at a
TPUSA event, joins Henrik and Lana for a segment during Flashback Friday November 1, 2019. We
discuss the rift inside the conservative movement. Is is going to be America First or Israel
First? Additionally, how are values not traditionally associated with conservative activists
going to help win over more people to their cause.
Mainstream Conservatives have no answer to moral questions on sodomy, fornication,
adultery, et cetera, as it pertains to the culture war, and this opens up opportunities for
interlopers. Dave will not have much competition on that topic. I admire the bravery.
Thanks for the post, good interview. Dave Reilly seems like decent fellow, but his "out of
the closet" Roman Catholic material will only work on religious cable shows. It's hard to
take, talking freedom with a back drop of massacres, indulgences, crusades, inquisitions, and
a millennium of Pedophile cover ups.
Gays try to contribute their lifestyle to everyone else. They can contribute but don't
push something I don't agree with on me. I am 100% for equality for everyone
@DanFromCT Well then, thank god for Tucker Carlson for going against the grain. He is
against all the Middle East wars, and wants to bring the troops home and put them on our
Southern Border. His is the only show that I watch anymore, and he pushes back from Fox's
Israel-first orthodoxy as much as he can and still keep his job, which he wouldn't have if
not for his high ratings. Tucker destroyed ultra hawk neocon John Bolton shortly before Trump
stupidly appointed him as his NSA.
BTW, Hannity is a war pig, who happens to be right on one issue – supporting Trump
against the democrat coup. And Buck is also right, Epstein did not kill himself.
@Patricus You are a victim of finance capitalism propaganda. Communism is Marxism, not
socialism. Socialists do not outright reject private ownership, the goal was co-ops to
displace finance capital. Co-ops are corporations where every member has only one share. The
majority decides, not one shareholder with 50.1% of the shares. The state is not the worker.
Real socialists are opposed to private central banks. I haven't heard any of the allegedly
"far left" Democratic Presidential candidates suggest nationalizing the Fed. Ron Paul was
more of a socialist than they are on that one.
Also part of the brainwashing is the absolute failure of the vast majority of Americans,
who fail to understand that immigration is the reserve army of capital, used to attack the
people of the nation. It lowers wages and working conditions; produces more pollution;
increases living costs; lowers standards of living; and most importantly, increases
profits
Any real nationalism, out of necessity, will have socialist aspects, because doing what is
right for the nation, in the truest sense of the word, means that the best solution can come
from anywhere on the political spectrum. Governments "own" armies. Is that communism, or
should it be a government asset that should be privatized just as the US government
privatized the control of its currency.
As long as people dwell in the land of "left" and "right" the owners will continue to
divide. One solution would be to ban political parties and require all candidates running for
office to be funded equally, out of the public purse. That would make candidates have to face
their electorate more directly, and make them more responsive to the electorate, rather than
the party. In Congress, the political parties would not get to choose committee chairs,
individuals would have to earn the respect of their peers for that.
@follyofwar Tucker Carlson is the only news show I can watch, too. The rest is pretty
obviously intended to neutralize the rise of native leadership with the relentless
insinuation that all we can do is whine like Lou Dobbs and his guests, vote Republican, and
show what we're made of by blowing hot air out our asses like Hannity with his mawkish
imbecilities about America still being great because he gets great deals at Costco. Sean wuvs
America and the gal who follows him turns to American-hating Alan Dershowitz to update us
about the espionage of his long-term client Jeffrey Epstein. Check.
Just yesterday the kosher msm was mendaciously portraying our Army's combat vets as baby
killers, while today no one says a word when Fox' toadeaters tout that "muh brothers, muh
mission" fake and phony honor among "warriors" -- now all heroes of course, just for putting
on the uniform for Eretz Israel and the Yinon Plan. More importantly, Fox News' elaborate
efforts concealing Israel's culpability for 9/11 constitutes, as a matter of law, powerful
circumstantial evidence of their guilt in the greatest act of treason against this country in
its history.
Fox News' basecamp commando and armchair warrior types were outed by Homer's Achilles in
the ninth century BC, in the Iliad. As Pope's translation has it,
O monster! Mixed of insolence and fear,
Thou dog in forehead, but in heart a deer!
When wert thou known in ambush'd fights to dare,
Or nobly face the horrid front of war?
'Tis ours, the chance of fighting fields to try;
Thine to look on, and bid the valiant die.
How dare Fox News demand we honor the soldiers who foolishly believed Fox News that they
were fighting for their country. They still go in droves to their possible deaths, mistaking
the costumed bureaucrats in the Pentagon who serve Israel first in all things for warrior
patriots like themselves. I do not believe a military whose leadership's chief trait is
servility toward a foreign nation and betrayal of its own can survive no matter how much
money is counterfeited by the Treasury out of thin air to pay its bills.
I started out thinking this article might actually be helpful. The only real issue is that it
doesn't make any clear distinctions between what the author references as "conservative inc."
and conservatism. And the reference material doesn't do much to clarify the matter. I am not
obtuse the difficulties of identifying or defining what a conservative is at present. given
the massacre of its principles in practice as well as abandoning the same for political
purposes.
But if in fact, you want to recognize that there is a damaging vent of so conservatives
that is actually anything but or damaging so deep it needs confronting then you have to
tackle the difficult but instrumental aspect of defining in some manner what is meant by
conservatism verses "conservative inc."
From a communicative perspective using the term conservative inc. is problematic because
it suggests strongly that "conservatism" as an ethos is under false -- by definition –
use of the word anchored by "incorporation".
I am unclear how inc. makes it distinct.
Clearly what the article refers to are "beltway" political or left and far left
conservatives, even it's possible to be far or left and still be a conservative. Those labels
would make matters more clear, even if one did not define them the distinctions they would
provide some manner recognizable distinction -- broadly speaking conservative relativity or
relative conservatives. Those who use conservative merely as a tool for political, social or
economic advantage.
And there are several issues that are outstanding to conservative ethos and practice
1. a divine authority
2. integrity of objective realities
3. the purpose of order and prudence not as an end but to the means best for all concerned
to just society -- fair playing fields.
4. a respect and support for the mechanisms (institutions) that enable justice and
fairness
5. limited government – not merely understood as "small" but least intrusive in the
lives of citizens
6. change and improvement are part of any social order -- however, the means chosen is
predicated on effectively doing so minus the damaging effects of abrupt and disorderly
attend.
7. understands the pillars of successful societies and supports them: family, local
community, regional, state and national mechanisms – each with attendant
responsibilities . . .
The frame work for US citizens is embodied in the historical documents of the Declaration
of Independence and the Constitution of the US neither of which are universal documents but
unique as written and intended to the formulation of the US of America and her alone.
Cuckold - Wikipedia A cuckold is the husband of an
adulterous wife. In evolutionary biology, the term is also applied
to males who are unwittingly investing parental effort
in offspring that are not genetically their own. [1]
One definition of "cuckservative" is a conservative who sells out, In a 2015 interview with
Breitbart News, Ben Harrison said he did not
support any presidential candidate in
the 2016 election, but said he admires Trump for "shaking up the
neocon-controlled
Republican Party
Notable quotes:
"... If you're asking how many people might agree with the underlying argument -- that the conservative movement has accommodated the cultural left for too long -- the answer might be millions. ..."
"... As many as 45 percent of self-identified "conservative Republicans" oppose any legal status for undocumented immigrants -- i.e., they oppose the establishment Republican position, as represented by Jeb Bush and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. ..."
Late last week, a neologism was born. Twitter was the incubator. "Cuckservative," a portmanteau of "conservative" and "cuckold"
(i.e. a man whose wife has cheated on him)
burned up Twitter as fans of Donald Trump's politicking warred with the movement conservatives who opposed it.
... ... ...
Who are the "cuckservatives?"
You might be one! The hashtag's targets are conservatives who seem to have made peace with elements alien to traditional white
Americanism. That could mean the transgender movement; it could mean non-white immigrants. Certainly, criticizing Trump's visit to
the border, saying he will alienate certain voters, is a trial run for cuckservative status.
"Just look at them!" said Spencer. "Glenn Beck, Erik [sic] Erickson, Mike Huckabee. They're mediocrities, or sub-mediocrities.
They're grinning, obese doofuses. No person with a deep soul -- no person who wants to take part in a moment that's idealistic,
that's going to change the world -- would want to be a part of 'conservatism.' In a way, the current 'cucks' are the residue of
the Bush era. They were the 'conservative' and 'Religious Right' allies of the neoconservatives. They're still around, for no
apparent reason."
What's the opposite of a "cuckservative," and how many of those people are there? There's no catch-all term, and the answer depends
on how you limit results. If it's just the people using the new term, then it's a limited number of activists online. The white nationalism
represented by Spencer has struggled to find footing. Youth for Western Civilization, a student group that attempted to bring millennials
on campus into the "traditionalist" cause, burned brightly for a few years, then went inactive.
If you're asking how many people might agree with the underlying argument -- that the conservative movement has accommodated
the cultural left for too long -- the answer might be millions.
As many as 45 percent of self-identified "conservative Republicans"
oppose any legal status for undocumented immigrants -- i.e., they oppose the establishment Republican position, as represented
by Jeb Bush and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
it took Eastern Europe a decade (1990-2000) to undo 45 years of communism, and regain
functional normality by local terms.
And it will only take slightly longer for neoliberalism, open borders ideology and
globo-decadence to utterly destroy Eastern Europe. At which time they'll be wishing they
still had the communists in power.
"... The Democratic establishment is deeply and widely imbued with rancid Russophobic attitudes. Most telling was (and remains) a core "Russiagate" allegation that "Russia attacked American democracy during the 2016 presidential election" on Trump's behalf -- an "attack" so nefarious it has often been equated with Pearl Harbor. ..."
"... We have also learned that the heads of America's intelligence agencies under President Obama, especially John Brennan of the CIA and James Clapper, director of National Intelligence, felt themselves entitled to try to undermine an American presidential candidacy and subsequent presidency, that of Donald Trump. ..."
"... We also learned that, contrary to Democratic dogma, the mainstream "free press" cannot be fully trusted to readily expose such abuses of power. ..."
"... Opponents of Barr's investigation into the origins of Russiagate say it is impermissible or unprecedented to "investigate the investigators." But the bipartisan Church Committee, based in the US Senate, did so in the mid-1970s. It exposed many abuses by US intelligence agencies, particularly by the CIA, and adopted remedies that it believed would be permanent. Clearly, they have not been. ..."
"... However well-intentioned Barr may be, he is Trump's attorney general and therefore not fully credible. As I have also argued repeatedly, a new Church Committee is urgently needed. It's time for honorable members of the Senate of both parties to do their duty. ..."
Almost daily for three years, Democrats and their media have told us very bad things about
Donald Trump's life, character, and presidency. Some of them are true. But in the process, we
have also learned some lamentable, even alarming, things about the Democratic Party
establishment, including self-professed liberals. Consider the following:
The Democratic establishment is deeply and widely imbued with rancid Russophobic
attitudes. Most telling was (and remains) a core "Russiagate" allegation that "Russia
attacked American democracy during the 2016 presidential election" on Trump's behalf -- an
"attack" so nefarious it has often been equated with Pearl Harbor. But there was no
"attack" in 2016, only, as I have
previously explained , ritualistic "meddling" of the kind that both Russia and America
have undertaken in the other's elections for decades. Little can be more phobic than the
allegation or belief that one has been "attacked by a hostile" entity. And yet this myth and
its false narrative persist in the Democratic Party's discourse, campaigning, and
fund-raising. We have also learned that the heads of America's intelligence agencies
under President Obama, especially John Brennan of the CIA and James Clapper, director of
National Intelligence, felt themselves entitled to try to undermine an American presidential
candidacy and subsequent presidency, that of Donald Trump. Early on, I termed this
operation " Intelgate ," and it has
since been well documented by other writers, including
Lee Smith in his new book . Intel officials did so in tacit alliance with certain
leading, and equally Russophobic, members of the Democratic Party, which had once opposed
such transgressions. This may be the most alarming revelation of the Trump years: Trump will
leave power, but these self-aggrandizing intelligence agencies will remain. We also
learned that, contrary to Democratic dogma, the mainstream "free press" cannot be fully
trusted to readily expose such abuses of power. Indeed, what the mainstream media --
leading national newspapers and two cable news networks, in particular -- chose to cover and
report, and chose not to cover and report, made the abuses and consequences of Russiagate
allegations possible. Even now, exceedingly influential publications such as The New York
Times seem
eager to delegitimize the investigation by Attorney General William Barr and
his appointed special investigator John Durham into the origins of Russiagate. Barr's
critics accuse him of fabricating a "conspiracy theory" on behalf of Trump. But the real, or
grandest, conspiracy theory was the Russiagate allegation of "collusion" between Trump and
the Kremlin, an accusation that was -- or should have been -- discredited by the Robert
Mueller report. And we have learned, or should have learned, that for all the talk by
Democrats about Trump as a danger to US national security, it is their Russiagate allegations
that truly endanger it. Consider two examples. Russia's new "hyper-sonic" missiles, which can
elude US missile-defense systems, make new nuclear arms negotiations with Moscow imperative
and urgent. If only for the sake of his legacy, Trump is likely to want to do so. But even if
he is able to, will Trump be entrusted enough to conduct negotiations as successfully as did
his predecessors in the White House, given the "Putin puppet" and "Kremlin stooge"
accusations still being directed at him? Similarly, as I have asked repeatedly, if confronted
with a US-Russian Cuban missile–like crisis -- anywhere Washington and Moscow are
currently eyeball-to-eyeball militarily, from the Baltic region and Ukraine to Syria -- will
Trump be as free politically as was President John F. Kennedy to resolve it without war? Here
too there is an inconvenient truth: To the extent that Democrats any longer seriously discuss
national security in the context of US-Russian relations, it mostly involves vilifying both
Trump and Russian leader Vladimir Putin. (Recall also that previous presidents were free to
negotiate with Russia's Soviet communist leaders, even encouraged to do so, whereas the
demonized Putin is an anti-communist, post-Soviet leader.)
The current state of US-Russian relations is unprecedentedly dangerous, not only due to
reasons cited here -- a new Cold War fraught with the possibility of hot war. Whether President
Trump serves one or two terms, he must be fully empowered to cope with the multiple
possibilities of a US-Russian military confrontation. That requires ridding him and our nation
of Russiagate allegations -- and that in turn requires learning how such allegations
originated.
Opponents of Barr's investigation into the origins of Russiagate say it is impermissible
or unprecedented to "investigate the investigators." But the bipartisan Church Committee, based
in the US Senate, did so in the mid-1970s. It exposed many abuses by US intelligence agencies,
particularly by the CIA, and adopted remedies that it believed would be permanent. Clearly,
they have not been.
However well-intentioned Barr may be, he is Trump's attorney general and therefore not
fully credible. As I have also argued repeatedly, a new Church Committee is urgently needed.
It's time for honorable members of the Senate of both parties to do their duty.
"... The Clinton camp was hardly absent from social media during the 2016 race. The barely-legal activities of Clintonite David Brock were previously reported by this author to have included $2 million in funding for the creation of an online " troll army " under the name Shareblue. The LA Times described the project as meant to "to appear to be coming organically from people and their social media networks in a groundswell of activism, when in fact it is highly paid and highly tactical." In other words, the effort attempted to create a false sense of consensus in support for the Clinton campaign. ..."
"... In terms of interference in the actual election process, the New York City Board of Elections was shown to have purged over one hundred thousand Democratic voters in Brooklyn from the rolls before the 2016 primary, a move that the Department of Justice found broke federal law . Despite this, no prosecution for the breach was ever attempted. ..."
"... In 2017, the Observer reported that the DNC's defense counsel argued against claims that the party defrauded Sanders' supporters by favoring Clinton, reasoning that Sanders' supporters knew the process was rigged. Again: instead of arguing that the primary was neutral and unbiased in accordance with its charter, the DNC's lawyers argued that it was the party's right to select candidates. ..."
"... The DNC defense counsel's argument throughout the course of the DNC fraud lawsuit doubled down repeatedly in defense of the party's right to favor one candidate over another, at one point actually claiming that such favoritism was protected by the First Amendment . ..."
"... The DNC's shameless defense of its own rigging disemboweled the most fundamental organs of the U.S. body politic. This no indication that the DNC will not resort to the same tactics in the 2020 primary race, ..."
"... f Debbie Wasserman Schultz's role as disgraced chairwoman of the DNC and her forced 2016 resignation wasn't enough, serious interference was also alleged in the wake of two contests between Wasserman Schultz and professor Tim Canova in Florida's 23rd congressional district. Canova and Wasserman Schultz first faced off in a 2016 Democratic primary race, followed by a 2018 general congressional election in which Canova ran as an independent. ..."
"... Debacles followed both contests, including improper vote counts, illegal ballot destruction , improper transportation of ballots, and generally shameless displays of cronyism. After the controversial results of the initial primary race against Wasserman Schultz, Canova sought to have ballots checked for irregularities, as the Sun-Sentinel reported at the time: ..."
"... Ultimately, Canova was granted a summary judgment against Snipes, finding that she had committed what amounted to multiple felonies. Nonetheless, Snipes was not prosecuted and remained elections supervisor through to the 2018 midterms. ..."
"... Hillary Clinton's recent comments to the effect that Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard is being "groomed" by Russia, and that the former Green Party Presidential candidate Dr. Jill Stein is a "Russian asset", were soon echoed by DNC-friendly pundits. These sentiments externalize what Gabbard called the "rot" in the Democratic party outward onto domestic critics and a nation across the planet. ..."
"... Newsweek provided a particularly glaring example of this phenomenon in a recent op-ed penned by columnist Naveed Jamali, a former FBI double agent whose book capitalizes on Russiagate. In an op-ed titled: " Hillary Clinton Is Right. Tulsi Gabbard Is A Perfect Russian Asset – And Would Be A Perfect Republican Agent," ..."
Establishment Democrats and those who amplify them continue to project
blame for the public's doubt in the U.S. election process onto outside influence, despite the clear history of the party's subversion
of election integrity. The total inability of the Democratic Party establishment's willingness to address even one of these critical
failures does not give reason to hope that the nomination process in 2020 will be any less pre-ordained.
The Democratic Party's bias against Sen. Bernie Sanders during the 2016 presidential nomination, followed by the DNC defense counsel
doubling down on its right to rig the race during the
fraud lawsuit brought
against the DNC , as well as the irregularities in the races between former DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz and Tim Canova,
indicate a fatal breakdown of the U.S. democratic process spearheaded by the Democratic Party establishment. Influences transcending
the DNC add to concerns regarding the integrity of the democratic process that have nothing to do with Russia, but which will also
likely impact outcomes in 2020.
The content of the DNC and
Podesta emails published by WikiLeaks demonstrated that the DNC
acted in favor of Hillary Clinton in the lead up to the 2016 Democratic primary. The emails also revealed corporate media reporters
acting as surrogates of the DNC and its pro-Clinton agenda, going so far as
to promote Donald Trump during the GOP primary process as a preferred " pied-piper
candidate ." One cannot assume that similar evidence will be presented to the public in 2020, making it more important than ever
to take stock of the unique lessons handed down to us by the 2016 race.
Social Media Meddling
Election meddling via social media did take place in 2016, though in a different guise and for a different cause from that which
are best remembered. Twitter would eventually admit to actively suppressing
hashtags referencing the DNC and Podesta emails in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election. Additional
reports indicated that tech giant Google also showed measurable "pro-Hillary
Clinton bias" in search results during 2016, resulting in the alleged swaying of between 2 and 10 millions voters in favor of Clinton.
On the Republican side, a recent episode of CNLive! featured discussion
of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, in which undecided voters were micro-targeted with tailored advertising narrowed with the combined
use of big data and artificial intelligence known collectively as "dark strategy." CNLive! Executive Producer Cathy Vogan noted that
SCL, Cambridge Analytica's parent company, provides data, analytics and strategy to governments and military organizations "worldwide,"
specializing in behavior modification. Though Cambridge Analytica shut down in 2018, related companies remain.
The Clinton camp was hardly absent from social media during the 2016 race. The
barely-legal activities of Clintonite David Brock
were previously reported by this author to have included $2 million in funding
for the creation of an online " troll army " under the name Shareblue. The
LA Times described the project as meant to "to appear
to be coming organically from people and their social media networks in a groundswell of activism, when in fact it is highly paid
and highly tactical." In other words, the effort attempted to create a false sense of consensus in support for the Clinton campaign.
In terms of interference in the actual election process, the New York City Board of Elections was shown to have
purged over one hundred thousand Democratic voters in Brooklyn from the rolls
before the 2016 primary, a move that the Department of Justice found
broke federal law . Despite this, no prosecution
for the breach was ever attempted.
Though the purge was not explicitly found to have benefitted Clinton, the admission falls in line with allegations across the
country that the Democratic primary was interfered with to the benefit of the former secretary of state. These claims were further
bolstered by reports indicating that voting results from the 2016 Democratic
primary showed evidence of fraud.
DNC Fraud Lawsuit
The proceedings of the DNC fraud lawsuit provide the most damning evidence of the failure of the U.S. election process, especially
within the Democratic Party. DNC defense lawyers argued in open court for the party's
right to appoint candidates at its own discretion, while simultaneously denying
any "fiduciary duty" to represent the voters who donated to the Democratic Party under the impression that the DNC would act impartially
towards the candidates involved.
In 2017, the Observer reported that the DNC's defense counsel argued
against claims that the party defrauded Sanders' supporters by favoring Clinton, reasoning that Sanders' supporters knew the process
was rigged. Again: instead of arguing that the primary was neutral and unbiased in accordance with its charter, the DNC's lawyers
argued that it was the party's right to select candidates.
The Observer noted the sentiments of Jared Beck, the attorney representing the plaintiffs of the lawsuit:
"People paid money in reliance on the understanding that the primary elections for the Democratic nominee -- nominating process
in 2016 were fair and impartial, and that's not just a bedrock assumption that we would assume just by virtue of the fact that
we live in a democracy, and we assume that our elections are run in a fair and impartial manner. But that's what the Democratic
National Committee's own charter says. It says it in black and white."
The DNC defense counsel's argument throughout the course of the DNC fraud lawsuit doubled down repeatedly in defense of the party's
right to favor one candidate over another, at one point actually claiming that such favoritism was
protected by the First Amendment . The DNC's lawyers wrote:
"To recognize any of the causes of action that Plaintiffs allege would run directly contrary to long-standing Supreme Court
precedent recognizing the central and critical First Amendment rights enjoyed by political parties, especially when it comes to
selecting the party's nominee for public office ." [Emphasis added]
The DNC's shameless defense of its own rigging disemboweled the most fundamental organs of the U.S. body politic. This no indication
that the DNC will not resort to the same tactics in the 2020 primary race,
Tim Canova's Allegations
If Debbie Wasserman Schultz's role as disgraced chairwoman of the DNC and her forced 2016 resignation wasn't enough, serious interference
was also alleged in the wake of two contests between Wasserman Schultz and professor Tim Canova in Florida's 23rd congressional district.
Canova and Wasserman Schultz first faced off in a 2016 Democratic primary race, followed by a 2018 general congressional election
in which Canova ran as an independent.
Debacles followed both contests, including improper vote counts, illegal
ballot destruction , improper
transportation of ballots, and generally
shameless displays of cronyism. After the controversial
results of the initial primary race against Wasserman Schultz, Canova sought to have ballots checked for irregularities, as the
Sun-Sentinel reported at the time:
"[Canova] sought to look at the paper ballots in March 2017 and took Elections Supervisor Brenda Snipes to court three months
later when her office hadn't fulfilled his request. Snipes approved the destruction of the ballots in September, signing a certification
that said no court cases involving the ballots were pending."
Ultimately, Canova was granted a summary judgment against Snipes, finding that she had committed what amounted to multiple felonies.
Nonetheless, Snipes was not prosecuted and remained elections supervisor through to the 2018 midterms.
Republicans appear no more motivated to protect voting integrity than the Democrats, with
The Nation reporting that the GOP-controlled Senate
blocked a bill this week that would have "mandated paper-ballot backups in case of election machine malfunctions."
Study of Corporate Power
A 2014
study published by Princeton University found that corporate power had usurped the voting rights of the public: "Economic elites
and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average
citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence."
In reviewing this sordid history, we see that the Democratic Party establishment has done everything in its power to disrespect
voters and outright overrule them in the democratic primary process, defending their right to do so in the DNC fraud lawsuit. We've
noted that interests transcending the DNC also represent escalating threats to election integrity as demonstrated in 2016.
Despite this, establishment Democrats and those who echo their views in the legacy press continue to deflect from their own wrongdoing
and real threats to the election process by suggesting that mere discussion of it represents a campaign by Russia to attempt to malign
the perception of the legitimacy of the U.S. democratic process.
Hillary Clinton's recent comments to the effect that Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard is being "groomed" by Russia, and that the former
Green Party Presidential candidate Dr. Jill Stein is a "Russian asset", were soon echoed by DNC-friendly pundits. These sentiments
externalize what Gabbard called the "rot"
in the Democratic party outward onto domestic critics and a nation across the planet.
Newsweek provided a particularly glaring example of this phenomenon in a
recent op-ed penned by columnist Naveed Jamali, a former FBI double agent whose book capitalizes on Russiagate. In an op-ed titled:
" Hillary Clinton Is Right. Tulsi Gabbard Is A Perfect Russian Asset – And Would Be A Perfect Republican Agent," Jamali
argued :
"Moscow will use its skillful propaganda machine to prop up Gabbard and use her as a tool to delegitimize the democratic process.
" [Emphasis added]
Jamali surmises that Russia intends to "attack" our democracy by undermining the domestic perception of its legitimacy. This thesis
is repeated later in the piece when Jamali opines : "They want to see a retreat
of American influence. What better way to accomplish that than to attack our democracy by casting doubt on the legitimacy of our
elections." [Emphasis added]
The only thing worth protecting, according to Jamali and those who amplify his work (including former Clinton aide and establishment
Democrat Neera Tanden), is the perception of the democratic process, not the actual functioning vitality of it. Such deflective tactics
ensure that Russia will continue to be used as a convenient international pretext for
silencing domestic dissent as we move into 2020.
Given all this, how can one expect the outcome of a 2020 Democratic Primary -- or even the general election – to be any fairer
or transparent than 2016?
* * *
Elizabeth Vos is a freelance reporter, co-host of CN Live! and regular contributor to Consortium News. If you value this
original article, please consider
making
a donation to Consortium News so we can bring you more stories like this one.
@DanFromCT Well then, thank god for Tucker Carlson for going against the grain. He is
against all the Middle East wars, and wants to bring the troops home and put them on our
Southern Border. His is the only show that I watch anymore, and he pushes back from Fox's
Israel-first orthodoxy as much as he can and still keep his job, which he wouldn't have if
not for his high ratings. Tucker destroyed ultra hawk neocon John Bolton shortly before Trump
stupidly appointed him as his NSA.
BTW, Hannity is a war pig, who happens to be right on one issue – supporting Trump
against the democrat coup. And Buck is also right, Epstein did not kill himself.
"... "Manufacturing Consent," Taibbi writes, "explains that the debate you're watching is choreographed. The range of argument has been artificially narrowed long before you get to hear it" (p. 11). ..."
"... Americans were held captive by the boob tube affords us not only a useful historical image but also suggests the possibility of their having been able to view the television as an antagonist, and therefore of their having been able, at least some of them, to rebel against its dictates. Three decades later, on the other hand, the television has been replaced by iPhones and portable tablets, the workings of which are so precisely intertwined with even the most intimate minute-to-minute aspects of our lives that our relationship to them could hardly ever become antagonistic. ..."
"... The massive political revolution was, going all the way back to 1989, the collapse of the Berlin Wall, and then of the Soviet Union itself -- and thus of the usefulness of anti-communism as a kind of coercive secular religion (pp. 14-15). ..."
"... our corporate media have devised -- at least for the time being -- highly-profitable marketing processes that manufacture fake dissent in order to smother real dissent (p. 21). ..."
"... And the smothering of real dissent is close enough to public consentto get the goddam job done: The Herman/Chomsky model is, after all these years, still valid. ..."
"... For Maddow, he notes, is "a depressingly exact mirror of Hannity . The two characters do exactly the same work. They make their money using exactly the same commercial formula. And though they emphasize different political ideas, the effect they have on audiences is much the same" (pp. 259-260). ..."
Matt Taibbi's Hate Inc . is the most insightful and revelatory book about American
politics to appear since the publication of Thomas Frank's Listen, Liberal almost four
full years ago, near the beginning of the last presidential election cycle.
While Frank's topic was the abysmal failure of the Democratic Party to be democratic and
Taibbi's is the abysmal failure of our mainstream news corporations to report news, the
prominent villains in both books are drawn from the same, or at least overlapping, elite social
circles: from, that is, our virulently anti-populist liberal class, from our
intellectually mediocre creative class, from our bubble-dwelling thinking class.
In fact, I would strongly recommend that the reader spend some time with Frank's What's the
Matter with Kansas? (2004) and Listen, Liberal! (2016) as he or she takes up
Taibbi's book.
And to really do the book the justice it deserves, I would even more vehemently recommend
that the reader immerse him- or herself in Taibbi's favorite book and vade-mecum ,
Manufacturing Consent (which I found to be a grueling experience: a relentless
cataloging of the official lies that hide the brutality of American foreign policy) and, in
order to properly appreciate the brilliance of Taibbi's chapter 7, "How the Media Stole from
Pro Wrestling," visit some locale in Flyover Country and see some pro wrestling in person
(which I found to be unexpectedly uplifting -- more on this soon enough).
Taibbi tells us that he had originally intended for Hate, Inc . to be an updating of
Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent (1988), which he first read
thirty years ago, when he was nineteen. "It blew my mind," Taibbi writes. "[It] taught me that
some level of deception was baked into almost everything I'd ever been taught about modern
American life .
Once the authors in the first chapter laid out their famed propaganda model [italics
mine], they cut through the deceptions of the American state like a buzz saw" (p. 10). For what
seemed to be vigorous democratic debate, Taibbi realized, was instead a soul-crushing
simulation of debate. The choices voters were given were distinctions without valid
differences, and just as hyped, just as trivial, as the choices between a Whopper and a Big
Mac, between Froot Loops and Frosted Mini-Wheats, between Diet Coke and Diet Pepsi, between
Marlboro Lites and Camel Filters. It was all profit-making poisonous junk.
"Manufacturing Consent," Taibbi writes, "explains that the debate you're watching is
choreographed. The range of argument has been artificially narrowed long before you get to hear
it" (p. 11). And there's an indisputable logic at work here, because the reality of
hideous American war crimes is and always has been, from the point of view of the big media
corporations, a "narrative-ruining" buzz-kill. "The uglier truth [brought to light in
Manufacturing Consent ], that we committed genocide of a fairly massive scale across
Indochina -- ultimately killing at least a million innocent civilians by air in three countries
-- is pre-excluded from the history of the period" (p. 13).
So what has changed in the last thirty years? A lot! As a starting point let's consider the
very useful metaphor found in the title of another great media book of 1988: Mark Crispin
Miller's Boxed In: The Culture of TV . To say that Americans were held captive by
the boob tube affords us not only a useful historical image but also suggests the possibility
of their having been able to view the television as an antagonist, and therefore of their
having been able, at least some of them, to rebel against its dictates. Three decades later, on
the other hand, the television has been replaced by iPhones and portable tablets, the workings
of which are so precisely intertwined with even the most intimate minute-to-minute aspects of
our lives that our relationship to them could hardly ever become antagonistic.
Taibbi summarizes the history of these three decades in terms of three "massive revolutions"
in the media plus one actual massive political revolution, all of which, we should note, he
discussed with his hero Chomsky (who is now ninety! -- Edward Herman passed away in 2017) even
as he wrote his book. And so: the media revolutions which Taibbi describes were, first, the
coming of FoxNews along with Rush Limbaugh-style talk radio; second, the coming of CNN, i.e.,
the Cable News Network, along with twenty-four hour infinite-loop news cycles; third, the
coming of the Internet along with the mighty social media giants Facebook and Twitter.
The massive political revolution was, going all the way back to 1989, the collapse of
the Berlin Wall, and then of the Soviet Union itself -- and thus of the usefulness of
anti-communism as a kind of coercive secular religion (pp. 14-15).
For all that, however, the most salient difference between the news media of 1989 and the
news media of 2019 is the disappearance of the single type of calm and decorous and slightly
boring cis-het white anchorman (who somehow successfully appealed to a nationwide audience) and
his replacement by a seemingly wide variety of demographically-engineered news personæ
who all rage and scream combatively in each other's direction. "In the old days," Taibbi
writes, "the news was a mix of this toothless trivia and cheery dispatches from the frontlines
of Pax Americana . The news [was] once designed to be consumed by the whole house . But once we
started to be organized into demographic silos [italics mine], the networks found
another way to seduce these audiences: they sold intramural conflict" (p. 18).
And in this new media environment of constant conflict, how, Taibbi wondered, could public
consent , which would seem to be at the opposite end of the spectrum from conflict,
still be manufactured ?? "That wasn't easy for me to see in my first decades in the
business," Taibbi writes. "For a long time, I thought it was a flaw in the Chomsky/Herman
model" (p. 19).
But what Taibbi was at length able to understand, and what he is now able to describe for us
with both wit and controlled outrage, is that our corporate media have devised -- at least
for the time being -- highly-profitable marketing processes that manufacture fake dissent in
order to smother real dissent (p. 21).
And the smothering of real dissent is close enough to public consentto get the goddam
job done: The Herman/Chomsky model is, after all these years, still valid.
Or pretty much so. Taibbi is more historically precise. Because of the tweaking of the
Herman/Chomsky propaganda model necessitated by the disappearance of the USSR in 1991 ("The
Russians escaped while we weren't watching them, / As Russians do ," Jackson Browne presciently
prophesied on MTV way back in 1983), one might now want to speak of a Propaganda Model 2.0.
For, as Taibbi notes, " the biggest change to Chomsky's model is the discovery of a far
superior 'common enemy' in modern media: each other. So long as we remain a bitterly-divided
two-party state, we'll never want for TV villains" (pp. 207-208).
To rub his great insight right into our uncomprehending faces, Taibbi has almost
sadistically chosen to have dark, shadowy images of a yelling Sean Hannity (in lurid FoxNews
Red!) and a screaming Rachel Maddow (in glaring MSNBC Blue!) juxtaposed on the cover of his
book. For Maddow, he notes, is "a depressingly exact mirror of Hannity . The two characters
do exactly the same work. They make their money using exactly the same commercial formula. And
though they emphasize different political ideas, the effect they have on audiences is much the
same" (pp. 259-260).
And that effect is hate. Impotent hate. For while Rachel's fan demographic is all wrapped up
in hating Far-Right Fascists Like Sean, and while Sean's is all wrapped up in despising Libtard
Lunatics Like Rachel, the bipartisan consensus in Washington for ever-increasing military
budgets, for everlasting wars, for ever-expanding surveillance, for ever-growing bailouts of
and tax breaks for and and handouts to the most powerful corporations goes forever
unchallenged.
Oh my. And it only gets worse and worse, because the media, in order to make sure that their
various siloed demographics stay superglued to their Internet devices, must keep
ratcheting up levels of hate: the Fascists Like Sean and the Libtards Like Rachel must be
continually presented as more and more deranged, and ultimately as demonic. "There is us and
them," Taibbi writes, "and they are Hitler" (p. 64). A vile reductio ad absurdum has
come into play: "If all Trump supporters are Hitler, and all liberals are also Hitler," Taibbi
writes, " [t]he America vs. America show is now Hitler vs. Hitler! Think of the
ratings! " The reader begins to grasp Taibbi's argument that our mainstream corporate media are
as bad as -- are worse than -- pro wrestling. It's an ineluctable downward spiral.
Taibbi continues: "The problem is, there's no natural floor to this behavior. Just as cable
TV will eventually become seven hundred separate twenty-four-hour porn channels, news and
commentary will eventually escalate to boxing-style, expletive-laden, pre-fight tirades, and
the open incitement to violence [italics mine]. If the other side is literally Hitler,
[w]hat began as America vs. America will eventually move to Traitor vs. Traitor ,
and the show does not work if those contestants are not eventually offended to the point of
wanting to kill one another" (pp. 65-69).
As I read this book, I often wondered about how difficult it was emotionally for
Taibbi to write it. I'm just really glad to see that the guy didn't commit suicide along the
way. He does describe the "self-loathing" he experienced as he realized his own complicity in
the marketing processes which he exposes (p. 2). He also apologizes to the reader for his not
being able to follow through on his original aim of writing a continuation of Herman and
Chomsky's classic: "[W]hen I sat down to write what I'd hoped would be something with the
intellectual gravitas of Manufacturing Consent ," Taibbi confesses, "I found decades of
more mundane frustrations pouring out onto the page, obliterating a clinical examination" (p.
2).
I, however, am profoundly grateful to Taibbi for all of his brilliantly observed anecdotes.
The subject matter is nauseating enough even in Taibbi's sparkling and darkly tragicomic prose.
A more academic treatment of the subject would likely be too depressing to read. So let me
conclude with an anecdote of my own -- and an oddly uplifting one at that -- about reading
Taibbi's chapter 7, "How the News Media Stole from Pro Wrestling."
On the same day I read this chapter I saw that, on the bulletin board in my gym, a poster
had appeared, as if by magic, promoting an upcoming Primal Conflict (!) professional
wrestling event. I studied the photos of the wrestlers on the poster carefully, and, as an
astute reader of Taibbi, I prided myself on being able to identify which of them seemed be
playing the roles of heels , and which of them the roles of babyfaces .
For Taibbi explains that one of the fundamental dynamics of wrestling involves the invention
of crowd-pleasing narratives out of the many permutations and combinations of pitting
heels against faces . Donald Trump, a natural heel , brings the goofy
dynamics of pro wrestling to American politics with real-life professional expertise. (Taibbi
points out that in 2007 Trump actually performed before a huge cheering crowd in a
Wrestlemania event billed as the "battle of the billionaires." Watch it on YouTube!
https://youtu.be/5NsrwH9I9vE --
unbelievable!!)
The mainstream corporate media, on the other hand, their eyes fixed on ever bigger and
bigger profits, have drifted into the metaphorical pro wrestling ring in ignorance, and so,
when they face off against Trump, they often end up in the role of inept prudish
pearl-clutching faces .
Taibbi condemns the mainstream media's failure to understand such a massively popular form
of American entertainment as "malpractice" (p. 125), so I felt more than obligated to buy a
ticket and see the advertised event in person. To properly educate myself, that is.
I have stopped watching broadcast "news" other than occasional sessions of NPR in the car.
I get most of my news from sources such as this and from overseas sources (The Guardian,
Reuters, etc.). I used to subscribe to newspapers but have given them up in disgust, even
though I was looking forward to leisurely enjoying a morning paper after I retired.
I was brought up in the positive 1950's and, boy, did this turn out poorly.
Matt Taibbi is an American treasure, and I love his writing very much, but we also need to
ask, Why hasn't another Chomsky (or another Hudson), an analyst with a truly deep and
wide-ranging, synthetic mind, appeared on the left to take apart our contemporary media and
show us its inner workings? Have all the truly great minds gone to work for Wall Street? I
don't have an answer, but to me the pro wrestling metaphor, while intriguing, misses
something about the Fourth Estate in America, if it indeed still exists. And that is, except
for radio, there is a distinct imbalance between the two sides of the MSM lineup. On the
corporate liberal side of the national MSM team you have five wrestlers, but on the
conservative/reactionary side you have only the Fox entry. Because of this imbalance, the
corruption, laziness, self-indulgence, and generally declining interest in journalistic
standards seems greater among the corporate liberal media team, including the NYT and WaPo,
than the Fox team.
I'm not a fan of either Maddow (in her current incarnation) or Hannity, but Hannity,
perhaps because he thinks he's like David, often hustles to refute the discourse of the
corporate liberal Goliath team. Hannity obviously does more research on some topics than
Maddow, and, perhaps because he began in radio, he puts more emphasis on semi-rationally
structured rants than Maddow, who depends more on primal emotion, body language, and
Hollywood-esque fear-inducing atmospherics.
I'd wager that in a single five-minute segment there will often be twice as many rational
distinctions made in a Hannity rant than in a Maddow performance. In addition, for the last
three years Hannity has simply been demonstrably right about the fake Russiagate propaganda
blitz while Maddow has been as demonstrably wrong from the very beginning as propaganda
industry trend-setter Adam Schiff. So for at least these last three years, the Maddow-Hannity
primal match has been a somewhat misleading metaphor. The Blob and the security state have
been decisively supporting (and directing?) the corporate liberal global interventionist
media, at least regarding Russia and the permanent war establishment, and because the
imbalance between the interventionist and the non-interventionist MSM, Russia and Ukraine are
being used as a wedge to steadily break down the firewalls between the Dem party, the intel
community, and the interventionist MSM. If we had real public debates with both sides at
approximately equal strength as we did during the Vietnam War, then even pro wrestling-type
matches would be superior to what we have now, which is truthy truth and thoughtsy thought
coming to us from the military industrial complex and monopolistic holding companies. If
fascism is defined as the fusion of the state and corporations, then the greatest threat of
fascism in America may well be coming from the apparent gradual fusion of the corporate
liberal MSM, the Dem party elite, and the intel community. Instead of an MSM wrestling match,
we may soon be faced with a Japanese-style 'hitori-zumo' match in which a sumo wrestler
wrestles with only himself. Once these sumo wrestlers were believed to be wrestling with
invisible spirits, but those days are gone . http://kikuko-nagoya.com/html/hitori-zumo.htm
Today's Noam Chomksy? Chomsky was part of the machine who broke ranks with it. His MIT
research was generously funded by the Military Industrial Complex. Thankfully, enough of his
latent humanity and Trotskyite upbringing shone through so he exposed what he was part of. So
I guess today that's Chris Hedges, though he's a preacher at heart and not a semiotician.
> In addition, for the last three years Hannity has simply been demonstrably right
about the fake Russiagate propaganda blitz while Maddow has been as demonstrably wrong
Eh. Read whats-his-name's (Frankfurter?) book On Bullshit . You are giving
Hannity credit for something he doesn't really care about.
I don't believe the media environment as a whole leans corporate Dem/neoliberal.
T.V. maybe, but radio is much more right wing than left (yes there is NPR and Pacifica,
the latter with probably only a scattering of listerners but ) and it's still out there and a
big influence, radio hasn't gone away. So doesn't the right wing tilt of radio kind of
balance out television? (not necessarily in a good way but). And then there is the internet
and I have no idea what the overall lean of that is (I mean I prefer left wing sites, but
that's purely my own bubble and actually there are much fewer left analysis out there than
I'd like)
The whole review is good, but this extract should be quoted extensively:
While Frank's topic was the abysmal failure of the Democratic Party to be democratic and
Taibbi's is the abysmal failure of our mainstream news corporations to report news, the
prominent villains in both books are drawn from the same, or at least overlapping, elite
social circles: from, that is, our virulently anti-populist liberal class, from our
intellectually mediocre creative class, from our bubble-dwelling thinking class.
In short, stagnation and self-dealing at the top. What could possibly go wrong?
Are you serious? Maddow called Trump a traitor and accused him of betrayal in Russiagate,
and was caught out when that fell apart. This was pointed out all over the MSM .
Three decades later, on the other hand, the television has been replaced by iPhones and
portable tablets
and then goes on to spend most of the article talking about television. I'd say television
is still the main propaganda instrument even if many webheads like yours truly ignore it
(I've never seen Hannity's show or Maddow's–just hear the rumors). Arguably even
newspapers like the NYT have been dumbed down because the reporters long to be on TV and join
the shouting. And it's surely no coincidence that our president himself is a TV (and WWE)
star. Mass media have always been feeders of hysteria but television gave them faces and
voices. Watching TV is also a far more passive experience than surfing the web. They are
selling us "narratives," bedtime stories, and we like sleepy children merely listen.
This rave review has inspired me to add this to my to-read non-fiction queue. Currently
reading William Dalrymple's The Anarchy, on the rise of the East India Company. Next up: Matt
Stoller's Goliath. And then I'll get to Taibbi. Probably worth digging up my original copy of
Manufacturing Consent as well, which I read many moons ago; time for a re-read.
May I suggest Stephen Cohen's "War with Russia?" if it's not already on your list? In
focusing on the danger emerging from the new cold war, seeded by the Democrats, propagated by
corporate media (which he thinks is more dangerous than the first), Cohen clarifies the
importance of diplomacy especially with one's nuclear rivals.
Us rubes knew decades ago about pro wrestling. There was a regional circuit and the hero
in one town would become the villain in another town. The ones to be surprised were like John
Stossel, who got a perforated eardrum from a slap upside the head for his efforts at
in-your-face journalism with a wrestler who just wouldn't play along with his grandstanding.
Somewhere, kids cheered and life went on.
Ah, Ancient Athens, here we come – running back to repeat your mistakes! Our MSM
media has decided that when we are not at our neighbor's throats, we should be at each
other's throats!
I was watching old clips of the 'Fred Friendly Seminars' on YouTube. IMHO any channel that
produced a format such as this would be a ratings bonanza. Imagine a round table with various
media figures (corporate) left, (corporate) right, and independent being refereed by a
host-moderator discussing topics in 'Hate, Inc.'. In wrestling it's called a Battle Royale.
The Fourth Estate in a cage match!
And the smothering of real dissent is close enough to public consentto get the goddam
job done: The Herman/Chomsky model is, after all these years, still valid.
This is important, if people don't want to be naive about what democracy buys. Democracy
in the end is a ritual system to determine which members of an elite would win a war without
actually having to hold the war. Like how court functions to replace personal revenge by
determining (often) who would win in a fight if there were one, and the feudal system
replaced the genocidal wars of the axial age with the gentler warfare of the middle ages
which were often ritual wars of the elite that avoided the full risk of the earlier wars.
That, I think, is important -- under a democracy, the winner should be normally the winner
of the avoided violent conflict to be sustainable. Thus, it's enough to get most people to
consent to the solution, using the traditional meaning of consent being "won't put up a fight
to avoid it". If the choices on the table are reduced enough, you can get by with most people
simply dropping out of the questions.
Qui tacet consentire videtur, ubi loqui debuit ac potuit
It shouldn't be a surprise that we've moved to "faking dissent" -- it's the natural
evolution of a system where a lot of the effective power is in the hands of tech, and not
just as in the early 20th century, how many workers you have and how many soldiers you can
raise.
If you don't like it, change the technology we use to fight one another. We went from
tribes to lords when we switch from sticks to advanced forged weapons, and we went from
feudalism to democracy when we had factories dropping guns that any 15 year old could use
(oversimplifying a bit). Now that the stuff requires expertise, you'd expect a corresponding
shift in how we ritualize our conflict avoidance, and thus the organization of how we control
communication and how we organize our rituals of power.
Aka, it's the scientists and the engineers who end up determining how everything is
organized, and people never seem to bother with that argument, which is especially surprising
that even hard-core Marxists waste their time on short-term politics rather than the tech
we're building.
I'd be curious whether Taibbi thought about the issue of the nature of the technology and
whether there are technological options on the horizon which drive the conflict in other
directions. If we had only kept the laws on copyright and patent weaker, so that the
implementation of communicative infrastructure would have stayed decentralized
Tabby's "manufacturing fake consent" was really the whole punchline – the joke's on
us. Hunter S. Thompson, another of Taibbi's heroes, is, along with Chomsky, speaking to us
through MT. Our media is distracting us from social coherence. Another thing it is doing
(just my opinion) is it is overwhelming us to the point of disgust. Nobody likes it. And we
protect ourselves by tuning it out. Turning it off. Once the screaming lunatics marginalize
themselves by making the whole narrative hysterical, we just act like it's another family
fight and we're gonna go do something else. When everyone is screaming, no one is
screaming.
I have tried to read Hate Inc. and Taibbi's Griftopia but one of my main issues with
Taibbi's writing is his lack of notes, references, or bibliography, etc. in his books. In
skimming Hate Inc. it seems like a book I would enjoy reading, however my personal value
system is that any book without footnotes, endnotes, citations, or at minimum a bibliography
is just an opinion or a story. At least Thomas Frank's Listen Liberal has a section for End
Notes/References at the end of the book. Again just my personal values.
I am from Greater Boston, far, far from flyover country (which I imagine begins in Yonkers
NY), but I sure grew up with pro wrestling as part of the schoolyard discourse. I certainly
knew it was as much of a family affair as Disney on Ice and have trouble believing he thought
otherwise though I will not impugn his honesty. I am very grateful to the author for taking
the time to write this, but is it possible for a male who grew up in the US to be as deeply
embedded in the MSNBC demo as he claims to be?
Seriously, how is it possible for a male raised in the US to not at least have some
working familiarity with pro wrestling? My family along with my community was very close to
the national median income–do higher income boys really not learn about WWF and
WWE?
Seriously, rich kids, what was childhood like? I know you had music lessons and sports
camps, what else? Was it really that different?
Sorry, my blue collar, lifetime union member brother says your view is horseshit. All the
knows about WWE and WWF is that they are big-budget fakery and that's why they are of no
interest.
aye. in my blue to white collar( and back to blue to no collar) upbringing, wrestling was
never a thing. it was for the morons who couldn't read. seen as patently absurd by just about
everyone i knew. and this in klanridden east texas exurbia
wife's mexican extended familia oth luche libre is a big thing that all and sundry talked
about at thanksgiving. less so these days possibly due to the hyperindiviualisation of media
intake mentioned
(and,btw, in my little world , horseshit is a good thing)
Even allowing for my lefty-liberal bias, I do not see how it is possible to equate Fox
Noise and MSNBC, or Hannity and Maddow, as "both-sides" extremists. Fox violates basic
professional canons of fairness and equity on a daily basis. MSNBC occasionally does, but is
quick to correct errors of fact. Hannity is a thuggish outer-borough New York schmuck without
much education or knowledge of the world. Maddow is an Oxford Ph.D. and Rhodes Scholar. It is
one of the evil successes of the right-wing news cauldron to have successfully equated these
two figures and organizations.
Huh? MSNBC regularly makes errors of omission and commission with respect to Sanders. They
are still pushing the Russiagate narrative. That's a massive, two-year, virtually all the
time error they have refused to recant.
The blind spots of people on the soi-disant left are truly astonishing.
'Hannity is a thuggish outer-borough New York schmuck without much education or knowledge
of the world. Maddow is an Oxford Ph.D. and Rhodes Scholar '
oh, well, then – end of conversation! i mean, god knows, it'd be a cold day in hell
before a rhodes scholar, or even someone married to one, would ever lead us astray down the
rosy neoliberal path to hell, while, at the same time, under the spell of trump derangement
syndrome, actually attempt to revive the mccarthy era, eh?
Actual drugs are being used to hinder debate as well as emotional drugs like hate.
They can't trust agency to be removed by words and images alone – the stakes are too
high.
Now all of you go take a feel good pill and stop complaining!
I've been impressed with Taibbi's work, what I've read of it, but ironically this very
article contains a quote from him which exemplifies the problem: his casual assertion that
the US committed "genocide" in Indochina. Even the most fervent critics of US policy didn't
say this at the time, for the very good reason that there was no evidence that the US tried
to destroy a racial, religious, ethnic or nationalist group (the full definition is a lot
more complex and demanding than that). He clearly means that the US was responsible for lots
of deaths, which is incontestable. But the process of endless escalation of rhetoric, which
this book seems to be partly about, means that everything now has to be described in the most
extreme, absurd or apocalyptic tones, and at the top of your voice, otherwise nobody takes
any notice. So any self-respecting war now has to be qualified as "genocide" or nobody will
take any notice.
So it's probably good that "Grayfell" and his pals discovered me and are feverishly
"correcting" my article, and God knows how many other articles that don't conform to Wikipedia
"policy," or Philip Cross' political preferences, or Antifa's theory of "
preemptive self-defense ," or whatever other non-ideological, totally objective editorial
standards the "volunteer editors" at the Ministry of Wiki-Truth (who have nothing to do with
the Intelligence Community, or Antifa, or any other entities like that) consensually decide to
robotically adhere to.
How else are they going to keep their content "neutral," "unbiased," and "reliably sourced,"
so that people can pull up Wikipedia on their phones and verify historical events (which really
happened, exactly as they say they did), or scientific "facts" (which are indisputable) or
whether Oceania is at War with EastAsia, or Eurasia, or the Terrorists, or Russia?
Oh, and please don't worry about my Wikipedia article. König Ubu assures me he has done
all he could to restore it some semblance of accuracy, and that the Ministers have moved on to
bigger fish. Of course, who knows what additional "edits" might suddenly become a top priority
once "Grayfell" or Antifa gets wind of this piece.
Wikipedia is a perfect platform for manufacturing reality, disseminating
pro-establishment propaganda, and damaging people's reputations, which is a rather popular
tactic these days.
The simple fact is, when you google anything, Wikipedia is usually the first link that
comes up. Most people assume that what they read on the platform is basically factual and
at least trying to be "objective" which a lot of it is, but a lot of it isn't.
Excellent characterization.
Many speak of the liberating features of the Internet, how the old MSM stranglehold has
been whipped. The way the Internet is being used, that is just not true today. It was true
for early adopters (1990s?) and early-mid adopters (late 1990s and early 2000s?).
The 2010s has given us a pendulum swing back in the other direction. By circa 2020,
information is, effectively, funneled through a few chokepoints -- Wikipedia, Youtube,
Twitter, Facebook, the Google quasi-Monopoly And the limits of acceptable discourse are
policed using various tactics. This is a great example.
In this sense, Unz Review is a throwback to an earlier era of the Internet, in the best
way.
In the anti-establishment circles I move in, Wikipedia is notorious for this kind of
stuff, which is unsurprising when you think about it. It's a perfect platform for
manufacturing reality, disseminating pro-establishment propaganda, and damaging people's
reputations, which is a rather popular tactic these days.
Of course, the Ministry of Wiki-Truth keeps its content "neutral," "unbiased," and "reliably
sourced," such as Brian Stelter's sudser "Reliable Sources" at CNN. Except for the scientific
articles, all the rest are ideological Soviet-style trash. The more fool you, using this
phony "Encyclopedia," which has been hijacked by the thought policy long ago.
As the White House seems to turn its back on the Neocons' immoral interventionism, some Jews
may be discomfited by the fact that the Neocon war mongering doctrine has been largely a Jewish
project. As Haartez writer Ari
Shavit wrote back in 2003: "The war in Iraq was conceived by 25 neoconservative
intellectuals, most of them Jewish " Maybe some Jews now understand that the Zionist shift from
a 'promised land' to the Neocon 'promised planet' doesn't reflect well on the Jews as a
group.
I am trying to point out the possibility that the overwhelming fear of 'anti-Semitism,'
documented however poorly by the AJC, might well be the expression of guilt. American Jews may
feel communal guilt over the disastrous politics and culture of some sections of their
corrupted elite. They might even feel guilty as Americans about the brutal sacrifice of one of
America's prime values, that of freedom of speech as guaranteed by the 1st Amendment, on the
altar of
'antisemitsm.' .
Obviously, I would welcome AJC's further investigation of this. It would be interesting to
learn about the correlation between the Jewish fear of anti Semitsm and Jewish guilt. It would
also be fascinating to find out how Jewish anxiety translates into self-reflection. In that
regard, I suggest that instead of blaming the American people, Jews try introspection. US Jews
may want to follow the early Zionists, such as Theodor Herzl, who turned guilt into
self-examination. Herzl was deeply disturbed by anti Semitism but this didn't stop him from
digging into its causes. "The wealthy Jews control the world, in their hands lies the fate
of governments and nations,"Herzl wrote. He continued, "
They set governments one against the other. When the wealthy Jews play, the nations and the
rulers dance. One way or the other, they get rich." Herzl, like other early Zionists,
believed that Jews could be emancipated from their conditions and even be loved globally by
means of a cultural, ideological and spiritual metamorphosis with the aspiration of
'homecoming.' Herzl and his fellow early Zionists were clearly wrong in their proposed remedy
for the Jewish question, but were absolutely spot on in their adherence to self-reflection and
harsh self-criticism.
American Jews have much to learn from Herzl and other early Zionists. They should ask
themselves how their American 'Golden Medina' their Jewish land of opportunities, has
turned into a 'threatening' realm. What happened, what has changed in the last few years? Was
it the constant cries over anti-Semitism and the desperate and institutional attempts to
silence critics that turned their Golden Medina into a daunting space?
Anti-Semitism is a subset of class warfare, and thus perfectly natural in any society with
high inequality and large numbers of Jews. Because Jews always ally themselves with the
rulers and higher classes, as a survival strategy, and also because their talents naturally
place them in the higher classes.
The intelligent anti-Semitism of people like Chesterton and Belloc are of this type. These
people are perfectly capable of having honorable respect for Jews and deep appreciation for
Jewish culture while believing Jews may not be a good fit for their host society. Its nothing
personal. Just realism.
Unlike Gilad Atzmon, who sees no problem with other groups who compete and pursue self
interest but finds Jews doing so uniquely unacceptable and a cause for "guilt", they are
generally self-aware and honest enough to not blame Jews for competing on the world stage
– for being human – and realize Europeans were far harsher towards those foreign
peoples they competed against.
There is another kind of anti-Semitism that just reflects mankind's propensity to hate
anyone who is different, and comes from the same place as the vicious cruelties against all
manner of heretics and dissenters, including genocides, that was such a pronounced
characteristic of Christian Europe, and the racism of European society.
This generally has to do with pent up frustrations and resentments, which because of
special aspects of European culture, were uniquely intense in that part of the world (
Europeans were/are uniquely frustrated and unhappy with existence). Most anti-Semites on Unz
are of this kind, like commenters Colin Wright and utu, for instance, and authors Linh Dinh
and Kevin Barrett, Andrew Joyce, and Guyenot, and others.
These kinds of anti-Semites despise Jewish culture and anything Jewish, and often feel
compelled to invent elaborate grotesque mythologies using selective sources and distorted
interpretations to "prove" that Jewish culture and religion is unlike any other and uniquely
evil. Completely un-selfaware and lacking in introspection or historical perspective, they
are are not honest enough and emotionally stable enough to see group competition as the
historic norm, and their own group as no angels in this regard.
In their reading of history, no group competes except Jews, and the whole world would be a
paradise of harmony if not for these devilishly evil Jews.
Needless to say, this kind of infantile anti-Semitism is more of an emotional cri de ceour
of personal anguish, from an unbalanced mind, than anything to be taken seriously. And these
people today are effectively marginalized.
The Jewish "problem" in Europe is simply that of normal group competition among a host
population that by world standards, has always been uniquely intolerant of other ways of life
and thought, and uniquely imperialistic about its own values and standards, and uniquely
addicted to trying to control its environment (which ended up in science and technology).
Jews in China, India, and to some extent the Muslim world, hardly posed a comparable
"problem".
Zionism has obviously been an almost complete success in shifting Jewish group competition
away from within societies more towards the more normal pattern of national competition, as
Gilad Atzmon prefers as "healthy".
Jewish influence today outside of Israel is primarily directed to the current Imperial
center, America. Empires, by nature, always have foreign factions vying for favor and
influence. Rome was of course the same way. This is quite natural for empires. So Jewish
attempts to influence America – the self-designated policeman of the world – is
quite naturally a part of any imperial system, as the world policeman, one naturally needs to
have him on your side, of course.
So the Jewish "problem" has largely been solved through Zionism – but of course, as
more Jews move to Israel, the situation will get even better. And if imperial power shifts
away from America, the new imperial center will, obviously, become the site for various
foreign factions to vie for influence.
@AaronB no one
has a problem with Jews being gifted or being part of the elite,, but ppl do have problems
with Madoffs, Binary options, Weinstein, Epstein, Aipac, ADL interfering with elementary
freedoms do you really need me to explain all of that? for the record, by the time the Jewish
problem was solved by Zionism, Zionism was defeated by Jewishness and Israel became the
Jewish State ,,, my next book is all about that
' So the Jewish "problem" has largely been solved through Zionism – but of course,
as more Jews move to Israel, the situation will get even better. And if imperial power shifts
away from America, the new imperial center will, obviously, become the site for various
foreign factions to vie for influence.'
but as power shifts away from America, she becomes less able to nurture Israel and shield
her from the consequences of her actions, and then what?
You talk about moving back there. Would you do that if your standard of living there would
be, say, a quarter of what it is now, and if, to please the world, you had to accept that the
judge you were going to appear before might well be Muslim?
I doubt it. As US power declines, Israel will be abandoned. So we won't have gotten
anywhere at all.
Antisemitism is useful component of the rabbinate to generate internal group cohesion. It
forms a separation barrier, like an eruv, between goyim and Jew.
@Gilad Atzmon
imo your essay misses the point of why Jews should feel guilt, therefore AaronB's
comment also fails to address a critical issue.
I can't cite chapter and verse, but it has to be the case in the course of human events
that plenty of individuals and even groups have engaged in behavior as objectionable as
Madoff, Weinstein, Epstein, and the the numerous swindles Israel engages in.
I don't think those offenses are exclusive to Jews. Atzmon's essay here may amount to a
limited hangout.
AaronB's comment is braggadocio; Although I agree w/ AaronB that the power-center will shift
from USA to the East, and that if Jews follow the pattern of their ancient myths and last 120
years of history, they will destroy USA on their way out; nevertheless Jews will have to
share power with Russia and China, Arabs/Muslims will have a say, and Iran should not be
counted out -- they've dealt with Jews longer than any other people and know well their
treachery. It ain't over 'til the fat lady sings , AaronB, and there's a whole cast of divas just
warming up.
I do believe that the creation of zionist Israel may be unique in the known history of the
world: Jews not only dispossessed a native people in Palestine -- USAians did pretty much the
same -- Jews got other nation-states to do their killing for them.
But even more significantly, Jews killed -- genocided, really -- non-Jews in the countries
that had hosted them -- American colonists did not genocide the British in British homeland
-- once again, Jews arranged for the killing to be carried out by another state, in the case
of the genocide of Germany, American and British Christians became Jewish weapons to kill
their own fellow-Christians.
At the same time, Jews needed to cull their own herd: the elite that Atzmon and AaronB
gloat over -- the "remnant," is a relatively recent phenomenon; it may be that the vaunted 6
million were dead wood; impoverished, filthy, inbred: Jabotinsky found them disgusting and
Nordau called them "Degenerate." Worse: they were a drag on the mean. Russia and Poland were
crawling with Jews of "unsuitable human material" for the "new Jew" that was to populate the
zionist utopia. They had to be got rid of; just as Moses delegated Levites to kill fellow
Jews at Mt. Sinai, so Louis Brandeis, Frankfurter etc. fell upon Hitler, Churchill, Stalin
and FDR to kill surplus, degenerate Jews. Saddam & el Baghdadi are minor replicas of a
similar mold employed to kill inconvenient challengers or competitors to zionist Jews.
Jews killed -- or arranged for the killing -- of their own undesireables. In addition,
Jews killed or arranged for the killing of "the best gentiles;" and then, the master stroke:
Jews proclaimed themselves the victims and psychologically manipulated those shattered
peoples -- Germans and other Western Europeans– to the extent that those populations
paid and continue to pay Jews for "Jewish suffering," while also punishing themselves out of
existence with their own Jewish-induced, psychologically-manipulated guilt.
This systemic program -- patterned on the mythic flight from Egypt, and conquest of Canaan
but worked out in real time, is, I believe, unique in all the world.
Jewish holocaustism is why Jews are hated.
Maybe some Jews realize what they have done.
Jews are correct to feel "guilty" and fearful of a "rise in antisemitism."
No statistics or polls to cite, just hazarding a guess: "antisemitism" will rise in
lockstep with realization among non-Jews that the holocaust is a hoax.
I am not sure the possibility exists for Jews to be forgiven for what they have done.
Even with activist groups trying to spook Jews and cajole them into making aliyah ,
fuck-all of them do – and an almost-offsetting number leave.
The net migration rate (all religions) for Occupied Palestine is 0.2%/yr – a
rounding error – and inwards-migration is overwhelmingly 'economic refugee' in
character (almost half of annual Jewish in-migration is from former Soviet countries).
As guys like Sassoon, Shlomo Sand, and others have noted: Western European Jews have every
opportunity to go live in Palestine, but have always exhibited fuck-all interest in doing so.
In this they echo Maimonides: after the Almohad conquest of Cordoba and the abolition of
dhimmi status for non-Muslims, the Rambam spent almost all of his life in Egypt and
Morocco – he had every opportunity to settle in Palestine but chose to live and work
elsewhere.
And so it is to this day: affluent, educated Western Jews would rather eat their own dicks
that move to Palestine. And that's even true of arch-Zionists like Adelson and Dershowitz
– neither of whom are 'Western' in any real sense (they're pretty obvious of Lithuanian
or other- Osteuropäische ). descent.
Given the Exodus (LOL) of secular Jews, and the pattern of in-migration and reproduction,
it's pretty clear that Palestine will become a third-world nation in a couple of generations:
having emerged from the hovels of Eastern Europe, the Ashkenazim are remaking Palestine in
its image.
There are good signs though: the huge-and-rising proportion of datlashim among the
children of "box-heads" (Ultra-Orthodox), for a start. Even when everyone around them is
trying to fill their heads with primitive supremacist tribal drivel, almost a third of
children of box-heads are secular by the time they finish high school.
There is a well-understood (outside the US) bifurcation of Jewish communities into "
People Like Us " and Eastern Europeans.
In Australia the dividing line can be drawn at around 1920: "People Like Us" are
integrated, and for the most part they politely and quietly ignore the rabbit-eaters –
those are the ones howling all the time about how at-risk they are, but who somehow can't
find a way to get to the Jewish 'safe space' in Palestine unless there is a warrant out for
their arrest, in which case it's " Tomorrow Morning in Jerusalem! ".
@Gilad Atzmon
But that's ridiculous. Every group has its criminals and the more ambitious and talented, the
worse. You can't have the talented Jews who contribute to science, technology, culture, and
philanthropy without some of that energy getting corrupted.
It's like that will all groups. When Europe was very energetic and vital it produced
tremendous sinners and corruption while also people of tremendous benefit to society and the
world.
Saints go along with sinners. Its because when you have a certain quantum of energy, you
cannot control where all of it goes. Some of it had to get corrupted. Only way to avoid this
is to neuter people.
So again .what does this have to do with Jewishness specifically? How this is different
from the Robber Barons of the 19th century, the rapacious and deceptive imperialists, the
current day Chinese oligarchs, etc? Umm, European and world history is littered with bad
actors a million times worse than, wet, Bernie Madoff and the ADL, lol
That Jews also produce bad actors proves that there is something uniquely wrong with
Jewishness per se? Are you nuts? This is what I mean by complete lack of self awarness and
historical literacy
Pick up a history book. You are so self absorbed in your fantasy world its as if no other
people produces bad actors or have ever, and we must search for the utterly mysterious fact
that some Jews act in the unique characteristics of Jewishness
@Colin Wright US
support has always acted as much as a restraint as a benefit. Israel's most contested wars
were won without US support, and in fact the US only became heavily involved with Israel only
after it firmly established itself and demonstrated its capacity for self reliance, and it
thought it could use it as an ally in the Cold War.
While certainly appreciated, US support is hardly crucial to Israel's survival lol. Your
historical illiteracy and wishful thinking causes you to completely misunderstand it and
vastly overrate it.
@Colin Wright
Bullshit –accept your own stupidity if you like but dont deign to speak for anyone else
!! Take any large city bedevilled by organised crime -- are the ORGANISED criminals
successful at least temporarily –yes ! Are they smarter than anyone else –NO !!
If the Jews are so smart why do they eventually always eff up??
They are organised with rat like cunning no doubt but seem to create misery wherever they
go and are so effin smart they are astounded that they are hated !! What could have caused it
–we are so smart why cant we figure it out !!
@Colin Wright
What are you talking about. I just said there is a perfectly reasonable type of anti-Semitism
that is a natural response to group competition – the actions of Jews themselves.
Obviously no ones hands are clean when it comes to group competition. This is an
"innocent" phenomenon of history that characterizes all groups without exception.
What Jews object to is not normal criticism, which we engage in ourselves in a very
spirited manner, but the singling out of Jewish competitive behavior in the struggle for life
as somehow uniquely evil and bad. I won't even go into the horrific crimes Europeans and
Asians have committed in this struggle and compare them to, err, Bernie Maddow, but accept
for the sake of argument all groups are equally guilty.
So a sane criticism of Jews that places it in the normal context of group competition,
which is always horrific, is perfectly ok. But the kind of singling out for special stigma
and opprobrium the Jewish part in the universal human struggle for survival – when if
anything it is milder than that of other groups which are truly horrific – is indeed
sinister and justifies terms like anti-Semitism.
Now because so many people single out Jews for special criticism, as if they alone are not
allowed to compete to live, some Jews have become hypersensitive and see in even innocent and
justified criticism the seeds of the kind of sinister anti-Semitism that so often rears its
ugly head. Thats perfectly understandable, although I condemn it.
I, for one, can't think of another people who invest so much energy in measuring their
unpopularity.
This is perfectly logical. No other group sees their hosts as dangerous cattle which has
to be exploited and undermined at every opportunity. Feeling the pulse of the herd –
before these actions create another blowback – is just part of the chosenite's job.
I don't see much guilt among the Jews. It's mostly (justified) fear that certain elements
of the Tribe are moving too aggressively and spoiling it for the rest.
@SolontoCroesus
This is what you have wrought Gilad. A philosophy of yours about Judaism and Jews and this is
where it ends up. With guys like this writing about.
But even more significantly, Jews killed -- genocided, really -- non-Jews in the
countries that had hosted them -- American colonists did not genocide the British in
British homeland -- once again, Jews arranged for the killing to be carried out by another
state, in the case of the genocide of Germany, American and British Christians became
Jewish weapons to kill their own fellow-Christians.
@AaronB If you
knew your history you would know about Operation Nickel Grass: 22,325 tons of tanks,
artillery, ammunition per Wikipedia. This was US aid during one of Israel's most contested
wars (Yom Kippur) and unsurprisingly, we don't get any appreciation for it. I bet I could
find an article criticizing the US for not doing it fast enough.
@Colin Wright I
have no doubt you're smarter than me, Colin. Your'e a pretty smart dude. I don't know about
Fran Taubman, though.
Statistically, there are far more smart whites than Jews by a huge margin. And I am not
even sure Jews are smarter than whites – I think the advantage in Jewish ways of
thinking are cultural. We don't buy into simple binary thinking like whites do, so remain
more intellectually supple and dextrous.
Anyways, one of the great things about Israel is that we can be more physical and don't
have to be so smart anymore. Oh sure, Israeli Jews are smart. They make good technology and
produce lots of great army officers and tactics and techniques, great conpanies, etc. But the
kind of cunning needed by diaspora Jews isn't so necessary anymore, and I've always been
struck by how maladroit and clumsy Israelis seemed on tv presenting defending Israel and the
like.
Hopefully, when I move to Israel ill lose another 10 IQ points or so, if I'm lucky.
Bliss.
@cyrusthevirus'What are you talking about. I just said there is a perfectly reasonable type of
anti-Semitism that is a natural response to group competition – the actions of Jews
themselves '
virtually all of said actions being perfectly reasonable -- according to you. Just group
competition.
Oh wait, you mentioned Bernie Madoff. How about, say, those actions that drove the
previously rather amiable Lithuanian peasantry into a murderous frenzy in the summer of
1941?
@AaronB'
It's like that will all groups. When Europe was very energetic and vital it produced
tremendous sinners and corruption while also people of tremendous benefit to society and the
world '
This is your typical glib generalization -- upon inspection, it seems to have absolutely
no basis in fact.
Several small communities have managed to produce people who notably helped mankind
without any concomitant output of villains. Norway comes to mind; how about Switzerland.
Conversely, other groups notoriously produce bad actors in abundance without ever offering
much of anything good at all in compensation -- Gypsies, for example.
So it's the purest nonsense to assert that Jewish villains are the necessary flip side to
Jewish saints. There's no rational reason to accept this statement.
That's one of the things that irritates me about you. You simply dream up and write
whatever sounds good -- without any apparent concern as to whether it's actually so or not.
It's like you could announce that in Israel, Jews grow to be an average of seven feet tall.
If it sounded good to you, you'd say it. It would never occur to you to check.
http://www.unz.com/mhudson/the-saker-interviews-michael-hudson/
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Introduction: I recently spoke to a
relative of mine who, due to her constant and voluntary exposure to the legacy AngloZionist media, sincerely
believed that the three Baltic states and Poland had undergone some kind of wonderful and quasi-miraculous
economic and cultural renaissance thanks to their resolute break with the putatively horrible Soviet past
and their total submission to the Empire since. Listening to her, I figured that this kind of delusion was
probably common amongst those who still pay attention and even believe the official propaganda. So I asked
Michael Hudson, whom I consider to be the best US economists and who studied the Baltics in great detail, to
reply to a few very basic questions, which he very kindly did in spite of being very pressed on time. Once
again, I want to sincerely thank him for his kind time, support and expertise.
* * *
The Saker:
The US
propaganda often claims that the three Baltic states are a true success, just like Poland is also supposed
to be. Does this notion have a factual basis? Initially it did appear that these states were experiencing
growth, but was that not mostly/entirely due to EU/IMF/US subsidies? Looking specifically at the three
Baltic states, and especially Latvia, these were the "showcase" Soviet republics, with a high standard of
living (at least compared to the other Soviet republics) and a lot of high-tech industries (including
defense contracts). Could you please outline for us what truly happened to these economies following
independence? How did they "reform" their economies going from an ex-Soviet one to the modern "liberal" one?
Michael Hudson:
This is
a trick question, because it all depends on what you mean by "success."
The post-Soviet neoliberalism has been a
great success for kleptocrats at the top. They gave themselves the public domain, from key industries to
prime real estate. But the Balts largely let their Soviet industries collapse, making no effort to salvage
or reorganize them.
Much of the problem, of course, was that all the linkages to Soviet-era
industry were torn apart as the Soviet Union was disbanded. With their supplier and final markets closed
down from Russia to Central Asia, the Baltic economies had to start afresh – with a very right-wing tax
policy and no government help whatsoever, as the government itself had become privatized in the hands of
former officials and grabitizers.
Lithuania was marginally better in having some industrial policy. EU and
NATO accession in 2004, along with easy credit, kicked off property bubbles in the Baltics, largely inflated
by Swedish banks that made a bonanza off these countries that lacked their own banks or public credit
creation. The resulting 2008 crashes were the largest in the world as a percent of GDP, with Latvia
suffering the world's biggest contraction.
The neoliberal western advisors who took
control of these economies – as if this was the only alternative to Soviet bureaucracy – imposed crushing
austerity programs to restore macroeconomic "stability" meaning security of their land and infrastructure
grabs. This was applauded by Europe's bankers, who thought the Balts had discovered a workable recipe
allowing austerity governments to retain power in a seeming democracy. These policies would have collapsed
governments anywhere else, but the ability to emigrate, plus ethnic divisions against Russian speakers,
allowed these governments to survive.
It's a historically specific situation,
but Europe's bankers promote it as a generalized model. George Soros's INET and his associated front
institutions have been leaders in subsidizing this financialization-cum-grabitization. The result has been a
massive exodus of prime working age people from Lithuania and Latvia. (Estonians simply commute to Finland.)
Meanwhile, their economies are buoyed by foreign bank lending, which sends profits back to home countries
and can be reversed at any time.
Politically, the neoliberal revolution also has been a success for U.S.
Cold Warriors, who sent over native Balts from Georgetown and other universities to impose "free market"
doctrine – that is, a market "free" of domestic regulation against theft of the public domain, against
monopolies, against land taxes and other income taxes. The Baltic states, like most of the rest of the
former Soviet Union, became the Wild East.
What was left to the Baltic countries
was land and real estate. Their forests are being cut down to sell wood abroad. I describe all this in my
book
Killing the Host
.
The Saker:
After
independence, the Baltic states had tried to cut as many ties with Russia as possible. This included
building (rather silly looking) fences, to forcing the Russians to develop their ports on the Baltic, to
shutting down large (or selling to foreign interests which then shut them down) and profitable factories
(including a large nuclear plant I believe), etc. What has been the impact of this policy of "economic
de-Sovietization" on the local economies?
Michael Hudson:
Dissolution of the Soviet Union meant
that Baltic countries lost their traditional markets, and had to shift their focus to Western Europe and, to
some extent, Asia.
Latvia and Estonia had been assigned computer and information technology,
and they have found this to be much in demand. When I was in Japan, for instance, CEOs told me that they
were looking to Latvia above all to outsource computer work.
Banking also was a surviving sector.
Gregory Lautchansky, former vice-rector at the University of Riga had been a major player already in the
1980s for moving out Russian oil and KGB money. (His company, Nordex, was sold to Mark Rich.) Many banks
continued to shepherd Russian flight capital via offshore banking centers into the United States, Britain
and other countries. Cyprus of course was another big player in this.
The Saker:
Russians are still considered "non-citizens"
in the Baltic republics; what has been the economic impact of this policy, if any, of anti-Russian
discrimination in the Baltic states?
ORDER IT NOW
Michael Hudson:
Russian-speakers, who do not acquire citizenship (which requires passing local language and history tests),
are blocked from political office and administrative work. While most Russian speakers below retirement age
have now acquired that citizenship, the means by which citizenship must be acquired has caused divisions.
Early on in independence, many Russians
were blocked from government, and they went into business, which was avoided by many native Balts during the
Soviet era because it was not as remunerative as going into government and profiting from corruption. For
instance, real estate was a burden to administer. Russian-speakers, especially Jewish ones, have wisely
focused on real estate.
The largest political party is Harmony
Center, whose members and leadership are mainly Russian-speaking. But the various neoliberal and nationalist
parties have jointed to block its ability to influence law in Parliament.
Since Russian speakers are only able to
"vote with their feet," many have joined in the vast outflow of emigration, either back to Russia or to
other EU countries. Moreover, the poor quality of social benefits has led to few children being born.
The Saker:
I often hear that a huge number of locals
(including non-Russians) have emigrated from the Baltic states. What has caused this and what has been the
impact of this emigration for the Baltic states?
Michael Hudson:
The Baltic states, especially Latvia,
have lost about 30 percent of their population since the 1990s, especially those of working age. In Latvia,
about 10 percent of the loss were Russians who exited shortly after independence. The other 20 percent have
subsequently emigrated.
The European Commission forecasts that Latvia's working-age population
will decline by 1.6% annually for the next 20 years, while the birth rate remains as stagnant as it was in
the late 1980s. The retired population (over age 65) will rise to half a million people by 2030, more than a
quarter of today's population, and perhaps about a third of what remains. This is not a domestic market that
will attract foreign or local investment.
And in any case, the European Union has
viewed the post-Soviet economies simply as markets for their own industrial and agricultural exports, not as
economies to be built up by public subsidy as the European countries themselves, the U.S. and Chinee
economies have done. The European motto is, "Give a man a fish, and he will be fed all day with your surplus
fish and consumer goods – but give him a fishing rod and we will lose a customer."
Readers who are interested might want to
look at the following books and articles. I think the leading work has been done by Jeffrey Sommers and
Charles Woolfson.
The Contradictions of Austerity: The Socio-Economic Costs of the Baltic Model
(London:
Routledge Press, 2014). Editors, J. Sommers & C. Woolfson. Foreword, J. Galbraith. ISBN:
978-0-415-82003-5.
Jeffrey Sommers, "No People, Big Problem': Democracy And Its Discontents In Latvia's National
Elections,"
Social Europe,
October 17, 2018.
Jeffrey Sommers, "Decline of the Demos: Latvia, the Face of New Europe and Austerity's Return," in F.
Jaitner, T. Olteanu and T. Spöri, eds.,
Crises in the Post-Soviet Space: From the dissolution of the
Soviet Union to the conflict in Ukraine
(Routledge Press, 2018) pp. 195-209. ISBN 9780815377245.
Jeffrey Sommers,
"
Austerity as a global prescription and lessons from the neoliberal
Baltic experiment."
Economic & Labour Relations Review.
Keynote article, 25:3 (fall 2014) pp.
1-20. DOI 10.1177/1035304614544091. Co-authored with C. Woolfson and A. Juskaa.
The Saker:
Finally,
what do you believe is the most likely future for these states? Will the succeed in becoming a "tiny
anti-Russia" on Russia's doorstep? The Russians appear to have been very successful in their
import-substitution program, at least when trying to replace the Baltic states: does that mean that the
economic ties between Russia and these states is now gone forever? Is it now too late, or are there still
measures these countries could take to reverse the current trends?
Michael Hudson:
Trump's
trade sanctions against Russia hurt the Baltic countries especially. One of their strong sectors was
agriculture. Lithuania, for instance, was known for its cheese, even in Latvia. The sanctions led Russian
dairy farming to develop their own cheese-making, and agriculture has become one of Russia's strongest
performing sectors.
This is a market that looks like it will
be permanently lost to the Baltic states. In effect, Trump is helping Russia follow precisely the policy
that made American agriculture rich: agricultural isolation has forced domestic replacement for hitherto
foreign food. I expect that this will lead to consumer goods and other products as well.
I am in Tallinn, Estonia right now. Just how good an economy is performing is often hard to determine by
talking to people, because like economists, many people have different perceptions. I was just talking to a
Russian-Estonian who was telling me how much better Lithuanians and Latvians are then Estonians at doing
things and how much cheaper things are there. It is true that things are much cheaper in the other Baltic
countries because Estonia (a tiny country of just over 1 million people) has taken off. Since the 2008
econmic collapse housing prices have shot up and in Tallinn there is building going on all over the city.
But, my acquaintance is wrong about other things. Estonians do things very well and Tallinn is a very nice
city, with beautiful cafes, clean and well kept streets and crime is very low. It is a very good city,
except it is now very expensive, especially considering how much people make here. The weather is not nice,
except for in the summer and there are friendly Estonians but they don't have a reputation for being
particularly friendly, even among themselves. I have not been back to Latvia yet, but when I was in Riga
years ago, it was a gorgeous city, bigger than Tallinn too. I think they do things very well there too. The
Russians I speak to here are often friendly and based on what I have been told, relations between Russians
and Estonians are much better than when I was here in the early 2000's.
No offense is intended to
Russians, but the Baltic countries had large German populations that played a key role in the development of
the cultures and peoples of these countries. There were also many Jews here prior to WW II. By the time WW
II had begun the German populations were much smaller than they had been and at the end of the war the
Jewish populations were much smaller. Jews were targeted in Latvia and Lithuania and many Latvians,
Lithuanians and Estonians were shipped off to far off places in the USSR during the war. I believe the Jews
were largely pro communist and welcomed the Soviet takeover of these countries in 1940, while the Latvian
and Estonian peoples were pro German, thus explaining the hard feelings between Balts and Jews.. They wanted
independence and formed legions to fight alongside the German army during WW II.
These countries were very advanced before WW II, having engineering industries and the Russian Empire's
first auto company was formed in Riga before WW I. While engineering may have been restarted after WW II,
these countries populations were decimated and they never returned to their former heights. Perhaps they
still can.
I'm assuming that these 3 East European countries are being bombarded with the same propaganda as the Ukies
are, so Russian speakers and those intelligent enough to see the game being played will be belittled and
isolated. But the Russian folks living in Russia have a birds eye view of what is going on in the west and
their puppet countries. Russia TV and debate programs, just have to show the delinquencies that are daily
happenings in the States, and Europe, in order to make the Ru people say – No Thanks to that way of life. As
far as the new Russian cheeses that are now in the markets -lol – they make a lightly smoked gouda that is
really good and is about 120-140 roubles a kilo. And, they are making more cheddar that is a white medium
taste as well. No scarcity of good natural food in Russia and No POlice state. Spacibo Unz Rev.
The trade volume between Russia and the Baltic states has actually risen, despite the sanctions. The Baltics
send food products and booze to Russia (and another 150 countries, food exports to Russia actually grew in
2016-2018). As well as chemical products and pharmaceuticals. Meldonium, btw, is made in Latvia and is still
being sent to Russia (as well as 20 other countries), not for athletes, but for regular folks. Work is being
carried out on a new generation Meldonium pill (the biggest market will be Russia).
Growth in the Baltic states has been 3-4% in the last few years. GDP per capita, as well as HDI, is
higher than in Russia. Foreign investment, including from Russia, has been growing (Russia was the second
largest investor in Latvia in 2018). Savings rates are growing, too. After a relative quiet period after
2010, the number of Russian (and other tourists) has grown again.
Estonia's population stopped shrinking in 2016 and is now growing in fact. They've seen immigration from
Finland, Ukraine, Belarus and Russia, as well as returning Estonians.
Emigration is a problem, of course, but this is partly because the Baltic states are the only former USSR
republics whose citizens were even given work permits in the West, imagine what would happen if these
permits were given to Russians from the regions.
Neo-liberal policies are of course bad and certain types of investment should be controlled, but to say
that there are no social services in the Baltic states is complete nonsense. Due to generous parental
payments, birthrates have risen significantly since the 1990s – in fact, birthrates in the Baltics are now
slightly higher than the EU average. Life expectancy is also growing. Latvia covers IVF treatments in full.
There are free school lunches.
Yes, it is true that some of the Soviet era factories should've been salvaged but the problem was they
were not competitive globally at that time (and there was no capital to remodel them). The Soviet market was
a closed one. However, some businesses were salvaged. There is local manufacturing (electronics,
pharmaceuticals, etc).
Not everything is ideal, but it is also not the kind of gloom and doom as you paint.
Saker says:
"Initially it did appear that these states were experiencing growth, but was that not
mostly/entirely due to EU/IMF/US subsidies?"
"Foreign Aid Makes Corrupt Countries More Corrupt":
"Any time a government hands out money, not just foreign aid, it breeds corruption And there are few
better examples than Ukraine – just don't tell the House impeachment hearings. Counting on foreign aid to
reduce corruption is like expecting whiskey to cure alcoholism .If U.S. aid was effective, Ukraine would
have become a rule of law paradise long ago . The surest way to reduce foreign corruption is to end
foreign aid."
@onebornfree
The EU gives every year about 2,500 million euros to the 3 Baltic countries ( 6 million people the three of
them ) , and 9000 million euros to Poland ( 38 million people ) , plus more billions to other eastern
members .
Older members of the EU , spetially the UK which is going out , Greece witch was tortured ( again )
economically by Germany , and south Europe in general are not very happy about admitting so many ex-soviets
countries en the EU and subsidizing them .
Recovery and self-sufficiency since Yeltsin show the brilliance of the Russian people
It's not so much brilliance as sheer necessity to survive under sanctions. But some results were better
than anyone expected. Say, food before sanctions used to be so-so in the provinces and downright bad in
Moscow because of abundance of imported crap. Now the food is exclusively domestic, fresh and tasty. Russia
never had traditions of making fancy cheeses. Now, to bypass sanctions, quite a few Italian and French
cheese-makers started production in Russia, so in the last 2-3 years domestically made excellent fancy
cheeses appeared in supermarkets. Arguably, Russian agriculture benefited by sanctions more than any other
sector, but there are success stories virtually in every industry. Sanctions and Ukrainian stupidity served
as a timely wake up call for Russian elites, who earlier wanted to sell oil and natural gas and buy
everything else. Replacing imports after the sanctions were imposed had a significant cost in the short run,
but in the long run it made Russia much stronger, economically and militarily. Speak of unintended
consequences.
My mom is from Lithuania and I've been there several times. We have second cousins our age.
Her father was
a surveyor for the Republic in the 20s and 30s, charged with breaking up the manors and estates and the
state distributing the land to the peasantry. It was near-feudalism. There was very little
industrialization; that which existed were in a few urban centers. One interesting comment from her was that
the "Jews were communists". From what I've read they were the urban working class, but perhaps part of the
socialist/Jewish Bund?
There is no doubt that the Soviet period unleashed considerable industrialization and modernization.
Lithuania had some of the best infrastructure in the USSR. Its traditional culture was really celebrated.
When I first visited, not long after the fall of the USSR, there were enormous, vacant industrial plants.
The collective farms were in the process of being sold off the western European agribusiness firms. One
relative through marriage was from the Ukraine, with a PhD in Physics and had been employed in the military
industries -- she was cleaning houses thereafter.
Any usable industrial enterprises were quickly sold off. The utilities are all foreign owned. Part of EU
mandates are "open" electricity "markets", which resulting in DC interconnections costing hundreds of
millions with the west to import very high priced electricity. The EU has paid for "Via Baltica", a highway
running from Poland to Estonia; it is choked with trucks carrying imports and there are huge distribution
and fulfillment centers along the highway. Such progress, huh?
There had been good public transport in the earlier years of independence, but that has been replaced
with personal automobiles -- usually western European used cars that pollute a lot. Trakai is a commuter town
to Vilnius with a medieval castle (restored in Soviet times). First time I went it was very pleasant. Second
time in 2018 the place was choked with cars and not very nice at all.
The impact of emigration cannot be over-stated. College educated young people leave by the hundreds of
thousands. Those that remain are paid very low wages (e.g., 1000 euros for a veterinarian or dentist), but
pay west European prices for many essentials. Housing is cheaper than the west.
Last time in Kazlu Ruda there were huge NATO exercises in progress and even bigger ones planned for 2020.
German units were billeted at an airbase nearby, rumored to have been a CIA black site. How fitting, as the
Germans with the Lithuanian Riflemens Union exterminated a quarter of a million Jews in a matter of months
(see Jager Report on Wikipedia). There is a Red Army graveyard in the town that has the remains of perhaps
350 soldiers killed in the area driving out the Nazis. I was frankly surprised it was still there.
Lithuania hasn't been independent since the days of the Pagans and Vytautas. It surely isn't independent
today.
Anecdotal -- yes. But based on personal observation.
The 'they are manipulating Trump' angle is valid I'm sure but it tends to diminish those
other aspects of Trump's 'intuition'. It is stated in the article though. Trump is antiwar in
the sense that he is against useless wars. Give him a clear goal and he doesn't mind war at
all. Looting and pillage is fine. Attacking defenseless enemies is fine. Convince him that
endless wars are actually good business and he'll support those as well. He doesn't require
manipulating for that. The antiwar elements in his thinking are easily used to paper over his
other characteristics as 'being manipulated'.
Another subject is that of Trump's dishonesty. In fact it is more about out of sync
dishonesty: 'normal people' (policy level) use shared schemas for when to lie and when not to
lie. Trump uses a different one. He will lie when others consider it a bad idea and will
speak the truth when others consider it a bad idea.
The Washington Post actually ran a very favorable article
on Gabbard's campaign in Iowa a couple of days ago. Most unusual for them. Only explanation I can
think of is that they realize she has a good chance of winning the Iowa caucuses and don't want
to be caught flatfooted by continuing their noncoverage of her campaign.
The explanation is more likely the opposite, I'm afraid. The Iowa caucuses are now close
enough, and Gabbard polling low enough, that the WashPost feel they can tidy up their record
by publishing something about her, even something favorable. If she were really threatening
the front-runners, minimal and/or hostile coverage would be de rigueur.
Thanks for your reply! IMO, Gabbard was correct to vote Yea for the inquiry as it doesn't
specify the crime(s). On her Twitter , Gabbard
called out Trump for his continuing criminal actions in Syria which constitute a High Crime
and impeachable offense. Furthermore, the orders given were all illegal orders as they're
against international and US Law and should've been refused by every soldier issued them as
it's their duty to do so . Unfortunately, Gabbard didn't make that very important
point.
The whole impeachment show the Democrats launched is a major political mistake.
Right on b, a MAJOR blunder. But they stampeded themselves into that blunder because of
their hysteria over Trump gunning for Biden and all the other carpetbaggers in Ukraine. This
Demoncrat gang of shysters have as much wisdom as a flat rock. They have now lost Biden, must
choose frootloop Warren as they can never have Sanders.
That looks a lot like keeping USA safe for Trump to me.
It is so pathetically obvious and these Demoncrats can't even assemble a package of
legislation with their majority to benefit USA citizens even one small bit. The Demoncrats
'leadership' are owned in their entirety by the oligarchs of MIC, big pharma and big
insurance. The Greens are incapable of breaking through their glass ceiling. What a total
shambles in just about every USA allied country.
I just posted poll results two days ago from New Hampshire showing Gabbard at 5% while
Harris had dropped to 3%. And given the size of the field, 5% is respectable and was clearly
a boost provided by Clinton's outburst. Gabbard was just given space for an op/ed in
The
Wall Street Journal which prompted the WaPost item. Can't read the WSJ item since
it's behind a paywall, but The Washington Times
ran its own piece about her op/ed that provides some insight as to its content, but that
site won't allow copy/paste so I can't provide MoA with the blurb it published.
Here's a WaPost item about Gabbard's Iowa campaign, which as I discovered when using
google is one of many by the WaPost. Despite all the ads, I liked it, but it won't get me to
subscribe.
Just got another fundraiser email from Tulsi's campaign. It ends with:
Tulsi is taking this fight directly to the people -- with a packed schedule of townhalls and
meet and greets, with big ad spends in the early states, with signs and boots on the ground.
The best thing you can do right now to help Tulsi rise above the smear campaigns is to help
her keep speaking truth to power. . . .
From what I read at ZeroHedge, it sounds like it will be "Make my day" time in the Senate,
with GOP senators able to subpoena anyone they want.
Yes, but if the GOP senators stick with their usual grandstanding posing then they can
subpoena whoever they like and it'll be pointless. Actually, it'll be a complete and utter
waste of fucking time because GOP senators have little or no experience of forensic
cross-examination and will spend their time dicking around and asking stupid questions in a
vain vain attempt to look good.. If they really want to stick it to the Democrats they need a
Senate impeachment resolution that allows them to use really experienced outside criminal
lawyers to plan and carry out the questioning. Since most experienced U.S. criminal lawyers
are experts at making deals with prosecutors for their clients rather than going to trial, I
would suggest they should bring in a couple of top-flight British QCs (barristers)with their
teams of juniors.
With Russia and now Ukrainegate, I'm reminded on the Fed dropping interest rates every time
the market has a down week. Yet eventually this shot of adrenaline will not work and the
market falls through the floor.
So now that Ukrainegate has a huge hole in its chest, do the dems have a plan c, or is this
the Big One?
I make this point because there are very many never Trumpers out there, clinging to this
spiel, but eventually even they will wake up and where do they go? Do they finally accept the
whole system really is rigged?
Eventually the ground under the powers that be will turn to quicksand and this really is a
notable earthquake.
"Well, you know, thank God for the 'deep state'," McLaughlin responded, provoking
laughter and applause.
The former intelligence official was speaking at an event hosted by George Mason
University, joined by former Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe and former CIA Director John
Brennan -- both of whom have been critical of the president.
"With all of the people who knew what was going on here, it took an intelligence officer
to step forward and say something about it, which was the trigger that then unleashed
everything else," McLaughlin said.
He went on to praise the intelligence community. "This is the institution within the
U.S. government -- that with all of its flaws, and it makes mistakes -- is institutionally
committed to objectivity and telling the truth," he said.
"It is one of the few institutions in Washington that is not in a chain of command that
makes or implements policy. Its whole job is to speak the truth -- it's engraved in marble
in the lobby."
As b stated in a previous post, it is
the Borg who should dictate US foreign policy. It certainly is not one of the three
branches of government (the legislature, the executive, and the judiciary) of the trias
politica model. The Intelligence Community if the Fourth Estate (Vierte Gewalt)
that rules supreme over the three other branches of government.
Since the UN Charter has the same legal status as Acts of Congress under U.S. law, the AUMF
can certainly violate the UN Charter, under U.S. law. The AUMF may violate international law,
but that is another matter.
A friend of mine attended a government meeting under President G.H.W. Bush. I believe the
subject was the kidnapping of General Noriega from Panama. In any case, I was told that at
the meeting William Barr said, "F!!! international law!" And it is well known that (according
to Richard Clark) George W. Bush said in the White House the evening of 9/11, "I don't care
what the international lawyers say, we're going to kick some ass!"
lysias 98 US when it comes to international law has been lawless since 1986.
"The Republic of Nicaragua v. The United States of America (1986) ICJ 1 is a public
international law case decided by the International Court of Justice (ICJ). The ICJ ruled in
favor of Nicaragua and against the United States and awarded reparations to Nicaragua. The
ICJ held that the U.S. had violated international law by supporting the Contras in their
rebellion against the Nicaraguan government and by mining Nicaragua's harbors. The United
States refused to participate in the proceedings after the Court rejected its argument that
the ICJ lacked jurisdiction to hear the case. The U.S. also blocked enforcement of the
judgment by the United Nations Security Council and thereby prevented Nicaragua from
obtaining any compensation.[2]"
In the last decades, US has used things like R2P and coalitions and so forth, but under
Trump, US is dropping most pretenses.
Pompeo at times is as honest as Trump when it comes to US and what it is.
I linked a video in an earlier comment to Pompeo, but then I realised there was a bit more to
"We lied, we cheated, we stole." The piece that was cut off in the earlier video I linked "
It reminds you of the glory of the American experiment"
The Bushes were a CIA family. William Barr's first jobs after college were with the CIA, and
his father was OSS. This has been the CIA's attitude towards law from the start. They've
largely been running the country since the JFK assassination, and now they're out in the open
trying to topple an elected president.
lysias , Nov 2 2019 2:31 utc |
104Peter AU1 , Nov 2 2019 2:33 utc |
105
The non Trump section of the swamp is not going down without a fight..
That effort was carried out at the request of at least one Ukrainian official, prosecutors
said. Trump ordered the ambassador, Marie Yovanovitch, removed in May."
b said;" The whole impeachment show the Democrats launched is a major political mistake."
Exactly b, and most Dems know it. That's the whole point, find a way to pretend they
want
DJT gone, when in reality, they love what this Admin. is doing. Devolving the Gov. so their
corporate masters can rake in more $ thru deregulation.
Big $ has finally achieved it's goal of of complete and total hegemony in the U$A.
Pelosi & Schumer are sycophants for the uber-wealthy, along with the majority of both
parties.
Known cost of Intel: $80 Billion for 17 Agencies.
Results? No known benefits.
Unknown cost: The damage they do.
Posted by: Don Bacon | Nov 2 2019 3:17 utc | 106
Since the activity is secret, so are the benefits! Actually, as a place for work,
"agencies" offer a number of benefits, especially post-employment opportunities.
On the topic of scholarship and the benefits of war, here's a reminder of what passes for
elite leadership. Tulsi Gabbard wants to end endless wars and the knives are now out for her.
Somebody takes Morris's thesis seriously. The world will be better off with the US the
permanent military leader of the world.
This is blowing up all over Twitter, with Gabbard slapping back, and the HRC loyalists
calling Gabbard an Assad apologist and worse.
According to HRC logic, American third party candidates are necessarily Russian stooges
placed to help the Kremlin's candidate win. The logic is "inescapable" according to HRC. BUT
OF COURSE!!!! Now it ALL MAKES SENSE! 1992 Perot-Clinton, 2000 Nader-Bush, 2016 Jill
Stein-Trump, and, 2020 Gabbard-Trump!!!!
It's all so clear now! The KGB wanted to keep HW Bush out of office as the former Soviet
Union collapsed! That's how she and Bill entered the WH in 1992! Perot was a KGB stooge, and
Bill and Hillary have been lifelong assets of the KGB. Of course!!! That's why Hillary sold
all that uranium to the Russians! Lest, anyone believe the charge of dual-loyalty leveled
against Gabbard is a fiction, check for yourselves.
The above is an actual argument just made by the 2016 candidate for POTUS. Russia controls
US elections by promoting third-party candidates. The best part is that HRC, beneficiary of
"obvious" Russian interference may yet end up running in 2020. Something to look forward to!
Imagine if HRC had won in 2016. Conspiracy theories out the wazoo!
Kind of puts the Morris "scholarship" in perspective, doesn't it? my mother and sister
have. Dipper, probably not)
Hi John, do whatever you want with this interview with Tulsi. It looks like it's on –
big time. Clinton versus Gabbard for the nomination and the chance to run against orange man
bad. On the basis of what I've seen I'd say Tulsi is the only Dem with a message to take
Donald down, and she's not scared to reach out to everyone for support.
I wonder about the Morris book, really. Histories aimed at the popular market are rarely
written in a vacuum. As you know, post-9/11 we saw a bumper crop of mostly crap histories of
the class of civilizations variety. I won't be buying or reading Morris, simply because I
find wide, encompassing arguments generally useless and dull. Anyway, from the sounds of it,
I do think Morris has a constituency among the FP elites.
by John Quiggin on October 13, 2019 On Facebook, my frined
Timothy Scriven pointed to an opinion piece by classics professor Ian Morris headlined
In the long run, wars make us safer and richer It's pushing a book with the clickbaity
title War! What is it Good For? Conflict and the Progress of Civilization from Primates to
Robots .". Timothy correctly guessed that I wouldn't like it.
Based on the headline, I was expecting a claim along the lines "wars stimulate technological
progress" which I refuted (to my own satisfaction at any rate) in Economics in Two
Lessons" . But the argument is much stranger than this. The claim is that war, despite its
brutality created big states, like the Roman empire, which then delivered peace and
prosperity.
For the classical world at 100 CE or so, the era on which Morris is an expert, that argument
seemed pretty convincing. As the famous Life of Brian sketch suggests, Roman rule delivered a
lot of benefits to its conquered provinces.
The next 1900 years or so present a bit of a problem, though. There have been countless wars
in that time, and no trend towards bigger states. On the contrary two or three dozen states
(depending on how you count them) now occupy the territory of the former Roman Empire.
You could cut the number down a bit by treating the European Union as a new empire, but then
you have an even bigger problem. The EU was not formed through war, but through a determination
to avoid it. Whatever you think about the EU in other respects, this goal has been
achieved.
Morris avoids the problem by a "no true Scotsman" argument. He admits in passing that the
1000 years of war following the high point of Rome had the effect of breaking down larger,
safer societies into smaller, more dangerous ones, but returns with relief to the era of true
wars, in which big states always win. That story works, roughly, until 1914, when the empires
he admires destroyed themselves, killing millions in the process.
After that, the argument descends into Pinker-style nonsense. While repeating the usual
stats about the decline in violent deaths, Morris mentions in passing that a nuclear war could
cause billions of deaths. He doesn't consider the obvious anthropic fallacy problem – if
such a war had happened, there would not be any op-eds in the Washington Post discussing the
implications for life expectancy.
I haven't read the book, and don't intend to. If someone can't present a 700 word summary of
their argument without looking silly, they shouldn't write opinion pieces. But, for what its
worth, FB friends who have read it agree that it's not very good.
William Meyer 10.13.19 at 12:31 pm (no link)
I have not read the book in question, so I don't know if the author made this point: "Since
violence or implicit violence is how we overcome essentially all collective action problems
as humans, war probably does belong in the human toolkit." Obviously it would be better if we
could find more and better alternatives to war, and remove the obvious glitches in the
alternatives (e.g., representative democracy, single-party states, etc.) we have tried in the
past. So I find it odd as I get old that so little energy/research/academic effort is devoted
by the human race to finding better means of collective decision making. Clearly our current
abilities in this field are completely inadequate. I ponder if this is because we are
incapable of doing better by some inherent flaw in our makeup or if it is because, as in some
many areas of life, the wicked work tirelessly to maintain the systems that enrich and
empower them. I suspect I'll never find out.
Omega Centauri 10.13.19 at 4:33 pm (no link)
There might be a case to be made for empire building conquest advancing human society. I
think it was primarily by forcing the mixing of cultures which otherwise would have been
relatively isolated from each other. Also empires tended to create safe internal trade
routes, the Silk Road was made possible by the Mongol empire.
At least the authors of books about such empires like to state that over a timespan of
centuries that empire creation was a net positive.
Orange Watch 10.13.19 at 7:07 pm (no link)
Tim Worstall and Dipper's suggestion that the EU is borne of war is mostly just a failure to
take Morris's claim on its unsophisticated face and instead assume it contains subtle
complexity that is obviously missing if you read the article itself:
This happened because about 10,000 years ago, the winners of wars began incorporating
the losers into larger societies. The victors found that the only way to make these larger
societies work was by developing stronger governments; and one of the first things these
governments had to do, if they wanted to stay in power, was suppress violence among their
subjects.
For the EU to have been a result of war in the sense that Morris means, it would have to
have been forcibly formed in 1945 by the US/UK/Russia forcibly incorporating Europe into it.
When Morris states "wars make us stronger and richer" he very simply means wars of conquest
are long-term net positives. He doesn't mean something subtle about nations banding together
to forestall further war; he bluntly means conquerors gluing together their conquests into
empires and then liberally applying boot leather to necks.
Mark Brady 10.13.19 at 7:56 pm (no link)
John Quiggin is, of course, well aware of this quotation, but some of you may not.
"Though some of them would disdain to say that there are net benefits in small acts of
destruction, they see almost endless benefits in enormous acts of destruction. They tell us
how much better off economically we all are in war than in peace. They see "miracles of
production" which it requires a war to achieve. And they see a postwar world made certainly
prosperous by an enormous "accumulated" or "backed up" demand. In Europe they joyously count
the houses, the whole cities that have been leveled to the ground and that "will have to be
replaced." In America they count the houses that could not be built during the war, the nylon
stockings that could not be supplied, the worn-out automobiles and tires, the obsolescent
radios and refrigerators. They bring together formidable totals.
"It is merely our old friend, the broken-window fallacy, in new clothing, and grown fat
beyond recognition. This time it is supported by a whole bundle of related fallacies. It
confuses need with demand."
Henry Hazlitt, Economics in One Lesson, Chapter 3, "The Blessings of Destruction."
Alex SL 10.13.19 at 8:37 pm (no link)
On one side, AFAIK the last few centuries of war in Europe have indeed seen a reduction of
the number of states. Yes, the trend was partly reversed since 1914, but never to the degree
of splintering that existed in the middle ages.
On the other side, even the widely accepted cases of supposedly 'beneficial' empires such
as the Romans bringing the Pax Romana and the Mongols allowing far-reaching trade and travel
need to be seen against the devastation they caused to make their victories possible. The
Romans, for example, committed genocide in Gaul and Carthage, and they enslaved millions.
Best case argument in my eyes is that a very successful war is beneficial because it stops
continuous smaller wars, which is still not exactly the same as a general "war is
beneficial". Why not just create institutional arrangements that avoid wars between small
nations in the first place?
fran6 10.13.19 at 9:26 pm (no link)
Here's another personality who's also unfazed by the evils of war (although, she does wish
more folks were "kind" to each other):
Stephen @11 Say what? Are you suggesting that the Soviet bloc was part of the EU? As both
your comment and Tim Worstall's unwittingly illustrate, the fact that the EU has been
entirely peaceful since its creation (by contrast with non-EU Europe) is not because
Europeans suddenly became pacifists.
Sorry if I have a hard time getting Morris' argument, but: towards the end, be seems to be
saying the world requires a "Globocop" like the US to ensure its prosperity. But how does
that relate to his wider point about the benefits of war? Does Morris believe the hegemon
owes it to itself, and to the rest of the world, to wage permanent war?
Morris sold out. This was evident in his book comparing the progress of China and Europe,
though that book made excellent points in between the fluff and is well worth reading. But he
is well versed enough in Chinese history to be aware of the ultimate example of armies
conquering and bringing peace to a large area, which happens repeatedly in Chinese history.
Actually, Chinese history itself shows that the opposite argument has more support, that
instead of war being valuable because one powerful country will conquer a large area and
bring peace to it, its valuable because competition between states who are worried about
other states getting a jump on them turns out to be valuable to progress. Large continental
empires, including the Roman one as well, tended to stagnate in terms of culture and
technology and become correct.
MFB 10.15.19 at 7:18 am (no link)
Well, the opinion-piece was published on Jeff Bezos' blog. Oligarchs are naturally in favour
of centralised power and therefore of empires (so long as they are at the apex thereof, which
they usually are). The best way to build an empire is through war.
Of course, the author has to say "despite Hitler, Stalin and Mao", for ideological
reasons. Actually, Hitler built his empire largely through the threat of war rather than
through war itself; once he had actually started the war, he antagonised three more powerful
empires than his own and his empire was then crushed. As for Stalin, he actually did various
double-back-somersaults to avoid getting into wars, and the "empire" which he built in
Eastern Europe as a result of winning a war he didn't want did not sustain itself. And of
course Mao didn't start any wars at all -- his name just had to be thrown in for reactionary
reasons.
It is true that the Spanish, Portuguese, French and British empires were built upon war.
But where are they now? The United States fought a lot of wars against its indigenous people,
but frankly it would still have been a global superpower if it had simply sidestepped most of
them, at least from about 1865 onward.
An interesting question: can it be that a professor of Classics doesn't actually have to
understand the concept of evidence-based argument in any case, because everything has already
been said on the subject and all you have to do is cherry-pick other people's statements?
Because that seems to be how that silly article reads.
And yes, the whole thing reeks of the better angels propaganda. Let's not forget, by the
way, that various members of the EU -- Britain, France, Italy et al -- have launched brutally
murderous wars elsewhere, and the fact that they don't fight among themselves doesn't make
them peaceful or moral entities.
@TheSophist #25: that was mentioned as a joke rather than self-publicity, but if you're
really interested: The Roman Empire: roots of imperialism (Pluto Press, 2020). Obviously
books about the Roman Empire are ten a penny; my main claim for this one, besides its being
less apologetic and/or gung-ho than most, is that I try to integrate the historical reality
with its reception, i.e. how people have subsequently deployed Rome as an example or model.
Maybe the Roman Empire delivered on peace, but prosperity is a bit more complicated. Some
years ago David Hays wrote a book on the history of technology. One of the things he did was
make a back-of-the-envelope estimate of material welfare at different levels of development.
He concluded that, while civilization has always been a good deal for the elite, it's been
rather iffy for peasants and workers. It's only during the Industrial Evolution that the
standard of living at the lower end of society rose above that of hunter-gatherers. So, the
prosperity delivered by the Roman Empire went mostly to the elite, not the peasantry.
Peter Erwin@43 wanted the Nazis to roll right up to the eastern border of Poland, etc. etc.
So did Hitler. And although I'm quite reluctant to read minds, especially dead one, I will
nevertheless guarantee the move into the Baltics was seen as a blow to his plans, even if
accepted for temporary advantage. You must always see who hates Stalin for beating Hitler,
and those rare few who object to his real crimes.
And, Erwin thinks Chinese troops being in Korea with permission is an aggression, while US
troops closing on Chinese borders is not. The US still isn't out of Korea, but China is, but
he can't figure out who the aggressor is.
Really, Peter Erwin really says it all. The maddest ant-Communist propaganda is now
official.
MFB 10.17.19 at 9:02 am (no link)
I don't want to unnecessarily dump on Peter Erwin, because I don't believe in kicking
disadvantaged children, but if he reads the original post he will notice that it was talking
about international wars, not civil wars. I'll admit the invasion of Finland (and of the
Baltic states and Poland) but those were fairly obviously ways of strengthening the USSR's
position in order to discourage a German invasion, and all took place within the boundaries
of the former Russian Empire which Stalin undoubtedly saw as the default position.
As to Mao, he didn't start the Korean war (as Erwin unwillingly admits) and all the other
wars except for the invasion of Vietnam were civil wars since they entailed moving into
Chinese-controlled territory which had broken away during the main civil war. I'll admit that
Vietnam was a problem, but then, since Mao had been dead for some time by then, it's would be
hard for Erwin to blame him except for the fact that Erwin clearly lives on Planet
Bizarro.
@John Quiggin The claim is that war, despite its brutality created big states, like the
Roman empire, which then delivered peace and prosperity
I don't think this is an intellectually generous summary of the arguments, as presented in
the article.
The author himself summarizes it as "war made states, and states made peace", and if it is
indeed true that the author often speaks of "larger, more organized societies" there is a
strong implication that for a society to be "large" in the sense discussed in the article, it
is not really necessary that it be territorially very wide (the most clear cut indication of
that is that the author refers to the European states of the 1600s as "big, settled states"
while they all were geographically tiny at the time). So the point of the author, if
interpreted with intellectual honesty, seems to me to be twofold: 1) that war has been a
crucial factor in the formation of complex, organized states and societies and 2) that these
complex, organized states and societies brought with them so many positive things that the
wars required to form them were worth it.
The second point is pure Pinker. I consider it logically meaningless, myself (it
ultimately relies on the concept that History proceeds like an individual who is choosing a
pair of shoes) and morally repugnant (it is not hard to see who will be pleased to have a
rhetorical tool that can justify any atrocity by the long term gains it will provide humanity
– indeed, it is instructive in that respect to read SS internal papers on when and why
children should be executed with their parents, and how to select people for that task:
contrary to what could be guessed, the manual recommends the soldiers who appear to have a
strong sense of empathy and morality, with the idea that they will those who will most
strongly endorse the "by doing this abominable act, we are sacrificing ourselves on behalf of
future generations" thesis).
The first point, however, appears to me to be broadly correct descriptively. Extracting an
interesting thesis out of it requires much more work than is indicated by the article,
however (I consider Ertman's Birth of the Levianthan an example of that kind of extra
work done successfully).
@John Quiggin Lots of people predicted, along the lines of your post, that with the
external threat of the USSR gone, and the US pulling back, the old warlike Europe would
reassert itself.
I think what we may call the "wide military context thesis" runs rather like this: because
of the experience of WWII and the Cold War, modern industrial states have amassed enormous
military power while at the same time knowing that they can experience total destruction if
they enter into a military conflict with a state of comparable military might. As a
consequence, peace dominates between them. So France is not at war with the United Kingdom or
Germany, certainly in part because they are all (for now) members of the EU but also in part
for the same reason Japan is not at war with South Korea and Russia not at war with
China.
Personally, I think it would be absurd to claim that the EU has played no role in the
pacification of Western Europe in the second half of the twentieth century, but I think it
would be equally absurd to deny the role of other factors that plainly play a major role in
the equally remarkable pacification of other regional areas in the absence of an economical
and political unification process (rise in prosperity, rise in education, aging populations,
increased military power ).
@7, Omega
Not really wanting to get into the "do empires benefit civilization by promoting trade"
argument, but having just read Lost Enlightenment, nothing in that lengthy tome suggests the
Silk Road city states gain any special advantage from the Mongol invasion. In fact, quite the
opposite. After the Mongols (in part for reasons preceeding the conquest), Central Asia never
regained its pre-eminence (it had actually not just been a facilitator of trade but also a
center of manufacture, culture, scientific progress). Maybe the trade routes hobbled along as
trade routes but the civilization that was both built by and facilitated trade did not
rebound. Most empires seem to get that there is wealth to be had from involvement in trade,
they don't always know how to keep the gold goose alive.
LFC 10.20.19 at 9:10 pm (no link)
"War made states and states made peace" is a riff on Charles Tilly's line "war made the state
and the state made war."
Arguably some of the most significant events since the eight-year long war's start have played out in Syria with rapid pace over
just the last month alone, including Turkey's military incursion in the north, the US pullback from the border and into Syria's oil
fields, the Kurdish-led SDF&# deal making with Damascus, and the death of ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. All of this is why a
televised interview with Presiden39;st Bashar Assad was highly anticipated at the end of this week.
Assad's commentary on the latest White House policy to "secure the oil" in Syria, for which US troops have already been redeployed
to some of the largest oil fields in the Deir Ezzor region, was the biggest pressing question. The Syrian president's response was
unexpected and is now driving headlines, given what he said directly about Trump, calling him the "best American president" ever
– because he's the "most transparent."
"When it comes to Trump you may ask me a question and I'll give you an answer which might seem strange. I tell you he's the best
American president," Assad said, according to a
translation provided by NBC.
"Why? Not because his policies are good, but because he is the most transparent president," Assad continued.
"All American presidents commit crimes and end up taking the Nobel Prize and appear as a defender of human rights and the 'unique'
and 'brilliant' American or Western principles. But all they are is a group of criminals who only represent the interests of the
American lobbies of large corporations in weapons, oil and others," he added.
"Trump speaks with the transparency to say 'We want the oil'." Assad's unique approach to an 'enemy' head of state which has just
ordered the seizure of Syrian national resources also comes after in prior years the US president called Assad "our enemy" and an
"animal."
Trump tweeted in April 2018 after
a new chemical attack allegation had surfaced: "If President Obama had crossed his stated Red Line In The Sand, the Syrian disaster
would have ended long ago! Animal Assad would have been history!"
A number of mainstream outlets commenting on Assad's interview falsely presented it as "praise" of Trump or that Assad thinks
"highly" of him; however,
it appears the Syrian leader was merely presenting Trump's policy statements from a 'realist' perspective , contrasting them from
the misleading 'humanitarian' motives typical of Washington's rhetoric about itself.
That is, Damascus sees US actions in the Middle East as motivated fundamentally by naked imperial ambition, a constant prior theme
of Assad's speeches , across administrations, whether US leadership dresses it up as 'democracy promotion' or in humanitarian terms
characteristic of liberal interventionism. As Assad described, Trump seems to skip dressing up his rhetoric in moralistic idealism
altogether, content to just unapologetically admit the ugly reality of US foreign policy.
I see Americans keep calling Assad and Putin a ''dictator'' Hey, jackasses, they were ELECTED in elections far less corrupt than what you have in the USSA
Assad is a very eloquent speaker. Witty, sharp and always calm when speaking with decadent press. Of course the MSM understood
what he DID mean, but they cannot help themselves, but parse anything to try hurting Trump.
If true. It means the Vatican (the oldest most important money there is) like Saudi Arabia and the UAE sure do seem to care
about stuff like purchasing power in their "portfolios" and a "store of value"?...
I see lots of EU participants taking their money to Moscow as well with that Arctic bonanza that says "come hither" if you
want your money to be worth something!!!
It's always been about oil. Spreading Freedumb, Dumbocracy and Western values, is PR spiel. The reality is, the West are scammers,
plunderers and outright thieves. Forget the billions Shell Oil, is holding for the Biafran people/region in Nigeria, which it
won't give to either the Bianfran states in the east, nor the Nigerian government, dating back to the secessionist state of Biafra/Nigerian civil war 1967-70. The west are nothing more than gang-bangers, but on the world stage.
Yet the department for trade and industry is scratching its head, wondering why their are so few takers for a post-Brexit trade
deal with the UK, where the honest UK courts have the final say? lol
Too bad it is political suicide for an American president to try to establish communication with Assad. He seems like a pretty
practical guy and who knows, it might be possible to work out a peaceful settlement with him.
economic warfare on the syrian civlian population through illegal confiscation of vital civilian economic assets, and as conducted
in venezeula, is called ________________
Assad is saying where before the UKK was a masked thief, with Trompas and his egotism alias exceptionalism, has not bothered
withthe mask. He is still a murderer and thief.
Now Assad has some idea why Trump is so popular with his base, they love him for not being politically correct, for "telling
it like it is". He's like the wolf looking at the sheep and telling them he's going to eat them and the sheep cheering because
he's not being a wolf in sheep's clothing.
Unfortunately in the case of Trump's sheeple, they don't even have a clue they're going to be eaten, the Trumptards all think
he's going to eat someone else like the "deep state" or the "dumbocrats". Meanwhile he's chewing away at their health care, their
export markets, piling up record deficits, handing the tax gold to the rich and corporations while they get the shaft, taking
away program after program that aided students, the poor, and the elderly, appointing lobbyists to dismantle or corrupt departments
they used to lobby against, and in general destroying the international good will that it's taken decades to build.
"... Believing herself untouchable and immune from any genuine criticism or objective analysis after having successfully evaded prosecution from the nation's top law enforcement agencies, HRC went off the deep end dragging the Democratic party further into the ditch. ..."
"... She is a favorite of the Russians. That's assuming that Jill Stein will give it up which she might not because she is also a Russian asset." ..."
"... Gabbard's message is relatively simple -that is: Instead of the US destroying countries it should be spending the Military Budget on rebuilding the US. Yes that sounds like an America First type of stance but it has a decent logic about it. ..."
"... The US needs an enemy to justify its massive defence bill and 800 bases worldwide. ..."
"... Stoltenberg would happily stop all social services in order to buy more missiles and gain a few brownie points from Trump. Stoltenberg along with the US Neocons are are sick SOB's. ..."
"... Both Trump and Jabbard are opponents of the CIA – Wall street complex. Nationalists vs Globalists, but some people still believe the former are more dangerous than the latter. ..."
"... The Dems morphed into neocons when her willy-waving husband sold out and destroyed the Democratic Party of LBJ's Great Society. ..."
"... Tulsi has shown a lot of class, truth to the darkest Power, and long may she have this platform.. ..."
As you may have figured out by now, Hillary Clinton, warped by her own self aggrandizement of entitlement, did Tulsi Gabbard and
her Presidential campaign against interventionist wars a huge incidental favor.
While the Democrats continue to splinter and spiral out of control on the eve of what promises to be a transformative national
election, the Grand Inquisitor seized an opportunity to allege that Gabbard (and Jill Stein) are " Russian assets " and " Putin puppets
".
Since Tulsi is a Major in the US Army Reserves and holds the highest security clearance available, the term 'asset,' which is
associated with being an agent of a foreign power, carries a level of national security significance.
Believing herself untouchable and immune from any genuine criticism or objective analysis after having successfully
evaded
prosecution from the nation's top law enforcement agencies, HRC went
off the deep end dragging the Democratic party
further into the
ditch.
She is a favorite of the Russians. That's assuming that Jill Stein will give it up which she might not because she is also
a Russian asset."
Clinton's
historic pronouncement came in the mistaken belief that publicly humiliating Gabbard would intimidate the Aloha Girl to silence
and seek refuge on her surfboard – but that is not how it has played out.
An unexpected bonus proved once again that political strategy has never been Clinton's strong suit as her malicious comments have
brought the anti-war alt left with the libertarian alt-right together in Gabbard's defense. With HRC's injudicious taunts, the glimmer
of an emerging political realignment , one that has
been at odds with both the Dem and Republican establishments, has surfaced – probably not exactly what HRC intended.
In response to having received a burst of unprecedented support, Gabbard is about to assure her place on the November debate stage
and continues to solidify her credibility as a critic of a corrupt bipartisan political establishment and its endless wars.
If they falsely portray me as a traitor, they can do it to anyone. Don't be afraid. Join me in speaking truth to power to take
back the Democrat Party and country from the corrupt elite."
It is noteworthy that HRCs accusation was to the only candidate who stands in direct opposition to the Queen Bee's history for
the war machine and all of its bells and whistles. As if to call attention to the contradiction, the entire fiasco has acknowledged
what was never meant to be acknowledged: that one little known Congresswoman from Hawaii would dare to publicly confront the omnipotent
HRC with her own demons and malfeasance; thereby elevating the one candidacy that represents a threat to the military industrial
complex and its globalist order.
It is no coincidence that the corporate media operates in lockstep as an offensive October 12th
NY Times article was immediately
followed by a CNN
commentary as well as other media sycophants, all tagging Gabbard as a Russian asset.
Contrary to Journalism 101 on how professional media should conduct themselves, there has been no evidence, no facts, no supporting
documentation as they characteristically rely on innuendo and disinformation.
At the last Dem debate and during the kerfuffle with Clinton, Tulsi has stepped up and
showed herself
to be a candidate the country has been waiting for. With a powerful inner grit, she did not hesitate to take the
Times and CNN
publicly to task and then
in response
called HRC out as a warmonger and
dared her to enter the 2020 fray.
There lies a deep truth within
Gabbard's response especially identifying Clinton as the " personification of the rot that has sickened the Democratic Party.
"
During Clinton's term as Secretary of State which is little more than a Glorified Global Hustler for the US military industrial
complex, the Democratic Party lost its soul, morphing as nefarious neocons in pursuit of raw political and economic power that emanates
from a policy of unfettered regime change and interventionist wars.
As Democrats embraced the neocons with no objection to the unrestrained violence, increased military budgets, indiscriminate selling
of weapons to bomb a civilian population, then why should the party's grassroots object to the Tuesday morning assassination list
or drone attacks on civilians or creating war in four countries living in peace in 2008?
As the party faithful allow themselves to dismiss all the suffering, the death and destruction wrought by US-made weapons as if
Amazon and Google toys were an acceptable trade, they lost their conscience and their connection to the basic essence of humanity's
need for peace, love and compassion.
The latest example of the Party's devotion to war is their opposition to the withdrawal of US troops from Syria as they created
the phony debate that the Kurds were worth more American blood or resources. The Dems have always been more pro-war than they have
been given credit for with WWI, WWII, the Korean War and Vietnam all initiated and/or expanded under Democrat Presidents.
With no substantiation from the mindless meanderings of a seriously disoriented woman, it is now clear that Clinton's derangement
syndrome of unresolved guilt and denial led the Democratic party to its irrational embrace of Russiagate as the justification for
her 2016 loss.
In other words, it was Russiagate that protected HRC's fragile self-esteem from the necessary introspection as Americans were
pitted against one another, dividing the nation in a deliberate disruption of civil society in a more acrimonious manner than any
time since the 1860's. The country has paid a bitter, unnecessary price for a divisive strategy due to Clinton's refusal to personally
accept responsibility for her own failings.
HRC's most egregious war crimes as Secretary of State include assigning Victoria Nuland to conduct the
overthrow of a democratically elected
President in Ukraine in 2014 and the ensuing violence and civil war in the Donbass as well as her
joyous rapture cackling at the death of Libyan President Qaddafi in 2011. The now infamous video " We came, we saw, he died "
showed her to be more than just your average war criminal but a Monster who experiences an aberrant thrill at death and destruction.
Since June, TPTB have done their darnedest to deny Tulsi a spot on the debate stage rigging the qualifying requirements as best
they could. Making it near impossible for the polling firms, which rely on campaign season and their economic connection with the
DNC to call the shots in a fair and equitable manner.
As the early primary states loom ahead, the last thing TPTB need is a powerful pro-peace voice resonating with the American public.
The message seems clear: talk of peace is verboten and equates with being a Russia asset and anyone with pacifist tendencies will
be publicly chastised and condemned for being a tool of the Kremlin.
None of that has stopped Tulsi Gabbard.
Renee Parsons has been a member of the ACLU's Florida State Board of Directors and president of the ACLU Treasure Coast
Chapter. She has been an elected public official in Colorado, an environmental lobbyist with Friends of the Earth and staff member
of the US House of Representatives in Washington DC. She can be found on Twitter @reneedove31
Ken Kenn
I am very impressed by Tulsi Gabbard. She's a bit too patriotic for me – but I'm a Brit so for a serving American it's understandable.
It isn't the person that is dangerous- it is the insertion of the idea that Regime Change wars are counterproductive.
Gabbard's message is relatively simple -that is: Instead of the US destroying countries it should be spending the Military
Budget on rebuilding the US. Yes that sounds like an America First type of stance but it has a decent logic about it.
Wasteful wars and the idea that the US should install its version of Democracy across the Middle East has always been a doomed
project and co-operation and an attempt at rebuilding these nations in order to attempt some kind of democracy and future prosperity
is required – not bombing and bullying.
You could be outraged by Clinton's nasty rhetoric but let's face it. Clinton lost to someone she considered to be a Clown.
In actuality the DNC almost promoted Trump as person they could beat hands down.
It bit them on the arse as did the Brexit result in the UK.
Clinton has never got over losing to a chump and she is just covering her backside as to why she lost.
Hell hath no fury like a self appointed Candidate scorned. Like Johnson in the UK Clinton thought she had the right to rule.
She didn't and doesn't. To quote some US Senator; " The people have spoken. The bastards!"
Igor
The objective is not to install American "democracy". Which does not exist anywhere, USA is officially a republic. Unofficially,
it is an oligarchy. Elite super wealthy families and their corporations run the USA. All 45 Presidents have been related to those
families. The President is actually elected by the Electoral College, not the popular vote. This was designed into the Constitution
of USA, Inc.
The aim of regime change is to create chaos in MENA, by which a small ME state can profit without doing any visible dirty work.
The Democrats(oxymoron for il Partito Fascista Americano) are doing this for the simple reason knowing full well that most traditional
old school democrats identify with Bernie Sanders. The whole notion of the WASP notion of left right paradigm is oxymoron in itself.
Any political science follower or student would have to agree. What is the political left mean in the west????????? Has anyone
ever read Marx and Engles ???????????? Social democrat WTF does that mean. Historical revisionist get labelled Nazi sympathisers.
The constant lies and obfuscation with real facts. Like population stats death births . The Classic method being used at the moment
is they no longer due c0up d'etats the good old fascistic way. The popular vote gets discredited by the judicial system. IE the
recent elections of Argentina and Bolivia does not suit the IMF( the International Mafia Fund) henc e the European Union Funded
election monitoring organisations are all openly stating that both elections were not KOSHER.
Look at the people in Venezuela and Bolivia that are demonstrating against the popular elected and voted for Governments. White
upper middle class figli di putane. Plain and simple the western paradigm of fake democrazia and fake economy is dying the plutocratic
and oligarchical class are just creating storms and fires just do deviate from good old fashion bread and butter issues.
Conclusion:
The pax-americana Democrats(RATS) know full well that Bernie will not lead the party Gabbard will not lead the party so here
is there strategy and good old Chuckie Schuemer the anglo-zionist par excellance laid it out in 2015. They are hoping that old
fashion conservative Republicans that are disgusted with the Orange one will vote for them and further reduce the number of voters.
Just think of this. In this day and age with the largest wealth gap exceeding the Gilded age which individual would take a day
off to line up to vote on a bitter grey November day. So these remarkable establishment shills in their great wisdom are running
as Eisenhower Republican and hoping to steal votes from the Republicans and not win any votes from the new ever growing lower
so called middle class.
POST SCRIPTUM: The irony and the complete paradox more war will give us peace and the rich getting richer will give us the
sheeple wealth. Black is white and grey does not exist and left vs right. What a sad state of affairs.
Docius in fundem: The sad reality in our dying western paradigm of pax-americana is never in the history of the modern and
post modern era we have more people graduating from tertiary education but we have created the most ignorant and pliant class
of individuals ever.
Jon
She came, we saw, she lied.
Hugh O'Neill
Russian asset and Putin puppet, Jesus of Nazareth reportedly said: "Blessed are the Peace Makers". As we know, Trump receives
maximum MSM contempt for anything approaching diplomacy and peace, and highest MSM approval when advocating war and destruction.
Likewise, when a Presidential candidate dare breathe the word "Peace" then she is either ignored, ridiculed or accused of treachery
– and that greatest of all crimes, being pro-Russian (ergo anti-American). It is timely perhaps to re-read President Kennedy's
(largely unreported) Commencement Address to American University, 10th June 1963:
" What kind of peace do I mean? What kind of peace do we seek? Not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons
of war. Not the peace of the grave or the security of the slave. I am talking about genuine peace, the kind of peace that makes
life on earth worth living, the kind that enables men and nations to grow and to hope and to build a better life for their children–not
merely peace for Americans but peace for all men and women–not merely peace in our time but peace for all time".
"I speak of peace because of the new face of war. Total war makes no sense in an age when great powers can maintain large and
relatively invulnerable nuclear forces and refuse to surrender without resort to those forces. It makes no sense in an age when
a single nuclear weapon contains almost ten times the explosive force delivered by all the allied air forces in the Second World
War. It makes no sense in an age when the deadly poisons produced by a nuclear exchange would be carried by wind and water and
soil and seed to the far corners of the globe and to generations yet unborn."
Lest we forget: Lee Harvey Oswald was sheep-dipped as a Russian-loving commie precisely so as to blame Russia for killing that
commie/socialist/pacifist/drug-addled/free-lovin' Jack Kennedy. Somehow, their script didn't really make any sense. Script-writer
Allen Dulles had written a turkey, but the show must go on, and on .
Igor
It won't be allowed. The People have no say in the matter. Politics is pure spectacle, to distract and entertain the masses, and
to make them think that they have a voice. All 45 US Presidents have been interrelated through 200+ super wealth elite intertwined
families. If Tulsi Gabbard is not related, then she is not getting into the White House. If she is related, she will get in and
do nothing different from what the previous actors have always done.
#Resist45 and Trump, Mr. #45, work for the same people. Keeping the nation dazed and confused, since January 2017. Congress
does nothing useful, by design, concentrating on impeachment. The Media has plenty of Trump social media coverage to prevent ever
having space to report on actual events (as if they would).
Chinese Asset?
Please don't make the Republicans look better than they are. Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Ms. Hua Chunying said at a press briefing
that
Pence's speech made Thursday revealed his "sheer arrogance and hypocrisy, and was packed with political prejudice and lies"
So refreshing to hear it from a high level official! Ms Hua also accused Pence of using China as a prop to distract from
the United States' failings. Now we know, the 'Russian asset' accusation is used to distract from the continuous and
never-ending murderous operation of the US regime.
Seamus Padraig
Since Tulsi is a Major in the US Army Reserves and holds the highest security clearance available, the term 'asset,' which
is associated with being an agent of a foreign power, carries a level of national security significance.
Alt-journalist
Caity Johnstone has recently remarked upon how the Democrats and the media (but I repeat myself) have started to give the
word 'asset' their own little proprietary meaning:
"Russian 'assets' are not formal relationships in the USIC [US Intelligence Community] sense of the word," CNN analyst and
former FBI agent Asha Rangappa explained via Twitter. "If you are parroting Russian talking points and furthering their interests,
you're a source who is too dumb to know you're being played to ask for money."
"It's important to point out here that a Russian 'asset' is not the same thing as a Russian 'agent'," tweeted virulent establishment
narrative manager Caroline Orr. "An asset can be witting or unwitting; it's any person or org who can be used to advance Russia's
interests. It's pretty clear that Tulsi satisfies that criteria."
"One doesn't have to be on the Kremlin's payroll to be a Russian asset. One doesn't even have to know they are a Russian
asset to be a Russian asset. Have you not heard the term 'useful idiot' before?" tweeted writer Kara Calavera.
At this rate, pretty soon, we'll all have to check with RT first before we open our mouths in public, just to make sure we're
not accidentally agreeing with the Russians!
The Dems have always been more pro-war than they have been given credit for with WWI, WWII, the Korean War and Vietnam all
initiated and/or expanded under Democrat Presidents.
Ha, ha! That takes me back–all the way to 1976, to be exact–to when Bob Dole (then a candidate for Vice-President) described
all the wars of the 20th century as " Democrat wars
".
Igor
"CNN analyst and former FBI agent Asha Rangappa explained via Twitter. "
Says the CNN paid asset.
Hugh O'Neill
Thanks once again to Renee for championing Tulsi. Yesterday my local paper here in NZ (The Otago Daily Times) in its "This Day
in History" column, briefly referred to JFK and the peaceful resolution of the Cuban Missile Crisis. I wrote to the editor my
appreciation:
"Although I am old enough to remember both the 1960 election and the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy, I was
blissfully unaware of the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962 (when I was almost 7 years old). My thanks to the ODT for marking
this date which is the day in History when the world stepped back from the abyss of nuclear war and ended all life on Earth. Sadly,
too many today live in blissful ignorance of the most dangerous moment in the History of Mankind.
As the old saying goes, those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it. Next time around, there may no longer be the politicians
with the courage and intelligence of Kennedy and Khrushchev: both men had to out-manoeuvre their own military hawks, and each
man knew the personal risks he faced in doing so. Khrushchev was replaced within a year and died in ignominy.
JFK's lived another year before his own untimely end. Though we may lament the execution of John F. Kennedy, he had not lived
and died in vain, because we are still here despite the military. I cannot recommend highly enough two books: firstly, Bobby Kennedy's
"13 Days> A Memoir of the Cuban Missile Crisis" and James Doulglass "JFK & The Unspeakable. Why he died & Why it Matters".
Tulsi has been the only candidate in a very long time to speak the unspeakable truth. Do not condemn her for whatever flaws
some commenters below perceive. No-one is absolutely perfect in every way – not even Mary Poppins. But Tulsi is a breath of fresh
air and has immense courage, eloquence, passion, integrity and charisma to bring out the best in people. The real enemy is within
– in every sense.
Thanks, Gwyn. I knew this story already but it is worth rereading. The fact that some dimwitted USN ship started dropping depth
charges without top authority shows that JFKs grip on his own military was tenuous. He had recently read Barbara Tuchman's "The
guns of August" which showed how stupid acts by subordinates could have massive consequences. Once again, this demonstrates the
treachery of the military. Recently, some British General stated publicly that if Corbyn were elected, there would be a coup.
The military mind cannot cope with the concept of Democracy.
Stoltenberg would happily stop all social services in order to buy more missiles and gain a few brownie points from Trump.
Stoltenberg along with the US Neocons are are sick SOB's.
Antonym
Trump doesn't want US taxpayers to fund US mil in Europe, not unreasonable. Both Trump and Jabbard are opponents of the CIA
– Wall street complex. Nationalists vs Globalists, but some people still believe the former are more dangerous than the latter.
Amazon, Google or Apple have more power than North Korea, Iran or Xyz. China cannot be the CIA-Wall street bogey now as they make
too much profit of it: Russia is much smaller fish margin wise (the Clinton's only managed a few dozen million$) so that makes
the perfect fake enemy. On top Russia actually competes with oil and gas, which China can't.
Wilmers31
Someone with more knowledge to the timeline needs to correlate the punishments for Russia (sanctions) to the oil price. I think
they started sanctions when Russian oil and gas deliveries were getting cheaper but US needed 75$+ for the frackers. It was just
eliminating a competitor, especially after they could not purchase the monopoly on Russian gas and oil through the monopoly company
Yukos.
Gary Weglarz
This is something I've been thinking a lot about lately, and this seems like a good post to share it on.
Watching trolls emerge to discredit and attack the lone U.S. candidate who publicly and vocally opposes America's regime change
wars and even dares tell the American people that "we are supporting the terrorists – not fighting them" – is bad enough in MSM,
but a sad and interesting comment on how completely engaged the State has become with attempting to "control" and "shape" discourse
on progressive sites such as this.
My favorite of course is when one State troll debates another State troll in completely "fake" discourse, attempting to amplify
their troll message. The other technique that is endlessly amusing is when a single troll posts something a well informed person
with progressive values can quite agree with one day, followed the next by complete gibberish posing as "sophistication," followed
the next day by talking points right out of the CIA & Pentagon, and then follows all that up with posting something sensible again.
Just a bit "crazy-making" no?
It pays to remember ("The 4 D's: Deny / Disrupt / Degrade / Deceive") that come right out of the trolling manual. It should
be a red-flag if these descriptors characterize someone's posts.
The saying that if it ("looks like a duck, walks like a duck and talks like a duck, well, it just might be a duck") – is one
that is worth applying to our comment's sections discourse. Because if it "posts like a troll"- in the end it doesn't really matter
if it "is" a troll (something we will never know), or is simply an uniformed but opinionated idiot – as that person is "doing
the work of" the State sponsored trolls in either case.
I find it is always worth periodically reviewing what we know about these operations (thank you Edward Snowden) – as it helps
us to better understand and prepares us to better deal with the State sponsored troll operations we now see routinely in all of
our truly progressive comments sections on alternative media sites. What we now deal with here at OffG and elsewhere are daily
routine attempts to take over, shape and control otherwise rational informed sincere discussion by readers. Sadly this is how
some people make their living – existing in a continual state of existential "bad faith."
Anyone who stands for a perception managed 'business as usual' candidacy is authentic: anyone who tries to expose the vicious
hypocrisy is an 'asset' or a 'troll'? Welcome to the postmodern anti-debate.
I'm trying to think of where I have come across a more cynical attempt to distort the truth and apologetically cover ethnic
cleansing and cultural anti-Muslim genocide? And I cannot think of a better example. Anyone who attempts to expose Gabbard for
her cultural links to actual Hindutva supremacism and real live fascism must be a paid state troll? What can I say: I am a peace
troll exposing the Politics of Lies you appear to support. Tulsi Gabbard is a traitor to humanity.
What I laid out below is not trolling: it exposes just how much you have to invert the true values of liberation and freedom
to get a 'peace candidate' from a Zionist fascist supporter. In brief synopsis: Modi tore up the Indian constitution; flooded
Jammu and Kashmir with troops; invoked the 'Riot Act' to eject all journalists and TV crews; in order that his ethnic cleansing
of the valley goes unseen. This is a crime against humanity: which also carries no small risk of nuclear war. Making this apparent
is trolling?
In the perversion of the narrative script you propose: this is called "vocally opposing America's regime change wars". How;
by apologising for not being able to attend the 'Howdy, Modi' because she was pre-commited to be lying somewhere else?
In contrast: Arundhati Roy stands accused as a traitor and having her rights and citizenship stripped for bringing attention
to Modi's war crimes. What does Gabbard do? Pass the caviar and offer more lucrative trade deals for Modi's murderers? That is
the difference between a real world candidate and a fake. Will Gabbard call out Modi; el-Sisi; Netanyahu or Adelson for that matter?
You know the scene that Milosevic likes to post: of Netanyahu being feted by Congress – which looks exactly like the Nuremberg
Rallies Gabbard was there to listen to the ally and friend of the United States – that is the only democracy in the Middle East
– denounce Iran. Afterward, she went on Fox News and glibly agreed Greta Van Susteren that the deal was akin to the infamous Munich
Pact. Blithely nodding her head before engaging in some fantasy talking points about North Korean nukes hitting Hawaii: and the
three month acquisition of the Iranian bomb which comes straight off of one of Nuttyyahoo's empty CD-roms. So can we drop the
pretense please?
Adelson's 'Champion of Freedom' nails her real colours to the mast?
Then you invoke Sartre: did you know he was a communist? Who staid loyal to Stalin's Soviet Union for much longer than he really
should have? What do you think he would have made of a candidate who dines with Hindutva fascist racist supremacists and offers
them more trade on a pro rata basis of carrying out war crimes and crimes against humanity? Bad faith and authenticity: where
do yo think they lie? Gabbard is an authentic candidate only in such a highly perception managed world as we have. Which is why
we have such a highly perception managed world – because we highly perception manage it ourselves. No paid state trolls required:
except in the imagination perhaps? Perhaps only those not suffering the illusion can see who she really is?
The only way to make this real is by censoring the right to criticism the illegitimate candidacy of those who are silent on
Modi's open fascism and very probable silent, unseen ethnic cleansing. If it is silent and unseen then it is not happening. Then
we have our perfect 'peace candidate'. Do you see how it works?
Let us shut down any chance of any open debate on that. Well done Gary. You and all the fawning sycophants on this page have
the perfect peace candidate you deserve. By ignoring valid and authentic critical consciousness and suppressing the voice of freedom.
Gabbard needs to be exposed as a modified war candidate: and friend of the Gods of Money and their pet dictators. It is a cynical
ploy to try and close down such real world exposure as 'trolling'. Trolling for peace maybe? Peace we may never now know.
Gary Weglarz
My comments were not intended to be a defense of Gabbard. Though she is the only candidate I can remember in many years that is
speaking some truth, any truth, about the amoral U.S. war machine, she of course has no chance whatsoever of winning and no one
in their right mind would suggest otherwise. Yet I and others who are quite aware of this obvious reality find the undeniable
fact she is "publicly speaking some truth" about that war machine a rather important addition to the theatre of the absurd political
debate here in the U.S. So strange that support and recognition of this simple fact is so controversial to some.
No, my comments were not some defense of Gabbard as an impure savior, but rather about the trolls and those who perhaps in
their boundless narcissism simply do the work of the government trolls because they routinely "post like trolls." You know, ("The
4 D's: Deny / Disrupt / Degrade / Deceive"). Perhaps you missed that somehow?
I tire of so much smug narcissistic idiocy, and predictable attacks on any who might disagree, posing as – "commentary" or
"discourse." Of course neither you nor Big B have commented a word on that topic- the actual topic of my post. Instead simply
strawman attacks related to Tulsi. How strange. But then again: "You've obviously got it all sewn up :(" – eh Frank?
I really don't give a shit about what the totally corrupt US political system is doing.
They are all scum and vermin, who, in a sane world, would all be swept down the gutter.
In the Middle East we are on the verge of WW3. The Russians and the Chinese are not going to put up with the American Frankenstein
any more. Do Americans realise what this will mean?
I doubt it, because many Americans don't have a brain cell between them (Clue: America will be totally destroyed in a WW3).
nonameforsure
8 elements appeared on a website recently which the author suggested could be used to identify fake, false, or self agenda propaganda..
learn them.. apply them.
Develop an international way to report in some standard way on the elements that appear in articles. Maybe date, time, place presented,
element identified, together with a comment that fits each expression. In my opinion it is important to build the case that the
same false narrative appears in your favorite fake media as well as everyone else's favorite fake media.
You will be able to detect how these 8 elements develop fact that identify processes and activities of those in charge and
how these elements will allow those seeking the truth to build a collaborative means to debunk fake. Example refer to paragraph
7 in a subject article by indicating "place" on "date" @ "time" "time" "title" and element number and then make a comment to explain
why you marked the expression with a element number.
This kind of reference system allows to detect and compare both intra article fake news with inter publication fake news..
so maybe it will be discovered the news outlets and publishers and authors that hawk the same false or misleading propaganda in
time to inform the public, moreover, if you can get the public to understand and to apply the element method of debunking propaganda;
article by article, paragraph by paragraph, just the act of doing it, might wake them up.
1) EN establish the narrative :fake always try to establish the tuth
2) WR They wrong, we right : inconvenient facts are transformed to support the narrative
3) PF Cherry Pick the Facts : only report the facts that support the narrative
4) IS Ignore stuff : never include something that is contrary to the narrative
5) VB Blame the Victim : keep the victim on the defensive
6) MU Make up Stuff: false or non fact claims can be made up to fit the narrative
7) AC Attack and deny any form to all challengers: Persons who ask ?s are conspiracy terrorist.
8) RL Repeat the lies, repeat the lies, repeat the lies. People need help to remember the lie
Capricornia Man
Your eight methods for creating fake news aptly describe the way the 'systemic anti-Semitism in the UK Labour Party' myth was
promoted. Particularly methods 3,4 and 8.
When I complained to a broadcaster about its incompetent and biased 'coverage' of this non-issue, one of its chief defences
was: 'that's what all the other news outlets are saying'.
The MSM wonder why they are regarded as mendacious and contemptible by thinking people who take the trouble to separate the
facts from the spin.
mark
A Brief Summary Of The War In Syria.
2011. The Neocons activate a long standing plan that has been around for 20 years to destroy Syria. Syria is to be destroyed,
like Iraq and Libya before it. Assad will be toppled within a few months and Syria smashed into a thousand pieces.
The Axis of Evil, the US and its NATO satraps, Shady Wahabia, Kosherstan and Sultan Erdogan, flood Syria with the necessary
cannon fodder, hundreds of thousands of head choppers and throat slitters from a hundred countries, with a licence to murder,
burn, rape, loot, steal and enslave to their hearts content. An alphabet soup of takfiri groups is created out of thin air, armed,
trained, paid, transported and orchestrated with tens of billions of western taxpayers money. ISIS is just one of many.
The Syrian state, armed forces and people resist with unexpected courage and determination, and fight the proxy head choppers
to a standstill. But they are under extreme pressure and have to concentrate their forces in the main battles in the west of the
country. This leaves a vacuum that is filled by the phantom ISIS caliphate. This suits the Axis of Evil just fine. There is no
problem with ISIS black flags flying over Damascus provided Syria is destroyed.
By 2015, the outcome is in the balance. Clinton and Sultan Erdogan have agreed to impose a no fly zone to turn the tide in
favor of the head choppers. A series of Gas Attack Hoaxes and false flag atrocity claims are staged over a protracted period of
time to justify Libya style intervention.
All bets are off as Putin overrides his advisors and dispatches Russian forces to intervene and prevent the destruction of
the Syrian state. With the support of Iran and Hezbollah, the situation is transformed. Though the worst of the fighting is yet
to come, the Neocon plot to destroy Syria is a busted flush. Syria is steadily liberated from terrorist occupation.
The main terrorist sponsors try to salvage something from this failure. Sultan Erdogan switches sides and takes the opportunity
to attack the Kurds. Trump seizes the opportunity to scale back US involvement, generating much hysteria from all the Zionist
shills in Washington. The Kurds seek some kind of accommodation with Damascus.
The war is now winding down. It will take some time before all the terrorist areas are liberated and occupying US and Turkish
forces have to withdraw. But the outcome is now inevitable.
Funny you mentioned Arundhati Roy as I almost bought her book today: Capitalism A Ghost Story, in a Left bookshop here, however
ended up getting Culture & Imperialism by Edward Said and a second hand copy of Pedadogy Of The Oppressed which I've, um, never
read. Time to broaden the mind, as have hardly read any books for years except articles on the Internet. Will pick up Arundhati's
book next time. Have a good day
eddie
The Dems morphed into neocons when her willy-waving husband sold out and destroyed the Democratic Party of LBJ's Great Society.
Tulsi being a member of the establishment which she lambasts is quite a paradox, but can be seen from one's own moral perspective.
During the VietNam war era, '63-75, many who opposed the fiasco took a stronger stance: prison as a conscientious objector, moving
to Canada, undesirable discharges, very vocal public protests & arrests. Many lives and futures ruined, my own included, to actively
stop the illegal & profit driven Invasion ..
Tulsi has shown a lot of class, truth to the darkest Power, and long may she have this platform..
Rhys Jaggar
Next they will try saying that because she is not a mother she has no place being President. If I had a vote in the US, I would
vote for any man, woman, black/white/Hisoanic/Asian/any other ethnicity, straight/gay/indeterminate who:
1. Pledged to cut the US military budget in half, sign up to existing OPCW conventions on chemical+biological weapons and demanded
that Israel did likewise.
2. Removed the right for dual citizen US-Israeli zionists to hold public US office (tell em to decide whether they are primarily
aligned to Israel or not) and neutered the election-rigging AIPAC monstrosity at source.
3. Called out the global warming hoax as the biggest scam of the 21st century.
4. Enforced the concept that polluters pay to clean up their polluting, particularly in extractive industries, agriculture, mining
and packaging.
5. Promoted the restoration of mutually owned local finance, particularly in providing mortgages.
6. Confronted the self-serving victim gravy train, in particular making the terms 'man' and 'woman' beyond the rights of anyone
to take legal action.
7. vowed to shut down 25% of US overseas military bases in a first term and a further tranche in a second term.
Very interesting but I have a small note. Not that it matters politically how they entered
France, but World War 2 was Blitzkrieg.
"In desperation, Churchill therefore ordered a series of large-scale bombing raids against the German capital of Berlin, doing
considerable damage, and after numerous severe warnings, Hitler finally began to retaliate with similar attacks against British
cities." (RU)
This makes me wonder when this happened and how the bombing of Rotterdam (may 14 1940) by the Nazis fits into the story chronologically.
I have read most of the revisionist literature (regarding the holocaust) on your website and found most of it either beyond my
ken or else rather poorly sourced. There is something though that I know for 100% sure and it mitigates against the revisionists:
starting even before the war and then continuing the German government started to exterminate all Germans they considered not
worthy of further sustenance. That is severly physically or mentally handicapped children and the insane. At least a 100 000 children
and adults were killed. Usually by injection but some also by being gassed. Although it was a government secret as this happened
in Germany and to ethnic Germans the news inadvertedly spread and the practise was (officially but not entirely) abandoned after
the Catholic Archbishop of Münster had publicly protested against it. So if gas was used in Germany to exterminate Germans it
seems rather logical that it would be also used against Jews.
Having said that I do agree that there are things that are rather spurious regarding the Holocaust. Specifically the numbers
don´t seem to add up.
One book in your archive stood out: The Dissolution of Eastern European Jewry by
WALTER N. SANNING: a book revising downward the number of Jews killed in Poland. A meticilously researched piece of scholarship
about the demographics of Eastern European Jewry.
Everything else I find rather doubtful. I have personally talked to several people who have survived the Holocaust and there
is no doubt in my mind that to be a Jew in German dominated Europe amounted to a death sentence. That is not to say that the numbers
haven´t been exaggerated. Just as the numbers of German vistims after the war have been downplayed. Alas, that has been the way
since antiquity: the victor writes what is later regarded as "history" .
Simply magnificent. Simply infuriating.
It's bone chilling to read this. It must be an enormous burden for Mr Unz to possess this knowledge. It feels demoralising to simply be the recipient of it – knowing full well the price of telling the truth, even now, even today.
Typical Unzian goulash. It is good that he exposed Churchill's lunacy & Eisenhower's culpability (although I'm not sure for how
many victims Eisenhower is to blame).
Though, I'm not convinced at all that Japanese soldiers would have surrendered en masse from 41. to 45. The situation with
Soviets is simply not derivable from their previous behavior. As for Hitler- no, he was much more ambitious & ruthless:
Ron Unz seems to write in the following manner: Nazi empire was not 100% guilty for the outbreak of WW 2 (true)- therefore
Nazis were almost blameless (false); Churchill & his cronies have much to be blamed for (true) -therefore, they're almost completely
guilty (false); Jews have magnified numbers of their WW 2 victims & some influential American Jewish figures like Morgenthau are
repulsive & perhaps war criminals (true) – therefore, Jews suck & are to be blamed for many, if not most of Germany's miseries
during 1940s (false).
Readers & followers of this site think, I guess, that Jews are collectively guilty of __ (type in your favorite obsession).
This is the inversion of another lunatic idea: Germans are collectively guilty for WW 2 in Europe.
Of course, both claims are nonsensical. Collective guilt does not exist.
Here's the scoop on ww2. that pos, fdr (he set up Pearl Harbor attack) got us into it even though he knew the vast majority of
Americans were against going to war in Europe. We lost every encounter we had with the German infantry without our overwhelming
air and arty support (Africa, Sicily, Italy, Normandy, Holland, Bulge, Hurtgen Forest, etc. Then we did unspeakable things to
the German people and their leadership all for the jews. There you have it – simple.
WRONG, and it is an insult to the courageous and diligent efforts of people like David Irving, Ernst Zundel, A J P Taylor,
Harry Elmer Barnes, Ron Unz to keep repeating that Bernaysian drivel.
What the victors wrote re the 20th century world wars is not history, it is a continuation of propaganda.
Historian Thomas Fleming (RIP) has argued that at least 50 years must pass before cool, objective history can be written; before
that, recountings of the events are emotion-laden and agenda-driven.
It is intellectually lazy and extremely dangerous to "sum up" by miming the victor's 2 minutes of hate: you do their work for
them.
"Atrocity propaganda is how we won the war. And we're only really beginning with it now! We will continue this atrocity propaganda,
we will escalate it until nobody will accept even a good word from the Germans, until all the sympathy they may still have abroad
will have been destroyed and they themselves will be so confused that they will no longer know what they are doing. Once that
has been achieved, once they begin to run down their own country and their own people, not reluctantly but with eagerness to please
the victors, only then will our victory be complete. It will never be final. Re-education needs careful tending, like an English
lawn. Even one moment of negligence, and the weeds crop up again – those indestructible weeds of historical truth."
-- Sefton Delmer, 1904-1979, former British Chief of Black propaganda, said after the German surrender, in 1945, in a conversation
with the German professor of international law, Dr. Friedrich Grimm
@Bardon Kaldian
Yes, this reversed black-and-white thinking irks me too. I have said before that WWII was not a war of "good guys against bad
guys", even if we reverse the roles. All parties (including the Jews) were guilty in this conflict. All lied and all committed
atrocities.
As for "collective guilt", I think to a certain degree it does exist. Groups of course are led by their leaders, and "collective
crimes" are instigated by their leaders, but still it is the groups that choose or tolerate their leaders, and thus share a responsibility
in their criminal conduct.
@Antares Chronologically,
I am not sure.
Some use Rotterdam and Warsaw as examples of terror bombing being used by the Germans before the British ever but they also leave
out why those cities were bombed. Firstly they were not declared "open cities" as Paris was, secondly Dutch and Polish troops
had occupied their respective cities before any formal cease fire/peace treaty had been formalized. Also in the case of Warsaw
the mayor, or whatever the equivalent, had refused multiple German demands for surrender.
@Brabantian
Czechoslovakia was being torn apart by all its neighbors, Austria, Hungary and Poland. Not just Germany. There was also ethnic
tensions among the Czechs and Slovaks. The prime minister of Czechoslovakia met Hitler in Germany a few days before the countries
complete annexation REQUESTING Germany occupy the entire country before an ethnic civil war or perhaps the Hungarians or Poles
decided they wanted more.
For instance, most Germans did not vote for Hitler. And even if he was elected by 90% margin- what would it mean? He did many
great things to heal German post-WW 1 humiliation & succeeded in spectacular economic recovery. When Europe (and world) descended
into WW 2 – how could an average German, or any group of Germans, do anything to change the course of history?
They were indoctrinated, but even if most of them had not been – no individual nor collective can change the inertia of events.
Things just keep on happening. For instance, Waffen SS were denounced as a "criminal organization" & its members deprived of military
honors (ca. 900,000 men, 500,000 out of them Germans). I call it baloney. You don't have 900,000 "war criminals". This is simply
a nonsense.
I am not saying that collectives do not share peculiar characteristics (for instance, you can't have anything seriously done
with Gypsies), but any political-social-historical movement is too complex to be reduced to moralistic sermonizing.
@Brabantian
Yes, all wars are bankers war. That being said, once the first spark is struck, events rapidly spiral out of control. What I find
with these older and even newer versions of revisionist history is Stalin and Soviet Russia very rarely ever assigned any blame
in the starting of the whole mess which I find absurd. A great example of this is story of Rudolf Hess and how he was betrayed
by everyone.
[Hide MORE]
Was Hess aware at the time of the existence of a Secret Protocol, attached to the Hitler-Stalin "Non-Aggression" Pact of
Aug. 23, 1939 and signed by Nazi Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop and Soviet Foreign Minister Vyascheslav Molotov, which
stated "in event of any war," Russia would be assigned"spheres of influence" in eastern Poland (40% of the country); .the Baltic
states of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia; a freehand in Finland; and that portion of Romania abutting Soviet territory. Soviet
actions after Hitler's invasion of Poland on Sept. 1, 1939, showed how precisely the Soviets adhered to the Protocol's terms.
On Sept. 17, Russia invaded Poland from the east; on Sept. 18 Russian and German troops shook hands in Poland. Then, Moscow
invaded Finland. Next, it took the Baltic states.
"Stalin was able, in conference with Britain and the United States (when they became his allies against Hitler), to present
these actions as "defensive" against the Nazi threat. But the
Secret Protocol would prove that, to the contrary, Russia had used the deal with Hitler to advance her ancient imperial designs
on Europe."
"Obviously, if Stalin were shown to be guilty of plotting with Hitler-to wage aggressive war, then the question arose: What
were the Soviets doing as judges with the French,
British, and Americans on the Nuremberg tribunal? The tribunal would have to be reconstituted. Would not Molotov and Stalin
have to be tried? They had stood at a map table with Ribbentrop in Moscow, while Ribbentrop consulted with Hitler on the phone
from Germany, and the four of them had redrawn the map of Eastern Europe. Stalin and Molotov could be accused of having conspired
with Hitler to wage war; shouldn't they take their
places in the Nuremberg dock?"
As for Hitler- no, he was much more ambitious & ruthless:
That video is pretty questionable imo, because as far as I know the Generalplan Ost plans of the SS don't exist anymore,
at least not in detail. What does exist, is a memorandum drawn up by Dr Wetzel from Rosenberg's Ostministerium , whose
text can be read here: https://www.ifz-muenchen.de/heftarchiv/1958_3_5_heiber.pdf
The proposals in that document are undoubtedly extremely racist and would have amounted to massive ethnic cleansing programmes,
at least against Poles and Czechs. They don't quite amount to genocide though, in fact the author explicitly states that one can't
physically exterminate Poles like Jews (whose physical destruction is quite openly affirmed in the text), because Germany would
then be generally hated by all neighbouring peoples instead Poles who can't be Germanized should emigrate to Siberia, or possibly
to Brazil. Proposal for Russia is basically to split up the country in various republics and foster regional identities, with
Siberia maybe becoming a pan-European economic zone.
Much attention is devoted to "racially valuable" Slavs who should be sent to the Reich for Germanization (Dr Wetzel is concerned
about foreign workers from Italy and the Balkans who could bring Near Eastern and negroid ancestry to Germany; he'd prefer to
replace them with "Nordic" types from Belarus). Even the view of Russians isn't entirely negative while Wetzel regards most of
them as a "dull primitive mass", he thinks there still are Nordic types in the Russian peasantry and attributes Russia's industrialization
to people of such a background (which makes Russia especially dangerous). So this isn't exactly the same view as of Jews.
Of course even the ethnic cleansing schemes proposed in that document could easily have shaded into genocide (in 1940 even top
Nazis still thought of just sending the Jews away to Madagascar, not killing them all, so there was a precedent for such radicalisation).
And presumably the plans of the SS were more extreme than what Rosenberg's Ostministerium proposed.
Still, in any case a German victory in WW2 would certainly have been pretty bad for many of the peoples of Eastern Europe. As
for revisionism of the kind demonstrated once again on Ron Unz's article, imo it's not worth bothering with, since it's so far
removed from reality.
I know many people have a great deal of difficulty comprehending just how many wars are started for no other purpose than to
force private central banks onto nations, so let me share a few examples, so that you understand why the US Government is mired
in so many wars against so many foreign nations. There is ample precedent for this.
In the beginning of World War I, Woodrow Wilson had adopted initially a policy of neutrality. But the Morgan Bank, which was
the most powerful bank at the time, and which wound up funding over 75 percent of the financing for the allied forces during World
War I pushed Wilson out of neutrality sooner than he might have done, because of their desire to be involved on one side of the
war.
@Alta And what
would be excuse for bombing Frampol? Because for Wieluń Germans had at least excuse that before war there was cavalry unit stationed
nearby, though indiscriminate bombing still was bad.
Not to mention that Polish witnesses remember that all Red Cross flags soon had to be taken off the hospitals and other objects,
because they became favourite target of Luftwaffe.
@Alta Because
you said so. And, of course, Poles from Zamojszczyzna left their homes voluntarily, and thousands or testimonies about Zamojszczyzna
children being separated from families (and most of them never returned) are all propaganda, while you should believe without
question all German stories.
Japanese soldiers on the Pacific islands had habits. One of those was sometimes setting off a grenade after 'surrendering'.
This lead to a lot fewer surrenders being accepted.
American soldiers on the Pacific islands also had habits. One of those was routinely torturing and murdering Japanese servicemen
who tried to surrender, and mutilating and defiling their corpses.
This lead to a lot fewer Japanese surrendering, and to some of them setting off a grenade after "surrendering".
In case I have to point it out, I'm not saying this to be anti-American. I think that's more or less what you can expect to
happen when you send these scared young men, forcefed for years on propaganda about the Japanese being subhuman monsters, out
to fight them life or death in hellish climates thousands of miles from home. I blame the crooked politicians and the lying media
more than the soldiers. But it's astonishing how, even today, the propaganda narratives about noble Yanks and evil Japs still
persist. Even among people who ought to know better.
If anyone else feels inclined to nod and agree with knee-jerk posts like the one I'm responding to here, please make the effort
to at least read the book about the Pacific War our host Mr. Unz is recommending. (I've read it. It's good, and it's not
just mindless America-bashing like some people will no doubt want to think. Dower looks at how both the Americans and the
Japanese dehumanized the enemy.) It's one more tiny but important step along the difficult road toward the vitally necessary goal
of attaining a more balanced view of our modern history.
@German_reader
I am not saying that everything would go as if planned in some document. Those totalitarian regimes possess their own internal
dynamic which is hard to stop when they're set into motion.
For instance, all atrocities which devoured perhaps 30+ million people (including those who perished in Russian civil war)
were contained, in nuce , in Lenin's works, ideas & positions (I am not talking about good things that came to pass as
the result of his actions). Lenin did not write about extermination of whole classes, forced famine, new & more efficient Inquisition
etc. But they were somehow logical result of his (and not only his) vision of the future society.
Hitler's (mostly) intra-white racism could also have predictable results. His world-view had, basically, two pillars: eastern
expansion to somewhere along Urals- Caucasus axis & getting rid of Jews. Of course Jews get much rap because they suffered, percentage-wise,
more than others (Gypsies excluded), but the real deal would be annihilation of Balto-Slavophone central & eastern European peoples
(Czechs, Poles, Ukrainians, Belarusians, Russians & most Baltic peoples).
He would, I guess, have chosen "racially" desirable children for assimilation & off with others. First, they would have worked
as slaves; then, they would be simultaneously killed & deported (probably similar to Stalin's deportation of Chechens & other
potentially disloyal peoples. Out of 900,000 of them, perhaps 400,000-500,000 died in the process of deportation). If one tries
to annihilate a people- and these are numerous peoples by European standards – you don't have to shoot or gas them. Just relocate
them somewhere in the east of Urals, most of them (you can't keep so many of them within your sphere of authority because they
will rebel, sooner or later). So, I guess tens of millions individuals, from Czechs to Russians, were slated to death from famine,
disease & overwork.
Generalplan Ost is more important as the document of the state of mind than as a master plan with all the details & nuances.
And that state of mind would have resulted in tens of millions of unnatural deaths & Poles, Ukrainians, .. would be now just a
footnote in history, similar to Indians in what is now Manhattan.
They say nothing about exterminating half of Russia; on the contrary, they expected the population to grow through natural
increase under the German occupation once it was no longer oppressed by Communism.
Gee whizz, Hitler had the bright future for Russians somewhere in his heart. Just..he somehow failed to communicate his hidden
sympathies to them.
@Bardon Kaldian
No. He wanted Russia to be a subordinate, essentially colonial dependency for Germany to use as a captive market for its industries,
so he would be able to compete with global American capitalism capitalism in economies of scale. He realized that you need a domestic
market of hundreds of millions of people (like US, Russia, China) to be an economic superpower.
Hitler personally used the figure of India a lot in his "Table Talk" conversations: Just like India was the market for Britain's
textile industries in the 19th century, Russia would be the market for Germany's modern industries in the 20th. (In those, if
you check them, he incidentally also used a lot of hyperbole about wanting the Russian rank and file to be illiterate, though
in the official policy documents he wanted a compulsory elementary school for them. Which, of course, makes infinitely better
economic sense.)
Hitler did want meritocracy within his empire: Russians who were of good character and "good race" were to be given German
work permits and citizenship if they applied for it, just like Dutchmen, poles and anyone else who was Aryan (that is, "White").
So kind of a H1B option, more like India is for America in the 21st century than it was for Britain in the 19th. I guess you could
say he wanted a "bright future" for them. But the big mass of Russians he wanted to stay in Russia, and to be banned from moving
to Germany (which he wanted to remain ethnically German, with only a relatively small leavening of bright foreigners).
However, in order to be good consumers of German exports, the Russians in Russia still had to have their living standards raised
over the squalor of Bolshevism. Hitler thought that was absolutely necessary. So in the end, they would benefit, even if they
remained subordinate and disprivileged compared to the Germans.
Of course, these were long-term plans, spanning over decades. Hitler and his planning staff still anticipated that many Russians
would die in the war (which of course happened in real life, even though they won it), and weren't extremely sad about that. But
it wasn't a specific aim of German policy to cause those deaths. In more modern lingo that wasn't yet used at the time, they were
collateral damage from destroying the Communist superstate and establishing a German economic and political sphere of influence.
Of course, this makes the Nazis sound well, not exactly nice, but far less evil than Stalin was comfortable with, given potential
comparisons to his own record. Which is why he had his propaganda commissars bruit the nonsense that the Nazis wanted to murder
all Russians (and/or all "Slavs" for good measure). And incidentally, such a demonic image also fit very well with how certain
other powerful vested interests, these ones operating in the "Western" world's media, academia and assorted institutions, wanted
to portray a regime they hated for their own reasons. Though Stalin is long gone, these other ones are still going strong, and
still keeping up his good work.
I again recommend that you read the Madajczyk book I referred to, if you read German. It will add considerably to your understanding
of World War II. If you don't read German, there is another good book by one Dr. Rainer Zitelmann that has been translated and
is called "Hitler: The Policies of Seduction" in English. That one is more about Hitler's general ideology and policy, but touches
on these issues also.
History isn't binary. You don't have to think Hitler and the Germans were angels from Heaven, any more than you have to buy
that they were demons from Hell. But in this day and age, with so much material available fairly easily (and often even free on
the Internet), there are few excuses left for believing the recycled Soviet propaganda your video was promoting.
gjohnsit on Wed,
10/30/2019 - 3:11pm The Clinton Dead-Enders aren't very clever or original, but they can
stick to a script.
First Bernie defends Tulsi from baseless smears.
Tulsi Gabbard has put her life on the line to defend this country. People can disagree on
issues, but it is outrageous for anyone to suggest that Tulsi is a foreign asset.
@Biff
"According to Cohen, Barr is going to investigate the CIA. America's top cop is going to
investigate America's top criminal organization. This should get really interesting. I wonder
who's gonna win?"
Few seem to remember the results of the big CIA investigation of the 70's, the rub then
was the CIA got caught operating domestically against it's charter. Well, Bush Sr. was
appointed to head the investigation when he was actually the HEAD of the domestic branch of
the CIA at the time. Looking at Barr's background I can only conclude we are about to be fed
another similar magic act. I have no doubt who will win the deck is stacked.
Cohen observes in his latest conversation with John Batchelor that the so-called Impeachment
inquiry, whether formal or informal, will make the new Cold War even worse and more dangerous
than it already is, noting that an inflection point has been reached, because at the core of
these allegations -- most of which are undocumented and a substantial number of which are
untrue -- revolving around Russiagate and now Ukrainegate is an underlying demonization of
Russia. Relations between America and Russia will continue to deteriorate either due to the
fact that the entire political spectrum is engaging in a frenzy of Russophobia or that
President Trump, who ran and won on a platform of improving relations with Russia, is now
completely shackled, thus it is inevitable that the new Cold War will continue to become more
dangerous.
Regarding Attorney General Barr's investigation into the origins of Russiagate, as Cohen
noted previously, Barr has made it clear that he's investigating not the FBI but the
intelligence agencies, and Cohen is uncertain that even the Attorney General of the United
States can be successful in that line of inquiry. For example, the young and politically
inconsequential George Papadopolous, a young aid to the Trump campaign, got four or five
visitors, every one of them tied to foreign intelligence, American or European, which makes it
self-evident that the Intelligence Agencies were running an operation against the Trump
campaign. Cohen says that even if Barr is a resolute man and says he wants to get to the bottom
of this, Cohen is not confident that he will be able to do so.
Cohen notes that the Russian press, which follows American politics closely, has resulted in
a consensus that all of this -- Russiagate, Ukrainegate -- was created to stop Trump from
having better relations with Russia. Thus, it is important that Putin had been told the reason
Trump cannot engage in détente is because of Trump being shackled.
Discussing the recent American mission against Abu Baker al-Baghdadi in Syria, Cohen stated
Nancy Pelosi utterly disgraced herself when she complained Trump informed the Russians about
the success of the mission and its initiation, considering the fact that this wing of Congress
is so against Trump he had no guarantee that one of them would not have leaked the mission
before it began. Russian intelligence in that part of the world is probably better than other
nation's, so Cohen assumes Russia knew about the mission and that they helped by providing
information to America.
In addition, Cohen has noted Putin discussed a partnership with America against domestic
terrorism starting with his approach to Obama and noted that even considering the September 11
terror attack, Russia has suffered more victims of domestic terrorism than America has. Obama
thought about the proposal, hesitated, and it never happened. These recent events are a
reminder that the United States and Russia are uniquely positioned to partner against
international terrorism, but this may be slightly beyond the grasp of President Trump at the
present time.
Cohen noted that expert opinion in Russia -- which informs the Kremlin leadership, including
Putin -- has soured on the United States; the older generation of Russian America specialists
who like America, who visit regularly and appreciate American culture, have become utterly
disillusioned and cannot promote a Russian-American partnership given what has happened to
Trump.
Regarding Ukraine, Cohen notes it shares a very large border with Russia, tens of millions
of intermarriages, language, culture and history, and although the United States shares none of
this with Ukraine, the United States has declared Ukraine is a strategic ally, and this would
be equivalent to Russia stating that Mexico is its strategic ally, which is preposterous; the
term "strategic" clearly has military implications.
Expanding on the topic of Ukraine, despite its size and natural resources, it is the poorest
country in Europe. The new president, a comedian who starred in a TV show portraying the
Ukranian president and thus life imitates art, ran as a peace candidate; that and his promise
to fight corruption resulted in his victory. Part of his pledge was to meet with Putin to try
to solve the conflicts; but he promised to end the hot war with Russia. American politics got
in the way and people are still dying: at last count, there were approximately thirteen
thousand dead, including women and children. And the peace candidate has been dragged into
American politics and the commentary on Ukraine has a colonial tone. America speaking of
Ukraine as a "strategic ally" is foolishness and warfare thinking. What should be the American
policy is to encourage Zelensky to pursue these peace policies with Russia so the war doesn't
spread and the killing stops and that Ukraine, which is a potentially rich country, can
recover. While Obama egged on the war policy, Trump seemed to have no policy, other than to
encourage Zelensky in his peace initiative. What isn't known in the conversation Trump had with
Zelensky was whether he encouraged him in his peace initiative; the transcript is a fragment,
redacted and edited so that it doesn't mention the war but certainly it was discussed. The
issue is whether the United States should give Ukraine's government $400 million dollars in
military equipment. Obama, who Cohen observes was not a good foreign policy president refused
to do so but Cohen concludes that was a wise decision. All that providing weapons to Ukraine
would accomplish is to incite the pro-war forces in Kiev against the anti-war forces led by
Zelensky; the military advantage in any event lies with Russia.
Despite the fact Zelensky is an actor, he did run on a program of peace and Cohen believes
that he is sincere; Cohen notes the problem is not Russia, but the armed Nationalists who are
opposed to peace -- approximately 30,000 -- who have publicly threatened Zelensky. Cohen notes
Putin wants to end the war with Ukraine and he has made efforts to help Zelensky, such as the
recent prisoner release, although he included people Russians consider terrorists. Thus,
Zelensky doesn't have a lot of political power. While there are bad nationalist actors -- the
Azov battalion, which threatened Zelensky with either removal or death -- nevertheless Cohen
has asked where the regular army stands: will it back him, will it be loyal? That answer now is
unknown.
Cohen concluded to most Ukrainians Zelensky represented hope, hope in the war against
corruption and hope against the war. The Kremlin wants to end the war; Zelensky has a chance,
he's supported by Germany and France, Putin is helping, but the United States is not a party of
the Minsk Agreement peace acccord. Trump has intruded in his own unusual way but can be a
factor for good. If Cohen were advising President Trump, he'd tell him if he favored the
negotiations for Russian and Ukrainian peace, this would favor his historical reputation.
@Biff
"According to Cohen, Barr is going to investigate the CIA. America's top cop is going to
investigate America's top criminal organization. This should get really interesting. I wonder
who's gonna win?"
Few seem to remember the results of the big CIA investigation of the 70's, the rub then
was the CIA got caught operating domestically against it's charter. Well, Bush Sr. was
appointed to head the investigation when he was actually the HEAD of the domestic branch of
the CIA at the time. Looking at Barr's background I can only conclude we are about to be fed
another similar magic act. I have no doubt who will win the deck is stacked.
Next they will try saying that because she is not a mother she has no place being President.
If I had a vote in the US, I would vote for any man, woman, black/white/Hisoanic/Asian/any
other ethnicity, straight/gay/indeterminate who:
1. Pledged to cut the US military budget in half, sign up to existing OPCW conventions on
chemical+biological weapons and demanded that Israel did likewise.
2. Removed the right for dual citizen US-Israeli zionists to hold public US office (tell em
to decide whether they are primarily aligned to Israel or not) and neutered the
election-rigging AIPAC monstrosity at source.
3. Called out the global warming hoax as the biggest scam of the 21st century.
4. Enforced the concept that polluters pay to clean up their polluting, particularly in
extractive industries, agriculture, mining and packaging.
5. Promoted the restoration of mutually owned local finance, particularly in providing
mortgages.
6. Confronted the self-serving victim gravy train, in particular making the terms 'man' and
'woman' beyond the rights of anyone to take legal action.
7. vowed to shut down 25% of US overseas military bases in a first term and a further tranche
in a second term.
This is something I've been thinking a lot about lately, and this seems like a good post to
share it on.
Watching trolls emerge to discredit and attack the lone U.S. candidate who publicly and
vocally opposes America's regime change wars and even dares tell the American people that "we
are supporting the terrorists – not fighting them" – is bad enough in MSM, but a
sad and interesting comment on how completely engaged the State has become with attempting to
"control" and "shape" discourse on progressive sites such as this.
My favorite of course is when one State troll debates another State troll in completely
"fake" discourse, attempting to amplify their troll message. The other technique that is
endlessly amusing is when a single troll posts something a well informed person with
progressive values can quite agree with one day, followed the next by complete gibberish
posing as "sophistication," followed the next day by talking points right out of the CIA
& Pentagon, and then follows all that up with posting something sensible again. Just a
bit "crazy-making" no?
It pays to remember ("The 4 D's: Deny / Disrupt / Degrade / Deceive") that come right
out of the trolling manual. It should be a red-flag if these descriptors characterize
someone's posts.
The saying that if it ("looks like a duck, walks like a duck and talks like a duck, well,
it just might be a duck") – is one that is worth applying to our comment's sections
discourse. Because if it "posts like a troll"- in the end it doesn't really matter if it "is"
a troll (something we will never know), or is simply an uniformed but opinionated idiot
– as that person is "doing the work of" the State sponsored trolls in either case.
I find it is always worth periodically reviewing what we know about these operations
(thank you Edward Snowden) – as it helps us to better understand and prepares us to
better deal with the State sponsored troll operations we now see routinely in all of our
truly progressive comments sections on alternative media sites. What we now deal with here at
OffG and elsewhere are daily routine attempts to take over, shape and control otherwise
rational informed sincere discussion by readers. Sadly this is how some people make their
living – existing in a continual state of existential "bad faith."
Truth Jihad / Kevin
Barrett October 27, 2019
7 Comments Reply Dr. Cynthia McKinney
got elected to Congress six times -- and soon found herself under attack by the Israel lobby
when she refused to sign the "pledge of allegiance to Israel" demanded of all
representatives!
The Lobby was able to eject Rep. McKinney from Congress twice, once in 2002 and again in
2006, by fabricating a primary opponent backed by the vast fortunes of the Zionist oligarchs
and the tireless energy of the 500,000-footsoldier "Zionist Power Configuration" or ZPC. (For
information about the ZPC, read Dr. James Petras's The Power of Israel
in the United States alongside Walt and Mearsheimer
, and then check out the documentary film
The Lobby .)
So are we allowed to discuss what "Jewish state" means? Can we explore the historical,
psychological, and cultural factors that led to the Zionist colonization of Palestine? The
Zionist Power Configuration says "no way!"
According to the ZPC and its attack-dog ADL, anyone who talks about such things is an
"anti-Semite" and should muzzled, deplatformed, and persecuted.
In this interview Dr. McKinney bravely goes where few if any former Congressional
representatives have gone before, speaking frankly about Israel's control of the US Congress
and other centers of power, and raising the taboo issue of the so-called
"Jewish question."
Just prior to the R-Party Nominating Convention at Cleveland in July 2016, Pepe
wrote :
"Some powerful, well-connected business interests supporting Trump from New York to the
Midwest have outlined their reasons to me, off the record. The fact that their reasons run
completely opposite to the Beltway consensus speaks volumes."
Yes, I remember this article quite well as should other barflies. As I wrote at the time,
those Pepe cited had their own perverted twist on history and thus incorrect reasons as to
the why of America's decline as this paragraph details:
"Why Russia? ' Because Russia does not rig their currency against us to destroy our
industries, and is therefore a natural ally rather then Germany and Japan, who still rig
their currencies against the United States and have destroyed much of our industrial
power .'" [Italics Original]
The bolded text above is what the businessmen were wrong about, and in a big way. But
Trump's isn't the first time policy was based on misconceptions and incorrect history. Pepe
provides further citations that I'll omit here, although they are important, and just provide
his summation followed by one a bit too important to omit here:
"For these business interests, illegal immigration, rigged currencies, and the
'unnecessary war' against Russia are the biggest issues of the presidential campaign....
"This business crowd is distinctly anti-war: ' When Mr. Trump talks about war having to
have rational profit and loss expectation, he is sounding as a logical businessman .'
They also stress that, ' the war against Russia is also destroying our oil industry
as the US ordered the Gulf States to dump their shut-in oil production capacity on the oil
market to bankrupt Russia .'" [Bolded text my emphasis]
But 3 years later, oil price has yet to really recover to the point where Frackers can
make a profit and their Ponzi Scheme seems about to go bust, which is why we're seeing
something that looks like a shift in Trump's initial plan regarding Syria. And there's still
more that can be gleaned from the article that goes against what was then current policy and
its direction. I think it's now fairly easy to see the reasoning behind Trump's UNGA tirade
aimed at the Globalists while contradicting himself about patriots as he's fighting against
one of the most noted--and demonized--of the planet's patriots--Bashar Hafez al-Assad.
From Wikipedia "Alexander Vindman and his twin brother Yevgeny were born to a Jewish family in the Ukrainian SSR , Soviet Union . [3] After the
death of their mother, the three-year-old twins and their older brother Leonid were brought to
New York in December 1979 by their father, Semyon (Simon). They grew up in Brooklyn's "
Little Odessa "
neighborhood" ... Beginning in 2008, Vindman became a Foreign Area Officer specializing in
Eurasia. In this capacity he served in the U.S. embassies in Kyiv , Ukraine , and Moscow , Russia . Returning to Washington, D.C. he was then a
politico-military affairs officer focused on Russia for the Chairman of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff . Vindman served on the Joint Staff at the Pentagon from September 2015 to
July 2018. [8] In July 2018, Vindman
accepted an assignment with the National Security Council. [9] In his role on the
NSC, Vindman became part of the U.S. delegation at the inauguration of the Ukraine's newly
elected President, Volodymyr Zelensky . The five member
delegation, led by Rick
Perry , United States Secretary of
Energy , also included Kurt Volker , then U.S. Special Representative
for Ukraine Negotiations, Gordon Sondland , United States
Ambassador to the European Union , and Joseph Pennington, then acting chargé d'affaires .
[10][11]
Here is the whistleblower on Trump's Ukraine call . Why is it that no matter what rock you
turn over there is a Jew underneath?
Who Is Alexander Vindman? A Ukrainian Refugee Turned White House Official Testifies in
the Impeachment Inquiry
He fled Ukraine at age 3 and became a soldier, scholar and official at the White House.
That's where, he told impeachment investigators, he witnessed alarming behavior by President
Trump.
By Sheryl Gay Stolberg
Oct. 29, 2019Updated 12:55 p.m. ET
WASHINGTON -- Alexander S. Vindman and his twin brother, Yevgeny, were 3 years old when
they fled Ukraine with their father and grandmother, Jewish refugees with only their
suitcases and $750, hoping for a better life in the United States
To give Trump his due, his original announcement that he was removing ALL U.S. troops from
Syria made powerful new enemies in the Israel Lobby, which has been backing the president
because of his many favors to Tel Aviv but which has never really liked or trusted him. Israel
has long, and even openly, promoted the breaking up of Syria into its component tribal and
religious parts to enable the acquisition of even more land in the Golan Heights and to reduce
dramatically the threat coming from any unified government in Damascus. It has also seen the
Syrian civil war as a proxy conflict fought by the its poodle the United States against Iran.
Israel and its friends in Congress and the media will, to say the least, be disappointed if the
war is now truly ended and the U.S. military is withdrawn.
Trump also must continue to deal with the fallout from his Democratic Party opponents,
having given them a cudgel to beat him over the head with as Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer and
Adam Schiff all wax emotional over how they really love those "freedom fighting" Kurds. The
Democrats, having denounced Trump with one voice, were joined by Republicans like Mitch
McConnell, Marco Rubio, Mitt Romney and the ever-versatile Lindsay Graham, all dedicated to the
continuation of an interventionist foreign policy, though they would never quite call it that.
It is not likely that any of them are really pleased with a deal to end the Syrian
fighting.
So the opposition, coming from multiple directions against a Donald Trump also on the
impeachment block for Ukraine, will continue and as of this writing it is by no means clear
what will happen vis-à-vis the Pentagon announcing that some troops, augmented by armor
units, would remain in Syria to
protect the oil fields . Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper
explained to reporters that the remaining U.S. troops would seek "to deny access,
specifically revenue to ISIS and any other groups that may want to seek that revenue to enable
their own malign activities." The president
has also suggested , in true Trumpean fashion, that "We want to keep the oil, and we'll
work something out with the Kurds. Maybe we'll have one of our big oil companies to go in and
do it properly," a step that even the feckless Obama Administration had hesitated to take on
legal grounds as the oil unquestionably belongs to Syria. Trump's amigo Senator Lindsey
Graham
elaborated on the plan , saying bluntly that "We can use some of the revenues from future
Syrian oil sales to pay our military commitment in Syria."
And there will be additional fallout from Syria in the damaged relationships in the region.
Demonstrating that it could actually screw up two things simultaneously, the White House had
unleashed Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who warned last Tuesday that the United States was
ready to go to war against Turkey if it proved necessary.
He said "We prefer peace to war But in the event that kinetic action or military action is
needed, you should know that President Trump is fully prepared to undertake that action."
Pompeo's comment comes on top of Trump warnings that he would "obliterate" or "destroy" the
Turkish economy, statements that did not sit well in Ankara and will predictably only create
new problems with a NATO member that has the largest army and economy in the Middle East.
And in another maladroit move, the White House has just announced that it will be giving
$4.5 million to the so-called White Helmets, the major propaganda arm of the Syrian
"resistance." Falsely claiming to be a humanitarian rescue and relief organization, the White
Helmets produced carefully edited films of "heroism under fire" that have been released
worldwide. The films conceal the White Helmets' relationship with the al-Qaeda affiliated group
Jabhat al-Nusra and its participation in the torture and execution of "rebel" opponents.
Indeed, the White Helmets only operated in rebel held territory, which enabled them to shape
the narrative both regarding who they were and what was occurring on the ground.
The White Helmets travelled to bombing sites with their film crews trailing behind them.
Once at the sites, with no independent observers, they are able to arrange or even stage what
was filmed to conform to their selected narrative. Perhaps the most serious charge against the
White Helmets consists of the evidence that they
actively participated in the atrocities , to include torture and murder, carried out by
their al-Nusra hosts. There have been numerous photos of the White
Helmets operating directly with armed terrorists and also celebrating over the bodies of
execution victims and murdered Iraqi soldiers. The group's jihadi associates regard the White
Helmets as fellow "mujahideen" and "soldiers of the revolution."
Trump using our troops to occupy Syrian oil fields -- part of our regime change war to
topple the Syrian government by crippling their economy -- is a modern-day siege that will
hurt the Syrian people the most.
Lindsey Graham elaborated on the plan, saying bluntly that "We can use some of the
revenues from future Syrian oil sales to pay our military commitment in Syria."
And Trump's statement that Saudi would pay for our troops in Saudi.
So now the US is whoring out our military . They are all insane .all of them.
Our politicians are whores for Israel and then middle men pimps who whore out Americans and
our troops.
The best thing that could or can be said of Orange Donald is that Hillary would've been
worse. Every time I see and hear him speak I can only imagine the intense embarrassment that
thinking Americans must feel. Yes, Obama was worse, as was Bill, but Trumpenstein is a sick
joke of a president by any measure. Sad indeed. It's Halloween every day in America these
days it seems.
excerpts
.
"An ally's value is not just a function of interests and capabilities, however; it may also
depend on how it treats its partners. A good ally doesn't interfere too much in one's own
domestic politics and doesn't overtly favor one political faction over another. A good ally
is (mostly) truthful and doesn't lie to you or deliberately feed faulty information to your
intelligence agencies. All nations spy on one another to some extent, but a good ally doesn't
do so with abandon. Needless to say, a good ally doesn't cut deals with your biggest rivals
and isn't constantly hunting for a better deal from some other patron.
Allies that violate one or more of these strictures are more problematic partners. That
does not necessarily mean that the alliance should be terminated, but the net value of an
otherwise useful ally will decline if it becomes unstable, repeatedly gets into trouble and
has to be bailed out, becomes weaker with time and requires more and more protection , makes
promises and doesn't keep them, and repeatedly flirts with one's rivals. The more that such
behaviors become commonplace, the more the alliance's value should be questioned.
With respect to the Middle East, therefore, the United States should adopt a more
conditional and businesslike approach to its current partners and its present adversaries.
None of its current allies are so valuable or virtuous to deserve unconditional U.S. support,
and confining U.S. policy toward Iran to the imposition of even-stricter sanctions just
limits U.S. leverage even more. Why should any of its current allies do its bidding when they
know it'll back them no matter what? And if the Saudis, Israelis, Egyptians, and others knew
the United States was also talking to Iran (something China and Russia do routinely), they
might be inclined to do more to keep Washington happy.
The obvious solution to this dilemma is to be more selective in extending commitments in the
first place. This is the essence of foreign-policy restraint: The United States should define
its interests somewhat more narrowly and then defend those interests more consistently and
vigorously. In alliance terms, it means extending commitments only when vital U.S. interests
are at stake. Carefully considered commitments will be highly credible, because both allies
and adversaries can see for themselves why it is in the U.S. interest to fulfill them. (Pro
tip: When it is hard to convince some other country that you really will fight for them,
maybe that's telling you something important about their strategic value.)
Everyone with brains saw this coming. This is so typically Donald Trump. He doesn't have a
clue at all. The most righteous thing that the US can do is to fail in Syria. But this will
also doom the empire itself. Hopefully it will also spell the end for Israel.
But this game is far from over yet. Hezbollah is denounced as a terrorist organisation as
another step in the war against the region. US and Israel will continue until the very last
end. They will never quit because their empires are at stake.
" White House ..will be giving $4.5 million to the ..White Helmets, the major propaganda
arm of the Syrian "resistance.". the "major propaganda arm of the Syrian resistance"?
I just don't see how investing in propaganda in Syria can make a profit for the
white house ?
What American interest in Syria would support challenging the world to take on the USA
military?
Seems kind of risky to me.. if someone accepts, or false flags, the challenge, the result
might initiate WW III.
I am pretty tough on the president. However, on this issue, I would have grant him credit for
being prudent, even if his frustration in that mode is to grant interventionists some of what
they want.
I don't like ironing his suits every other day -- however, if anything can be drawn from
all of the hysteria, it is that the president is slowly making some headway. And had he not,
no daylight would be visible on this issue. it took all of about a day before the
interventionists demonstrated just how entrenched this policy is.
The real damage is what this policy has done to US credibility on the whole. I am aware
that lost of very smart people consider "credibility" a nonissue. But I disagree. Anyone
wanting to check Russian influence would not have invaded Iraq or Afghanistan and had they
done so, they would have done so by exercising full force and owning the countries in
full.
Attempting to hold Afghanistahn to development -- could never have been piecemeal work and
it was folly. Not to mention wholly unnecessary to the purpose. Even the invasion to capture
twenty wanted suspects of 9/11 -- uh conspiracy aside -- was ineffectual.
-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -
Before the waxing on about Israel starts. Clearly, we must take responsibility for our
foreign policy.
Decision-makers in Western capitals had long viewed the Assad regime as a grim model of
Middle Eastern stability, but in 2011, they suddenly thought that "people power" would
bring down Assad as it had other Arab despots. The Assad regime, however, had something the
others didn't. "Popular resistance" strategies work well against authoritarian systems
whose leadership come from the country's ethnic and sectarian majority , such as Egypt.
Soldiers ordered to turn their guns on protestors are faced with a choice: Shoot their
brethren among the protestors, or help get rid of those ordering them to do so. This causes
a split in the army and security services, which can lead to a toppling of the
government.
Assad's by contrast is a minority government with a kind of fortress of sectarian
interests around it. Minority Alawites serve at the core, followed by concentric rings of
other minorities (Christians, Shia, etc.), and finally by coopted Sunnis who represent the
majority in Syria. Minority army and security officers are therefore farther removed
from the majority Sunni population, making them more likely to order fire against
protestors than to topple their brethren in power.
Trump has told us at least twenty times how ISIS has been defeated so if that is truly the
case then the oil fields aren't in need of protection by the U.S. military. The last remnants
of ISIS and their bloodthirsty leader, Al-Baghdadi, were supposedly just killed in the
weekend raid, so while ISIS may live on in the hearts of some Muslims it has lost almost all
of its leadership and military potential to threaten the oil fields.
Trump says he wants to end "these stupid wars" but by his rhetoric and schizophrenic
policy seems possibly on the verge of starting new ones.
Russia is correct in saying that the continued U.S. presence in Syria preventing Assad
from assuming control over his own oil constitutes "international state banditry". On that
point I say the U.S. has learned the craft of banditry well from its Israeli handlers and
masters.
Not sure the US empire have allies.
There are vassals, the occupied and conquered, the colonies, euphemistically called "allies",
and there is an enemy parasite euphemistically called "ally", Israel.
Then there is maybe sort of "junior" ally in crime, the Brits, who are more or less
vassals too.
US Admiral Inman called Israel an enemy, who is aggressively spying.
as of this writing it is by no means clear what will happen vis-à-vis the
Pentagon announcing that some troops, augmented by armor units, would remain in Syria to
protect the oil fields.
Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper explained to reporters that the remaining U.S. troops
would seek "to deny access, specifically revenue to ISIS and any other groups that may want
to seek that revenue to enable their own malign activities." The president has also
suggested, in true Trumpean fashion, that "We want to keep the oil, and we'll work
something out with the Kurds. Maybe we'll have one of our big oil companies to go in and do
it properly,"
Embarrassing.
" We want to keep the oil ." That's the oil in Syria? A foreign country and
sovereign state.
This is something like a bad caricature, a comedy sketch.
Trump says he is a nationalist. He is a one-step-forward-two-steps-back nationalist.
@renfro The
US military is nothing but a make work program for middle America. But keeping them engaged
in countless overseas "conflicts" the power that be hope to keep them from noticing that the
jobs they used to do either don't exist or are being done by illegals all while funneling tax
dollars into the military industrial complex. The bonus is that in the process you kill or
maim a disproportionate number of traditional Americans while the folks at home encourage the
whole thing
It's funny the Isreal lobby has gotten more out of Trump than the American public, and they
are still complaining and don't trust him. Why would anyone work with these ghastly wretches
after seeing this kind of temperament. The Isreal lobby in America enjoys more privileges and
benefits that any other individual group, yet it's never enough. Notice how Obama wanted
regime change in Syria, and then it's neocons who are urging the fight to continue today.
What did this tiny ethnic minority ever do to earn the absolute devotion of the entire US
government.
Now as to the challenge of governing effectively, Trump must be allowed two "excuses" for
his less-than-ideal governance. One, the major one, is that he is being obstructed --
attacked actually -- by the entire entrenched Establishment which has been looting the
country forever, in good times and bad, and wishes to preserve that status quo. The other is
the personal limitations inherent in every human being. We all have our strengths and
weaknesses. Trump is a bright guy, and a very strong personality, but clearly not omniscient.
On his own, he will not be able to get it right every time. So, subject to these two factors,
Trump will have -- has had -- diminished effectiveness. That said, he's incredibly nimble,
and can "flip-flop" -- ie turn on a dime, to change direction -- when something isn't
working. That's in stark contrast to the "foolish consistency [that] is the hobgoblin of
[the] little minds" -- ie rigidity -- of the professional political class. In any event, the
game will take a while, and Trump will stick with it and he knows how to win.
The Trump-haters won't acknowledge this, of course, and his supporters may be unable to
properly assess the obstacles he has to deal with so as to be able to accept a certain level
of disappointment. But unless Tulsi can break out, Trump will have five+ more years -- that's
four more plus the fourteen months remaining of this, his first term -- to work on fixing the
US.
Personally, I don't give a damn -- I'm safe and prosperous and outside the nuclear blast
zone -- and as a Trump supporter who wants to see him burn Washington to the ground, I'm
enjoying -- thoroughly enjoying -- the spectacle. I'm particularly excited by the prospect of
the coming take-down of the Deep State coup plotters. Brennan, Clapper, and Comey:
perp-walked, in the dock, orange jump-suits, etc. Bring it!
I look at actions and their results, not the noise of rhetorical "perception
management"/mind-rape.
He has half the nation, 95+ percent of Washington, DC, 95+ of NYC elites, 95+ percent of
the media, 100% of the Democrats, half the Republicans, 95+ percent of the world's people,
including their leaders
who hate his guts with a netherworld insanity, and would like to see him and the
Deplorables castrated and then burned alive. In that order.
So is it any surprise that his rhetoric is disjointed and contradictory?
Is it Donald Trump who's torturing Julian Assange, or the Deepstate scum who also hate
Donald Trump?
I've said all along, that the day he starts a war with Iran, (or anyone else, for that
matter), is the day I damn his soul. (insofar as a mortal can do so ; ).
But he hasn't started a war with Iran. All screeching- from every orifice of the
media and Deepstate and Zion and zio-Christians and MIC and CIA; ad infinitum.-
notwithstanding.
As you so colorfully put it, "I wouldn't give a damn if Trump wore a tutu and farted and
belched.." his Tweets, so long as we get no war with Iran, and the troops ebb their way out
of the Eternal Wars.
That's how I see it all. The guy is swimming in a septic tank full of Chuck Schumer's
turds and Nancy Pelosi's acid piss. The pure hatred of the media, and a very significant
percentage of Mitts and Marcos and other assorted human excrement. He's hated by most of the
world for simply being an unapologetic white guy, as opposed to the leaders of Germany and
France and Canada and England, where sniveling, abased self-loathing is de rigueur.
I certainly don't approve of everything he does, but considering that the alternative
would have meant the end of even the pretense of human freedom in my lifetime, at least in
the (dying) Western world- what he's done is given us a precious few more years. That's
critical time to plan an escape rout, and get thee to Uruguay. If for no other reason, I'm
grateful to Trump for that.
Improvement of this sorry state would take lots of painstaking capacity building to offset
CIA's ongoing capacity demolition. Everybody at State is a CIA focal point or an actual
official-cover fake dip, a professional ratfucker ratfucking Assad or Assange or everybody
else A-Z. They could not negotiate their way out of a paper bag. They have no inkling what
authorities govern their official functions.
I looked at the foreign service exam once and thought, who would waste their precious
moments on this shit? Grade-school civics, Microsoft office tips & tricks, just crap
insulting your intelligence. They're churning out statesmooks who don't know what the UN
Charter says. They know nothing about diplomatic history. They spy on foreign diplomats
instead of just like asking them what they think.
Your whole fucking country is a joke, a laughingstock, cause CIA knuckle-draggers wrecked
it. And it's extra funny now that Russia can make Langley, the Farm, Camp Swampy, No Man's
Island and all your fusion centers into big sinkholes of molten basalt and there ain't nothin
you can do about it, so you just got to watch the whole world laugh in your face and blow you
off.
The long nightmare in Syria might finally be coming to an end, but not thanks to the United
States and the administration of President Donald Trump.
Trump's boast that "this was an outcome created by us, the United States, and nobody else"
was as empty as all the other rhetoric coming out of the White House over the past two and a
half years. Nevertheless, it now appears that the U.S. military just might finally be bidding
farewell to an exercise that began under President Barack Obama as a prime bit of liberal
interventionism, with American forces illegally entering into a conflict that the White House
barely understood and subsequently meddling and prolonging the fighting.
The fundamental reason why the U.S. was so ineffective was that the Obama Administration's
principal objective from the beginning was to remove Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, yet
another attempt at "humanitarian" regime change similar to that which produced such a wonderful
result in Libya. Al-Assad was never in serious danger as he had significant popular support,
including from the country's Christian minority, and American piecemeal attempts to negotiate
some kind of exit strategy were doomed as they eschewed any dealing with the legitimate
government that was in place. The Syrian civil war supported and even enabled by Washington
caused more than 500,000 deaths, created some 9 million internal and external refugees, and
destroyed the Syrian economy and infrastructure while also almost starting a war between the
U.S. and Turkey.
The Russians understood the American mistake and consequently were able to arrange a
settlement which now appears to be viable. They were able to deal with the Syrian government,
Turkey, and the Kurds who had been set adrift by Washington. The arrangement arrived at has a
number of significant features. First, it guarantees Syria's territory integrity, which
presumably means the U.S. will eventually have to evacuate its remaining positions in the oil
region. Second, it satisfies Turkish legitimate security demands for a disarmed safe zone,
which means that Kurdish militias will have to disarm and/or move twenty miles away from the
border. The safe zone will be patrolled by the Syrian Army and the Russians with Turkish
observers. Third, all separatist groups (terrorists) will be hunted down and eliminated and
further attempts by them to reestablish in Syria will be opposed by all parties to the
agreement. Fourth, steps will be taken to make possible the orderly return of refugees to
Syria.
It is undeniably true that throughout the Syrian farrago, President Trump's admittedly
inherited policy could not possibly have been more incoherent, occasionally bizarre,
predictably inconsistent, and actually dangerous to genuine American interests in the region.
It is to everyone's benefit that the game is finally over, but one can expect the
neoconservatives in the United States to do their best to bring about yet another reversal by
Trump.
It must be conceded that along the way, President Trump was not exactly acting with a free
hand. He has been beleaguered by a Deep State conspiracy against him that began even before he
was nominated, though he didn't have to help his enemies by shooting himself in the head at
every opportunity through tweets and demeaning language. The apparent commitment to withdraw
all U.S. forces from Syria was long overdue as Washington's involvement in the fighting was
wrong by every measure right from the beginning and remaining has only served to make more
complicated the country's recovery from eight years of conflict. It also was contrary to its
publicly stated objective of destroying ISIS. A strong Syrian government was and is best placed
to do just that and Washington, in a panic to recruit, train and arm mercenaries to fight
Damascus often wound up arming terrorists.
But doing what is right does not go far in today's United States of America and the fact
that Trump is now taking credit for a ceasefire and by extension a settlement of the conflict
means little as he has predictably folded already once on plans to withdraw. The argument that
the Kurds have been betrayed has a certain cogency, but the reality is that the Kurdish leaders
entered into a relationship with the U.S. military based on their own interests with no
expectation that Washington would be backing them up forever. They are now well placed to cut
their own deals with both Damascus and Ankara, with Russia in the middle working to sustain the
agreement to end the fighting and restore the Syrian state's status ante bellum.
To give Trump his due, his original announcement that he was removing ALL U.S. troops from
Syria made powerful new enemies in the Israel Lobby, which has been backing the president
because of his many favors to Tel Aviv but which has never really liked or trusted him. Israel
has long, and even openly, promoted the breaking up of Syria into its component tribal and
religious parts to enable the acquisition of even more land in the Golan Heights and to reduce
dramatically the threat coming from any unified government in Damascus. It has also seen the
Syrian civil war as a proxy conflict fought by the its poodle the United States against Iran.
Israel and its friends in Congress and the media will, to say the least, be disappointed if the
war is now truly ended and the U.S. military is withdrawn.
Trump also must continue to deal with the fallout from his Democratic Party opponents,
having given them a cudgel to beat him over the head with as Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer and
Adam Schiff all wax emotional over how they really love those "freedom fighting" Kurds. The
Democrats, having denounced Trump with one voice, were joined by Republicans like Mitch
McConnell, Marco Rubio, Mitt Romney and the ever-versatile Lindsay Graham, all dedicated to the
continuation of an interventionist foreign policy, though they would never quite call it that.
It is not likely that any of them are really pleased with a deal to end the Syrian
fighting.
So the opposition, coming from multiple directions against a Donald Trump also on the
impeachment block for Ukraine, will continue and as of this writing it is by no means clear
what will happen vis-à-vis the Pentagon announcing that some troops, augmented by armor
units, would remain in Syria to
protect the oil fields . Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper
explained to reporters that the remaining U.S. troops would seek "to deny access,
specifically revenue to ISIS and any other groups that may want to seek that revenue to enable
their own malign activities." The president
has also suggested , in true Trumpean fashion, that "We want to keep the oil, and we'll
work something out with the Kurds. Maybe we'll have one of our big oil companies to go in and
do it properly," a step that even the feckless Obama Administration had hesitated to take on
legal grounds as the oil unquestionably belongs to Syria. Trump's amigo Senator Lindsey
Graham
elaborated on the plan , saying bluntly that "We can use some of the revenues from future
Syrian oil sales to pay our military commitment in Syria."
And there will be additional fallout from Syria in the damaged relationships in the region.
Demonstrating that it could actually screw up two things simultaneously, the White House had
unleashed Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who warned last Tuesday that the United States was
ready to go to war against Turkey if it proved necessary.
He said "We prefer peace to war But in the event that kinetic action or military action is
needed, you should know that President Trump is fully prepared to undertake that action."
Pompeo's comment comes on top of Trump warnings that he would "obliterate" or "destroy" the
Turkish economy, statements that did not sit well in Ankara and will predictably only create
new problems with a NATO member that has the largest army and economy in the Middle East.
And in another maladroit move, the White House has just announced that it will be giving
$4.5 million to the so-called White Helmets, the major propaganda arm of the Syrian
"resistance." Falsely claiming to be a humanitarian rescue and relief organization, the White
Helmets produced carefully edited films of "heroism under fire" that have been released
worldwide. The films conceal the White Helmets' relationship with the al-Qaeda affiliated group
Jabhat al-Nusra and its participation in the torture and execution of "rebel" opponents.
Indeed, the White Helmets only operated in rebel held territory, which enabled them to shape
the narrative both regarding who they were and what was occurring on the ground.
Some White Helmets continue to operate in Syria's terrorist-controlled Idlib province,
raising the question whether the United States is prepared to give more taxpayer derived money
directly to terrorists. Several months ago, as the Syrian Army closed in on some of the other
pockets where the White Helmets operated, the U.S. and Israel mounted an operation to evacuate
many of them. Some of them and their families were moved to Israel and Jordan and many of them
have wound up in Canada. If the White House again does a flip-flop and pulls the plug on the
money earmarked for them it would truly be a welcome sign that the U.S. has realized that the
game is over and its direct involvement in Syria should be ended.
Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest,
a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a
more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is
councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its
email is[email protected] .
Trump using our troops to occupy Syrian oil fields -- part of our regime change war to
topple the Syrian government by crippling their economy -- is a modern-day siege that will
hurt the Syrian people the most.
You know what they say about karma being a (word that rhymes with "witch"), right?
At the second Democratic presidential primary debate back in July, Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (HI)
absolutely torched Sen. Kamala Harris' (CA) criminal justice
reform record during her time as California's attorney general. It was the political shot
heard round the world.
Understandably, Harris was none too pleased about it and let it be known in a post-debate
interview in what Brandon Morse
described at the time as a "childish and elitist"
response :
ANDERSON COOPER, CNN: Did you expect that from Tulsi Gabbard? Had you had interaction
about that in the past? And how do you think it went?
SEN. KAMALA HARRIS: Well, I mean, listen, I -- this is going to sound immodest, but I'm
obviously a top-tier candidate, and so I did expect that I would be on the stage and take
hits tonight because there are a lot of people that are trying to make the stage for the next
debate.
COOPER: For a lot of them it's do or die.
HARRIS: Especially when some people are at zero or 1%, whatever she might be at. So I did
expect that I might take hits tonight.
It was a particularly cheap shot from someone who'd had such a disastrously poor debate
performance. She actually stooped even lower during the same interview with Cooper, calling
Gabbard an "apologist" for Syrian president Bashar al-Assad.
Well, here we are three months later, and the tables have dramatically turned. Not only has
Kamala Harris'
campaign cratered , but in some national and state polls Gabbard is now ahead of her, in
spite of
vicious attacks on the Hawaii congresswoman earlier this month from failed 2016 Democratic
presidential nominee Hillary Clinton.
First up, the CNN/UH state poll out of New Hampshire:
... ... ...
Here's how things have trended in that poll since July:
... ... ...
Next, a national poll from Suffolk University and USA Today:
... ... ...
The trend on that one looks like this:
... ... ...
To be fair, there
are other polls taken recently that show Harris ahead of Gabbard by a few percentage
points, but it's still gotta sting Harris to know that the woman whose numbers she made fun of
back in July is polling ahead of her in select polls now.
Daily Caller's James Hasson calls it for what it is:
... ... ...
To make matters worse for Harris, Gabbard is just one
poll away from qualifying for the November Democratic debate (which is scheduled for
Nov. 20th in Georgia ).
Assuming Gabbard ends up qualifying, one has to wonder if she'll be prepared to use a
rhetorical finishing maneuver on her political foe this time around (assuming the mods
don't run interference ).
-- Based in North Carolina, Sister
Toldjah is a former liberal and a 16+ year veteran of blogging with an emphasis on media
bias, social issues, and the culture wars. Read her Red State archives here . Connect with her on Twitter . –
Democrats haven't been too kind to Hawaii Rep. Tusli Gabbard. Ever since she took down
California's Sen. Kamala Harris, she's had a target on her back, with wild accusations being
thrown her way such as being a "Russian asset."
Recently, as my colleague
Thomas LaDuke covered , Gabbard announced that she won't be seeking reelection for her seat
in congress, and instead, putting all her efforts into running for President.
It's pretty clear, however, that Gabbard isn't going to win the 2020 nomination from the
Democrats, but some Democrats fear that in light of this obvious fact, Gabbard may continue her
campaign under a different banner, and go for a third party run. Despite Gabbard not being
anywhere near the front of the pack, she is somewhat popular, and Democrats fear that her
third-party run would subtract from the total number of Democrat voters.
According to The Hill ,
strategists are expressing their worries:
Some party strategists and operatives fear that a third-party bid by the Hawaii
congresswoman could fracture parts of the electorate and stir chaos in the 2020 contest,
ultimately setting the stage for President Trump 's reelection.
The criticisms are particularly pointed from people in former Secretary of State
Hillary Clinton 's
orbit.
"She has absolutely zero path to becoming the Democratic nominee, so what is she doing?"
said Adam Parkhomenko, a Democratic strategist and former aide to Clinton, the party's 2016
presidential nominee. "To say that she's going to take her campaign all the way to the
convention just suggests that she's trying to create chaos."
Other Democrats have expressed their worries as well according to The Hill:
"I think the possibility of [Gabbard] running as a third party is very, very real and it
should concern all of us," one DNC member said. "Look what Jill Stein did to Hillary Clinton.
She was the difference in three states."
Despite Gabbard's insistence that she has ruled out a third-party campaign, some Democrats
remain skeptical. Sellers said there was still plenty of time for the congresswoman to change
her mind.
"I don't trust anything she says in that regard," Sellers said. "I think we've seen that
before, but I think many of the concerns that Hillary Clinton and myself had about
congresswoman Gabbard are proving to be true and I think that's unfortunate."
This is an echo of things Clinton herself has said previously. The failed 2016 candidate
once indirectly made the wild accusation that Gabbard was being groomed for a third party run.
A spokesperson later confirmed that Clinton was speaking about Gabbard.
"I'm not making any predictions, but I think they've got their eye on somebody who's
currently in the Democratic primary and are grooming her to be the third-party candidate," said
Clinton to the Campaign HQ podcast.
Despite their fears, Gabbard herself has made it very clear that she has no intention of
seeking a third-party run, but in the event that she did, Democrats would definitely have a
problem on their hands.
As of right now, Gabbard is polling with an approval average of 12.5 according to
Real Clear Politics . Miniscule in terms of the big picture, but between Gabbard, the Green
Party's Jill Stein, and possibly others who may jump into the race, such as
Dick's Sporting Goods CEO Ed Stack , leftist figures could nickel and dime the Democrats
into another election loss.
As of right now, it's already not looking good for Democrats as is. One more pebble in their
shoe would spell doom, and Gabbard has proven to be a pretty big pebble.
Following a short artillery and air engagement with Syria over raids by exiled Palestinian
guerillas, Egypt mobilized against her nemesis in 1967. President Nasser sent six divisions to
the Sinai, removed the UN peacekeeping force, and closed the Straits of Tiran south of Israel.
Israel struck first, fearing annihilation.
As Israeli historian Martin Van Creveld states in
The Transformation of War , "for six glorious days war was Israel and Israel was war."
The result was a smashing victory for the Israelis
, who lost around 800 soldiers, as opposed to 20,000 for Egypt, Syria, and Jordan. The Sinai
peninsula, the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Golan Heights were added to
Israel's territory.
Compare this short war with another conflict that played out in 2006. For 34 days, Israel
battled Hezbollah in southern Lebanon in response to the Shia terrorist group's killing and
capturing of several Israeli soldiers in cross-border raids. Israel launched a massive air and
artillery campaign, followed by a ground invasion in late July. When the ceasefire was signed
on August 14, both sides claimed victory, but as John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt noted in
The Israel Lobbyand U.S. Foreign
Policy , "it was clear to most independent experts" that "Hezbollah had come out ahead
in the fight." The IDF chief of staff resigned, and an Israeli government investigation rebuked
the planning and handling of the campaign, stating that the military had "pursued goals that
were not clear and could not be achieved."
Worse still, the air, artillery, and naval campaign killed an estimated 1,183 Lebanese (a
third of them children) and devastated the country's infrastructure. These actions drew strong
condemnation from Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch for causing "destruction on a
catastrophic scale." During the last three days of the war, the IDF fired over one million
cluster bombs into southern Lebanon, "saturating the area." The leader of an IDF rocket unit called these actions
"insane and monstrous."
War can still be won by being nasty and short, as shown in the first Gulf War, but time is
not on the side of the powerful. Escalation by a powerful state against a poorly equipped
adversary almost always works to the advantage of the weaker side. Van Creveld compares this
situation to an adult who "administers a prolonged, violent beating to a child in a public
place." Observers will sympathize with the child and intervene, regardless of its prior
behavior.
With the Palestinians, the position of weakness is even more extreme. Israel dominates the
lives of 3.8 million Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, controlling air, land, and sea
access, in a situation that's been compared to "living in a cage" by Swedish foreign minister
Jan Eliasson. Despite numerous American attempts to secure Palestinian statehood and resolve
the conflict, the present situation seems worse than ever.
The Trump administration, on the other hand, has made it clear that Israel will be supported
through thick and thin. And the world has slowly but surely begun to take notice. The
BDS movement (Boycott, Divest, Sanction), initially confined to college campuses and
Palestine, spilled into the national news when Democratic lawmakers Ilhan Omar and Rashida
Talib spearheaded a movement opposing bills aimed at criminalizing support of BDS. Some
Republicans, namely Senator Rand Paul, have opposed those bills, too, on
free speech grounds.
Recently, after the congresswomen were denied entry to Israel because of their support of
BDS, liberal Jewish journalist Peter Beinart defended their stance. Speaking on a CNN panel , he openly
sympathized with the plight of the Palestinians, claiming their treatment by Israel constitutes
an "indefensible denial of basic human rights." Fellow panelists attempted to tie support for
Palestine to terrorism, a common tactic. But terrorism in that part of the world is nothing
new. Israel's defenders tend to forget or are ignorant of the fact that beginning in 1937, the
militant Zionist group Irgun
was responsible for placing bombs in buses and large crowds. One of its leaders during Israel's
war for independence, future prime minister Menachem Begin, was referred to by Prime Minister
Levi Eshkol simply as "the terrorist."
Modern Israel is no longer a weak state in danger of annihilation. The IDF is highly
motivated, trained, and funded. Emboldened by the financial and moral backing of the United
States and powerful lobbying groups, its treatment of Palestinians and other enemies has become
steadily more severe.
With recent
elections still contested , it remains to be seen whether these policies will continue. But
militarily, Israel's position is not tenable. You can win at the tactical level and rack up a
higher body count, but still lose the war. As frequent TAC contributor and military historian
William S. Lind notes, "in the 3,000 years that the story of David and Goliath has been told,
how many listeners have identified with Goliath?"
Israel will last as long as Wash. extorts money from our wages and supports it. Without the
US taxpayer, Israel wouldn't exist, both from its beginning to right now.
I think the lack of sympathy for Israel is not that it s the "Goliath" of this story but
that it is allowing settlers to live in the Occupied Territories.
So TAC is standing with the Palestinians now I see. Will it stand with those other Davids,
the intersectional allies of the BDS crowd too? namely Black Lives Matter, illegal Latino
migrants, the LGBTQ+ community, and other assorted SJW types?
We are now in the end times; when it comes to Israel, all is in the hands of the Lord. As
the nations of the earth seek to attack and destroy Israel, they fall into ruin: look at
the entire Muslim world; look at what's happening to Europe. Most of all, look at the
astonishing rise and continued power of Donald Trump, the man who recognized Jerusalem as
the capital of Israel. Pick your side and accept your fate accordingly.
"Escalation by a powerful state against a poorly equipped adversary almost always
works to the advantage of the weaker side."
I don't always buy this. For me this only works if the powerful state is in the wrong.
And sadly, in this situation, Israel is deeply in the wrong.
But what does happen is over time, the weak becomes slowly stronger. Because they are
always studying their enemies. They are learning their tactics and how to defeat them. This
may take decades, but eventually the weak become the strong.
This is why it is always best to quickly offer a hand of friendship to a vanquished
enemy. If you don't, you'll eventually trade places.
You know what they say about karma being a (word that rhymes with "witch"), right?
At the second Democratic presidential primary debate back in July, Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (HI)
absolutely torched Sen. Kamala Harris' (CA) criminal justice
reform record during her time as California's attorney general. It was the political shot
heard round the world.
Understandably, Harris was none too pleased about it and let it be known in a post-debate
interview in what Brandon Morse
described at the time as a "childish and elitist"
response :
ANDERSON COOPER, CNN: Did you expect that from Tulsi Gabbard? Had you had interaction
about that in the past? And how do you think it went?
SEN. KAMALA HARRIS: Well, I mean, listen, I -- this is going to sound immodest, but I'm
obviously a top-tier candidate, and so I did expect that I would be on the stage and take
hits tonight because there are a lot of people that are trying to make the stage for the next
debate.
COOPER: For a lot of them it's do or die.
HARRIS: Especially when some people are at zero or 1%, whatever she might be at. So I did
expect that I might take hits tonight.
It was a particularly cheap shot from someone who'd had such a disastrously poor debate
performance. She actually stooped even lower during the same interview with Cooper, calling
Gabbard an "apologist" for Syrian president Bashar al-Assad.
Well, here we are three months later, and the tables have dramatically turned. Not only has
Kamala Harris'
campaign cratered , but in some national and state polls Gabbard is now ahead of her, in
spite of
vicious attacks on the Hawaii congresswoman earlier this month from failed 2016 Democratic
presidential nominee Hillary Clinton.
First up, the CNN/UH state poll out of New Hampshire:
... ... ...
Here's how things have trended in that poll since July:
... ... ...
Next, a national poll from Suffolk University and USA Today:
... ... ...
The trend on that one looks like this:
... ... ...
To be fair, there
are other polls taken recently that show Harris ahead of Gabbard by a few percentage
points, but it's still gotta sting Harris to know that the woman whose numbers she made fun of
back in July is polling ahead of her in select polls now.
Daily Caller's James Hasson calls it for what it is:
... ... ...
To make matters worse for Harris, Gabbard is just one
poll away from qualifying for the November Democratic debate (which is scheduled for
Nov. 20th in Georgia ).
Assuming Gabbard ends up qualifying, one has to wonder if she'll be prepared to use a
rhetorical finishing maneuver on her political foe this time around (assuming the mods
don't run interference ).
-- Based in North Carolina, Sister
Toldjah is a former liberal and a 16+ year veteran of blogging with an emphasis on media
bias, social issues, and the culture wars. Read her Red State archives here . Connect with her on Twitter . –
"Democratic presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard appeared on Fox News' "Hannity" Thursday
evening to criticize the House's impeachment investigation into President Donald Trump.
"I don't know what's going on in those closed doors," Gabbard said. "We as members of
Congress do not have access to the information that's being shared. I think the American
people deserve to know exactly what the facts are, what the evidence is being presented as
this inquiry goes on."
Imagine that! Republicans as the anti-war party. Could happen ... and Democrats have only
themselves to blame for stiffing the large percentage of the population that opposes fighting
pointless and futile wars forever. But hey, if 'defense' contractors got big bucks, you can
bet Democrats will be sniffing up their crotches...
The author seems to be writing an interesting fiction, reminds one of a Hollywood movie
about a Russian oligarch at the behest of a senior Russian government official, attempting
to engineer wall street crash.
Taking out a newspaper advertisement with proper representation to state one's case can't
be compared with the US funded National Endowment for Democracy's funding of Hong Kong's
increasingly violent rioting.
This is like apple and orange, not comparable. China did not interfere in
NBA's affairs, just reacting to her citizens uproar against the infamous now
deleted tweet. Thus many Chinese Chinese sponsors pulled out. This is no
different to sponsors pulling out of US athletes endorsements from time to
time when there are scandals.
Whereas NED is US intelligence cover for interference in targeted countries
like Ukraine, Venezuela, Iran and many Islamic countries around the world, to
advance US political agenda.
And in breaking news. 39 Britons have been found dead in a container
trying to be smuggled fromt eh failed UK state to the successful state
run by the CCP.
Did I get that the right-way round ?
This is a paper or news site about asia. It is written in English? What does this tell
you? The audience ostensibly consists of westerners (or educated people from asia or
elsewhere) who want to read an alternative to the drivel and rubbish that's propagated in
copious quantities by the scat factories of the west and their zionist-oligarch dominated
news conglomerates...
Who is interfering in elections? Does china name some loser guaido as president of
venezuela or support terrorists in syria? Is china sanctioning (with financial warfare)the
whole world including their own allies? You must have no modicum of shame to come up with
this absolute smorgasbord of rancid festering bollocks that you think is befitting of
"reporting." You are bettet off taking a sabbatical and never coming back... i would tell
you all of this to your face with the utmost respect that i could muster before i
vomited...
Presidents come and go... the empire, deep state bureaucrats, and their slavish
dual-state minions such as yourself will march on no matter what until your rotten seed
perpetuate the corruption and degeneracy passed down through your genes. That xyz is
president makes zero difference in deterring the momentum of evil that lurks within the
diseased sociopaths such as yourself.
You are an unmitigated disgrace to true journalism and do a grave disservice to this
site's reputation.
CIA uses fake identities for the propaganda articles. If a nation is building close
ties with China, automatically an author with a name from that nation appears. They
also have groups posting propaganda under a single fake name. There are only a few
genuine Asian CIA hacks making a living off the CIA.
USA is heading for multiple
recessions possibly a depression unless they change their current anti China
policies.
In fact, in military, fake identities for information warfare are assigned to
one person, so that it multiplies the effect. To keep track of these
"personas" per each real person, and their postings -- a "persona" data bases
are needed to keep track of their activities. And unfortunately , there are
always some technicians who are more then happy to talk about it.
It would not surprise me if he worked for the CIA... this organization is, by
its mission, embedded into all public spheres...
What is worrisome is that
the cia has no accountability to anyone. It is one great example of deep state
operator. Also, cia is heavily infiltrated by mossad. In other words, cia is a
parallel drug traffickers organization that dabbles in news, democracy
promotion, torture, coups, blackmail, assasibation, rendition...
It is accountable to no one ... their actions are conducted in secrecy and
cannot be scrutinized... the president can't control them... these
organizations are a manifest example of why this article is a huge fallacy
dressed up in cured excrement.
These people are outrageously shameless in their assertion that they can openly interfere
in the internal affairs of other countries, like the recent bills passed by the US House
of Representatives in support of the Blackshirts of HK, but they would not brook any
interference from China in their election, not that it's true at all.
This is a good example of how the US apply its Orwellian ideology of "American
Exceptionalism" - "All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others" -
George Orwell's "Animal Farm."
Another guy cashing in on the evil China fad, pathetic. It is the US who conducts
financial warfare by imposing illegal sanctions and restrictions on other countries using
the dominance of the dollar in international trade.
If it is so easy to have a country's financial system snd stock markets manipulated -- how
do know that our own financial sharks are not already manipulating market to enrich them
selves , while making it appear that everything is fine? Or that they are not crashing
markets in order to profit?
There is something not right about a country with financial and market systems living off
the fumes of news cycle?
Look at how many times West attacked Russian financial systems
and markets, blocking whole companies and financial institutions -- yet nothing crashed.
Currency lost some value helping exports, while those earning in dollars simply had more
money to spend domestically. And by placing sanctions kn European food products -- they
shot up to the first place globally in wheat production.
I am wondering if the difference is Russia's large currency and gold reserves. As
opposed US economy that sits atop a large debt bubble? Than anything can spook it.
Bill Gertz is running out of stuff to bad mouth China. He is eager to make some money now
that he's been fired by Washington Free Beacon for having some shady deals with the
Chinese billionaire fugitive Guo who is the subject covered in his reporting.
Maybe Gertz can tell us who China wants to be elected by staging these financial influence
campaign? Gertz is sounding utterly ridiculous now.
american are losers, foreign influence here and there, well thanks to your own foreign
policies bombing here and there and regime change everywhere, you sow what you get. if you
don't want foreign influence. just build a great wall and extend it to these. not only no
5G, ditch all comunications including mail
This is a nonsense article. Lots of hypotheticals with no proof presented of China's
intention or cases of actually trying to influence any American election.
This is more
how Western countries behave with their Machivellian modus operandi overthrowing
governments in Eastern Europe, Latin America, etc. This author and American officials are
merely voicing what the USA is already capable of doing rather than what China has in
place.
In fact there is a debate among Chinese officials and think tanks that they might want
Trump to have a second term because as the USA p@sses off many countries including those
allied with the USA that might help China down the line.
Wait a minute -- Russia wants Trump to be reelected, and China wants him to lose?
With US creating legislation for the whole world -- our sanctions whose enforcement is
imposed in others -- means that other people must have the right to elect the president?
How can the world accept such financial burden on others with no right to vote.
Remember
America next time you vote for sanctions, tariffs etc. -- no taxation without
representation.
Global presidents must be elected globally!
There's no need for the Chinese to rely on 'covert' operation to influence the election's
outcome. For instance, if China just cancels the buying of the agricultural goods from the
US that it has dealt with Trump in what is being called the partial deal from the trade
war, it would be already enough to influence in the election. Lol!
MOSCOW, October 26, 2019 – RIA Novosti – The Russian Ministry of Defense has
published satellite intelligence images , showing American oil smuggling from Syria.
Image 1: Situation in the Syrian Arab Republic as of October 26, 2019.
According to the ministry, the photos confirm that "Syrian oil, both before and after the
routing defeat of the Islamic State terrorists in land beyond the Euphrates river , under the
reliable protection by US military servicemen, oil was actively being extracted and then the
fuel trucks were massively being sent for processing outside of Syria."
Image 2: Daman oil gathering station, Syria, Deir ez-Zor province, 42 km east of Deir
ez-Zor, August 23, 2019.
Here, in a picture of the Daman oil gathering station (42 kilometers east of the Deir-ez-Zor
province), taken on August 23, a large amount of trucks were spotted. "There were 90 automotive
vehicles, including 23 fuel trucks," the caption to the image said.
In addition, on September 5, there were 25 vehicles in the Al-Hasakah province, including 22
fuel trucks. Three days later, on September 8, in the vicinity of Der Ez-Zor, 36 more vehicles
were recorded (32 of them were fuel trucks). On the same day, 41 vehicles, including 34 fuel
trucks, were in the Mayadin onshore area.
Image 3: Gathering of vehicles in Syria, Al-Hasakah province, 8 km west of Al-Shaddadi,
September 5, 2019.
As the official representative of the Defense Ministry Igor Konashenkov noted, the Americans
are extracting oil in Syria with the help of equipment, bypassing their own sanctions.
Igor Konashenkov:
"Under the protection of American military servicemen and employees of American PMCs, fuel
trucks from the oil fields of Eastern Syria are smuggling to other states. In the event of
any attack on such a caravan, special operations forces and US military aircraft are
immediately called in to protect it," he said.
According to Konashenkov, the US-controlled company Sadcab , established under the so-called
Autonomous Administration of Eastern Syria , is engaged in the export of oil, and the income of
smuggling goes to the personal accounts of US PMCs and special forces.
The Major General added that as of right now, a barrel of smuggled Syrian oil is valued at
$38, therefore the monthly revenue of US governmental agencies exceeds $30 million.
Image 4: Gathering of vehicles in Syria, Deir ez-Zor province, 10 km east of Mayadin,
September 8, 2019.
"For such a continuous financial flow, free from control and taxes of the American
government, the leadership of the Pentagon and Langley will be ready to guard and defend oil
fields in Syria from the mythical 'hidden IS cells' endlessly," he said.
According to Konashenkov, Washington, by holding oil fields in eastern Syria, is engaged in
international state banditry.
Image 5: Gathering of vehicles in Syria, Deir ez-Zor province, 14 km east of Mayadin,
September 8, 2019.
The reason for this activity, he believes, "lies far from the ideals of freedom proclaimed
by Washington and their slogans on the fight against terrorism."
Igor Konashenkov:
"Neither in international law, nor in American legislation itself – there is not and
cannot be a single legal task for the American troops to protect and defend the hydrocarbon
deposits of Syria from Syria itself and its own people, " the representative of the Defense
Ministry concluded.
A day earlier, the Pentagon's head, Mark Esper declared that the United States is studying
the situation in the Deir ez-Zor region and intends to strengthen its positions there in the
near future "to ensure the safety of oil fields."
The Ruskies are mad - Trump is stopping them from taking the oil, it belongs to the Kurds
for their revenue and if US wants to help them have it so what....US is staying to secure
those oilfields against ISIS taking it again!
If everyone listened to the President when he talks there wouldn't be any spin that anyone
could get away with.
The oil is on Kurdish land. This part of Syria is just a small sector of Kurdish territory
that has been stolen from them by dividing it between four "countries", each of which has
oil. This is why the territory was stolen and why the Kurds have become the world's best
fighters.
Putin brokered a deal to stop Turkey wiping the Kurds by having their fighting force
assimilate with the Syrian military and required Russian observers access to ensure the Turks
keep their word and not invade to wipe all the Kurd civilians in order to also take their
Syrian oil.
So the corrupt US generals get caught in the act. Their senators and reps on the payroll
are going to need some more of that fairy tale PR for POTUS to read to us at bedtime.
If we are to believe that this is to protect the oil fields then the oil revenue should be
going to Syria, even though the Kurds are on the land. Follow the money to find the truth
because there is no one you can trust on this stage.
MSM are simply not covering this story. Or the other story about the supposed gas attack
at Douma where evidence was adulterated and/or ignored completely under US pressure.
Expect the same from MH17.
WTF is going on with our leaders and corporate MSM....can no one in a leadership position
distinguish between lies and the truth? Or fantasy and reality? Where are the 'journalists'
who will stand up and tell the truth in MSM? They no longer exist.
18 wheel fuel trucks around here hold 10K gal. 50 truck loads 500K of un processed oil if
it's true? I though they just got there. but no telling who might steal under those
conditions.
That was August. this is now. The Russians must have really wanted that oil to finance
their occupation. Trump is preventing ISIS from using the oil as their piggy bank.
Wasn't Erdogan doing the same not too long ago? Shortly after Erdogan became close friends
with Putin. Does this mean Trump and Putin will become close friends as well? Or is this
simply a common practice between two people who undeservingly place relatives in government
positions? First Turkey hands over Al Baghdadi (he received medical treatment in Southern
Turkey in a private clinic owned by Erdogan's daughter guarded by MIT agents) so that they
can continue to commit genocide against Kurds in Turkey and Syria... and now the US is
stealing Syrian oil like how the Turks initially were doing. What a mess and a
disappointment. Hopefully Erdogan visits DC and unleashes his security guards beating any
person freely walking the streets while Trump smiles and describes him as a great leader.
Watch in coming weeks as the tanker convoys are proven to be rogue operations from an out
of control CIA / Cabal network. Trump removed the troops, and now Russia is shining a light
on it.
No coincidence another article on ZH brung attention to the Ukrainian wareehouse arsos..12
in 2 yrs..2017-2018 where stored munition were carted away...not to fight rebels n Donbass
but sold to Islamic groups in Syria..it was one of Bidens pals..one keeps the wars going
while the others steal siphon of resources..whatever isn't nailed down..I've never seen
anything like this..Democrats are truly CRIME INC
w/o that oil..Syria can never reconstruct itself..Usually in a War or ,after that is, the
victors help rebuild..what we see is pillaging and salting the earth and walk away.. as the
Romans did to enemies like Carthage..it will resemble Libya ...a shambles
So the smuggling is protected by air cover and special forces? Light up the fields using
some scud missiles. I'm sure Iran or Iraq have a few they could lend Syria. Can't sell it if
its burning.
Brits and Americans have pillaged, as any other empire, wherever they conquered.
After WW1 the 'Allies' robbed Germany of all foreign currency and its entire gold. This
triggering hyperinflation and mega crisis.
During WW2 central bank gold was pillaged from countries that were 'liberated' across
Europe.
In more recent history, the gold of Iraq, Ukraine and Libya was flown to Fort Knox.
All well documented.
This is common practice by empires. Just please stop pretending you were the good
guys , spreading freedom and democracy, because that's really a mockery and the
disgusting part of your invasions.
During WW2 central bank gold was pillaged from countries that were 'liberated'.
Exactly, that's where the US got its 8,000 tons of gold. Before WWII, the US had 2000 tons
of gold, after WWII it had 8,000 tons. Even today the US always steals the gold of the
countries it "liberates"
Help me understand why the USA would want to smuggle oil from Syria. When the USA has more
oil than all of the middleast.
Now I can see why Russia would blame the USA if smuggling Oil from Syria. Russia needs
that oil really bad. So to get the USA away from the Syrian oil fields they would of course
create a reason for the rest of the world that the USA is Dishonerable and must not be
trusted with Syrian oil. It is just too obvious to me, what Russia is trying to
accomplish.
Huh? The US is stealing the oil to deprive the Syrian people energy they need to rebuild
the country we destroyed. This is collective punishment of Syrians because they won't
overthrow Assad.
Collective punishment is a crime against humanity according to international law. There's
your impeachable offense. But don't worry, that kind of crime is ok with Shifty Schiff and
the rest of the Israel ***-kissers in Congress.
The US is NOT stealing the oil - the American Military have become PIRATES - no different
than Somali Red Sea Pirates or looters in Newark stealing diapers and TV's
This is nothing new. We've been stealing oil from dozens of countries for the past 75
years since WWII. The only difference is that Trump is being blatant about it which in a way
is weirdly refreshing.
"... The below analysis is provided by " Ehsani " -- a Middle East expert, Syrian-American banker and financial analyst who visits the region frequently and writes for the influential geopolitical analysis blog, Syria Comment . ..."
"... An M1 Abrams tank at the Udairi Range Complex in Kuwait, via Army National Guard/Military Times. ..."
Here's
Why Trump's "Secure Syria's Oil" Plan Will Prove Practically Impossible
by
Tyler Durden
Sat, 10/26/2019 - 23:30
0
SHARES
The below analysis is provided by "
Ehsani
" -- a Middle
East expert, Syrian-American banker and financial analyst who visits the region frequently and writes
for the influential geopolitical analysis blog,
Syria Comment
.
Much has been debated since President Trump tweeted that
"The U.S has secured the oil"
in Syria. Is this feasible? Does it make any sense? The below will
explain how and why
the answer is a resounding
NO
.
Al-Omar and Conoco fields are already secured by Kurdish-led SDF and U.S forces. Some of the oil
from these fields was being sold through third parties to Syria's government by giving it in crude
form and taking back half the quantity as refined product
(the government owns the
refineries).
Syria's government now has access to oil fields inside the 32km zone
(established
by the Turkish military incursion and subsequent withdrawal of Kurdish forces). Such fields can produce
up to 100K barrels a day and will already go a long way in terms of meeting the country's immediate
demand.
So the importance of accessing oil in SDF/U.S hands is not as pressing any longer.
SDF/U.S forces can of course decide to sell the oil to Iraq's Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG)
but Syria's government now has control over the border area connecting Syria to KRG territory through
both Yaaroubia and Al-Mallkiya.
The Syrian government also now has control over supply of electricity. This was made possible by
taking control of the Tishreen and Furat dams.
Operating those fields needs electric power
supply and the state is now the provider.
Securing and operating these fields also entails paying salaries to those operating the fields.
International companies would be very reluctant to get involved without legal backing to operate
the fields.
"Securing the oil" therefore
can only mean preventing the Syrian state from accessing al-Omar/Conoco
only (not oil in the north)
. It's unlikely anything can be sold or transported.
And let's not forget "securing" this oil would need
ready air cover, and all for what?
SDF composition included Arab fighters and tribes who accepted Kurds in leadership since they had
American support and key cities in north. Many of those Arabs are already switching and joining the
Syrian Army.
"Securing" oil for benefit of the Kurds is likely to antagonize the Arab fighters
and tribes in the region.
Preventing rise of ISIS is likely to entail securing support of the region's Arabs and tribes more
than that of the Kurds. This Kurd/Arab issue is yet another reason why President Trump's idea of
"securing" the oil for the benefit of the Kurds just doesn't make sense nearly on every level
.
The psychopaths destroyed the last secular country in the ME. Same
with Lybia. Now all we get are extremists on all sides. Mossad doing
what it knows best, bringing chaos for the psychopaths.
By withdrawing from Northern Kurdistan and by making an exception
for the oil fields, Genius President Trump just told the world a number
of things:
To trust the U.S.A. as an ally is sheer stupidity
The "alternative media" theory that it is all about oil (and
possible gas) has been proven true
The U.S.A. is being ruled by a hobbyist who has no strategic
plans, replacing them with a "random walk" concept
Of course, the European allies (except Turkey) are still refusing
to learn from this experience. "Duck and cover until November 2020"
is their current tactics. Not sure if this is a good idea.
Turkey has learned to go their own ways, but I don't think it is
a good idea to create ever more enemies at one's borders. Greece,
Armenia, the Kurdish regions, Syria, Cyprus, not sure how their stance
is towards Iran. Reminds me of Germany before both World Wars. Won't
end well.
"America/The US", a label, is
actually just a location on a map and is not a reference to the actual
identities of those who start wars for profit.
Also it is hilarious to use that label as if an area of the planet
is or has attacked another area. Land can not attack itself, ever,
just as guns don't kill people, people kill people.
Trump is not claiming posession of oil in syria by leaving some
troops behind. Just as he did not declare war, nor start any EVER.
Every conflct on earth has it's roots with very specific individuals,
none of whom are even related to Trump.
Syria was a conflicting mess before he took office and he is dutifully
attempting to pull US soldiers out of a powder keg of nonsense he
wants no part of. Nor does any sane American want more conflict in
battles we can't afford, in countries we'll never even visit.
Like I said before, Trump can't just abruptly yank all our troops.
It's simply not that simple. And for those pretending he is doing
syria a disservice, I dare any one of you to go there yourselves and
see if you bunch of complete dipshits can do better. Who knows, maybe
you'll find the love of your life, ******* idiots.
First, the US invades Syria in violation of the Geneva Convention
on War making it an international criminal. Then it funds and equips
the most vile terrorists on the planet which leads to the killing
of thousands of innocent Syrians. And now it has decided to stay and
steal oil from Syria. The US is now the Evil American Empire owned
and run by crooks, gangsters and mass murderers. The Republic is dead
along with morality, justice and freedom.
Let's limit the culprits to: The Obama regime... and
not all the US. This is why these devils need to be brought
to trial and their wealth clawed out of their hiding places to
pay reparations to some of the victims.
The US has been an Evil American Empire for a long time, since
at least the Wilson administration, and Republican or Democrat...it
make little difference. World wars, the Fed, IRS, New Deal,
Korea, Vietnam, War OF Terror, assassinations, coups, sanctions,
Big Pharma, Seeds of Death and Big Agri...and the list goes
on and on. Please understand that America is not great and one
day all Americans will have to account for what their country
did in their name. If you believe in the Divine, then know that
their will be a reckoning.
The Obama regime was merely a continuation of the Chimpy Bush
regime, which was merely a continuation of the Clinton regime,
which was merely a continuation of the Pappy Bush regime, which
was merely a continuation... etc.
More chinks in the petrodollar armor will be the outcome of this. The credibility of murica is withering
away as every day passes. Iraqi pressure upon foreign troops there
to leave and/or drawdown further will also make this venture even
more difficult to manage.
The Kurds
may not be the smartest with regards to picking allies, but even they
may by now have learned that sticking to murica any longer will destroy
any semblance of hope for any autonomy status whatsoever once the
occupants have left. Likewise, the Sunni tribes around this area don't
want to become another Pariah group once things revert to normal.
Assad will eventually retake all his territory and
this is speeding up the process of eventual reconciliation in Syria.
They've spent far more on these wars than they've made back by stealing
other countries' resources. Trillions wasted in exchange for mere
billions in profit, to say nothing of the massive loss of life and
destruction incurred.
'The below analysis is provided by "
Ehsani
"
-- a Middle East expert, Syrian-American banker and financial analyst
who visits the region frequently and writes for the influential geopolitical
analysis blog,
Syria Comment
.'
this quote was my first red flag.
so POTUS outsmarts Erdongan, takes out ISIS leader BAGHDADI along
with Erdongan MIT agents meeting with him. sorry, Ehsani, i think
your full of sh*t.
CIA & MOSSAD LLC
friends ISIS is just the excuse the american
an israeli terrorists used and use in order to keep trying to remove
Assad from the Government.
They just can't accept defeat and absolute failure. What's worse
than an american/israeli terrorist destroyed ego?!
All info needs verification. US sources are not trustworthy including
anyone where money originates from the usual fake info instigators/
players.
POTUS is so misled by the deep state MIC /CIA/ FBI et al and their
willing fake media cohorts that he agreed to give the White Helmets
more public money for more fake movies, as has been properly proven
and widely reported.
Either they have taken control of his mind with a chip insert or
they have got his balls to the knife.
The false flags have been discredited systematically and only a
very brainwashed or a very frightened person would believe anything
from the same source until after a thorough scourge is proven successfully
undertaken.
It is evident that even the last hope department has been got at
by the money-power.
If they can do 9/11 and get away with it, as they have, then they
will stop at nothing to remain entrenched.
90% of oil is traded in U.S. dollars if that stops living standards
will drop in the U.S.. We dropped from 97% look how bad its now
with 7% imagine going down to 50% life would be unlivable
here.
...meanwhile, both according to
russia today
as well as the
(otherwise lying rag of a newspaper)
guardian
, the russian
government seems to take a different position to the views expressed
here by "a middle east expert".
russian state media is reporting that US troops are in the process
of taking control of syrian oil fields in the deir el-zour region
and have described such actions as "banditry". the crux of the matter
is this: if the US were not actually illegally taking control of Syrian
oil, then Russia would not be reporting this. Contrary to western
mainstream media, Russian sources have repeatedly shown themselves
to be factual.
Shame the "withdrawl" from Syria is tainted with "securing the oil".
US doesnt need that oil at all. So Orwellian! Unless the Kurds somehow
get rights to it.
Preventing rise of ISIS is likely to entail securing support of the region's Arabs and tribes more than that of the Kurds. This Kurd/Arab issue is yet another reason why President Trump's idea of
"securing" the oil for the benefit of the Kurds just doesn't make sense nearly on every level
.
Trump
is
securing
the
oil
not
for
the
Kurds
or
anything
in
the
middle
east-
his
doing
it
as
a response
to
the
media
backlash
he
received
when
he
announced
he's
abandoning
the
Kurds.
this is nonsense. thinking of the kurds and their interests is the absolutely last thing on trump`s mind: what counts for trump is how he is viewed by his voter base, no more, no less.
No
wonder Democratic Party bosses and mainstream media are trying to bury presidential contender Tulsi
Gabbard.
She is the only candidate, perhaps the only politician in the US, who is telling
the American public exactly what they need to know about what their government and military are
really up to: fighting illegal regime-change wars, and to boot, sponsoring terrorists for that
purpose.
It didn't come much clearer nor more explicit than when Gabbard fired up the Democratic TV
debate this week. It was billed as the biggest televised presidential debate ever, and the Hawaii
Representative
told
some prime-time
home-truths to the nation:
"Donald Trump has blood of the Kurds on his hands, but so do many of the politicians in our
country from both parties who have supported this ongoing regime-change war in Syria that
started in 2011 along with many in the mainstream media who have been championing and
cheer-leading this regime-change war."
The 38-year-old military veteran went on to denounce how the US has sponsored Al Qaeda
terrorists for its objective of overthrowing the government in Damascus.
It was a remarkably damning assessment of US policy in Syria and elsewhere in the Middle East.
And it was by no means the first time that Gabbard has leveled with the American people on the
brutality and criminality of Washington's so-called "interventions".
The other 11 Democratic candidates on the stage during the TV debate looked agog after Gabbard's
devastating and calmly delivered statement. All the others have proffered the false narrative that
US forces are in Syria to "fight terrorism". They deplore Trump's announcement last week to pull
back US troops from northeast Syria because, they say, it will undermine the fight against Islamic
State (IS or ISIS) and other Al Qaeda affiliates. They also condemn Trump for "betraying Kurdish
allies" by his partial troop withdrawal.
President Donald Trump talks about "ending endless wars" and "bringing our troops home".
But he still premises his views on a credulous belief that the US under his watch "defeated ISIS
100 per cent". In that way, he essentially shares the same corny view as the Democrats and media
that America is a force for good, that it is the "good guys wearing white hats riding into the
sunset".
On the other hand, Gabbard stands alone in telling the American people the plain and awful
truth. US policy is the fundamental problem. Ending its regime-change war in Syria and elsewhere
and ending its diabolical collusion with terror groups is the way to bring peace to the Middle East
and to spare ordinary Americans from the economic disaster of spiraling war debts.
American
citizens need to know the truth about the horror their government, military, media and politicians
have inflicted not just on countries in the Middle East, but also from the horrendous boomerang
consequences of this criminal policy on the lives and livelihoods of ordinary Americans,
including millions of veterans destroyed by injuries, trauma, suicide, and drug abuse.
Following the TV debate this week, it seems that Gabbard won the popular vote with her
truth-telling. A major
online poll
by the Drudge Report
found that she stole a march on all the other candidates, winning approval from nearly 40 per cent
of voters. Top ticket candidates Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden were trailing
behind with 7 per cent or less.
Gabbard has clearly struck a deep chord with the US public in her honest depiction of
American wars.
Despite her shattering exposé and seeming appreciation by the public, most mainstream media
tried to bury her after the TV debate. Outlets like Vox and CNN
declared
that
Warren was the winner of the debate, whose talking points were mainly about domestic policy issues.
Like the other candidates, Warren plies the propaganda narrative of US forces "fighting terrorism".
Vox even slated Gabbard as "a loser" in the debate and claimed she had made "blatantly false"
statements about the US' role in Syria.
Other mainstream news outlets chose to ignore reporting on Gabbard's demolishing of the official
propaganda about American wars. Earlier this week, CNN and the New York Times
smeared
her
as a "Russian asset" and an "apologist for Assad", referencing a visit she made to Syria in 2017
when she held talks with President Assad.
The Democratic National Committee is
claiming
that
Gabbard does not have sufficient support in polls it deems worthy for her to qualify for appearing
in the next TV debate in November.
International events, however, are proving the Hawaii Representative right. US troops, as with
other NATO forces, have been occupying Syrian territory illegally. They have no mandate from the
United Nations Security Council. The pullback of US troops by Trump has created a vacuum in
northeast Syria into which the Syrian Arab Army is quickly moving to reclaim the territory which
US-backed Kurdish fighters had de facto annexed for the past five years. Several
reports
show
the local people are joyfully welcoming the arrival of the Syrian army. The scenes are reminiscent
of when Syrian and Russian forces liberated Aleppo and other cities previously besieged by terror
groups.
America's war machine must get out of Syria for the sake of restoring peace to that
war-torn country.
Not because "they have defeated ISIS 100 per cent", as Trump would
conceitedly claim, nor because "we are betraying Kurds in the fight against terrorism", as most
Democrats and US media preposterously claim.
Peace will come to Syria and the Middle East when Washington finally ends its criminal
regime-change wars and its support for terrorist proxies. Tulsi Gabbard seems to be the
only politician with the intelligence and integrity to tell Americans the truth.
Unlike Trump she's against the patriot act and foreign
intervention. Trump hired Bolton, attempted a coup in Venezuela,
has been dropping more bombs on Syria than Obama did, is
escalating a new war with Iran, has sent more troops to Saudi
Arabia and Yeman. He's also for red flag laws to take away guns.
I cannot see her have a shot as DNC candidate. Either she
will end up like a young and liberal version of Ron Paul; get
angry and become a RossPerot-like spoiler type or (least likely)
become another Bernie sellout for a beachhouse.
The way she is being demonized by the Democrat party,
it is clear that she cannot win this battle.
Oct 25, 2019 | www.theamericanconservative.com
Curiously, this reticence doesn’t extend to voting on resolutions that seek to
preserve America’s military presence in the Middle East. Legislators are more interested in stopping troop withdrawals from
unauthorized conflicts than authorizing those conflicts in the first place.
Ask Congress to engage in an honest, open, and
transparent national conversation before launching the first cruise missile and they run for the hills like villagers from a
flash flood.
But ask them to spend an hour on the floor blasting the president for losing his “resolve” or upending American “leadership”
(those favorite Beltway buzzwords), and they arrive with speeches in hand. It would all be hilarious if it wasn’t so depressing.
It's way too late to be saying "the longer this continues". Undeclared wars have been
standard practice from the start. WW1 and WW2 were extremely unusual exceptions to the
normal rule.
It also begs the question who exactly is war supposed to be declared on here? Syria,
Turkey, Iran or Russia, and for what reason are they going to declare this war for?
Sorry, but the only one who's moaning here is you. While the article tells hard facts by
saying that there would be nothing to hold Trump to account for regarding foreign policy,
since he wouldn't have inherited any war, had the parliament done its job and denied Bush
II and Obama the authorization of the said wars. Now, it doesn't mean that those wars
wouldn't have happened, since the MIC, oil companies, pharmaceutical industry et al. could
have easily staged a coup to get rid of such an inconvenient parliament, but in such a case
the said (former) parliament could, at least, speak from a morally high ground. While now
their complaints sound like laments about a streak of assassinations from those who
prepared sniper nests for hitmen every single time.
The mistake the president made was to extend an olive branch to his opponents by hiring
them in the first place.
Whatever one thinks of Mr Bannon. He came out with a clear understanding . . . whatever
agenda or intent was had to reduce our use of force to regime change --
"fo ged aboud it . . . "
And while, I think he may have overstated the matter. It's clear that agenda was not
aided by those appointments to is cabinate.
Goodwill to policy goodbye.
It is farcical and painful to watch.
Note:
one aspect of my opposition to the conflict was the strategy chosen. And it that
strategy unfortunately did not include "pulling out all the stops."
BTW. the author states: "Most lawmakers accepted the administration's arguments with barely
a blink, which enabled one of the gravest U.S. foreign policy blunders (the second Iraq
War) in modern history."
Most of the Democrats were opposed, but remembering how they were raked over the coals
for opposing the first Iraq War, voted in favor of a war to cover their butts.
It doesn't matter why Team D voted the way they did - it's not like a whole hearted vote
in favor of aggressive war counts double, or the kids on the other end of the drone don't
really die if you feel sad when you push the "yes" button.
For that matter, it's not as if Team D are engaged in a wholesale mea culpa after
they claimed to have been rooked.
If our military members refuse to uphold their oath to constitution it's time to disband
the standing army as it has become nothing more than the tool of foreign occupiers who have
purchased our government. Revoke all their benifit packages, no more free college, no more
subsidized loans for housing. If these people are nothing but mercenaries then stop paying
them for violating the contract.
The globalist criminal elites will not be held responsible for any of these crimes. They're
bound together by ties of blackmail forged by guys like Epstein, mutually assured
incrimination in serial swindles which cross Left and Right political boundaries and literal
murder in the case of guys like Seth Rich.
The cozy proximity of recently-murdered Epstein himself to crypto-converso AG Barr's
family only makes me more certain that they will get away with this heist like they've done
with dozens of other billion-dollar swindles.
If they were only stealing money it would be bad enough, but the fact that these same
grifters are our "diplomats" and warmakers is positively Orwellian. Watching these petty
hoodlums play nuclear chicken with Russia so they can squeeze more shekels from the supine
Ukraine would be laughable if I could get the first-strike nightmares of my Cold War
childhood out of my head long enough to laugh.
Conservative government watchdog Judicial Watch have published formerly classified
documents from the U.S. Department of Defence which reveals the agencies earlier views on
ISIS, namely that they were a desirable presence in Eastern Syria in 2012 and that they
should be "supported" in order to isolate the Syrian regime.
Levantreport.com reports:
Astoundingly, the newly declassified report states that for "THE WEST, GULF COUNTRIES, AND
TURKEY [WHO] SUPPORT THE [SYRIAN] OPPOSITION THERE IS THE POSSIBILITY OF ESTABLISHING A
DECLARED OR UNDECLARED SALAFIST PRINCIPALITY IN EASTERN SYRIA (HASAKA AND DER ZOR), AND THIS
IS EXACTLY WHAT THE SUPPORTING POWERS TO THE OPPOSITION WANT, IN ORDER TO ISOLATE THE SYRIAN
REGIME ".
The DIA report, formerly classified "SECRET//NOFORN" and dated August 12, 2012, was
circulated widely among various government agencies, including CENTCOM, the CIA, FBI, DHS,
NGA, State Dept., and many others.
The document shows that as early as 2012, U.S. intelligence predicted the rise of the
Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL or ISIS), but instead of clearly delineating the
group as an enemy, the report envisions the terror group as a U.S. strategic asset.
Government watchdog Judicial Watch published more than 100 pages of formerly classified
documents from the U.S. Department of Defense and the State Department.
The documents obtained through a federal lawsuit, revealed the agencies earlier views on
ISIS, namely that they were a desirable presence in Eastern Syria in 2012 and that they
should be "supported" in order to isolate the Syrian regime.
The U.S. intelligence documents not only confirms suspicions that the United States and
some of its coalition allies had actually facilitated the rise of the ISIS in Syria –
as a counterweight to the Syrian government of President Bashar al-Assad- but also that ISIS
members were initially trained by members and contractors of the Central Intelligence Agency
at facilities in Jordan in 2012.
[MORE]
[EDITOR'S NOTE: Since publication, this story has been corrected to clarify that the fighters
trained in Jordan became members of the ISIS after their training.]
JERUSALEM – Syrian rebels who would later join the Islamic State of Iraq and the
Levant, or ISIS, were trained in 2012 by U.S. instructors working at a secret base in Jordan,
according to informed Jordanian officials.
The officials said dozens of future ISIS members were trained at the time as part of
covert aid to the insurgents targeting the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in
Syria. The officials said the training was not meant to be used for any future campaign in
Iraq.
The Jordanian officials said all ISIS members who received U.S. training to fight in Syria
were first vetted for any links to extremist groups like al-Qaida.
In February 2012, WND was first to report the U.S., Turkey and Jordan were running a
training base for the Syrian rebels in the Jordanian town of Safawi in the country's northern
desert region.
That report has since been corroborated by numerous other media accounts.
Last March, the German weekly Der Spiegel reported Americans were training Syrian rebels in
Jordan.
Quoting what it said were training participants and organizers, Der Spiegel reported it
was not clear whether the Americans worked for private firms or were with the U.S. Army, but
the magazine said some organizers wore uniforms. The training in Jordan reportedly focused on
use of anti-tank weaponry.
The German magazine reported some 200 men received the training over the previous three
months amid U.S. plans to train a total of 1,200 members of the Free Syrian Army in two camps
in the south and the east of Jordan.
Britain's Guardian newspaper also reported last March that U.S. trainers were aiding
Syrian rebels in Jordan along with British and French instructors.
Reuters reported a spokesman for the U.S. Defense Department declined immediate comment on
the German magazine's report. The French foreign ministry and Britain's foreign and defense
ministries also would not comment to Reuters.
"... Islamic State, or Isis, didn't emerge out of nowhere. It was entirely a creation of two decades of US interference in the Middle East. ..."
"... No, I'm talking about the fact that in destroying three key Arab states – Iraq, Libya and Syria – that refused to submit to the joint regional hegemony of Saudi Arabia and Israel, Washington's local client states, the US created a giant void of governance at the heart of the Middle East. They knew that that void would be filled soon enough by religious extremists like Islamic State – and they didn't care. ..."
"... The barely veiled aim of the attacks on Iraq, Libya and Syria was to destroy the institutions and structures that held these societies together, however imperfectly. Though no one likes to mention it nowadays, these states – deeply authoritarian though they were – were also secular, and had well-developed welfare states that ensured high rates of literacy and some of the region's finest public health services. ..."
"... After Rove and Cheney had had their fill playing around with reality, nature got on with honouring the maxim that it always abhors a vacuum. Islamic State filled the vacuum Washington's policy had engineered. ..."
"... The clue, after all, was in the name. With the US and Gulf states using oil money to wage a proxy war against Assad, Isis saw its chance to establish a state inspired by a variety of Saudi Arabia's Wahhabist dogma. Isis needed territory for their planned state, and the Saudis and US obliged by destroying Syria. ..."
"... This barbarian army, one that murdered other religious groups as infidels and killed fellow Sunnis who refused to bow before their absolute rule, became the west's chief allies in Syria. Directly and covertly, we gave them money and weapons to begin building their state on parts of Syria. ..."
"... We cannot, of course, forget an assistance this witch had from very GOPiish Senators such as late American hero John McCain and his buddy Lindsey Graham. They played a key role in supporting all kinds of jihadist elements. ..."
"... Let's be accurate: It was US Democrats AND REPUBLICANS who helped cultivate the barbarism of Isis. The mess was started with Bush/Cheney/Powell. McCain was probably the biggest ISIS guy ever. Graham, Romney and friends are the same, and at best marginally better than Hitlery Clinton. ..."
"... The population of Syria increased exponentially right up through 2010, with a doubling time of about 18 years, at which point food ran out and population started trending downwards (not so much due to outright famine, as to poverty, lack of medical care, warfare, and people fleeing the country.). ..."
"... Check out the section in wikipedia on Syria's aquifers and groundwater – the water table had been dropping drastically as far back as 1985. Long before the post-2010 dry spell, Syria's rapid population growth had been consuming more water than fell as rain – EVEN DURING WET YEARS. The low rainfall post-2010 was an early trigger, but the collapse would have come regardless. ..."
"... Tulsi may not win the democratic nomination, but I see her determination to educate the majority of Americans of what our government/deep state/military industrial complex/and later senators who become lobbyists are doing. ..."
"... Worse, I suspect that many weren't too disturbed by this prospect. After all, ISIS and its incredibly vicious terrorist attacks in the West did a great deal to fuel Islamophobia -- and Islamophobia has its uses. ISIS was probably the best thing to happen to Israel since 9/11. ..."
"... I think it is worse than that : ISIS was a creation by the Israel-US- Saudi Arabia-Gulf States-axis. Significantly ISIS never attacked Israeli interests ..."
"... It doesn't matter how many Arabs, Turks, Etruscans or Kurds are killed, as long as Israel's interests are taken care of, the results are "worth it". Its a very deeply cynical, and evil policy that the US has pursued all these years in the Mid-East. ..."
"... Gangster business and slavery are OK so long as our central bank gets our cut. ..."
"... They've re-started the Cold War. Keeps all the warmongers in business. Surely they're not stupid enough to want a hot one are they? ..."
"... It goes without comment that the first act of the US following Nudelman's (Why do these fuckers keep changing their names?) Ukraine coup was to steal its gold. ..."
"... "Pelosi and most of the Democratic leadership don't care about Syria, or its population's welfare. They don't care about Assad, or Isis. They care only about the maintenance and expansion of their own Democratic Party power – for the personal wealth and influence it continues to bestow on them." ..."
There is something profoundly deceitful in the way the Democratic Party and the corporate media are framing Donald Trump's decision
to pull troops out of Syria.
One does not need to defend Trump's actions or ignore the dangers posed to the Kurds, at least in the short term, by the departure
of US forces from northern Syria to understand that the coverage is being crafted in such a way as to entirely overlook the bigger
picture.
The problem is neatly illustrated in this line from a report by the Guardian newspaper of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's meeting
this week with Trump, who is described as having had a "meltdown". Explaining why she and other senior Democrats stormed out, the
paper writes
that "it became clear the president had no plan to deal with a potential revival of Isis in the Middle East".
Hang on a minute! Let's pull back a little, and not pretend – as the media and Democratic party leadership wish us to – that the
last 20 years did not actually happen. Many of us lived through those events. Our memories are not so short.
Islamic State, or Isis, didn't emerge out of nowhere. It was entirely a creation of two decades of US interference in the
Middle East. And I'm not even referring to the mountains
of evidence that US officials backed their Saudi allies in directly funding and arming Isis – just as their predecessors in Washington,
in their enthusiasm to oust the Soviets from the region, assisted the jihadists who went on to become al-Qaeda.
No, I'm talking about the fact that in destroying three key Arab states – Iraq, Libya and Syria – that refused to submit to
the joint regional hegemony of Saudi Arabia and Israel, Washington's local client states, the US created a giant void of governance
at the heart of the Middle East. They knew that that void would be filled soon enough by religious extremists like Islamic State
– and they didn't care.
Overthrow, not regime change
You don't have to be a Saddam Hussein, Muammar Gaddafi or Bashar Assad apologist to accept this point. You don't even have to
be concerned that these so-called "humanitarian" wars violated each state's integrity and sovereignty, and are therefore defined
in international law as "the supreme war crime".
The bigger picture – the one no one appears to want us thinking about – is that the US intentionally sought to destroy these states
with no obvious plan for the day after. As I explained in my book
Israel and the Clash of Civilisations
, these haven't so much been regime-change wars as nation-state dismantling operations – what I have termed overthrow wars.
The logic was a horrifying hybrid of two schools of thought that meshed neatly in the psychopathic foreign policy goals embodied
in the ideology of neoconservatism – the so-called "Washington consensus" since 9/11.
The first was Israel's long-standing approach to the Palestinians. By constantly devastating any emerging Palestinian institution
or social structures, Israel produced a divide-and-rule model on steriods, creating a leaderless, ravaged, enfeebled society that
sucked out all the local population's energy. That strategy proved very appealing to the neoconservatives, who saw it as one they
could export to non-compliant states in the region.
The second was the Chicago school's Shock Doctrine, as explained in Naomi Klein's book of that name. The chaotic campaign of destruction,
the psychological trauma and the sense of dislocation created by these overthrow wars were supposed to engender a far more malleable
population that would be ripe for a US-controlled "colour revolution".
The recalcitrant states would be made an example of, broken apart, asset-stripped of their resources and eventually remade as
new dependent markets for US goods. That was what George W Bush, Dick Cheney and Halliburton really meant when they talked about
building a New Middle East and exporting democracy.
Even judged by the vile aims of its proponents, the Shock Doctrine has been a half-century story of
dismal economic failure everywhere it has been attempted
– from Pinochet's Chile to Yeltsin's Russia. But let us not credit the architects of this policy with any kind of acumen for learning
from past errors. As Bush's senior adviser Karl Rove explained to a journalist whom he rebuked for being part of the "reality-based
community": "We're an empire now and, when we act, we create our own reality."
The birth of Islamic State
The barely veiled aim of the attacks on Iraq, Libya and Syria was to destroy the institutions and structures that held these
societies together, however imperfectly. Though no one likes to mention it nowadays, these states – deeply authoritarian though they
were – were also secular, and had well-developed welfare states that ensured high rates of literacy and some of the region's finest
public health services.
Given how closed a society Syria was and is, and how difficult it therefore is to weigh the evidence in ways that are likely to
prove convincing to those not already persuaded, let us set that issue aside too. Anyway, it is irrelevant to the bigger picture
I want to address.
The indisputable fact is that Washington and its Gulf allies wished to exploit this initial unrest as an opportunity to create
a void in Syria – just as they had earlier done in Iraq, where there were no uprisings, nor even the WMDs the US promised would be
found and that served as the pretext for Bush's campaign of Shock and Awe.
The limited uprisings in Syria quickly turned into a much larger and far more vicious war because the Gulf states, with US backing,
flooded the country with proxy fighters and arms in an effort to overthrow Assad and thereby weaken Iranian and Shia influence in
the region. The events in Syria and earlier in Iraq gradually transformed the Sunni religious extremists of al-Qaeda into the even
more barbaric, more nihilistic extremists of Islamic State.
A dark US vanity project
After Rove and Cheney had had their fill playing around with reality, nature got on with honouring the maxim that it always
abhors a vacuum. Islamic State filled the vacuum Washington's policy had engineered.
The clue, after all, was in the name. With the US and Gulf states using oil money to wage a proxy war against Assad, Isis
saw its chance to establish a state inspired by a variety of Saudi Arabia's Wahhabist dogma. Isis needed territory for their planned
state, and the Saudis and US obliged by destroying Syria.
This barbarian army, one that murdered other religious groups as infidels and killed fellow Sunnis who refused to bow before
their absolute rule, became the west's chief allies in Syria. Directly and covertly, we gave them money and weapons to begin building
their state on parts of Syria.
Again, let us ignore the fact that the US, in helping to destroy a sovereign nation, committed the supreme war crime, one that
in a rightly ordered world would ensure every senior Washington official faces their own Nuremberg Trial. Let us ignore too for the
moment that the US, consciously through its actions, brought to life a monster that sowed death and destruction everywhere it went.
The fact is that at the moment Assad called in Russia to help him survive, the battle the US and the Gulf states were waging through
Islamic State and other proxies was lost. It was only a matter of time before Assad would reassert his rule.
From that point onwards, every single person who was killed and every single Syrian made homeless – and there were hundreds of
thousands of them – suffered their terrible fate for no possible gain in US policy goals. A vastly destructive overthrow war became
instead something darker still: a neoconservative vanity project that ravaged countless Syrian lives.
A giant red herring
Trump now appears to be ending part of that policy. He may be doing so for the wrong reasons. But very belatedly – and possibly
only temporarily – he is seeking to close a small chapter in a horrifying story of western-sponsored barbarism in the Middle East,
one intimately tied to Islamic State.
What of the supposed concerns of Pelosi and the Democratic Party under whose watch the barbarism in Syria took place. They should
have no credibility on the matter to begin with.
But their claims that Trump has "no plan to deal with a potential revival of Isis in the Middle East" is a giant red herring they
are viciously slapping us in the face with in the hope the spray of seawater blinds us.
First, Washington sowed the seeds of Islamic State by engineering a vacuum in Syria that Isis – or something very like it – was
inevitably going to fill. Then, it allowed those seeds to flourish by assisting its Gulf allies in showering fighters in Syria with
money and arms that came with only one string attached – a commitment to Sunni jihadist ideology inspired by Saudi Wahhabism.
Isis was made in Washington as much as it was in Riyadh. For that reason, the only certain strategy for preventing the revival
of Islamic State is preventing the US and the Gulf states from interfering in Syria again.
With the Syrian army in charge of Syrian territory, there will be no vacuum for Isis to fill. The jihadists' state-building project
is now unrealisable, at least in Syria. Islamic State will continue to wither, as it would have done years before if the US and its
Gulf allies had not fuelled it in a proxy war they knew could not be won.
Doomed Great Game
The same lesson can be drawn by looking at the experience of the Syrian Kurds. The Rojava fiefdom they managed to carve out in
northern Syria during the war survived till now only because of continuing US military support. With a US departure, and the Kurds
too weak to maintain their improvised statelet, a vacuum was again created that this time has risked sucking in the Turkish army,
which fears a base for Kurdish nationalism on its doorstep.
The Syrian Kurds' predicament is simple: face a takeover by Turkey or seek Assad's protection to foil Turkish ambitions. The best
hope for the Kurds looks to be the Syrian army's return, filling the vacuum and regaining a chance of long-term stability.
That could have been the case for all of Syria many tens of thousands of deaths ago. Whatever the corporate media suggest, those
deaths were lost not in a failed heroic battle for freedom, which, even if it was an early aspiration for some fighters, quickly
became a goal that was impossible for them to realise. No, those deaths were entirely pointless. They were sacrificed by a western
military-industrial complex in a US-Saudi Great Game that dragged on for many years after everyone knew it was doomed.
Nancy Pelosi's purported worries about Isis reviving because of Trump's Syria withdrawal are simply crocodile fears. If she is
really so worried about Islamic State, then why did she and other senior Democrats stand silently by as the US under Barack Obama
spent years spawning, cultivating and financing Isis to destroy Syria, a state that was best placed to serve as a bulwark against
the head-chopping extremists?
Pelosi and the Democratic leadership's bad faith – and that of the corporate media – are revealed in their ongoing efforts to
silence and smear Tulsi Gabbard, the party's only candidate for the presidential nomination who has pointed out the harsh political
realities in Syria, and tried to expose their years of lies.
Pelosi and most of the Democratic leadership don't care about Syria, or its population's welfare. They don't care about Assad,
or Isis. They care only about the maintenance and expansion of American power – and the personal wealth and influence it continues
to bestow on them.
Jonathan Cook won the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His books include "Israel and the Clash of Civilisations:
Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East" (Pluto Press) and "Disappearing Palestine: Israel's Experiments in Human Despair"
(Zed Books). His website is www.jonathan-cook.net .
The problem largely traces back to simple mistakes by prior Saudi administrations.
The Wahhabi were a threat to the royal family. So, the royal family funded them to go elsewhere. Given the craziness of Wahhabism
that made sense at the time. Crazy usually dies out. However, in this case the Crazy came with enough money in hand to establish
credibility. The extremist Muslim Brotherhood is a direct result of these exported extremism.
ISIS is the result of a schism inside the extremist Muslim Brotherhood. A "direct action" group wanted an even more extreme
and immediate solution and broke away.
-- Did the U.S. or Israel attempt to deploy ISIS? This is far-fetched beyond the bounds of reasonability. Violent, ultra-extreme
ISIS fanatics would not follow the commands of infidel heretics. The Saudi royal family by this point realized that the Muslim
Brotherhood was a threat to them just like the original Wahhabi, but they had no good way to undo their prior mistake.
-- Did Turkey attempt to use ISIS to weaken Syria and Iraq? This is far more probable. Turkey's AK party is also a schismatic
offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood. So, there is a great deal of opportunity for the two troops to find common cause. The New
Ottoman Empire needs to absorb Syrian and Iraqi land, so undermining those governments would be step #1.
One does not need outside actors to explain how the hole was dug. Unfortunately, that means there is no good solution. If the
problem was driven by outside forces, those forces could stop it. However, the reality is that there are no outside forces driving
the Craziness. There is no "plug to pull".
The wild savage dogs of ISIS are the Khmer Rouge of Islamic fundamentalism and their rise and violence should be attributed to
the liberal interventionism that has proven to be a disaster not only for the region but those who carried out the intervention.
"One does not need outside actors to explain how the hole was dug. Unfortunately, that means there is no good solution.
If the problem was driven by outside forces, those forces could stop it. However, the reality is that there are no outside
forces driving the Craziness. There is no 'plug to pull'".
Absolute nonsense. And what do you mean by "outside forces." The US and Israel count as outside forces but Turkey does not?
Forces outside of what?
ISIS emerged out of ISI, Zarqawi's Islamic State in Iraq, an affiliate, for a while, of AQ. The US invasion of Iraq created
the political and military space in Iraq for transnational terror groups.
Meanwhile, the US, at Israel's instigation, had been working to weaken Assad in Syria. After the rebellion against him in 2011,
the US, along with Turkey, Saudi, Qatar, Israel and others, began to support various jihadi groups inside Syria with the goal
of eliminating the Assad government, each for his own reasons. Syria began lost control of its border with Iraq and much of eastern
Syria and the Euphrates valley as well. This process allowed ISIS to emerge from an ISI under stress during the so-called "surge"
in 2007-10 and establish itself in Syria. In 2014, ISIS, now a powerful well-armed group went back into Iraq to defeat the incompetent
and unmotivated Iraq Security Forces that the US had established.
While the US moved against ISIS in Iraq after 2014, it left ISIS in Syria alone since it was depriving Assad of control over
most of Syria's oil and much of its arable land.
And yes, of course the US, instigated by Israel, didn't "deploy" ISIS in the sense of directing its operations. But they left
ISIS largely unimpeded to play a role in the overthrow of Assad which was always the primary goal. ISIS, it was thought, could
be dealt with later after Assad was gone.
That plan would probably have worked eventually, but the Russians entered the picture in the second half of 2015 and changed
the situation.
The US had been nominally supporting the usual "freedom fighters" but in effect supplying the more competent and vicious jihadis
who could take the TOW missiles and other weapons the US was providing to the approved sad-sacks and make more effective use of
them. Finally, with Russia and Iran facilitating the roll-back of all the jihadis, and the US threatened with being relegated
to the sidelines, Obama jumped on the SDF (Kurdish) bandwagon and actually started doing what the US had not done previously:
Taking serious action against ISIS so that a Russian/Iranian-backed Syrian reconquest of eastern Syria could be pre-empted.
And of course, the biggest supporter of the Kurds has consistently been Israel, who sees the possibility of creating pro-Israel
statelets or at least enclaves in the midst of a Turkish, Iranian and Arab region that detests the Judenreich.
So in order to eliminate another of Israel's enemies, reduce a unified Syrian state to a handful of even more impotent emirates
and ensure that Bibi would not be pestered with legal questions over the seizure and retention of the Golan, Syria was laid waste
under the guise of "promoting democracy" and then further devastated under the guise of combatting ISIS.
We have done more than enough damage at the behest of Israel and its fifth column in the US. ISIS might well have emerged regardless
of US actions, but it was the Jew-induced insanity of US regime-change/COIN policies that created the geographical, political
and military space in Iraq and Syria for the jihadists and the ensuing physical destruction of so much of those countries.
The best solution would be to facilitate the re-establishment of Syrian sovereignty over all of Syria. But instead of doing
that, Trump has instead facilitated the entry of Turkish forces and allied jihadis in an attempt to mend fences with a thoroughly
alienated Erdogan. We'll see if Putin can mitigate the brutal incompetence of Israel-infected US policy.
@A123 For fuck's sake. Is there any way to stop Hasbara agents from effectively using software to get consistent first posts
on this site?
Their mere presence is annoying. Whatever they have to say, on any topic and no matter what it is, no one here wants to read
it because they are not beginning with any credibility whatsoever. As they are are religiously-avowed enemies of the West (who
they hold to be the continuation of Rome) and the demonstrated fervent enemies of non-Jewish Whites.
Given the craziness of Wahhabism
There is nothing in Sunni Islam that does not have its root in Judaism. To state otherwise is to be a typical Semitic liar.
A very real but completely unadvertised reality of these regime changes was that the publicly owned central bank of the country
– Iraq and Libya – was eliminated and changed to a private central bank. Iraq and Libya both succumbed and Ron Paul related that
the smoke had barely cleared in Libya before the private central bank charter was drafted and implemented. Syria and Iran are
the last two countries that do not have a private central banks. Hence the drive by the neo-cons to destroy those countries and
fully implement the New World (banking) Order.
Not widely discussed but (I think) vitally important to understanding foreign policy.
What of the supposed concerns of Pelosi and the Democratic Party under whose watch the barbarism in Syria took place. They should
have no credibility on the matter to begin with.
But their claims that Trump has "no plan to deal with a potential revival of Isis in the Middle East" is a giant red herring
they are viciously slapping us in the face with in the hope the spray of seawater blinds us.
I love the second para. Getting slapped with a red herring with hope that the salt water blinds us .
My only gripe with Jonathan Cook is that this and all mid-eastern conflicts are engineered by the dual citizens and Israel
isn't called out by him as the chief instigator. The saudis are slave of the west and amount to nothing.
@A123 " Did the U.S. or Israel attempt to deploy ISIS? This is far-fetched beyond the bounds of reasonability"
Perhaps. Except that it did happen in plain daylight, before our eyes, but we should, of course, trust your "reasonability" --
instead of our own lying eyes.
@A123 US President Donald Trump said Monday that a small number of US troops remain in Syria at the request of Israel and
Jordan, with some positioned near the borders with Jordan and Israel and others deployed to secure oil fields.
"The other region where we've been asked by Israel and Jordan to leave a small number of troops is a totally different section
of Syria, near Jordan, and close to Israel," Trump said when asked whether he would leave soldiers in Syria. "So we have a small
group there, and we secured the oil. Other than that, there's no reason for it, in our opinion."
Times of Israel
and J Post 21st oct
It 's all about Israel and for its "royal patsy when not for royal patsy it's for the cannon fodder/ foot solder of Israel.
This mayhem from 2003 hasn't seen the full effects of the blow-back yet .Just starting . Tulsi Gabbard and Trump have knowingly
and sometime unknowingly have told the master that the king never had any clothes even when the king was talking about the decency
of having clothes on .
"The first was Israel's long-standing approach to the Palestinians. By constantly devastating any emerging Palestinian institution
or social structures, Israel produced a divide-and-rule model on steriods, creating a leaderless, ravaged, enfeebled society that
sucked out all the local population's energy. That strategy proved very appealing to the neoconservatives, who saw it as one they
could export to non-compliant states in the region."-
This sums up everything one want to know about certain human clones and the impact of the clones on the humanity.
Who will ever blame the victims for creating a future Hitler among them ?
We cannot, of course, forget an assistance this witch had from very GOPiish Senators such as late American hero John McCain
and his buddy Lindsey Graham. They played a key role in supporting all kinds of jihadist elements.
Let's be accurate: It was US Democrats AND REPUBLICANS who helped cultivate the barbarism of Isis. The mess was started with
Bush/Cheney/Powell. McCain was probably the biggest ISIS guy ever. Graham, Romney and friends are the same, and at best marginally
better than Hitlery Clinton.
Lock them all up, regardless of party affiliation.
Many interesting points here, and I agree with a lot of them. But:
[MORE]
"Or was it driven by something else: as a largely economic protest by an under-class suffering from food shortages as climate
change led to repeated crop failures?"
Syria did run out of water, and it's hard not to see that as a major driver of the chaos that unfolded. But Syria didn't run
out of water because of "climate change," that's false.
The explanation is that the Syrian government deliberately engineered a massive population explosion. Seriously, they made
the sale and possession of contraceptives a crime! (See "Demographic Developments and Population: Policies in Ba'thist Syria (Demographic
Developments and Socioeconomics)", by Onn Winkler).
The population of Syria increased exponentially right up through 2010, with a doubling time of about 18 years, at which
point food ran out and population started trending downwards (not so much due to outright famine, as to poverty, lack of medical
care, warfare, and people fleeing the country.).
Now as far as weather goes, there were a couple of dry years before the collapse, but weather is always like that. Last year
there were record rainfalls. If Syria's population had been stable at 5 or even 10 million, they could have coasted on water stored
in the aquifers until the rains came back. But when the population increases so much that you drain the aquifers even when there
is plenty of rain, then when a temporary drought hits you have no reserve and it all falls apart.
Check out the section in wikipedia on Syria's aquifers and groundwater – the water table had been dropping drastically
as far back as 1985. Long before the post-2010 dry spell, Syria's rapid population growth had been consuming more water than fell
as rain – EVEN DURING WET YEARS. The low rainfall post-2010 was an early trigger, but the collapse would have come regardless.
simple and straightforward journalism that cuts through the "corporate veil." Tulsi may not win the democratic nomination,
but I see her determination to educate the majority of Americans of what our government/deep state/military industrial complex/and
later senators who become lobbyists are doing.
I also feel for our veterans who are indoctrinated to protect freedom, but in the end, when they come home injured and disabled,
or even dead, it was all for naught.
I find some of the rhetoric in this piece irritating and repetitive -- but the analysis is essentially correct.
We created a power vacuum that was almost certain to give rise to something like ISIS.
Worse, I suspect that many weren't too disturbed by this prospect. After all, ISIS and its incredibly vicious terrorist
attacks in the West did a great deal to fuel Islamophobia -- and Islamophobia has its uses. ISIS was probably the best thing to
happen to Israel since 9/11.
"The problem is neatly illustrated in this line from a report by the Guardian newspaper of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's meeting
this week with Trump, who is described as having had a "meltdown". "
That's a poorly written statement. It reads as though Trump was the one having a meltdown. How about: "House Speaker Pelosi's
meltdown during a meeting with Trump." ?
@MarathonMan That is a fact that should be kept foremost in the discussions of "why regime change is necessary". It is the
most basic and obvious reason for all this war in the ME.
"First, Washington sowed the seeds of Islamic State by engineering a vacuum in Syria that Isis – or something very like
it – was inevitably going to fill."
Not quite accurate. The US Government "sowed the seeds of" ISIS by giving them material support before the vacuum was created.
IS is mainly a creature of empire, including the US and older remnants of empire in the UK and Europe which survives mainly in
the existence of (international) banks.
@Christian truth Project "Tulsi is/was a member of the CFR". Aren't all Congressmen members? Doesn't that come with signing
the AIPAC form, getting the secret decoder ring from Adam Schiff, and the free trip to Israel? (maybe Ilhan Omar and Rashida Talib
"don't measure up?")
I believe CFR was the organization Biden was regaling with his story of holding up $one billion in Ukrainian
aid unless the Ukrainians fired the investigator of his son Hunter "who did nothing wrong". Can you imagine if Biden had been
President rather than VP? This would have been a scandal!
@A123 One does not need outside actors, but then there would be a lot of 'dark matter' in the history of the ME over the last
100 years. Personally it's plain state terrorism to me, and the Brits have a good definition!
http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2000/11/part/I
Pelosi and most of the Democratic leadership don't care about Syria, or its population's welfare. They don't care about
Assad, or Isis. They care only about the maintenance and expansion of American power
Correction: They only care about the maintenance and expansion of Israeli power.
I think it is worse than that : ISIS was a creation by the Israel-US- Saudi Arabia-Gulf States-axis.
Significantly ISIS never attacked Israeli interests, and when it once did so by accident, it apologized to Israel. The destruction
of Syria is part of Israel's notorious Oded Yinon plan, according to which all states in Israel's neighborhood need to be fragmentized.
In Iraq and Libya that was a success, in Syria, thanks to Iran, Hizbollah and Russia, it failed. The US is simply a puppet for
Israel's foreign policy, but nobody in the US, not even Tulsi Gabbard, dares to say so.
@A123 Sorry Bibi, but your beloved Israel played a BIG part in establishing ISIS, then supporting it with shekels, medical
care for their wounded, training and weapons.
WikiLeaks: US, Israel, And Saudi Arabia Planned Overthrow Of Syrian Govt. In 2006
Cables reveal that before the beginning of the Syrian revolt and civil war, the United States hoped to overthrow Assad and
create strife between Shiite and Sunni Muslims.
Let's not forget that when the term ISIS first came out, the Tel Aviv war mongers realized it stood for Israeli Secret Intelligence
Services and changed that to ISIL, which their adoring MSM gladly obliged by parroting that change.
From the Israeli masterminded 9/11 False Flag to the destruction of Syria, there's one common factor, Israel and her American
Jew sayanim who keep pushing America into forever wars so Israel can finish off the Palestinians and steal more land.
Based on the whistleblower's extensive presentation, including internal emails, text exchanges and suppressed draft reports,
we are unanimous in expressing our alarm over unacceptable practices in the investigation of the alleged chemical attack in
Douma, near the Syrian capital of Damascus on 7 April 2018. We became convinced by the testimony that key information about
chemical analyses, toxicology consultations, ballistics studies, and witness testimonies was suppressed, ostensibly to favor
a preordained conclusion.
We have learned of disquieting efforts to exclude some inspectors from the investigation whilst thwarting their attempts
to raise legitimate concerns, highlight irregular practices or even to express their differing observations and assessments
-- a right explicitly conferred on inspectors in the Chemical Weapons Convention, evidently with the intention of ensuring
the independence and authoritativeness of inspection reports.
Fixed "report" of OPCW was necessary to maintain anti-Assad narrative which is now unchallenged even by Gabbard (not to mention
the weak sheep-dog Sanders).
The US does not have to directly support the jihadists. It just has to manage the chaos, for whatever be
the action on the ground and whoever is killed or not killed, as long as there is chaos within their chosen sandbox, the chaos
masters in Israel wins and that is all that counts with all too many Americans. It doesn't matter how many Arabs, Turks, Etruscans
or Kurds are killed, as long as Israel's interests are taken care of, the results are "worth it". Its a very deeply cynical, and
evil policy that the US has pursued all these years in the Mid-East.
But fortunately the Russians have turned things around.
Gangster business and slavery are OK so long as our central bank gets our cut. ME is also about "fragmenting"
neighboring countries so Israel can expand. Yinon Plan.
Oct 18, 2019 Tulsi Gabbard responds to Hillary Clinton: Clinton "knows she can't control me"
Hillary Clinton implied Russians are "grooming" Tulsi Gabbard to run as a third-party candidate to disrupt the election, a
charge which Gabbard denies. In a live interview with CBSN, Gabbard responds to Clinton's claims and says she will not run as
a third-party candidate.
@TG Excellent post. You bring up 2 very important but rarely discussed issues.
Demographics: Population is one of the most easily predictable developments within a country, and you'd think it might be one
of the most publically-discussed, and therefore, best-managed. Au contraire. Assad wasn't the only one who stood on the tracks
watching the headlights approach:
1. The EU is having problems with an aging native population because it earlier encouraged low birth rates, and is now promoting
mass immigration of rapidly-breeding immigrants who threaten to at least overwhelm if not overrun European society. Yet, as Douglas
Murray points out in his book The Strange Death of Europe, openly talking about this problem has been, and still is, verboten.
2. China is now wondering to do with its preponderance of young men, caused very predictably by the Communist Party's one-child
policy.
Climate:
If the rains had been good every single year – which is impossible – it would only have pushed the point of collapse back
a few years, at most.
The Syrian case you cite shows how even relatively minor climate changes can carry events past a tipping point. I do agree
with you that effects of APGW on climactic conditions are greatly exaggerated, yet changes in climate, for good or ill, have often
triggered much larger historical events. The cooling that caused a famine and that preceded the Justinian Plague weakened European
and Sassanian civilizations. These misfortunes paved the way for the Islamic takeover that followed. Contrariwise, Norse exploration
and the Renaissance, to give 2 examples of increasing activity, both occurred during the Medieval Warming Period.
It goes without comment that the first act of the US following Nudelman's (Why do these fuckers keep changing
their names?) Ukraine coup was to steal its gold.
"Pelosi and most of the Democratic leadership don't care about Syria, or its population's welfare. They don't care about Assad,
or Isis. They care only about the maintenance and expansion of their own Democratic Party power – for the personal wealth and
influence it continues to bestow on them."
FTFY
Just as the GOP is precisely and thoroughly corrupt in exactly the same way, focused exclusively on their own craven self-interest,
the country be damned.
@Anonymous Jimmah was the last honest man in American politics. But since he told Americans that gas was going to cost more,
that perhaps they needed to drive a wee bit less, the Americans hated him. They didn't like the "malaise" of having to pay for
their lifestyle.
As for the Israelis, what did Jimmah not to do for them : Got Egypt out of the Arab alliance, arranged the annual tribute to
Israel, started the ball rolling on the Holocaust religion, paid off Egypt and Jordan to stay away from any alliance against the
Israelis. But what did he get in return; branded as anti-Semite merely for mentioning that the Palestinians had rights, were human
beings too. With the Zionist Jews, one is always on probation. No point playing their silly games.
"... Islamic State, or Isis, didn't emerge out of nowhere. It was entirely a creation of two decades of US interference in the Middle East. ..."
"... No, I'm talking about the fact that in destroying three key Arab states – Iraq, Libya and Syria – that refused to submit to the joint regional hegemony of Saudi Arabia and Israel, Washington's local client states, the US created a giant void of governance at the heart of the Middle East. They knew that that void would be filled soon enough by religious extremists like Islamic State – and they didn't care. ..."
"... The barely veiled aim of the attacks on Iraq, Libya and Syria was to destroy the institutions and structures that held these societies together, however imperfectly. Though no one likes to mention it nowadays, these states – deeply authoritarian though they were – were also secular, and had well-developed welfare states that ensured high rates of literacy and some of the region's finest public health services. ..."
"... After Rove and Cheney had had their fill playing around with reality, nature got on with honouring the maxim that it always abhors a vacuum. Islamic State filled the vacuum Washington's policy had engineered. ..."
"... The clue, after all, was in the name. With the US and Gulf states using oil money to wage a proxy war against Assad, Isis saw its chance to establish a state inspired by a variety of Saudi Arabia's Wahhabist dogma. Isis needed territory for their planned state, and the Saudis and US obliged by destroying Syria. ..."
"... This barbarian army, one that murdered other religious groups as infidels and killed fellow Sunnis who refused to bow before their absolute rule, became the west's chief allies in Syria. Directly and covertly, we gave them money and weapons to begin building their state on parts of Syria. ..."
"... We cannot, of course, forget an assistance this witch had from very GOPiish Senators such as late American hero John McCain and his buddy Lindsey Graham. They played a key role in supporting all kinds of jihadist elements. ..."
"... Let's be accurate: It was US Democrats AND REPUBLICANS who helped cultivate the barbarism of Isis. The mess was started with Bush/Cheney/Powell. McCain was probably the biggest ISIS guy ever. Graham, Romney and friends are the same, and at best marginally better than Hitlery Clinton. ..."
"... The population of Syria increased exponentially right up through 2010, with a doubling time of about 18 years, at which point food ran out and population started trending downwards (not so much due to outright famine, as to poverty, lack of medical care, warfare, and people fleeing the country.). ..."
"... Check out the section in wikipedia on Syria's aquifers and groundwater – the water table had been dropping drastically as far back as 1985. Long before the post-2010 dry spell, Syria's rapid population growth had been consuming more water than fell as rain – EVEN DURING WET YEARS. The low rainfall post-2010 was an early trigger, but the collapse would have come regardless. ..."
"... Tulsi may not win the democratic nomination, but I see her determination to educate the majority of Americans of what our government/deep state/military industrial complex/and later senators who become lobbyists are doing. ..."
"... Worse, I suspect that many weren't too disturbed by this prospect. After all, ISIS and its incredibly vicious terrorist attacks in the West did a great deal to fuel Islamophobia -- and Islamophobia has its uses. ISIS was probably the best thing to happen to Israel since 9/11. ..."
"... I think it is worse than that : ISIS was a creation by the Israel-US- Saudi Arabia-Gulf States-axis. Significantly ISIS never attacked Israeli interests ..."
There is something profoundly deceitful in the way the Democratic Party and the corporate media are framing Donald Trump's decision
to pull troops out of Syria.
One does not need to defend Trump's actions or ignore the dangers posed to the Kurds, at least in the short term, by the departure
of US forces from northern Syria to understand that the coverage is being crafted in such a way as to entirely overlook the bigger
picture.
The problem is neatly illustrated in this line from a report by the Guardian newspaper of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's meeting
this week with Trump, who is described as having had a "meltdown". Explaining why she and other senior Democrats stormed out, the
paper writes
that "it became clear the president had no plan to deal with a potential revival of Isis in the Middle East".
Hang on a minute! Let's pull back a little, and not pretend – as the media and Democratic party leadership wish us to – that the
last 20 years did not actually happen. Many of us lived through those events. Our memories are not so short.
Islamic State, or Isis, didn't emerge out of nowhere. It was entirely a creation of two decades of US interference in the
Middle East. And I'm not even referring to the mountains
of evidence that US officials backed their Saudi allies in directly funding and arming Isis – just as their predecessors in Washington,
in their enthusiasm to oust the Soviets from the region, assisted the jihadists who went on to become al-Qaeda.
No, I'm talking about the fact that in destroying three key Arab states – Iraq, Libya and Syria – that refused to submit to
the joint regional hegemony of Saudi Arabia and Israel, Washington's local client states, the US created a giant void of governance
at the heart of the Middle East. They knew that that void would be filled soon enough by religious extremists like Islamic State
– and they didn't care.
Overthrow, not regime change
You don't have to be a Saddam Hussein, Muammar Gaddafi or Bashar Assad apologist to accept this point. You don't even have to
be concerned that these so-called "humanitarian" wars violated each state's integrity and sovereignty, and are therefore defined
in international law as "the supreme war crime".
The bigger picture – the one no one appears to want us thinking about – is that the US intentionally sought to destroy these states
with no obvious plan for the day after. As I explained in my book
Israel and the Clash of Civilisations
, these haven't so much been regime-change wars as nation-state dismantling operations – what I have termed overthrow wars.
The logic was a horrifying hybrid of two schools of thought that meshed neatly in the psychopathic foreign policy goals embodied
in the ideology of neoconservatism – the so-called "Washington consensus" since 9/11.
The first was Israel's long-standing approach to the Palestinians. By constantly devastating any emerging Palestinian institution
or social structures, Israel produced a divide-and-rule model on steriods, creating a leaderless, ravaged, enfeebled society that
sucked out all the local population's energy. That strategy proved very appealing to the neoconservatives, who saw it as one they
could export to non-compliant states in the region.
The second was the Chicago school's Shock Doctrine, as explained in Naomi Klein's book of that name. The chaotic campaign of destruction,
the psychological trauma and the sense of dislocation created by these overthrow wars were supposed to engender a far more malleable
population that would be ripe for a US-controlled "colour revolution".
The recalcitrant states would be made an example of, broken apart, asset-stripped of their resources and eventually remade as
new dependent markets for US goods. That was what George W Bush, Dick Cheney and Halliburton really meant when they talked about
building a New Middle East and exporting democracy.
Even judged by the vile aims of its proponents, the Shock Doctrine has been a half-century story of
dismal economic failure everywhere it has been attempted
– from Pinochet's Chile to Yeltsin's Russia. But let us not credit the architects of this policy with any kind of acumen for learning
from past errors. As Bush's senior adviser Karl Rove explained to a journalist whom he rebuked for being part of the "reality-based
community": "We're an empire now and, when we act, we create our own reality."
The birth of Islamic State
The barely veiled aim of the attacks on Iraq, Libya and Syria was to destroy the institutions and structures that held these
societies together, however imperfectly. Though no one likes to mention it nowadays, these states – deeply authoritarian though they
were – were also secular, and had well-developed welfare states that ensured high rates of literacy and some of the region's finest
public health services.
Given how closed a society Syria was and is, and how difficult it therefore is to weigh the evidence in ways that are likely to
prove convincing to those not already persuaded, let us set that issue aside too. Anyway, it is irrelevant to the bigger picture
I want to address.
The indisputable fact is that Washington and its Gulf allies wished to exploit this initial unrest as an opportunity to create
a void in Syria – just as they had earlier done in Iraq, where there were no uprisings, nor even the WMDs the US promised would be
found and that served as the pretext for Bush's campaign of Shock and Awe.
The limited uprisings in Syria quickly turned into a much larger and far more vicious war because the Gulf states, with US backing,
flooded the country with proxy fighters and arms in an effort to overthrow Assad and thereby weaken Iranian and Shia influence in
the region. The events in Syria and earlier in Iraq gradually transformed the Sunni religious extremists of al-Qaeda into the even
more barbaric, more nihilistic extremists of Islamic State.
A dark US vanity project
After Rove and Cheney had had their fill playing around with reality, nature got on with honouring the maxim that it always
abhors a vacuum. Islamic State filled the vacuum Washington's policy had engineered.
The clue, after all, was in the name. With the US and Gulf states using oil money to wage a proxy war against Assad, Isis
saw its chance to establish a state inspired by a variety of Saudi Arabia's Wahhabist dogma. Isis needed territory for their planned
state, and the Saudis and US obliged by destroying Syria.
This barbarian army, one that murdered other religious groups as infidels and killed fellow Sunnis who refused to bow before
their absolute rule, became the west's chief allies in Syria. Directly and covertly, we gave them money and weapons to begin building
their state on parts of Syria.
Again, let us ignore the fact that the US, in helping to destroy a sovereign nation, committed the supreme war crime, one that
in a rightly ordered world would ensure every senior Washington official faces their own Nuremberg Trial. Let us ignore too for the
moment that the US, consciously through its actions, brought to life a monster that sowed death and destruction everywhere it went.
The fact is that at the moment Assad called in Russia to help him survive, the battle the US and the Gulf states were waging through
Islamic State and other proxies was lost. It was only a matter of time before Assad would reassert his rule.
From that point onwards, every single person who was killed and every single Syrian made homeless – and there were hundreds of
thousands of them – suffered their terrible fate for no possible gain in US policy goals. A vastly destructive overthrow war became
instead something darker still: a neoconservative vanity project that ravaged countless Syrian lives.
A giant red herring
Trump now appears to be ending part of that policy. He may be doing so for the wrong reasons. But very belatedly – and possibly
only temporarily – he is seeking to close a small chapter in a horrifying story of western-sponsored barbarism in the Middle East,
one intimately tied to Islamic State.
What of the supposed concerns of Pelosi and the Democratic Party under whose watch the barbarism in Syria took place. They should
have no credibility on the matter to begin with.
But their claims that Trump has "no plan to deal with a potential revival of Isis in the Middle East" is a giant red herring they
are viciously slapping us in the face with in the hope the spray of seawater blinds us.
First, Washington sowed the seeds of Islamic State by engineering a vacuum in Syria that Isis – or something very like it – was
inevitably going to fill. Then, it allowed those seeds to flourish by assisting its Gulf allies in showering fighters in Syria with
money and arms that came with only one string attached – a commitment to Sunni jihadist ideology inspired by Saudi Wahhabism.
Isis was made in Washington as much as it was in Riyadh. For that reason, the only certain strategy for preventing the revival
of Islamic State is preventing the US and the Gulf states from interfering in Syria again.
With the Syrian army in charge of Syrian territory, there will be no vacuum for Isis to fill. The jihadists' state-building project
is now unrealisable, at least in Syria. Islamic State will continue to wither, as it would have done years before if the US and its
Gulf allies had not fuelled it in a proxy war they knew could not be won.
Doomed Great Game
The same lesson can be drawn by looking at the experience of the Syrian Kurds. The Rojava fiefdom they managed to carve out in
northern Syria during the war survived till now only because of continuing US military support. With a US departure, and the Kurds
too weak to maintain their improvised statelet, a vacuum was again created that this time has risked sucking in the Turkish army,
which fears a base for Kurdish nationalism on its doorstep.
The Syrian Kurds' predicament is simple: face a takeover by Turkey or seek Assad's protection to foil Turkish ambitions. The best
hope for the Kurds looks to be the Syrian army's return, filling the vacuum and regaining a chance of long-term stability.
That could have been the case for all of Syria many tens of thousands of deaths ago. Whatever the corporate media suggest, those
deaths were lost not in a failed heroic battle for freedom, which, even if it was an early aspiration for some fighters, quickly
became a goal that was impossible for them to realise. No, those deaths were entirely pointless. They were sacrificed by a western
military-industrial complex in a US-Saudi Great Game that dragged on for many years after everyone knew it was doomed.
Nancy Pelosi's purported worries about Isis reviving because of Trump's Syria withdrawal are simply crocodile fears. If she is
really so worried about Islamic State, then why did she and other senior Democrats stand silently by as the US under Barack Obama
spent years spawning, cultivating and financing Isis to destroy Syria, a state that was best placed to serve as a bulwark against
the head-chopping extremists?
Pelosi and the Democratic leadership's bad faith – and that of the corporate media – are revealed in their ongoing efforts to
silence and smear Tulsi Gabbard, the party's only candidate for the presidential nomination who has pointed out the harsh political
realities in Syria, and tried to expose their years of lies.
Pelosi and most of the Democratic leadership don't care about Syria, or its population's welfare. They don't care about Assad,
or Isis. They care only about the maintenance and expansion of American power – and the personal wealth and influence it continues
to bestow on them.
Jonathan Cook won the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His books include "Israel and the Clash of Civilisations:
Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East" (Pluto Press) and "Disappearing Palestine: Israel's Experiments in Human Despair"
(Zed Books). His website is www.jonathan-cook.net .
The problem largely traces back to simple mistakes by prior Saudi administrations.
The Wahhabi were a threat to the royal family. So, the royal family funded them to go elsewhere. Given the craziness of Wahhabism
that made sense at the time. Crazy usually dies out. However, in this case the Crazy came with enough money in hand to establish
credibility. The extremist Muslim Brotherhood is a direct result of these exported extremism.
ISIS is the result of a schism inside the extremist Muslim Brotherhood. A "direct action" group wanted an even more extreme
and immediate solution and broke away.
-- Did the U.S. or Israel attempt to deploy ISIS? This is far-fetched beyond the bounds of reasonability. Violent, ultra-extreme
ISIS fanatics would not follow the commands of infidel heretics. The Saudi royal family by this point realized that the Muslim
Brotherhood was a threat to them just like the original Wahhabi, but they had no good way to undo their prior mistake.
-- Did Turkey attempt to use ISIS to weaken Syria and Iraq? This is far more probable. Turkey's AK party is also a schismatic
offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood. So, there is a great deal of opportunity for the two troops to find common cause. The New
Ottoman Empire needs to absorb Syrian and Iraqi land, so undermining those governments would be step #1.
One does not need outside actors to explain how the hole was dug. Unfortunately, that means there is no good solution. If the
problem was driven by outside forces, those forces could stop it. However, the reality is that there are no outside forces driving
the Craziness. There is no "plug to pull".
The wild savage dogs of ISIS are the Khmer Rouge of Islamic fundamentalism and their rise and violence should be attributed to
the liberal interventionism that has proven to be a disaster not only for the region but those who carried out the intervention.
"One does not need outside actors to explain how the hole was dug. Unfortunately, that means there is no good solution.
If the problem was driven by outside forces, those forces could stop it. However, the reality is that there are no outside
forces driving the Craziness. There is no 'plug to pull'".
Absolute nonsense. And what do you mean by "outside forces." The US and Israel count as outside forces but Turkey does not?
Forces outside of what?
ISIS emerged out of ISI, Zarqawi's Islamic State in Iraq, an affiliate, for a while, of AQ. The US invasion of Iraq created
the political and military space in Iraq for transnational terror groups.
Meanwhile, the US, at Israel's instigation, had been working to weaken Assad in Syria. After the rebellion against him in 2011,
the US, along with Turkey, Saudi, Qatar, Israel and others, began to support various jihadi groups inside Syria with the goal
of eliminating the Assad government, each for his own reasons. Syria began lost control of its border with Iraq and much of eastern
Syria and the Euphrates valley as well. This process allowed ISIS to emerge from an ISI under stress during the so-called "surge"
in 2007-10 and establish itself in Syria. In 2014, ISIS, now a powerful well-armed group went back into Iraq to defeat the incompetent
and unmotivated Iraq Security Forces that the US had established.
While the US moved against ISIS in Iraq after 2014, it left ISIS in Syria alone since it was depriving Assad of control over
most of Syria's oil and much of its arable land.
And yes, of course the US, instigated by Israel, didn't "deploy" ISIS in the sense of directing its operations. But they left
ISIS largely unimpeded to play a role in the overthrow of Assad which was always the primary goal. ISIS, it was thought, could
be dealt with later after Assad was gone.
That plan would probably have worked eventually, but the Russians entered the picture in the second half of 2015 and changed
the situation.
The US had been nominally supporting the usual "freedom fighters" but in effect supplying the more competent and vicious jihadis
who could take the TOW missiles and other weapons the US was providing to the approved sad-sacks and make more effective use of
them. Finally, with Russia and Iran facilitating the roll-back of all the jihadis, and the US threatened with being relegated
to the sidelines, Obama jumped on the SDF (Kurdish) bandwagon and actually started doing what the US had not done previously:
Taking serious action against ISIS so that a Russian/Iranian-backed Syrian reconquest of eastern Syria could be pre-empted.
And of course, the biggest supporter of the Kurds has consistently been Israel, who sees the possibility of creating pro-Israel
statelets or at least enclaves in the midst of a Turkish, Iranian and Arab region that detests the Judenreich.
So in order to eliminate another of Israel's enemies, reduce a unified Syrian state to a handful of even more impotent emirates
and ensure that Bibi would not be pestered with legal questions over the seizure and retention of the Golan, Syria was laid waste
under the guise of "promoting democracy" and then further devastated under the guise of combatting ISIS.
We have done more than enough damage at the behest of Israel and its fifth column in the US. ISIS might well have emerged regardless
of US actions, but it was the Jew-induced insanity of US regime-change/COIN policies that created the geographical, political
and military space in Iraq and Syria for the jihadists and the ensuing physical destruction of so much of those countries.
The best solution would be to facilitate the re-establishment of Syrian sovereignty over all of Syria. But instead of doing
that, Trump has instead facilitated the entry of Turkish forces and allied jihadis in an attempt to mend fences with a thoroughly
alienated Erdogan. We'll see if Putin can mitigate the brutal incompetence of Israel-infected US policy.
@A123 For fuck's sake. Is there any way to stop Hasbara agents from effectively using software to get consistent first posts
on this site?
Their mere presence is annoying. Whatever they have to say, on any topic and no matter what it is, no one here wants to read
it because they are not beginning with any credibility whatsoever. As they are are religiously-avowed enemies of the West (who
they hold to be the continuation of Rome) and the demonstrated fervent enemies of non-Jewish Whites.
Given the craziness of Wahhabism
There is nothing in Sunni Islam that does not have its root in Judaism. To state otherwise is to be a typical Semitic liar.
A very real but completely unadvertised reality of these regime changes was that the publicly owned central bank of the country
– Iraq and Libya – was eliminated and changed to a private central bank. Iraq and Libya both succumbed and Ron Paul related that
the smoke had barely cleared in Libya before the private central bank charter was drafted and implemented. Syria and Iran are
the last two countries that do not have a private central banks. Hence the drive by the neo-cons to destroy those countries and
fully implement the New World (banking) Order.
Not widely discussed but (I think) vitally important to understanding foreign policy.
What of the supposed concerns of Pelosi and the Democratic Party under whose watch the barbarism in Syria took place. They should
have no credibility on the matter to begin with.
But their claims that Trump has "no plan to deal with a potential revival of Isis in the Middle East" is a giant red herring
they are viciously slapping us in the face with in the hope the spray of seawater blinds us.
I love the second para. Getting slapped with a red herring with hope that the salt water blinds us .
My only gripe with Jonathan Cook is that this and all mid-eastern conflicts are engineered by the dual citizens and Israel
isn't called out by him as the chief instigator. The saudis are slave of the west and amount to nothing.
@A123 " Did the U.S. or Israel attempt to deploy ISIS? This is far-fetched beyond the bounds of reasonability"
Perhaps. Except that it did happen in plain daylight, before our eyes, but we should, of course, trust your "reasonability" --
instead of our own lying eyes.
@A123 US President Donald Trump said Monday that a small number of US troops remain in Syria at the request of Israel and
Jordan, with some positioned near the borders with Jordan and Israel and others deployed to secure oil fields.
"The other region where we've been asked by Israel and Jordan to leave a small number of troops is a totally different section
of Syria, near Jordan, and close to Israel," Trump said when asked whether he would leave soldiers in Syria. "So we have a small
group there, and we secured the oil. Other than that, there's no reason for it, in our opinion."
Times of Israel
and J Post 21st oct
It 's all about Israel and for its "royal patsy when not for royal patsy it's for the cannon fodder/ foot solder of Israel.
This mayhem from 2003 hasn't seen the full effects of the blow-back yet .Just starting . Tulsi Gabbard and Trump have knowingly
and sometime unknowingly have told the master that the king never had any clothes even when the king was talking about the decency
of having clothes on .
"The first was Israel's long-standing approach to the Palestinians. By constantly devastating any emerging Palestinian institution
or social structures, Israel produced a divide-and-rule model on steriods, creating a leaderless, ravaged, enfeebled society that
sucked out all the local population's energy. That strategy proved very appealing to the neoconservatives, who saw it as one they
could export to non-compliant states in the region."-
This sums up everything one want to know about certain human clones and the impact of the clones on the humanity.
Who will ever blame the victims for creating a future Hitler among them ?
We cannot, of course, forget an assistance this witch had from very GOPiish Senators such as late American hero John McCain
and his buddy Lindsey Graham. They played a key role in supporting all kinds of jihadist elements.
Let's be accurate: It was US Democrats AND REPUBLICANS who helped cultivate the barbarism of Isis. The mess was started with
Bush/Cheney/Powell. McCain was probably the biggest ISIS guy ever. Graham, Romney and friends are the same, and at best marginally
better than Hitlery Clinton.
Lock them all up, regardless of party affiliation.
Many interesting points here, and I agree with a lot of them. But:
[MORE]
"Or was it driven by something else: as a largely economic protest by an under-class suffering from food shortages as climate
change led to repeated crop failures?"
Syria did run out of water, and it's hard not to see that as a major driver of the chaos that unfolded. But Syria didn't run
out of water because of "climate change," that's false.
The explanation is that the Syrian government deliberately engineered a massive population explosion. Seriously, they made
the sale and possession of contraceptives a crime! (See "Demographic Developments and Population: Policies in Ba'thist Syria (Demographic
Developments and Socioeconomics)", by Onn Winkler).
The population of Syria increased exponentially right up through 2010, with a doubling time of about 18 years, at which
point food ran out and population started trending downwards (not so much due to outright famine, as to poverty, lack of medical
care, warfare, and people fleeing the country.).
Now as far as weather goes, there were a couple of dry years before the collapse, but weather is always like that. Last year
there were record rainfalls. If Syria's population had been stable at 5 or even 10 million, they could have coasted on water stored
in the aquifers until the rains came back. But when the population increases so much that you drain the aquifers even when there
is plenty of rain, then when a temporary drought hits you have no reserve and it all falls apart.
Check out the section in wikipedia on Syria's aquifers and groundwater – the water table had been dropping drastically
as far back as 1985. Long before the post-2010 dry spell, Syria's rapid population growth had been consuming more water than fell
as rain – EVEN DURING WET YEARS. The low rainfall post-2010 was an early trigger, but the collapse would have come regardless.
simple and straightforward journalism that cuts through the "corporate veil." Tulsi may not win the democratic nomination,
but I see her determination to educate the majority of Americans of what our government/deep state/military industrial complex/and
later senators who become lobbyists are doing.
I also feel for our veterans who are indoctrinated to protect freedom, but in the end, when they come home injured and disabled,
or even dead, it was all for naught.
I find some of the rhetoric in this piece irritating and repetitive -- but the analysis is essentially correct.
We created a power vacuum that was almost certain to give rise to something like ISIS.
Worse, I suspect that many weren't too disturbed by this prospect. After all, ISIS and its incredibly vicious terrorist
attacks in the West did a great deal to fuel Islamophobia -- and Islamophobia has its uses. ISIS was probably the best thing to
happen to Israel since 9/11.
"The problem is neatly illustrated in this line from a report by the Guardian newspaper of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's meeting
this week with Trump, who is described as having had a "meltdown". "
That's a poorly written statement. It reads as though Trump was the one having a meltdown. How about: "House Speaker Pelosi's
meltdown during a meeting with Trump." ?
@MarathonMan That is a fact that should be kept foremost in the discussions of "why regime change is necessary". It is the
most basic and obvious reason for all this war in the ME.
"First, Washington sowed the seeds of Islamic State by engineering a vacuum in Syria that Isis – or something very like
it – was inevitably going to fill."
Not quite accurate. The US Government "sowed the seeds of" ISIS by giving them material support before the vacuum was created.
IS is mainly a creature of empire, including the US and older remnants of empire in the UK and Europe which survives mainly in
the existence of (international) banks.
@Christian truth Project "Tulsi is/was a member of the CFR". Aren't all Congressmen members? Doesn't that come with signing
the AIPAC form, getting the secret decoder ring from Adam Schiff, and the free trip to Israel? (maybe Ilhan Omar and Rashida Talib
"don't measure up?")
I believe CFR was the organization Biden was regaling with his story of holding up $one billion in Ukrainian
aid unless the Ukrainians fired the investigator of his son Hunter "who did nothing wrong". Can you imagine if Biden had been
President rather than VP? This would have been a scandal!
@A123 One does not need outside actors, but then there would be a lot of 'dark matter' in the history of the ME over the last
100 years. Personally it's plain state terrorism to me, and the Brits have a good definition!
http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2000/11/part/I
Pelosi and most of the Democratic leadership don't care about Syria, or its population's welfare. They don't care about
Assad, or Isis. They care only about the maintenance and expansion of American power
Correction: They only care about the maintenance and expansion of Israeli power.
I think it is worse than that : ISIS was a creation by the Israel-US- Saudi Arabia-Gulf States-axis.
Significantly ISIS never attacked Israeli interests, and when it once did so by accident, it apologized to Israel. The destruction
of Syria is part of Israel's notorious Oded Yinon plan, according to which all states in Israel's neighborhood need to be fragmentized.
In Iraq and Libya that was a success, in Syria, thanks to Iran, Hizbollah and Russia, it failed. The US is simply a puppet for
Israel's foreign policy, but nobody in the US, not even Tulsi Gabbard, dares to say so.
@A123 Sorry Bibi, but your beloved Israel played a BIG part in establishing ISIS, then supporting it with shekels, medical
care for their wounded, training and weapons.
WikiLeaks: US, Israel, And Saudi Arabia Planned Overthrow Of Syrian Govt. In 2006
Cables reveal that before the beginning of the Syrian revolt and civil war, the United States hoped to overthrow Assad and
create strife between Shiite and Sunni Muslims.
Let's not forget that when the term ISIS first came out, the Tel Aviv war mongers realized it stood for Israeli Secret Intelligence
Services and changed that to ISIL, which their adoring MSM gladly obliged by parroting that change.
From the Israeli masterminded 9/11 False Flag to the destruction of Syria, there's one common factor, Israel and her American
Jew sayanim who keep pushing America into forever wars so Israel can finish off the Palestinians and steal more land.
@Digital Samizdat Absolutely. Gabbard is the "Democrat" Trump. A Jew puppet presented as an outsider. They're exactly the
same. Even Obama was presented that way to an extent.
Yet the dumb goyim will fall for it for the third time in a row.
Based on the whistleblower's extensive presentation, including internal emails, text exchanges and suppressed draft reports,
we are unanimous in expressing our alarm over unacceptable practices in the investigation of the alleged chemical attack in
Douma, near the Syrian capital of Damascus on 7 April 2018. We became convinced by the testimony that key information about
chemical analyses, toxicology consultations, ballistics studies, and witness testimonies was suppressed, ostensibly to favor
a preordained conclusion.
We have learned of disquieting efforts to exclude some inspectors from the investigation whilst thwarting their attempts
to raise legitimate concerns, highlight irregular practices or even to express their differing observations and assessments
-- a right explicitly conferred on inspectors in the Chemical Weapons Convention, evidently with the intention of ensuring
the independence and authoritativeness of inspection reports.
Fixed "report" of OPCW was necessary to maintain anti-Assad narrative which is now unchallenged even by Gabbard (not to mention
the weak sheep-dog Sanders).
@Ilyana_Rozumova The US does not have to directly support the jihadists. It just has to manage the chaos, for whatever be
the action on the ground and whoever is killed or not killed, as long as there is chaos within their chosen sandbox, the chaos
masters in Israel wins and that is all that counts with all too many Americans. It doesn't matter how many Arabs, Turks, Etruscans
or Kurds are killed, as long as Israel's interests are taken care of, the results are "worth it". Its a very deeply cynical, and
evil policy that the US has pursued all these years in the Mid-East.
But fortunately the Russians have turned things around.
@MarathonMan Gangster business and slavery are OK so long as our central bank gets our cut. ME is also about "fragmenting"
neighboring countries so Israel can expand. Yinon Plan.
Oct 18, 2019 Tulsi Gabbard responds to Hillary Clinton: Clinton "knows she can't control me"
Hillary Clinton implied Russians are "grooming" Tulsi Gabbard to run as a third-party candidate to disrupt the election, a
charge which Gabbard denies. In a live interview with CBSN, Gabbard responds to Clinton's claims and says she will not run as
a third-party candidate.
And now, according to the latest news, Trump will send tanks into Syria to help the Kurds secure the oil for Israel. It's hard
to understand why the Elders of the Deep State want to impeach Trump. He has done everything they wanted, moved the embassy, gave
Syria's Golan Heights to Israel, never criticizes the illegal settlements in Palestine. What else do they want from him?
What do you mean Pelosi has no credibility? Have you checked her bank balance lately? Nancy, had she not waded into politics,
would have been a pole dancer she had the goods for it.
@TG Excellent post. You bring up 2 very important but rarely discussed issues.
Demographics: Population is one of the most easily predictable developments within a country, and you'd think it might be one
of the most publically-discussed, and therefore, best-managed. Au contraire. Assad wasn't the only one who stood on the tracks
watching the headlights approach:
1. The EU is having problems with an aging native population because it earlier encouraged low birth rates, and is now promoting
mass immigration of rapidly-breeding immigrants who threaten to at least overwhelm if not overrun European society. Yet, as Douglas
Murray points out in his book The Strange Death of Europe, openly talking about this problem has been, and still is, verboten.
2. China is now wondering to do with its preponderance of young men, caused very predictably by the Communist Party's one-child
policy.
Climate:
If the rains had been good every single year – which is impossible – it would only have pushed the point of collapse back
a few years, at most.
The Syrian case you cite shows how even relatively minor climate changes can carry events past a tipping point. I do agree
with you that effects of APGW on climactic conditions are greatly exaggerated, yet changes in climate, for good or ill, have often
triggered much larger historical events. The cooling that caused a famine and that preceded the Justinian Plague weakened European
and Sassanian civilizations. These misfortunes paved the way for the Islamic takeover that followed. Contrariwise, Norse exploration
and the Renaissance, to give 2 examples of increasing activity, both occurred during the Medieval Warming Period.
When it comes to senior American politihoes, no one is ever right. Pelosi may be cultivating the ISIS, but Gabbard is busy blowing
assorted dictators and more closer to the heart, the hindoo nationalist queers, as impotent (I mean that in a literal sexual context,
as their elites don't marry) as they might be.
Tulsi needs to conduct herself with gravitas, because of her age. However, she is helped by the fact that the leader of the progressive
wing is a former bartender, and the leader of the environmental resistance is a high-school sophomore.
@MarathonMan It goes without comment that the first act of the US following Nudelman's (Why do these fuckers keep changing
their names?) Ukraine coup was to steal its gold.
"Pelosi and most of the Democratic leadership don't care about Syria, or its population's welfare. They don't care about Assad,
or Isis. They care only about the maintenance and expansion of their own Democratic Party power – for the personal wealth and
influence it continues to bestow on them."
FTFY
Just as the GOP is precisely and thoroughly corrupt in exactly the same way, focused exclusively on their own craven self-interest,
the country be damned.
There is nothing in Sunni Islam that does not have its root in Judaism. To state otherwise is to be a typical Semitic liar.
Lol! Deceitful lies from some godless/pagan whitrash.
If you are referring to some self-perceived notions of barbarity/deception/etc., within Islam, then you are a deceitful !@#
who is trying to cover up the sheer savagery/psychopathy/deception/hypocrisy/etc., of the Christoo whitrash race.
Again, as far as the roots of Islam being in Judaism, that is laughable. It is Christooism which is clearly having roots in
Judaism (there have been so many here who have quoted from your pagan scriptures about the haloed position of the Jooscum)
and Hindooism .
In-his-image mangods/womangods, Trinity/Trimurthi, the human body is the temple of god the list is long where you all share
your pagan theologies.
Islam utterly rejects all such pagan abominations. The following verses of the Holy Quran amply proves the simplest and purest
form of monotheism, that is Islam;
Say, "He is Allah, [who is] One, Allah, the Eternal Refuge. He neither begets nor is born , Nor is there to Him
any equivalent ."
@A123 "Did the U.S. or Israel attempt to deploy ISIS? This is far-fetched beyond the bounds of reasonability."
Wrong.
The Oded Yinon Plan employs exactly this strategy, and along with the Neocon dominated State Dept with its Regime Change program
(Oded Yinon plan in stealth mode) is the predicate. Meanwhile, once it emerged, Obama & Kerry sought to preserve ISIS as a means
to pressure Assad. Neocon Zionist fifth column in the US, & Israel-behind-the-scenes are the dual agency-behind-the-curtain of
US regime-change wars ***EVERYWHERE*** (because they hate Russia, too.).
@DESERT FOX And rule, finally, over a smoldering wreck of a planet? They already rule most of it, they're at the Endgame of
their long match with the world. Not that they eschew violence and mass murder. Indeed, they got their start thousands years ago
by worshiping a god who told them to genocide all their neighbors and steal all their goods.
@really no shit I'm in the same age cohort as most of these shameless grifters, so I know the end of this run on earth is
drawing near. I know that no one can take whatever they accumulate in this life with them into oblivion or whatever their imagined
version of paradise might be. The loot stays here in this vale of tears.
ALL of these players busy ruining and ending lives, like Pelosi, the Clintons and the Bush family, are multi-millionaires at
the least–and all on the taxpayers' dime. Why do they desperately seek to add ever more cash to their bank accounts by bringing
yet more misery into the world? It won't be very long and either the collection of psychopaths known as the government of the
United States and its ruthless war machine will end up with the proceeds or they will pass down to further generations of these
congenital parasites and deadbeats.
Does Joe ask himself whether it was worthy to spend his wretched life accumulating ill-gotten wealth to pass on to Hunter and
his ilk? Or for Hillary to set up Chelsea and the next generation of Rodham Clinton lampreys? Jimmy Carter seems to have been
the only American president who didn't constantly grasp for money once out of office and the world never heard a peep about Amy
ever again.
[MORE]
[EDITOR'S NOTE: Since publication, this story has been corrected to clarify that the fighters trained in Jordan became members
of the ISIS after their training.]
JERUSALEM – Syrian rebels who would later join the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, or ISIS, were trained in 2012 by U.S.
instructors working at a secret base in Jordan, according to informed Jordanian officials.
The officials said dozens of future ISIS members were trained at the time as part of covert aid to the insurgents targeting
the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in Syria. The officials said the training was not meant to be used for any future
campaign in Iraq.
The Jordanian officials said all ISIS members who received U.S. training to fight in Syria were first vetted for any links to
extremist groups like al-Qaida.
In February 2012, WND was first to report the U.S., Turkey and Jordan were running a training base for the Syrian rebels in
the Jordanian town of Safawi in the country's northern desert region.
That report has since been corroborated by numerous other media accounts.
Last March, the German weekly Der Spiegel reported Americans were training Syrian rebels in Jordan.
Quoting what it said were training participants and organizers, Der Spiegel reported it was not clear whether the Americans
worked for private firms or were with the U.S. Army, but the magazine said some organizers wore uniforms. The training in Jordan
reportedly focused on use of anti-tank weaponry.
The German magazine reported some 200 men received the training over the previous three months amid U.S. plans to train a total
of 1,200 members of the Free Syrian Army in two camps in the south and the east of Jordan.
Britain's Guardian newspaper also reported last March that U.S. trainers were aiding Syrian rebels in Jordan along with British
and French instructors.
Reuters reported a spokesman for the U.S. Defense Department declined immediate comment on the German magazine's report. The
French foreign ministry and Britain's foreign and defense ministries also would not comment to Reuters.
Conservative government watchdog Judicial Watch have published formerly classified documents from the U.S. Department of Defence
which reveals the agencies earlier views on ISIS, namely that they were a desirable presence in Eastern Syria in 2012 and that
they should be "supported" in order to isolate the Syrian regime.
Levantreport.com reports:
Astoundingly, the newly declassified report states that for "THE WEST, GULF COUNTRIES, AND TURKEY [WHO] SUPPORT THE [SYRIAN] OPPOSITION
THERE IS THE POSSIBILITY OF ESTABLISHING A DECLARED OR UNDECLARED SALAFIST PRINCIPALITY IN EASTERN SYRIA (HASAKA AND DER ZOR),
AND THIS IS EXACTLY WHAT THE SUPPORTING POWERS TO THE OPPOSITION WANT, IN ORDER TO ISOLATE THE SYRIAN REGIME ".
The DIA report, formerly classified "SECRET//NOFORN" and dated August 12, 2012, was circulated widely among various government
agencies, including CENTCOM, the CIA, FBI, DHS, NGA, State Dept., and many others.
The document shows that as early as 2012, U.S. intelligence predicted the rise of the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant
(ISIL or ISIS), but instead of clearly delineating the group as an enemy, the report envisions the terror group as a U.S. strategic
asset.
Government watchdog Judicial Watch published more than 100 pages of formerly classified documents from the U.S. Department
of Defense and the State Department.
The documents obtained through a federal lawsuit, revealed the agencies earlier views on ISIS, namely that they were a desirable
presence in Eastern Syria in 2012 and that they should be "supported" in order to isolate the Syrian regime.
The U.S. intelligence documents not only confirms suspicions that the United States and some of its coalition allies had actually
facilitated the rise of the ISIS in Syria – as a counterweight to the Syrian government of President Bashar al-Assad- but also
that ISIS members were initially trained by members and contractors of the Central Intelligence Agency at facilities in Jordan
in 2012.
@Anonymous Jimmah was the last honest man in American politics. But since he told Americans that gas was going to cost more,
that perhaps they needed to drive a wee bit less, the Americans hated him. They didn't like the "malaise" of having to pay for
their lifestyle.
As for the Israelis, what did Jimmah not to do for them : Got Egypt out of the Arab alliance, arranged the annual tribute to
Israel, started the ball rolling on the Holocaust religion, paid off Egypt and Jordan to stay away from any alliance against the
Israelis. But what did he get in return; branded as anti-Semite merely for mentioning that the Palestinians had rights, were human
beings too. With the Zionist Jews, one is always on probation. No point playing their silly games.
The path of U.S.-Israeli arrogance and domination, with its various dimensions, and with its direct and indirect extensions
and alliances, which is witnessing military defeats and political failures, reflected successive defeats for the American strategies
and plans, one after the other. All this has led [the U.S.] to a state of indecision, retreat, and inability to control the progress
of events in our Arab and Islamic world. There is a broader international context for this – a context that, in its turn, helps
to expose the American crisis, and the decline of the [U.S.] unipolar hegemony, in the face of pluralism, the characteristics
of which are yet to be stabilized.
"The crisis of the arrogant world order is deepened by the collapse of U.S. and international stock markets, and by the confusion
and powerlessness of the American economy. This reflects the height of the structural crisis of the model of capitalist arrogance.
Therefore, it can be said that we are in the midst of historic transformations that foretell the retreat of the USA as a hegemonic
power, the disintegration of the unipolar hegemonic order, and the beginning of the accelerated historic decline of the Zionist
entity.
After World War II, the U.S. has adopted the leading, central hegemonic project. At its hands, this project has witnessed great
development of the means of control and unprecedented subjugation. It has benefited from an accumulation of multi-faceted accomplishments
in science, culture, technology, knowledge, economy, and the military, which was supported by an economic political plan that
views the world as nothing but open markets subject to the laws of [the U.S.].
"The most dangerous aspect of Western logic of hegemony in general, and the American logic of hegemony in particular, is their
basic belief that they own the world, and have the right to hegemony due to their supremacy in several fields. Thus, the Western,
and especially American, expansionist strategy, when coupled with the enterprise of capitalist economy, has become a strategy
of a global nature, whose covetous desires and appetite know no bounds.
The barbaric capitalism has turned globalism into a means to spread disintegration, to sow discord, to destroy identities,
and to impose the most dangerous form of cultural, economic, and social plunder. Globalization reached its most dangerous phase,
when it was transformed into military globalization by the owners of the Western hegemony enterprise, the greatest manifestation
of which was evident in the Middle East, from Afghanistan to Iraq, to Palestine, and to Lebanon.
There is no doubt that American terrorism is the source of all terrorism in the world. The Bush administration has turned the
U.S. into a danger threatening the whole world, on all levels. If a global opinion poll were held today, the United States would
emerge as the most hated country in the world.
The most important goal of American arrogance is to take control of the peoples politically, economically, and culturally,
and to plunder their resources.
– Hassan Nasrallah December 8, 2009
and Trump IS NOT "pulling out" Will Tulsi? One way to find out. Doesn't look good though, unless shes willing to splinter the
C.I.A. into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds, as they say..
Where's the proof that she is CFR member, I see sock puppets parrot this line all the time but offer no proof. Her serving
on the armed & financial services committees and doing a speech for them doesn't make her a member. I'd take her over Trump any
day.
And now, according to the latest news, Trump will send tanks into Syria to help the Kurds
secure the oil for Israel. It's hard to understand why the Elders of the Deep State want to
impeach Trump. He has done everything they wanted, moved the embassy, gave Syria's Golan
Heights to Israel, never criticizes the illegal settlements in Palestine. What else do they
want from him?
Hundreds of Islamic State fighters, both Syrian and foreign, were covertly evacuated by US,
UK and Kurdish forces from the besieged city of Raqqa last month and freed to "spread out far
and wide across Syria and beyond".
Although reports on the convoy surfaced at the time, BBC journalists Quentin Sommerville
and Riam Dalati have revealed the details in their documentary Raqqa's Dirty Secret.
Their investigation describes how the convoy carrying 250 fighters, 3,500 family members,
and lorry loads of arms and possessions, was arranged for October 12th by local officials in
meetings attended by a western officer.
During a visit to Syria in mid-October, The Irish Times was told not only about the
evacuation but also that senior Islamic State commanders and their families, 45 people in
all, had been airlifted out of Raqqa by a US helicopter and flown to the Kurdish region in
northern Iraq.
Fighters escaping Raqqa were said to have been given passage across the desert to join
comrades battling the Syrian army and its allies in Deir al-Zor.
Among the people the BBC team interviewed for the exposé were drivers paid by the
Islamic State to drive the buses and trucks carrying the evacuees. According to driver Abu
Fawzi, men, women and children wore suicide vests and the trucks had been booby-trapped in
case "something went wrong".
The convoy contained 50 trucks, 13 buses, and more than 100 of the fighters' own vehicles.
Although it had been agreed they would take only personal weapons, they filled 10 trucks with
arms and ammunition.
Three-day convoy
It had also been stipulated that no foreigners would leave, but drivers told the BBC that
French, Turkish, Azerbaijani, Pakistani, Yemeni, Saudi, Chinese, Tunisian and Egyptians had
joined the exodus. The only restriction observed was a ban against flags and banners.
Whenever it passed through a village or hamlet, fighters warned frightened bystanders they
would return, a villager called Muhanad told the BBC, "running a finger across their
throats".
Two Humvees led the convoy into the desert where the going was rough. Coalition aircraft
and drones hovered above, dropping flares after dark to light the way. When the motorcade
reached Islamic State-held territory, fighters and civilians departed with their arms and
possessions and drivers returned home.
The BBC investigation compelled Col Ryan Dillon, spokesman for Operation Inherent Resolve,
to admit to the deal. He told the team: "We didn't want anyone to leave. But this goes to the
heart of our strategy 'by, with and through' local leaders on the ground.
His statement on foreign fighters contradicted information given to the BBC by drivers and
people along the route as well as a statement about strategy made by US defence secretary
James Mattis in May.
"... All that changed with the conversion of the federal government to a national-security state and with the adoption of a pro-empire, pro-intervention foreign policy. When that happened, the U.S. government assumed the duty to fix the wrongs of the world. ..."
"... That's when U.S. officials began thinking in terms of empire and using empire-speak. Foreign regimes became "allies," "partners," and "friends." Others became "opponents," "rivals," or "enemies." Events thousands of miles away became threats to "national security." ..."
"... The results of U.S. imperialism and interventionism have always been perverse, not only for foreigners but also for Americans. That's how Americans have ended up with out-of-control federal spending and debt that have left much of the middle class high and dry, unable to support themselves in their senior years, unable to save a nest egg for financial emergencies, and living paycheck to paycheck. Empire and interventionism do not come cheap. ..."
"... There is but one solution to all this chaos and mayhem -- the dismantling, not the reform, of the Pentagon, the military-industrial complex, the vast empire of foreign and domestic military bases, and the NSA, along with an immediate end to all foreign interventionism. A free, peaceful, prosperous, and harmonious society necessarily entails the restoration of a limited-government republic and a non-interventionist foreign policy to our land. ..."
The chaos arising from U.S. interventionism in Syria provides an excellent opportunity to explore the interventionist mind.
Consider the terminology being employed by interventionists: President Trump's actions in Syria have left a "power vacuum," one
that Russia and Iran are now filling. The United States will no longer have "influence" in the region. "Allies" will no longer be
able to trust the U.S. to come to their assistance. Trump's actions have threatened "national security." It is now possible that
ISIS will reformulate and threaten to take over lands and even regimes in the Middle East.
This verbiage is classic empire-speak. It is the language of the interventionist and the imperialist.
Amidst all the interventionist chaos in the Middle East, it is important to keep in mind one critically important fact: None of
it will mean a violent takeover of the U.S. government or an invasion and conquest of the United States. The federal government will
go on. American life will go on. There will be no army of Muslims, terrorists, Syrians, ISISians, Russians, Chinese, drug dealers,
or illegal immigrants coming to get us and take over the reins of the IRS.
Why is that an important point? Because it shows that no matter what happens in Syria or the rest of the Middle East, life will
continue here in the United States. Even if Russia gets to continue controlling Syria, that's not going to result in a conquest of
the United States. The same holds true if ISIS, say, takes over Iraq. Or if Turkey ends up killing lots of Kurds. Or if Syria ends
up protecting the Kurds. Or if Iran continues to be controlled by a theocratic state. Or if the Russians retake control over Ukraine.
It was no different than when North Vietnam ended up winning the Vietnamese civil war. The dominoes did not fall onto the United
States and make America Red. It also makes no difference if Egypt continues to be controlled by a brutal military dictatorship. Or
that Cuba, North Korea, and China are controlled by communist regimes. Or that Russia is controlled by an authoritarian regime. Or
that Myanmar (Burma) is controlled by a totalitarian military regime. America and the federal government will continue standing.
America was founded as a limited government republic, one that did not send its military forces around the world to slay monsters.
That's not to say that bad things didn't happen around the world. Bad things have always happened around the world. Dictatorships.
Famines. Wars. Civil wars. Revolutions. Empires. Torture. Extra-judicial executions. Tyranny. Oppression. The policy of the United
States was that it would not go abroad to fix or clear up those types of things.
All that changed with the conversion of the federal government to a national-security state and with the adoption of a pro-empire,
pro-intervention foreign policy. When that happened, the U.S. government assumed the duty to fix the wrongs of the world.
That's when U.S. officials began thinking in terms of empire and using empire-speak. Foreign regimes became "allies," "partners,"
and "friends." Others became "opponents," "rivals," or "enemies." Events thousands of miles away became threats to "national security."
That's when U.S. forces began invading and occupying other countries, waging wars of aggression against them, intervening in foreign
wars, revolutions, and civil wars, initiating coups, destroying democratic regimes, establishing an empire of domestic and foreign
military bases, and bombing, shooting, killing, assassinating, spying on, maiming, torturing, kidnapping, injuring, and destroying
people in countries all over the world.
The results of U.S. imperialism and interventionism have always been perverse, not only for foreigners but also for Americans.
That's how Americans have ended up with out-of-control federal spending and debt that have left much of the middle class high and
dry, unable to support themselves in their senior years, unable to save a nest egg for financial emergencies, and living paycheck
to paycheck. Empire and interventionism do not come cheap.
The shift toward empire and interventionism has brought about the destruction of American liberty and privacy here at home. That's
what the assassinations, secret surveillance, torture, and indefinite detentions of American citizens are all about -- to supposedly
protect us from the dangers produced by U.S. imperialism and interventionism abroad. One might call it waging perpetual war for freedom
and peace, both here and abroad.
There is but one solution to all this chaos and mayhem -- the dismantling, not the reform, of the Pentagon, the military-industrial
complex, the vast empire of foreign and domestic military bases, and the NSA, along with an immediate end to all foreign interventionism.
A free, peaceful, prosperous, and harmonious society necessarily entails the restoration of a limited-government republic and a non-interventionist
foreign policy to our land.
"... Whilst the are absorbing that part of their country the battle of Iblib will restart. After that they can move their attention south and southeast, al-Tanf and the oilfields. I can't see how the US will be able to stop them but at least they will have time to plan their exit. ..."
"... At the moment the Syrian Government has enough oil, it is getting it from Iran via a steady stream of SUEZMAX tankers. The cost, either in terms of money or quid pro quo, is unknown. ..."
"... For those who have wondered as to why the DC FedRegime would fight over the tiny relative-to-FUKUS's-needs amount of oil in the Syrian oilfields. It is clearly to keep the SAR hobbled, crippled and too impoverished to retake all its territory or even to restore social, civic and economic functionality to the parts it retains. FUKUS is still committed to the policy of FUKUSing Syria. ..."
"... This President appears at times to recognize the reality of nation states and the meaning of national sovereignty. He needs to understand that on principle, not merely on gut instinct. President Trump's press conference today focused in one section on a simple fact -- saving the lives of Americans. Gen. Jack Keane, Sen. Lindsay Graham, and other gamers who think they are running an imperial chessboard where they can use living soldiers as American pawns, are a menace. Thanks Col. Lang for calling out these lunatics. ..."
"... During the 2016 election, Jack Keane and John Bolton were the two people Trump mentioned when asked who he listens to on foreign affairs/military policy. ..."
"... The crumbling apart is apparent. I don't know in what delusional world can conceive that 200 soldiers in the middle of the desert can deny Syria possession of their oil fields or keep the road between Bagdad and Damascus cut. All the West's Decision Makers can do is threaten to blow up the world. ..."
"... Corporate Overlords imposed austerity, outsourced industry and cut taxes to get richer, but the one thing for certain is that they can't keep their wealth without laws, the police and the military to protect them. ..."
"... Latin America is burning too - although the elites here have plundered and imposed structural plunder for too long. No matter where you are it .. Chile poster of the right, or Ecuador, Peru, etc ..."
"... Did you notice the Middle East Monitor article on October 21 reporting that the UAE has released to Iran $700 million in previously frozen funds? ..."
"... Yet in early September, Sigal Mandelker, a senior US Treasury official, was in the UAE pressing CEOs there to tighten the financial screws on Iran. The visit was deemed a success. During this visit she was quoted as saying that the Treasury has issued over 30 rounds of curbs targeting Iran-related entities. That would include targeting shipping companies and banks. ..."
"... It depends on who will be the democratic ticket .. will it mobilize the basis? I think the compromise candidate is Warren, but she looks to me a lot like John Kerry, Al Gore.. representing the professional, college educated segment of society, and that doesn't cut it. ..."
"... Trump is far from consistent. This is the man who attacked Syria twice on the basis of lies so transparent that my youngest housecat would have seen through them, and who tried and failed to leave Syria twice, then said he was "100%" for the continued occupation of Syria. ..."
"... He could have given the order to leave Syria this month, but Trump did not. Instead, he simply ordered withdrawal to a smaller zone of occupation, and that under duress. ..."
"... The Great Trumpian Mystery. I don't pretend to understand but I'm intrigued by his inconsistent inconsistencies. https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2019/03/17/trump-mysteries-inconsistent-inconsistencies/ ..."
"... It probably should come as no surprise to us that Trump is having small, but not no, success in getting the ship to alter course - too many deeply entrenched interests with no incentive to recognize their failures and every incentive to stay the course by removing, or at least handicapping the President who was elected on a platform of change. ..."
"... Whether the country elected the right man for the job remains to be seen. At times he appears to be his own worst enemy and his appointments are frequently topsy-- turvy to the platform he ran on but he does have his moments of success. He called off the dumb plan to go to war with Iran, albeit at 20 minutes to mid night and he is trying hard against the full might of the Borg to withdraw from Syria in accord with our actual interests. Trumps, alas, assumed office with no political friends, only enemies with varying degrees of Trump hate depending on how they define their political interests. ..."
"... Keane manipulated Trump by aggravating his animosity towards Iran, more specifically, his animosity towards Obama's JCPOA. I doubt Trump can see beyond his personal animus towards Obama and his legacy. He doesn't care about Iran, the Shia Crescent, the oil or even the jihadis any more than he cares about ditching the Kurds. This administration doesn't need a national security advisor, it needs a psychiatrist. ..."
"... IMO Trump cares about what Sheldon Adelson wants and Adelson wants to destroy Iran: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6sCW4IasWXc Note the audience applause ..."
"... The difference between the reality that we perceive and the way it is portrayed in the media is so stark that sometimes I am not sure whether it is me who is insane or the world - the MSM and the cool-aid drinking libtards whose animosity against Trump won't let them distinguish black from white. Not that they were ever able to understand the real state of affairs. Discussions with them have always been about them regurgitating the MSM talking points without understanding any of it. ..."
"... "This administration doesn't need a national security advisor, it needs a psychiatrist." I think TTG speaks the truth. ..."
"... On Monday, 21 October, president Trump "authorized $4.5 million in direct support to the Syria Civil Defense (SCD)", a/k/a the White Helmets, who have been discussed here on SST before-- https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/statement-press-secretary-89/ ..."
"... TTG IMO you and the other NEVER Trumpers are confused about the presence in both the permanent and appointed government of people who while they are not loyal to him nevertheless covet access to power. A lot of neocons and Zionists are among them. ..."
"... ANDREW BACEVICH: First of all, I think we should avoid taking anything that he says at any particular moment too seriously. Clearly, he is all over the map on almost any issue that you can name. I found his comment about taking the oil in that part of Syria, as if we are going to decide how to dispose of it, to be striking. And yet of course it sort of harkens back to his campaign statement about the Iraq war, that we ought to have taken Iraq's oil is a way of paying for that war. So I just caution against taking anything he says that seriously. ..."
"... That said, clearly a recurring theme to which he returns over and over and over again, is his determination to end what he calls endless wars. He clearly has no particular strategy or plan for how to do that, but he does seem to be insistent on pursuing that objective. And here I think we begin to get to the real significance of the controversy over Syria in our abandonment of the Kurds ..."
"... the controversy has gotten as big as it is in part because members of the foreign policy establishment in both parties are concerned about what an effort to end endless wars would mean for the larger architecture of U.S. national security policy, which has been based on keeping U.S. troops in hundreds of bases around the world, maintaining the huge military budget, a pattern of interventionism. Trump seems to think that that has been a mistake, particularly in the Middle East. I happen to agree with that critique. And I think that it is a fear that he could somehow engineer a fundamental change in U.S. policy is what really has the foreign policy establishment nervous. ..."
"... we created the problems that exist today through our reckless use of American military power. ..."
"... He let them roll him, just like Obama and so many others. Just a different set of rollers. ..."
"Joltin" Jack Keane, General (ret.), Fox Business Senior Strategery Analyst, Chairman of the
Board of the Kagan run neocon "Institute for the Study of War" (ISW) and Graduate
Extraordinaire of Fordham University, was on with Lou Dobbs last night. Dobbs appears to have
developed a deep suspicion of this paladin. He stood up to Keane remarkably well. This was
refreshing in light of the fawning deference paid to Keane by all the rest of the Fox crew.
In the course of this dialogue Keane let slip the slightly disguised truth that he and the
other warmongers want to keep something like 200 US soldiers and airmen in Syria east of the
Euphrates so that they can keep Iran or any other "Iranian proxy forces" from crossing the
Euphrates from SAG controlled territory to take control of Syrian sovereign territory and the
oil and gas deposits that are rightly the property of the Syrian people and their government
owned oil company. The map above shows how many of these resources are east of the Euphrates.
Pilgrims! It is not a lot of oil and gas judged by global needs and markets, but to Syria and
its prospects for reconstruction it is a hell of a lot!
Keane was clear that what he means by "Iranian proxy forces" is the Syrian Arab Army, the
national army of that country. If they dare cross the river, to rest in the shade of their own
palm trees, then in his opinion the air forces of FUKUS should attack them and any 3rd party
air forces (Russia) who support them
This morning, on said Fox Business News with Charles Payne, Keane was even clearer and
stated specifically that if "Syria" tries to cross the river they must be fought.
IMO he and Lindsey Graham are raving lunatics brainwashed for years with the Iran obsession
and they are a danger to us all. pl
If only General Keane was as willing to defend America and America's oil on the Texas-Mexico
border. Or hasn't anyone noticed that Mexico just a lost a battle with the Sinaloa drug
cartel?
I view them as selling their Soul for a dollar. Keane comes across as dense enough to believe
his bile but Graham comes across as an opportunist without any real ideology except power.
Its probably one step at a time for the Syrians, although the sudden move over the past
couple of weeks must have been a bit of a God given opportunity for them.
Whilst the are absorbing that part of their country the battle of Iblib will restart.
After that they can move their attention south and southeast, al-Tanf and the oilfields. I
can't see how the US will be able to stop them but at least they will have time to plan their
exit.
As I posted in the other thread, the Syrian Government is the only real customer for their
oil and the Kurds already have a profit share agreement in place, so the US, if they allow
any oil out, will effectively be protecting the fields on behalf of Assad. Surely not what
Congress wants?
At the moment the Syrian Government has enough oil, it is getting it from Iran via a
steady stream of SUEZMAX tankers. The cost, either in terms of money or quid pro quo, is
unknown.
I think this might be President Putin's next problem to solve. As far as I know, there is no
legal reason for us to be there, not humanitarian, not strategic not even tactical. We simply
are playing dog-in-the-manger.
My guess is that we will receive an offer to good to refuse from Putin.
For those who have wondered as to why the DC FedRegime would fight over the tiny
relative-to-FUKUS's-needs amount of oil in the Syrian oilfields. It is clearly to keep the
SAR hobbled, crippled and too impoverished to retake all its territory or even to restore
social, civic and economic functionality to the parts it retains. FUKUS is still committed to
the policy of FUKUSing Syria.
Why is the Champs Elise' Regime still committed to putting the F in UKUS?
(I can understand why UKUS would want to keep France involved. Without France, certain nasty
people might re-brand UKUS as USUK. And that would be very not nice.)
Because France wants to be on the good side of the United States, and as you indicate, the
United States is in Syria to turn that country into a failed state and for no other reason.
A good antidote for Joltin' Jack Keane's madness would be for Lou Dobbs and other mainstream
media (MSM) to have Col Pat Lang as the commentator for analysis of the Syrian situation.
Readers of this blog are undoubtedly aware that Col. Lang's knowledge of the peoples of the
region and their customs is a national treasure.
This President appears at times to recognize the reality of nation states and the meaning
of national sovereignty. He needs to understand that on principle, not merely on gut
instinct. President Trump's press conference today focused in one section on a simple fact --
saving the lives of Americans. Gen. Jack Keane,
Sen. Lindsay Graham, and other gamers who think they are running an imperial chessboard where
they can use living soldiers as American pawns, are a menace. Thanks Col. Lang for calling out these lunatics.
In WWI millions of soldiers died fighting for imperial designs. They did not know it. They
thought they were fighting for democracy, or to stop the spread of evil, or save their
country. They were not. Secret treaties signed before the war started stated explicitly what
the war was about.
Now "representatives" of the military, up to and including the Commander in Chief say it's
about conquest, oil. The cards of the elite are on the table. How do you account for this?
During the 2016 election, Jack Keane and John Bolton were the two people Trump mentioned when
asked who he listens to on foreign affairs/military policy.
The crumbling apart is apparent. I don't know in what delusional world can conceive that
200 soldiers in the middle of the desert can deny Syria possession of their oil fields or
keep the road between Bagdad and Damascus cut. All the West's Decision Makers can do is
threaten to blow up the world.
Justin Trudeau was elected Monday in Canada with a minority in Parliament joining the
United Kingdom and Israel with governments without a majority's mandate. Donald Trump's
impeachment escalates. MbS is nearing a meat hook in Saudi Arabia. This is not a coincidence.
The Elites' flushing government down the drain succeeded.
Corporate Overlords imposed austerity, outsourced industry and cut taxes to get richer,
but the one thing for certain is that they can't keep their wealth without laws, the police
and the military to protect them. Already California electricity is being cut off for a
second time due to wildfires and PG&E's corporate looting. The Sinaloa shootout reminds
me of the firefight in the first season of "True Detectives" when the outgunned LA cops tried
to go after the Cartel. The writing is on the wall, California is next. Who will the lawmen
serve and protect? Their people or the rich? Without the law, justice and order, there is
chaos.
Latin America is burning too - although the elites here have plundered and imposed structural
plunder for too long. No matter where you are it .. Chile poster of the right, or Ecuador,
Peru, etc
No doubt that Keane and his ilk want endless war and view Trump as a growing obstacle. Trump
is consistent: He wanted out of JCPOA, and after being stalled by his national security
advisors, he finally reached the boiling point and left. The advisors who counseled against
this are all gone. With Pompeo, Enders and O'Brien as the new key security advisors, I doubt
Trump got as much push back. He wanted out of Syria in December 2018 and was slow-walked.
Didn't anyone think he'd come back at some point and revive the order to pull out? The talk
with Erdogan, the continuing Trump view that Russia, Turkey, Syria, Iran and Saudi Arabia
should bear the burden of sorting out what is left of the Syria war, so long as ISIS does not
see a revival, all have been clear for a long time.
My concern is with Lindsey Graham, who is smarter and nastier than Jack Keane. He is also
Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee and may hold some blackmail leverage over the
President. If the House votes up impeachment articles, Graham will be overseeing the Senate
trial. A break from Trump by Graham could lead to a GOP Senate stampede for conviction. No
one will say this openly, as I am, but it cannot be ignored as a factor for "controlling"
Trump and keeping as much of the permanent war machine running as possible.
Trump has committed the United States to a long war against the Shia Crescent. He has ceded
to Turkey on Syrian Kurds, but has continued with his operations against SAR. US needs
Turkey, Erdogan knows that. Likewise in regards to Russia, EU, and Iran. Turkey, as is said
in Persian, has grown a tail.
Did you notice the Middle East Monitor article on October 21 reporting that the UAE has
released to Iran $700 million in previously frozen funds?
Yet in early September, Sigal Mandelker, a senior US Treasury official, was in the UAE
pressing CEOs there to tighten the financial screws on Iran. The visit was deemed a success.
During this visit she was quoted as saying that the Treasury has issued over 30 rounds of
curbs targeting Iran-related entities. That would include targeting shipping companies and
banks.
It was also reported in September that in Dubai that recent US Treasury sanctions were
beginning to have a devastating effect. Iranian businessmen were being squeezed out. Even
leaving the Emirates. Yet only a few days ago--a month later-- there are now reports that
Iranian exchange bureaus have suddenly reopened in Dubai after a long period of closure.
Also, billions of dollars in contracts were signed between Russia, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE
during Putin's recent visit to the region. It seems to me that this is real news. Something
big seems to be happening. It looks to me as if there could be a serious confrontation
between the Trump administration and MBZ in the offing.
Do you have an opinion on the Iranian situation in Dubai at the moment?
I have my doubt that Sen. Graham will lead any revolt, but if it starts to look like Trump
will lose big next year, there will be a stampede looking like the Nile getting through a
cataract.
They will not want to go down the tube with Trump. I still maintain that there is a good
reason for him to resign before he loses an election or an impeachment. It will come down to
the price.
Lose big to whom in the next election? Biden got 300 people to show up for his rally in his hometown of Scranton and he is
supposedly the front runner. Bernie got 20,000 to show up at his rally in NY when he was
endorsed by The Squad and Michael Moore. Do you think the Dem establishment will allow him to
be the nominee?
Trump in contrast routinely can fill up stadiums with 30,000 people. That was the
indicator in the last election, not the polls. Recall the NY Times forecasting Hillary with a
95% probability of winning the day before the election.
As Rep. Al Green noted , the only way the Democrats can stop him is for the Senate to
convict him in an impeachment trial. Who do you believe are the 20 Republican senators that
will vote to convict?
Trump barely won the last time and while he currently has wide support in the GOP, it is not
nearly as deep as his cultists believe. When half the country, and growing, want him removed,
there is trouble ahead. Republicans are largely herd animals and if spooked, will create a
stampede.
You can tell that there are problems when his congressional enablers are not defending him
on facts and just using gripes about processes that they themselves have used in the past. In
addition to circus acts.
I realize that many do not want to admit that they made a mistake by voting for him. I am
not so sure they want to repeat that mistake.
It depends on who will be the democratic ticket .. will it mobilize the basis? I think the
compromise candidate is Warren, but she looks to me a lot like John Kerry, Al Gore..
representing the professional, college educated segment of society, and that doesn't cut it.
It's not a question if he barely won. The fact is he competed with many other Republican
candidates including governors and senators and even one with the name Bush. He was 1% in the
polls in the summer of 2016 and went on to win the Republican nomination despite the intense
opposition of the Republican establishment. He then goes on to win the general election
defeating a well funded Hillary with all her credentials and the full backing of the vast
majority of the media. That is an amazing achievement for someone running for public office
for the first time. Like him or hate him, you have to give credit where it's due. Winning an
election for the presidency is no small feat.
There only two ways to defeat him. First, the Senate convicts him in an impeachment trial
which will require at least 20 Republican senators. Who are they? Second, a Democrat in the
general election. Who? I can see Bernie with a possibility since he has enthusiastic
supporters. But will the Democrat establishment allow him to win the nomination?
We're no longer having to listen to Yosemite Sam Bolton. His BFF Graham is left to fight on
his own. I don't think Trump feels the need to pay that much attention to Graham. He didn't
worry about him during the primary when Graham always seemed to be on the verge of crying
when he was asked questions.
Trump is far from consistent. This is the man who attacked Syria twice on the basis of lies
so transparent that my youngest housecat would have seen through them, and who tried and
failed to leave Syria twice, then said he was "100%" for the continued occupation of Syria.
He could have given the order to leave Syria this month, but Trump did not. Instead, he
simply ordered withdrawal to a smaller zone of occupation, and that under duress.
What the Colonel calls the Borg is akin to an aircraft carrier that has been steaming at near
flank speed for many years too long, gathering mass and momentum since the end of Cold War I.
With the exception of Gulf War I, none of our interventions have gone well, and even the
putative peace at the end of GUlf War I wasn't managed well because it eventuated in Gulf War
Ii which has been worst than a disaster because the disaster taught the Borg nothing and
became midwife to additional disasters.
It probably should come as no surprise to us that
Trump is having small, but not no, success in getting the ship to alter course - too many
deeply entrenched interests with no incentive to recognize their failures and every incentive
to stay the course by removing, or at least handicapping the President who was elected on a
platform of change.
Whether the country elected the right man for the job remains to be seen.
At times he appears to be his own worst enemy and his appointments are frequently topsy--
turvy to the platform he ran on but he does have his moments of success. He called off the
dumb plan to go to war with Iran, albeit at 20 minutes to mid night and he is trying hard
against the full might of the Borg to withdraw from Syria in accord with our actual
interests. Trumps, alas, assumed office with no political friends, only enemies with varying
degrees of Trump hate depending on how they define their political interests.
With that said, I doubt very much whether the Republicans in the Senate will abandon Trump in
an impeachment trial. Trump's argument that the process is a political coup is arguably
completely true, or certainly true enough that his political base in the electorate will not
tolerate his abandonment by Republican politicians inside the Beltway. I think there is even
some chance that Trump, were he to be removed from office by what could be credibly portrayed
as a political coup, would consider running in 2020 as an independent. The damage that would
cause to the Republican Party would be severe, pervasive, and possibly fatal to the Party as
such. I doubt Beltway pols would be willing to take that chance.
I don't think Keane or Trump are focused on the oil. Keane just used that as a lens to focus
Trump on Iran. That's the true sickness. Keane manipulated Trump by aggravating his animosity
towards Iran, more specifically, his animosity towards Obama's JCPOA. I doubt Trump can see
beyond his personal animus towards Obama and his legacy. He doesn't care about Iran, the Shia
Crescent, the oil or even the jihadis any more than he cares about ditching the Kurds. This
administration doesn't need a national security advisor, it needs a psychiatrist.
And in response, Russia killed and captured hundreds of US Special forces and PMC's alongside
SAS in East Ghouta . It is said that the abrupt russian op on East Ghouta was a response to
the Battle of Khasham.
The difference between the reality that we perceive and the way it is portrayed in the media
is so stark that sometimes I am not sure whether it is me who is insane or the world - the
MSM and the cool-aid drinking libtards whose animosity against Trump won't let them
distinguish black from white. Not that they were ever able to understand the real state of
affairs. Discussions with them have always been about them regurgitating the MSM talking
points without understanding any of it.
While it will always be mystifying to me why so many people on the street blindly support
America fighting and dying in the middle east, the support of the MSM and the paid hacks for
eternal war is no surprise. I hope they get to send their children and grandchildren to these
wars. More than that, I hope we get out of these wars. Trump might be able to put an end to
it, and not just in Syria, if he wins a second term, which he will if he is allowed to
contest the next election. There is however a chance that the borg will pull the rug from
under him and bar him from the elections. Hope that doesn't come to pass.
No, they just have to sit there and be an excuse to fly Coalition CAPs that would effectively
prevent SAA from crossing the Euphrates in strength. Feasible until the SAA finishes with
Idlib and moves some of its new Russian anti-aircraft toys down to Deir Ezzor.
TTG IMO you and the other NEVER Trumpers are confused about the presence in both the
permanent and appointed government of people who while they are not loyal to him nevertheless
covet access to power. A lot of neocons and Zionists are among them.
Colonel Lang, I am well aware of the power seekers who gravitate towards Trump or whoever
holds power not out of loyalty, but because they covet access to power. The neocons and
Zionists flock to Trump because they can manipulate him to do their bidding. That fact
certainly doesn't make me feel any better about Trump as President. The man needs help.
you are an experienced clan case officer. You do not know that most people are more than a
little mad? Hillary is more than a little nuts. Obama was so desperately neurotically in need
of White approval that he let the WP COIN generals talk him into a COIN war in Afghanistan. I
was part of that discussion. All that mattered to him was their approval. FDR could not be
trusted with SIGINT product and so Marshall never gave him any, etc., George Bush 41 told me
that he deliberately mis-pronounced Saddam's name to hurt his feelings. Georgie Junior let
the lunatic neocons invade a country that had not attacked us. Trump is no worse than many of
our politicians, or politicians anywhere. Britain? The Brexit disaster speaks for itself, And
then there is the British monarchy in which a princeling devastated by the sure DNA proof
that he is illegitimate is acting like a fool. The list is endless.
CK, the people surrounding Trump are largely appointees. Keane doesn't have to be let into
the WH. His problem is that those who would appeal to his non-neocon tendencies are not
people he wants to have around him. Gabbard, for instance, would be perfect for helping Trump
get ourselves out of the ME, is a progressive. Non-interventionists are hard to come by.
Those who he does surround himself with are using him for their own ideologies, mostly neocon
and Zionist.
Bacevich interview:
> Andrew Bacevich, can you respond to President Trump pulling the U.S. troops away from
this area of northern Syria, though saying he will keep them to guard oil fields?
> ANDREW BACEVICH: First of all, I think we should avoid taking anything that he says at
any particular moment too seriously. Clearly, he is all over the map on almost any issue that
you can name. I found his comment about taking the oil in that part of Syria, as if we are
going to decide how to dispose of it, to be striking. And yet of course it sort of harkens
back to his campaign statement about the Iraq war, that we ought to have taken Iraq's oil is
a way of paying for that war. So I just caution against taking anything he says that
seriously.
> That said, clearly a recurring theme to which he returns over and over and over again,
is his determination to end what he calls endless wars. He clearly has no particular strategy
or plan for how to do that, but he does seem to be insistent on pursuing that objective. And
here I think we begin to get to the real significance of the controversy over Syria in our
abandonment of the Kurds.
> Let's stipulate. U.S. abandonment of the Kurds was wrong, it was callous, it was
immoral. It was not the first betrayal by the United States in our history, but the fact that
there were others certainly doesn't excuse this one. But apart from those concerned about the
humanitarian aspect of this crisis -- and not for a second do I question the sincerity of
people who are worried about the Kurds -- it seems to me that the controversy has gotten as
big as it is in part because members of the foreign policy establishment in both parties are
concerned about what an effort to end endless wars would mean for the larger architecture of
U.S. national security policy, which has been based on keeping U.S. troops in hundreds of
bases around the world, maintaining the huge military budget, a pattern of interventionism.
Trump seems to think that that has been a mistake, particularly in the Middle East. I happen
to agree with that critique. And I think that it is a fear that he could somehow engineer a
fundamental change in U.S. policy is what really has the foreign policy establishment
nervous.
> NERMEEN SHAIKH: As you mentioned, Professor Bacevich, Trump has come under bipartisan
criticism for this decision to withdraw troops from northern Syria. Senate Majority Leader
Mitch McConnell was one of the many Republicans to criticize Trump for his decision. In an
opinion piece in The Washington Post McConnell writes, quote, "We saw humanitarian disaster
and a terrorist free-for-all after we abandoned Afghanistan in the 1990s, laying the
groundwork for 9/11. We saw the Islamic State flourish in Iraq after President Barack Obama's
retreat. We will see these things anew in Syria and Afghanistan if we abandon our partners
and retreat from these conflicts before they are won." He also writes, quote, "As
neo-isolationism rears its head on both the left and the right, we can expect to hear more
talk of 'endless wars.' But rhetoric cannot change the fact that wars do not just end; wars
are won or lost." So Professor Bacevich, could you respond to that, and how accurate you
think an assessment of that is? Both what he says about Afghanistan and what is likely to
happen now with U.S. withdrawal.
> ANDREW BACEVICH: I think in any discussion of our wars, ongoing wars, it is important to
set them in some broader historical context than Senator McConnell will probably entertain. I
mean, to a very great extent -- not entirely, but to a very great extent -- we created the
problems that exist today through our reckless use of American military power.
> People like McConnell, and I think other members of the political establishment, even
members of the mainstream media -- _The New York Times_, The Washington Post -- have yet to
reckon with the catastrophic consequences of the U.S. invasion of Iraq back in 2003. And if
you focus your attention at that start point -- you could choose another start point, but if
you focus your attention at that start point, then it seems to me that leads you to a
different conclusion about the crisis that we are dealing with right now. That is to say,
people like McConnell want to stay the course. They want to maintain the U.S. presence in
Syria. U.S. military presence. But if we look at what the U.S. military presence in that
region, not simply Syria, has produced over the course of almost two decades, then you have
to ask yourself, how is it that we think that simply staying the course is going to produce
any more positive results?
> It is appalling what Turkey has done to Syrian Kurds and the casualties they have
inflicted and the number of people that have been displaced. But guess what? The casualties
that we inflicted and the number of people that we displaced far outnumbers what Turkey has
done over the last week or so. So I think that we need to push back against this tendency to
oversimplify the circumstance, because oversimplifying the circumstance doesn't help us fully
appreciate the causes of this mess that we're in.
In addition to oil from Iran, Assad also gets oil from the SDF and the Kurds. Supposedly a
profit sharing arrangement as commented on by JohninMK in a previous post.
This oil sharing deal was also mentioned by Global Research and Southfront back in June of
2018:
Colonel Lang, the only way to "overthrow" Trump is through impeachment in the House and
conviction in the Senate. That is a Constitutional process, not a coup. The process is
intentionally difficult. Was the impeachment of Clinton an attempted coup?
In the first place isn't the dissolution of Ukraine and Syria and Iraq and Libya and Yemen
exactly what we have wished to achieve, and wouldn't an intelligent observer, such as
Vladimir Putin, want to do exactly the same thing to us, and hasn't he come very close to
witnessing the achievement of this aim whether he is personally involved or not? What goes
around comes around?
But that is relatively unimportant compared to the question whether dissolution of the
Union is a bad thing or a good thing. Preserving it cost 600,000 lives the first time. One
additional life would be one additional life too many. Ukraine is an excellent example.
Western Ukraine has a long history support for Nazi's. Eastern Ukraine is Russian. Must a war
be fought to bring them together? Or should they be permitted to go their separate ways?
As Hector said of Helen of Troy, "She is not worth what she doth cost the keeping."
After hanging up from a call to Putin, thanking him for Russia's help with the Turks, YPG
leader Mazloum Kobane returned to the Senate hearings in which he alternately reminded his
flecless American allies of their failure, not only to protect Rojava from the Turks, but
didn't even give them a heads up about what was about to happen and begged an already angry
[at Trump] Senate about their urgent need for a continued American presence in the territory.
It seems that some in the USG do not understand that all the land on the east bank of the
Euphrates is "Rojava" or somehow is the mandate of the Kurds to continue to control. For a
long time, now, the mainly Arab population of that region have been chafing under what is
actually Kurdish rule. This could be a a trigger for ISIS or some other jihadis to launch
another insurgency, or at the least, low level attacks, especially in Rojava to the
north.
To remind, the USG is not using military personnel, but also contracts, about 200 troops in
one field and 400 contractors in the other.
There is video of the SAA escorting the Americans to the Iraqi border. PM Abdel Hadi has
reiterated that the US cannot keep these troops in Iraq, as they go beyond the agreed upon
number. It is quite likely that the anti-Iranian aspect of the border region is NOT something
they wish to see.
"Iranian proxies" refers to Hezbollah, the various Shia militia groups from Pakistan and
Afghanistan, and of course, others, not the SAA.
1. CIA, Hillary Clinton, 'Rothschild-Octopus' money power. Altogether, British Israel
(Zionism).
2. Pentagon-NSA, Donald Trump, second tier elites including, for example, Sheldon Adelson.
Altogether, Israel (and the USA) First.
If these are the primary factions vying for control of the New World Order, why did HRC
throw Tulsi such a honkin' big bone by calling her a Russian asset?
Clinton has endorsed Gabbard in the same way Catholicism endorses sin: ergo, there is a
working agreement between all Globalist factions for a final settlement of WW3.
Or is there a better explanation for HRC's non endorsement endorsement of TG?
Should we also mention both are card carrying members of the Council on Foreign
Relations?
Understanding we are ruled by a duopoly of 1st and 2nd tier elites is essential piecing
together who represents whom - and what it means for the vast majority of humanity, which
remains generally ignorant and utterly voiceless.
Class is everything, which is why both Globalizing tiers have agreed to, amongst other
things, pretend we don't exist. Clinton threw Tulsi a bone so that Tulsi could throw us
another, but it all counts for nothing when the bill for elite criminality comes due. Both
factions agree that We the People, the unrepresented Third Estate, will be paying for
everything.
...buried in Donald Trump's address is a clarion call to reject transnationalism and to
re-embrace a world of sovereign nation-states that cherish their independence and unique
identities.
Western man has engaged in this great quarrel since Woodrow Wilson declared America would
fight in the Great War, not for any selfish interests, but "to make the world safe for
democracy."
Our imperialist allies, Britain, France, Russia, Japan, regarded this as self-righteous
claptrap and proceeded to rip apart Germany, Austria, Hungary and the Ottoman Empire and to
feast on their colonies.
After World War II, Jean Monnet, father of the EU, wanted Europe's nations to yield up their
sovereignty and form a federal union like the USA.
Europe's nations would slowly sink and dissolve in a single polity that would mark a giant
leap forward toward world government -- Alfred, Lord Tennyson's "Parliament of man, the
Federation of the world."
Charles De Gaulle lead the resistance, calling for "a Europe of nation-states from the
Atlantic to the Urals."
For 50 years, the Gaullists were in constant retreat. The Germans especially, given their
past, seemed desirous of losing their national identity and disappearing inside the new
Europe.
Today, the Gaullist vision is ascendant.
"We do not expect diverse countries to share the same cultures, traditions, or even
systems of government," said Trump at the U.N. "Strong sovereign nations let diverse countries
with different values, different cultures, and different dreams not just coexist, but work side
by side on the basis of mutual respect.
"In America, we do not seek to impose our way of life on anyone, but rather to let it shine
as an example for everyone to watch."
Translation: We Americans have created something unique in history. But we do not assert
that we should serve as a model for mankind. Among the 190 nations, others have evolved in
different ways from diverse cultures, histories, traditions. We may reject their values but we
have no God-given right to impose ours upon them.
It is difficult to reconcile Trump's belief in self-determination with a National
Endowment for Democracy whose reason for being is to interfere in the politics of other nations
to make them more like us.
Trump's idea of patriotism has deep roots in America's past. After the uprisings of 1848
against the royal houses of Europe failed, Lajos Kossuth came to seek support for the cause of
Hungarian democracy. He was wildly welcomed and hailed by Secretary of State Daniel Webster.
But Henry Clay, more true to the principles of Washington's Farewell Address, admonished
Kossuth:
"Far better is it for ourselves, for Hungary, and for the cause of liberty that, adhering to
our wise, pacific system, and avoiding the distant wars of Europe, we should keep our lamp
burning brightly on the western shore as a light to all nations, than to hazard its utter
extinction amid the ruins of fallen or falling republics in Europe."
Trump's U.N. address echoed Clay: "In foreign affairs, we are renewing this founding
principle of sovereignty. Our government's first duty is to its people to serve their needs, to
ensure their safety, to preserve their rights, and to defend their values."
Trump is saying with John Quincy Adams that our mission is not to go "abroad in search of
monsters to destroy," but to "put America first." He is repudiating the New World Order of Bush
I, the democracy crusades of the neocons of the Bush II era, and the globaloney of Obama.
Trump's rhetoric implies intent; and action is evident from Rex Tillerson's directive to
his department to rewrite its mission statement -- and drop the bit about making the world
democratic. The current statement reads: "The Department's mission is to shape and sustain a
peaceful, prosperous, just, and democratic world." Tillerson should stand his ground. For
America has no divinely mandated mission to democratize mankind. And the hubristic idea that we
do has been a cause of all the wars and disasters that have lately befallen the republic. If we
do not cure ourselves of this interventionist addiction, it will end our republic. When did we
dethrone our God and divinize democracy?
And are 21st-century American values really universal values?
At least Mr. Buchanan's latest column has no Establishment horsefeathers about Russian
"hacking" of our precious democracy. However, doesn't he yet realize that there's usually
something for everyone in any formal address by President Trump?
The author can pluckily show how passages (apparently written by Stephen Miller?) are
consistent with America's founding principles, and perhaps an essay like this will reach and
enlighten others. But the President doesn't understand or hold those principles, as will once
again become evident in his own words thumbed into a so called smart phone and the actions of
an imperial Establishment for which he is, at best, nothing more than an embarrassing
annoyance.
"In America, we do not seek to impose our way of life on anyone, but rather to let it
shine as an example for everyone to watch."
Perhaps not, but we have been trying to impose (((American))) style democracy and
where/when that's not possible, puppet dictators. We claim to respect national sovereignty
but overthrew Saddam Hussein, helped overthrow Qadaffi, staged a color revolution in Ukraine,
seem to be undermining Maduro of Venezuela, are looking for ways to break the nuclear
agreement and reimpose sanctions on Iran and until recently, attempting to overthrow and
depose the duly elected leader of Syria which may still be in the works.
I guess the Jew(s) who wrote Trump's speech is hoping the world has amnesia. If Trump
truly means what he says then he will start closing our military bases and bringing our
troops home. His lofty words need to be matched by deeds.
If we ever want to overthrow any leader we just claim they are killing and torturing their
own people or possess unauthorized WMD. But if you are killing and torturing your people and
Israel likes you or doesn't feel threatened by you then we'll stand down.
And are 21st-century American values really universal values?
Should all nations embrace same-sex marriage, abortion on demand, and the separation of
church and state if that means, as it has come to mean here, the paganization of public
education and the public square?
the moral rot and spiritual sewage pumped out of ((Hollywood)) and ((Madison Ave.)) are
hardly pagan.
Paganism is a spiritual celebration of a people's blood and ancient Gods of lust,
fertility and heroism. The SJW of ((American)) culture today are the exact opposite of
paganism, as they wallow in blood-profaning 'diversity' and spiritual septic tanks of
homomania.
If freedom of speech and the press here have produced a popular culture that is an open
sewer and a politics of vilification and venom, why would we seek to impose this upon other
peoples?
it isn't freedom of speech or a free press that has produced the evils you speak of Pat,
but rather the consolidation of our press and media by the enemies of free speech. Duh.
For the State Department to declare America's mission to be to make all nations look
more like us might well be regarded as a uniquely American form of moral imperialism.
hardly moral imperialism, rather amoral imperialism.
promoting, indeed demanding moral rot and spiritual gangrene are ((America's)) exports
today, along with debt and bombs.
If Trump can somehow turn this situation around, and rein in the ((purveyors)) of hatred
and mass-murder, he'll be a modern day Charles [The Hammer] Martell. The Lion of the West,
and savior of Christendom and Europa.
An (unlikely) Second Coming of sorts, where Satan's nefarious rule is pushed back, and
humanity and Western civilization are once again free from the evils of Moloch's minion$.
Just imagine Putin in the East, and Trump in the West, and a healthy and ascendant Europe
in between, free from mass migrations and serial wars of ((imposed)) hatred and theft and
misery. Oy veh!
If a U.S. president calls an adversary "Rocket Man on a mission to suicide," and warns
his nation may be "totally destroyed,"
then it is quite irrelevant what else he says, because what's obvious is that he's
continuing his game of nuclear chicken with the North Korean regime, which is because he has
a problem with the fact that a country on the other side of a huge ocean is developing
nuclear weapons. Not very Gaullist, I think.
He was also threatening Iran, all the while lengthily admonishing Iran's leaders for their
form of government, for leading a "dictatorship", for having allegedly mismanaged their
country. This is not a Gaullist position at all, for example, quite the opposite.
At this stage trying to spin Trump utterances like that he might be a Gaullist is a complete
nonsense. His only redeeming value is that his enemies are who they are. Still as last
several months indicate Trump always ends up doing exactly what these "enemies" want.
http://patriotrising.com/2017/09/22/trump-hardly-knew-ye-bad-camelot-brief-shining-moment/
"Trump has unfortunately proven to be exactly what his detractors claimed he was; immature,
egotistical, unprincipled, vain, elitist. This certainly doesn't make most of his critics
any less offensive than they are. Indeed, that is the lone redeeming value of Trump's
administration; he continues to have all the right enemies. The threats of violence, even
assassination, from every pillar of the establishment almost make one want to continue to
defend him. Almost."
The US Multi-National Chamber of Commerce makes most of its money by arbitrage between
high price retailing to consumers in the USA and low cost manufacturing in China, et.al.. And
the C of C is nakedly buying the best Congressional GOP/RNC and DNC available and they're ALL
available.
This is called channel-stuffing. Stuff more people into the USA, get more arbitrage.
Then there's nakedly laundering payments to US corporations via "foreign aid." In every
case, the "aid" is either money to buy American weapons or such, or Uncle buys it himself and
sends it. Either way, the US Treasury borrows and spends .and US corporations collect.
In this regard, Uncle Sam is just like the typical college student or medical patient,
a means by which the supplier creates a conduit to the fruits of borrowed money.
Every bit of this grew up the last 36 years (well, it got way worse, anyway, from
poisonous seeds earlier) and it won't end until interest rates rise and choke off
borrowing.
This will happen when the Mass Mind finally awakens from a three and a half decade stupor
and realizes just what happened. Instead of empty platitudes about unpayable debts and
uncollectable pensions and future cash flows, the Mass Mind will SEE it clearly for the first
time.
Oh, the RAGE will be epic. I need to buy myself a cavern or old missile silo in which to
sit out the actions that will be animated by it.
I hope the economists and popular pundits who kept telling us debt was "no problem" are at
the head of the line when scapegoating gets REAL .
Western man has engaged in this great quarrel since Woodrow Wilson declared America would
fight in the Great War, not for any selfish interests, but "to make the world safe for
democracy."
To Wilson's credit, the logic of his argument was nationalist against imperialism. In
principle(if not in practice), he was calling for self-determination and national sovereignty
for all peoples of the world.
Wilson was NOT calling for wars to spread democracy. He was saying nations should
self-determine their own destinies and HOPEFULLY, democracy is the path they take.
In this sense. Bush and Neocons were not Wilsonian but closer to Teddy Rooseveltism that
was for empire and a World Club of Imperial Nations.
That said, Trump is a two-headed snake. Gaulle was a truly legendary leader. Trump is a
showman who has now cucked out to globalist. His rhetoric means nothing.
For 50 years, the Gaullists were in constant retreat. The Germans especially, given their
past, seemed desirous of losing their national identity and disappearing inside the new
Europe.
This makes no sense. The German Guilt in WWII was imperialism, not nationalism. They waged
war on nationalism all over Europe. They forced Poles, Ukrainians, Czechs, and etc to forgo
their identity and dissolve into German empire as helots.
Anti-Nazi struggle in WWII meant recovery of one's nation's sovereignty and
independence(though this was thwarted once again by Soviet domination of Eastern Europe).
Germans sure learned the wrong lesson. They no longer send armies to other nations, but
their message is the same to Poles, Hungarians, Greeks, and others.. SURRENDER YOUR
INDEPENDENCE AND SOVEREIGNTY AND BE RUN OVER BY FOREIGN INVADERS, this time Muslims and
Africans who are even worse than Germans.
They no longer send armies to other nations, but their message is the same to Poles,
Hungarians, Greeks, and others.. SURRENDER YOUR INDEPENDENCE AND SOVEREIGNTY AND BE RUN
OVER BY FOREIGN INVADERS,
agreed. now its more political and economic.
but to be fair, we dont know how much power Germany elites really have. how much of their
talk is really their views, vs how much is influenced from US/France/etc. do they want eu
seperate, do they want atlanticist eu-us connection?
i wonder how the demographic problems will play in the future. assuming projections are
right, slavic lands (especially between Germany and Russia) will have less people due to
fertility rates. will that be lebensraum for the new mixed society of germany?
Hey, if you don't like it "you're fired!" And you can't play football either! To think I once
was a Trump supporter Hillary or not, this guy is dangerous.
If freedom of speech and the press here have produced a popular culture that is an open
sewer and a politics of vilification and venom, why would we seek to impose this upon other
peoples?
Don't blame freedom of speech and the press for the popular culture that's an open [moral]
sewer; blame the self anointed money bag "elite" who control the press and much of everything
else whose "culture" has always been a sewer, albeit somewhat discreetly closed.
They say a fish rots from the head down, and evidently the rule has, and still does, apply
to human social systems as well.
The "why would we seek to impose this upon other peoples?" question is spot on,
however.
Neocons are lobbyists for MIC, the it is MIC that is the center of this this cult. People like Kriston, Kagan and Max Boot are
just well paid prostituttes on MIC, which includes intelligence agencies as a very important part -- the bridge to Wall Street so to
speak.
Being a neoconservative should receive at least as much vitriolic societal rejection as being a Ku Klux Klan member or a child
molester, but neocon pundits are routinely invited on mainstream television outlets to share their depraved perspectives.
Notable quotes:
"... Washington Post ..."
"... Neoconservatism is a psychopathic death cult whose relentless hyper-hawkishness is a greater threat to the survival of our species than anything else in the world right now. These people are traitors to humanity, and their ideology needs to be purged from the face of the earth forever. I'm not advocating violence of any kind here, but let's stop pretending that this is okay. Let's start calling these people the murderous psychopaths that they are whenever they rear their evil heads and stop respecting and legitimizing them. There should be a massive, massive social stigma around what these people do, so we need to create one. They should be marginalized, not leading us. ..."
Glenn Greenwald has just published a very important
article in The Intercept that I would have everyone in America read if I could. Titled "With New D.C. Policy Group,
Dems Continue to Rehabilitate and Unify With Bush-Era Neocons", Greenwald's excellent piece details the frustratingly under-reported
way that the leaders of the neoconservative death cult have been realigning with the Democratic party.
This pivot back to the party of neoconservatism's origin is one of the most significant political events of the new millennium,
but aside from a handful of sharp political analysts like Greenwald it's been going largely undiscussed. This is weird, and we need
to start talking about it. A lot. Their willful alignment with neoconservatism should be the very first thing anyone ever talks about
when discussing the Democratic party.
When you hear someone complaining that the Democratic party has no platform besides being anti-Trump, your response should be,
"Yeah it does. Their platform is the omnicidal death cult of neoconservatism."
It's absolutely insane that neoconservatism is still a thing, let alone still a thing that mainstream America tends to regard
as a perfectly legitimate set of opinions for a human being to have. As what Dr. Paul Craig Roberts rightly
calls "the most dangerous ideology that has ever
existed," neoconservatism has used its nonpartisan bloodlust to work with the Democratic party for the purpose of escalating tensions
with Russia on multiple fronts, bringing our species to the brink of what could very well end up being a
world war with a nuclear superpower and its allies.
This is not okay. Being a neoconservative should receive at least as much vitriolic societal rejection as being a Ku Klux Klan
member or a child molester, but neocon pundits are routinely invited on mainstream television outlets to share their depraved perspectives.
Check out leading neoconservative Bill Kristol's response to the aforementioned Intercept article:
... ... ...
Okay, leaving aside the fact that this bloodthirsty psychopath is saying neocons "won" a Cold War that neocons have deliberately
reignited by fanning the flames of the Russia hysteria and
pushing for more escalations , how insane is it that we live in a society where a public figure can just be like, "Yeah, I'm
a neocon, I advocate for using military aggression to maintain US hegemony and I think it's great," and have that be okay? These
people kill children. Neoconservatism means piles upon piles of child corpses. It means devoting the resources of a nation that won't
even provide its citizens with a real healthcare system to widespread warfare and all the death, destruction, chaos, terrorism, rape
and suffering that necessarily comes with war. The only way that you can possibly regard neoconservatism as just one more set of
political opinions is if you completely compartmentalize away from the reality of everything that it is.
This should not happen. The tensions with Russia that these monsters have worked so hard to escalate could blow up at any moment;
there are too many moving parts, too many things that could go wrong. The last Cold War brought our species
within a hair's
breadth of total annihilation due to our inability to foresee all possible complications which can arise from such a contest,
and these depraved death cultists are trying to drag us back into another one. Nothing is worth that. Nothing is worth risking the
life of every organism on earth, but they're risking it all for geopolitical influence.
... ... ...
I've had a very interesting last 24 hours. My
article about Senator John
McCain (which I titled "Please Just Fucking Die Already" because the title I really wanted to use seemed a bit crass) has received
an amount of attention that I'm not accustomed to, from
CNN to
USA Today to the
Washington Post . I watched Whoopi Goldberg and Joy Behar
talking about me on The View . They called me a "Bernie
Sanders person." It was a trip. Apparently some very low-level Republican with a few hundred Twitter followers went and retweeted
my article with an approving caption, and that sort of thing is worthy of coast-to-coast mainstream coverage in today's America.
This has of course brought in a deluge of angry comments, mostly from people whose social media pages are full of Russiagate
nonsense , showing
where McCain's current support base comes from. Some call him a war hero, some talk about him like he's a perfectly fine politician,
some defend him as just a normal person whose politics I happen to disagree with.
This is insane. This man has actively and enthusiastically pushed for every single act of military aggression that America has
engaged in, and some that
it hasn't , throughout his entire career. He makes Hillary "We came, we saw, he died" Clinton look like a dove. When you look
at John McCain, the very first thing you see should not be a former presidential candidate, a former POW or an Arizona Senator; the
first thing you see should be the piles of human corpses that he has helped to create. This is not a normal kind of person, and I
still do sincerely hope that he dies of natural causes before he can do any more harm.
Can we change this about ourselves, please? None of us should have to live in a world where pushing for more bombing campaigns
at every opportunity is an acceptable agenda for a public figure to have. Neoconservatism is a psychopathic death cult whose relentless
hyper-hawkishness is a greater threat to the survival of our species than anything else in the world right now. These people are
traitors to humanity, and their ideology needs to be purged from the face of the earth forever. I'm not advocating violence of any
kind here, but let's stop pretending that this is okay. Let's start calling these people the murderous psychopaths that they are
whenever they rear their evil heads and stop respecting and legitimizing them. There should be a massive, massive social stigma around
what these people do, so we need to create one. They should be marginalized, not leading us.
-- -- --
I'm a 100 percent reader-funded journalist so if you enjoyed this, please consider helping me out by sharing it around, liking
me on Facebook , following me on
Twitter , or throwing some money into my hat on
Patreon .
"... It was this curious arrangement that Tulsi Gabbard ran smack into earlier this week. Gabbard, a congresswoman from Hawaii and Democratic presidential candidate, was attacked seemingly out of nowhere by Hillary, who implied that the Russians might somehow be controlling her. "I'm not making any predictions," Clinton intoned on a podcast, "but I think they've got their eye on somebody who is currently in the Democratic primary and are grooming her to be the third-party candidate." ..."
"... It was a base (and baseless) smear, and it drew a furious response. Gabbard tweeted that Clinton was "queen of warmongers, embodiment of corruption, and personification of the rot that has sickened the Democratic Party for so long." She also dared Clinton to jump into the race, declaring that the primary was now effectively between the two of them. ..."
"... in a more macro sense, she's correct. Of all the dividing lines vivisecting the Democratic Party right now, there's an important and understated one that runs between Clinton World and everything that Gabbard has come to represent. At issue is whether or not one family ought to be able to run the Democratic National Committee like its own LLC, installing loyalists as its leaders, freezing its foreign policy in the past, embarrassing it with self-serving fabrications. ..."
"... Preserve the brand even at the expense of the party : that's what the Clintons have always done. ..."
"... The common denominator in Clinton World is always personal short-term gain; all else, including political reality, is subordinated to that. And even when they lose, they still linger, their business more like a monopoly, having accumulated so much personnel power as to immunize it from market forces. ..."
"... Gabbard, then, isn't Clinton World's most formidable opponent, but right now she looks like its clearest antithesis. Her knight's move has been to take the Clintons off the grounds of personal accomplishment and put them on the harsher terrain of policy accomplishment ..."
"... Hillary is less eager, meanwhile, to discuss her and her husband's writ large policy records, given the current revolt against the liberal internationalism and Third Way centrism they've long regarded as de rigueur . Gabbard not only brings this up, her entire candidacy is a homing missile aimed at the establishment's failed foreign policy, one of its most gaping vulnerabilities. While Clinton World thrashes on the floor screeching at the Russian nanobots in their nose hairs, Gabbard offers up informed critiques of actual events. ..."
"... THANK YOU TULSI GABBARD for opening this debate on the direction our national diplomacy should take in the future, for demanding a reassessment of the old Cold War approach that abandoned the Constitutional requirement that wars be declared by Congress. ..."
"... It doesn't look like she has much of a chance, but I admire Ms. Gabbard's integrity and forthrightness. ..."
"... Well spoken. Indeed, one doesn't have to buy all her policy positions or support her nomination campaign. But Gabbard is worthy of the kind of genuine respect ..."
Is there anything sadder in the year 2019 than to be a hanger-on of the Clintons? It's the one form of communitarianism even we here
at TAC can oppose. Five years back, the New York Times pointed its telescope at what it called
Clinton World, the seemingly endless ecosystem of staffers, clients, strategists, old friends, wonks, flatterers, henchmen, consiglieres,
and hired dog walkers who have latched on to the Clintons over the years. The takeaway for the Times was that such a vast
coterie is difficult to control, a big rig that can only turn so quickly -- but one quote in particular stands out. Said a Clinton
friend of Clinton World: "Some people get eaten up by the charisma and forget that, in the end, it is a business."
And that's just it right there. Has anyone ever fine-tuned the business-ification of politics as have the Clintons? Their conquering
of the Democratic Party over the past 25 years has often felt like a corporate takeover, the absorption of a nationwide political
apparatus into a family syndicate that exists to build and burnish the brand of a single couple.
It was this curious arrangement that Tulsi Gabbard ran smack into earlier this week. Gabbard, a congresswoman from Hawaii
and Democratic presidential candidate, was attacked seemingly out of nowhere by Hillary, who implied that the Russians might somehow
be controlling her. "I'm not making any predictions," Clinton intoned on a podcast, "but I think they've got their eye on somebody
who is currently in the Democratic primary and are grooming her to be the third-party candidate."
It was a base (and baseless) smear, and it drew a furious response. Gabbard tweeted that Clinton was "queen of warmongers,
embodiment of corruption, and personification of the rot that has sickened the Democratic Party for so long." She also dared Clinton
to jump into the race, declaring that the primary was now effectively between the two of them.
She's wrong about that, of course, at least in the literal sense. Gabbard, who rarely clears 2 percent in the polls, has little
chance of winning the Democratic nomination. But in a more macro sense, she's correct. Of all the dividing lines vivisecting
the Democratic Party right now, there's an important and understated one that runs between Clinton World and everything that Gabbard
has come to represent. At issue is whether or not one family ought to be able to run the Democratic National Committee like its own
LLC, installing loyalists as its leaders, freezing its foreign policy in the past, embarrassing it with self-serving fabrications.
The reason Clinton slimed Tulsi as a Russian patsy is because Clinton herself is obsessed with Russia. Over and over again, she's
blamed her own loss on their supposed meddling in the 2016 election, even going so far as to call Donald Trump's presidency
"illegitimate."
This is partly understandable -- no one wants to accept fault for difficult failures, least of all when the entire country is
watching -- and partly egotistical. But the belief that maybe Hillary really won, which extends well beyond the candidate
herself and throughout Clinton World, is also good business. However scant the evidence might be that the Russians heave-hoed votes
in Wisconsin, the Clintonian goal is always to guard their own -- "protect the shield," in the nonsensical words of the NFL. Better,
then, to hang around Democrats' neck a nutty conspiracy theory then to admit, even all these years later, that the Clinton product
might not be what it once was.
Preserve the brand even at the expense of the party : that's what the Clintons have always done. It's why Bill dragged
the Democrats into the realm of adolescent word parsing ("the definition of sex") rather than admit to his affair with Monica Lewinsky
from the start. It's why he was willing to triangulate during his presidency, chucking half the party platform off the wagon in order
to ensure he could net legislative victories. It's why Hillary obtusely insisted on running in 2008 and 2016, even though anyone
paying attention knew these would be populist years with her cast in role of Dickens' Monseigneur. The common denominator in
Clinton World is always personal short-term gain; all else, including political reality, is subordinated to that. And even when they
lose, they still linger, their business more like a monopoly, having accumulated so much personnel power as to immunize it from market
forces.
Still, all the bumps and losses have at least somewhat diminished the Clintons. There is little enthusiasm for another Hillary
rev of the engine, no matter how badly she seems to want one. As for Bill, when people say they're nostalgic for the 1990s, they
generally mean boy bands and Legends of the Hidden Temple , not blue dresses. Now enter Tulsi Gabbard. She is both a walking
repudiation of Clinton World and a product of its failures. A former vice chair at the DNC, she
resigned after it became clear the organization intended to slight Bernie Sanders' presidential candidacy in favor of Hillary's.
A political neophyte, she's running a barebones campaign, in contrast to Clinton World's legions. She remains unsullied by the corrupt
Democratic influencers of yore, from Goldman Sachs to Jeffrey Epstein, all of whom the Clintons have rubbed elbows with. And most
importantly, she served as a National Guard medic in Iraq and came away jaded by the very wars Hillary keeps endorsing.
Gabbard, then, isn't Clinton World's most formidable opponent, but right now she looks like its clearest antithesis. Her knight's
move has been to take the Clintons off the grounds of personal accomplishment and put them on the harsher terrain of policy accomplishment.
Hillary loves to tout her (substantial) record of public service as a woman, but Gabbard, a war veteran, can claim that too.
Hillary is less eager, meanwhile, to discuss her and her husband's writ large policy records, given the current revolt against the
liberal internationalism and Third Way centrism they've long regarded as de rigueur . Gabbard not only brings this up, her
entire candidacy is a homing missile aimed at the establishment's failed foreign policy, one of its most gaping vulnerabilities.
While Clinton World thrashes on the floor screeching at the Russian nanobots in their nose hairs, Gabbard offers up informed critiques
of actual events.
The contrast is unavoidable, and it's made Clinton World look one slice short of a (faux New York-style) pizza. (It's always wrong
to say that conspiracy theories are the sole province of "the fringes"; they can afflict the center, too, and they're all the more
embarrassing when they do.) Sure enough, fade to Iowa, where voters are expressing renewed interest in Gabbard. One
told the Associated Press that Hillary's smear
was "divisive and despicable" and said he likes Tulsi's "anti-regime-change message," while another accused Clinton of "sowing division
in the primary." As it turns out, protecting the brand of a couple that hasn't won a nationwide election in 23 years is not
a priority in flyover country.
It may be that this is the year the Democrats are finally ready to cast out the Clintons for good, along with all their attendant
wars and machinations and courtiers. If so, the strongest tonic they could swallow would be the campaign of Tulsi Gabbard. You don't
have to support her candidacy (I don't) to appreciate what she's trying to do here.
Matt Purple is the managing editor of The American Conservative.
Tulsi Gabbard has volunteered twice to serve active duty in the US military, and continues today as a Major in the Army National
Guard...definitely NOT a "Russian asset" but rather a very patriotic American. The worst thing about HRC's slander against Ms.
Gabbard (and the repeats of that slander by other Dem party operatives and even major media publishers of HRC-echoing op-eds)
is that the endless-undeclared-multiple-wars party won't debate the merits of their approach but rather only accuse opponents
of treason.
THANK YOU TULSI GABBARD for opening this debate on the direction our national diplomacy should take in the future,
for demanding a reassessment of the old Cold War approach that abandoned the Constitutional requirement that wars be declared
by Congress. THANK YOU TULSI GABBARD for your military service to our country, for your public service in various elected offices,
and now for your campaign that forces these issues back into the national debate.
It doesn't look like she has much of a chance, but I admire Ms. Gabbard's integrity and forthrightness. She ought to at least
rate a cabinet position if a Democrat becomes president. (SecDef, or State or National Security Advisor, perhaps?). I hope she
keeps hammering away on the foreign policy issue.
Well spoken. Indeed, one doesn't have to buy all her policy positions or support her nomination campaign. But Gabbard is worthy
of the kind of genuine respect that will elude HRC's legacy.
What she coerced in life will be denied her for eternity, methinks.
But Gabbard, however she may fare this time around, has upside. Because she's the real deal.
There is such a hole where our leadership
should be, an enormous surfeit of vacuity in the leadership ranks on both sides of the ball that looks to be the curse of our
time. It wouldn't bother me a bit if she helped fill the void.
Protecting the faded brand indeed. Because it's the sole explanation of a situation when someone starts dividing a party a year
before the election and after an impeachment debacle, aside from idiocy in both colloquial, clinical and ancient Greek meaning.
Russian agents behind Gabbard, Russian agents behind Stein, Russian agents behind Trump, Russian agents behind Clinton's fridge.
And it's not said by a 5-year-old girl. It keeps on being said by a grown-up woman who, basically, rules one of America's two
biggest parties. It starts feeling like some tragifarce already.
Last month, on the 80th anniversary of the start of World War II, the European Parliament
voted on a resolution entitled
" On the Importance of European Remembrance for the Future of Europe ." The adopted
document:
" Stresses that the Second World War, the most devastating war in Europe's history, was
started as an immediate result of the notorious Nazi-Soviet Treaty on Non-Aggression of 23
August 1939, also known as the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, and its secret protocols, whereby two
totalitarian regimes that shared the goal of world conquest divided Europe into two zones of
influence; Recalls that the Nazi and communist regimes carried out mass murders, genocide and
deportations and caused a loss of life and freedom in the 20th century on a scale unseen in
human history, and recalls the horrific crime of the Holocaust perpetrated by the Nazi
regime; condemns in the strongest terms the acts of aggression, crimes against humanity and
mass human rights violations perpetrated by the Nazi, communist and other totalitarian
regimes."
For 75 years, we have been told that the war started on September 1st, 1939 when Germany
invaded Poland, even though the Pacific Theater between Japan and China began two years
earlier. Now we are to understand that it actually began eight days prior when the German
foreign minister visited Moscow. Take no notice of the inherent doublespeak in the premise that
a war could be the consequence of a peace agreement, which without any evidence provided is
said to have contained "secret protocols", not provisions. You see, unlike the other pacts
signed between European countries and Nazi Germany -- such as the Munich Betrayal
of 1938 with France and Great Britain to which the Soviets were uninvited while Austria and
Czechoslovakia were gifted to Hitler for the courtesy of attacking Moscow --
Molotov-Ribbentrop was really a confidential agreement between Hitler and Stalin to
conquer Europe and divide it between them.
This is pure mythology. The fact of the matter is that neither the Soviets or even Germany
drew the dividing line in Poland in 1939, because it was a reinstatement of the border
acknowledged by the League of Nations and Poland itself as put forward by the British following
WWI. Even Winston Churchill during his first wartime radio broadcast later that year admitted :
"Russia has pursued a cold policy of self-interest. We could have wished that the Russian
Armies should be standing on their present line as the friends and allies of Poland, instead
of as invaders. But that the Russian Armies should stand on this line was clearly necessary
for the safety of Russia against the Nazi menace."
Yet according to the EU, even though Moscow was the last country to agree to a peace
deal with Hitler, it was all part of a hidden plot between them. In that case, why then did
Germany choose to invade the USSR in 1941? The EU leaves this question unanswered. Forget about
its racial policies of enslaving slavs or that Hitler openly declared in Mein Kampf that
Germany needed to conquer the East to secure the Lebensraum . Nevermind that in the
Spring of 1941, less than two months before Operation Barbarossa, Stalin gave a speech to the Kremlin
at a state banquet for recent graduates of the Frunze Military Academy to give warning of an
imminent attack:
"War with Germany is inevitable. If comrade Molotov can manage to postpone the war for two
or three months through the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, that will be our good fortune, but
you yourselves must go off and take measures to raise the combat readiness of our
forces."
The EU has redacted that the entire reason for the signing of the Nazi-Soviet pact in August
1939 had been to buy time for the Red Army's attrition warfare strategy to adequately prepare
its armaments against a future invasion by the Wehrmacht. The Soviet leadership well understood
that Germany would eventually renege on the agreement, considering that in 1936 it had signed
the Anti-Comintern Pact with Japan and Italy directed at the Communist International. For six
years, the USSR was thwarted in its attempts to forge an equivalent anti-fascist coalition and
to collectively defend Czechoslovakia by the British and the French, whose ruling classes were
too busy courting and doing business with Germany. It had been the Soviets alone who defended
the Spanish Republic from Franco in the final rehearsal before the worldwide conflict and only
when all other recourses had run out did they finally agree to a deal with the
Hitlerites.
Joachim von Ribbentrop signing the Anti-Comintern Pact
Just a week prior to the signing of the neutrality treaty, Stalin gave a secret
speech to the Politburo where he explained:
"The question of war or peace has entered a critical phase for us. If we conclude a mutual
assistance treaty with France and Great Britain, Germany will back off of Poland and seek a
modus vivendi with the Western Powers. War would thus be prevented but future events could
take a serious turn for the USSR. If we accept Germany's proposal to conclude with it a
non-aggression pact, Germany will then attack Poland and Europe will be thrown into serious
acts of unrest and disorder. Under these circumstances we will have many chances of remaining
out of the conflict while being able to hope for our own timely entrance into war."
This latest resolution is part of a long pattern of misrepresentation of WWII by the
Anglo-Saxon empire, but is perhaps its most egregious falsification that truly desecrates the
graves of the 27 million Soviet citizens who were 80% of the total Allied death toll. Earlier
this year, for the commemoration on the 75th anniversary of the Normandy landings, Russia and
its head of state were excluded from the events in Portsmouth, England. As if the ongoing
absence of Western European leaders from the May 9th Victory Day ceremonies held annually in
Russia weren't insulting enough, while it's true that the Eastern Front was not involved in
Operation Overlord, Russian President Vladimir Putin had previously been in attendance at the
70th anniversary D-Day events in 2014. No doubt the increase in geopolitical tensions between
the West and Moscow in the years since has given the EU license to write out Russia's role in
the Allied victory entirely with little public disapproval, though many of the families of
those who volunteered in the International Brigades were rightly insulted by this tampering of
history and voiced their objection.
The EU motion's real purpose is to fabricate the war's history by giving credit to the
United States for the liberation of Europe while absolving the Western democracies that opened
the door for the rise of fascism and tried to use Germany to annihilate the USSR. History
itself should always be open to debate and subject to study and revision, but the Atlanticists
have made this formal change without any evidence to support it and entirely for political
purposes. Like the founding of the EU project itself, the declared aim of the proposal is
supposedly to prevent future atrocities from taking place, even though the superstate was
designed by former Nazis like Walter Hallstein, the first President of the European Commission,
who was a German lawyer in several Nazi Party law organizations and fought for the Wehrmacht in
France until his capture as a POW after the invasion of Normandy.
Rather than preventing future crimes, the EU has committed one itself by deceptively
modifying the historical record of communism to be parallel with that of the Third Reich. Even
further, that they were two sides of the same coin of 'totalitarianism' and that for all the
barbarity committed during the war, the Soviets were equally culpable -- or judging by the
amount of times the text cites the USSR versus Germany, even more so. It remains unclear
whether we are now to completely disregard the previous conclusions reached by the military
tribunals held by the Allies under international law at Nuremberg of which all 12 war criminals
sentenced to death in 1946 were German, not Soviet. The document doesn't even attempt to hide
its politicized direction at the current government in Moscow, stating that:
"Russia remains the greatest victim of communist totalitarianism and that its development
into a democratic state will be impeded as long as the government, the political elite and
political propaganda continue to whitewash communist crimes and glorify the Soviet
totalitarian regime."
This accusation does not stand up to critical observation, as Russia has since erected
official memorials to those executed and politically persecuted during the so-called 'Great
Terror.' However, the stark difference between the EU resolution and the Wall of Grief in
Moscow is that the latter is based on evidence from the Soviet archives. It has become a
widespread and ridiculous belief in the West that Stalin somehow killed as much as five times
as many people as Hitler, an absurdity not reflected in the now disclosed and once highly
secretive Soviet archives, which after two decades of examination show that over a period of
three decades from the early 1920s to his death in 1953, the total recorded number of Soviet
citizens executed by the state was slightly less than 800,000. While that is certainly a horrid
number, how does it even begin to compare to an industrial scale extermination based on the
race theory?
How can anyone believe Stalin killed tens of millions of people when even the most simple
analysis of a population demographics chart shows that the Soviet population rate consistently
increased each decade with the only reduction taking place during WWII as a result of
their casualties? Socialists, who perhaps more than any other political tendency seem to suffer
from autophobia, should defend their own history from such falsification. It is only when flaws
occur under communist states that the entire political and economic system is to be denounced
outright, but never capitalism which for five centuries has colonized half the world while
enslaving and killing entire nations.
Most of the wildly exaggerated death figures stem from falsities written in The Black
Book of Communism by a group of right-wing French academics in 1997 , who did not
conceal their
apologism for the Nazi collaborationist self-proclaimed Russian Liberation Army (ROA)
commanded by Gen. Andrey Vlasov who defected to Germany during the war:
"A singular fate was reserved for the Vlasovtsy, the Soviet soldiers who had fought under
the Soviet general Andrei Vlasov. Vlasov was the commander of the Second Army who had been
taken prisoner by the Germans in July 1942. On the basis of his anti-Stalinist convictions,
General Vlasov agreed to collaborate with the Nazis to free his country from the tyranny of
the Bolsheviks."
The other highly cited work by the West for its overestimated portrayal of Soviet repression
is the equally unreliable The Gulag Archipelago volumes by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who
as historian Ludo Martens noted also attempted to provide justification for Vlasov's treason
in his best-selling 1973 work :
"And so it was that Vlasov's Second Shock Army perished, literally recapitulating the fate
of Samsonov's Russian Second Army in World War I, having been just as insanely thrown into
encirclement. Now this, of course, was treason to the Motherland! This, of course, was
vicious, self-obsessed betrayal! But it was Stalin's. Treason does not necessarily involve
selling out for money. It can include ignorance and carelessness in the preparations for war,
confusion and cowardice at its very start, the meaningless sacrifice of armies and corps
solely for the sake of saving one's own marshal's uniform. Indeed, what more bitter treason
is there on the part of a Supreme Commander in Chief?"
Alexander Solzhenitsyn
The truth is located in the Soviet archives which indicate that Stalin's successor, the
Ukrainian-born Nikita Khrushchev, was as intent on absolving the entirety of the Soviet
leadership as himself from any culpability in the purges of the 1930s so that blame for its
excesses were placed squarely on his predecessor. In succession, Western historians like the
British Foreign Office propagandist Robert Conquest followed his example and this account
quickly became official doctrine. In hindsight, Khrushchev's infamous 1956 secret speech, "
On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences ", was what planted the seeds of
self-doubt in the Soviet system that would eventually lead to its undoing decades later. To the
contrary, what the historical records
show is most of those who were purged in that period were not necessarily perceived as
political threats to Stalin himself, but were targeted because of an overall systemic paranoia
held by the entire Soviet government regarding internal sabotage and counter-revolutionary
activity by a real fifth column getting inspiration from a certain traitorous former Bolshevik
in exile and a potential invasion originating from outside the country.
Many forget that during the Russian Civil War, exactly such a scenario had occurred when the
Allies of World War I, including the United States, collectively intervened on the side of the
Whites only to be driven out by the Red Army, making such fearful instincts not entirely
unreasonable. Not to mention, the rapid industrialization of the entire nation in a single
decade while in preparation for the growing threat of war with Germany. When Hitler began his
Masterplan for the East, their worst fears came to fruition when tens of thousands of Banderite
turncoats enlisted in the 14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS (1st Galician) in Ukraine to
collaborate with the German occupiers in the slaughter of their fellow countrymen and after the
war ended, continued their treasonous struggle during the 1950s with assistance from the CIA.
So the saying goes, just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't out to get you
As for the accusation of "whitewashing", it is true that recent
polls indicate that 70% of Russians today hold a favorable view of Stalin -- but just as
many are nostalgic for communism itself and regret the breakup of the USSR on the basis that
the socialist system '
took care of ordinary people .' Putin did once remark that despite Stalin's legacy of
repression, he doubted that the native Georgian statesman would have been willing to drop two
atomic bombs on Japan like the United States, an atrocity that killed 225,000 innocent
civilians (most of them instantly) which is more than a quarter of those capitally
punished during the entire Stalin era. Was he wrong to say so? A significant amount of deaths
also occurred in the Soviet-wide famines of the 1930s, but there is significantly more evidence
to suggest that the British deliberately starved 3 million Bengalis to death then there is to
support the Holodomor fraud concocted by the Ukrainian nationalist diaspora. If the West wants
to talk about deliberate starvation, it should take a look at what the U.S. did with its
economic sanctions in the 1990s killing half a million Iraqi children which former U.S.
Secretary of State Madeleine Albright famously described as "worth it."
This isn't the first time the Anglosphere has historically omitted the Soviet role in the
Allied victory or conflated the USSR with the Third Reich. On previous occasions the European
Parliament has issued resolutions declaring August 23rd " a European day of remembrance of
the victims of the Nazi-Soviet alliance ." This is all an attempt by the Atlanticists to
depict communism as somehow worse than fascism while disconnecting the Nazis from the lineage
of European settler colonialism whose racism was its source of inspiration. Why is that which
befell the Jews not considered an extension of what was already done to the Herero-Nama tribes
for which Namibia is now suing Germany a century later?
The neoliberal political establishment in Europe and its anti-EU populist opponents are fond
of appearing dead-set against one another, but it seems they share the same fairytale beliefs
about WWII that the Nazis and Soviets were equivalent evils as inscribed in this latest decree.
It has always been ironic that the liberal billionaire "philanthropist" and currency
manipulator George Soros is so derided by right-wing populists when it was his Open Society
Institute NGOs which engineered the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe. Soros may be
averse to the anti-immigrant brand of right-wing nationalism currently on the rise in Western
Europe, but as a fanatical Russophobe he is willing to make strange bedfellows with
ultra-nationalists in Kiev to undermine Moscow's sphere of influence and that includes revising
WWII history to a version favored by the Banderites which took power during the pro-EU 2014
coup d'etat in Ukraine.
The Nazi junta regime in Kiev has since instituted Russophobic 'de-communization' laws
erasing the remaining traces of Ukraine's Soviet past while replacing them with memorials to
their wartime foes. A recent example was the city of
Vinnitsa renaming a street that paid tribute to the Soviet spy and war hero Richard Sorge to
that after Omelyan Hrabetsk, a commander of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army which cooperated with
Germany during the war and killed thousands of Poles and Jews. Sorge posed as a German
journalist in Tokyo and famously provided timely intelligence to Moscow that Japan did not plan
to attack the USSR, allowing Stalin to transfer essential reinforcements to the Battle of
Moscow which proved to be a major turning point in the war. He was executed by the Japanese in
1944 and posthumously awarded the Hero of the Soviet Union.
Now the EU is 'decommunizing' history in its own legislation. Meanwhile, Soros's influence
over the EU cannot be overstated as his lobbying power has enabled him to provide direct
council to its executive branch more than any official head of state in the political and
economic union. The hedge fund tycoon made a fortune as an investor during Russia's mass
privatization in the 1990s after enlisting Jeffrey Sachs and the IMF to apply 'shock therapy'
to its economy as it did in Poland and his native Hungary. Under Putin, however, Soros's NGOs
have since been barred from Russia. Perhaps the reason he can so cynically provide support to
fascist elements in Ukraine to undercut Moscow is that he did so personally in his upbringing
in Hungary.
Born Gyorgy Schwartz, during WWII he was a teenager from an affluent Jewish family which
survived the Axis occupation by using their wealth to bribe a government official from the
collaborationist Arrow Cross government who provided the Soros's forged documents identifying
them as Christians, while the adolescent by his own admission delivered deportation notices to
other Jews. A short time later, the young Soros impersonated the adopted gentile son of an
official who inventoried the stolen valuables and property from Jewish estates and even
accompanied him during his work. One would assume as a Jew he would have been haunted by these
experiences, but Soros has repeatedly stated he has no regrets and even disturbingly compared
it to his future work as an investor.
https://www.youtube.com/embed/X9tKvasRO54?feature=oembed SHOCKING: George Soros, a chief financial supporter of Antifa, was himself a Nazi
collaborator and to this day has no regrets
Like Soros, the EU has no ideology except an unquenchable thirst for greed and is fond of
Nazis when they are the kind that hate Russia. For its own political interests, it is willing
to dangerously foster a version of history invented by a rebranded far right where the
quislings who collaborated with the Axis powers elude guilt and the Soviets who courageously
defeated them are maliciously slandered. Fascism was never fully eradicated only because the
West continued to nurture it during the Cold War and even now that capitalism has been
reinstated in Eurasia, it continues to do so to undermine a resurgent Moscow on the world
stage.
As the world appears increasingly on the brink of WWIII, one is reminded of the expression
by Karl Marx who famously stated that "history repeats itself first as tragedy, then as farce"
in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon , when comparing Napoleon Bonaparte's
seizure of power in the French Revolution with the coup by his nephew half a century later
which brought an end to the French Revolution. Equally fitting is the humorous line by the
legendary writer and noted anti-imperialist Mark Twain who reputedly said, "history doesn't
repeat itself, but it does rhyme." Both are applicable to the unquestionable tragedy of WWII
and the farcical mockery of its history by the EU whose policies continue to make another
global conflict that much more likely.
Max Parry is an independent journalist and geopolitical analyst. His work has appeared in
Counterpunch, Global Research, Dissident Voice, Greanville Post, OffGuardian, American Herald
Tribune and more. Max may be reached [email protected]
I think it is a bit backward to say that Stalins speech in Spring of 1941 of Nazi aggression
is proof of Germany's plan to invade the Soviets, but instead more likely telegraphing and
preparing his troops for the offensive that he had planned himself.
@Tusk Have you read NOTHING?? The ENTIRE basis of Hitler's foreign policy, all the way
back to "Mein Kampf", was a massive German invasion to destroy international Bolshevism and
seize Lebensraum (living space) for German colonization in Eastern Europe. The discussions
with the Russians in 1939 were temporary, tactical diplomacy intended ONLY to stabilize the
local situation during resolution of the "Polish Crisis".
Many forget that during the Russian Civil War, exactly such a scenario had occurred when
the Allies of World War I, including the United States, collectively intervened on the side
of the Whites only to be driven out by the Red Army, making such fearful instincts not
entirely unreasonable.
America reciprocated when Russia was being threatened by an Allied force in Siberia in
1919. The United States troops were there more for the purpose of watching the Japanese
than of fighting Russians. During the course of the peace conference, both Wilson and Lloyd
George went home for a short time and in their absence the conferees were whipped up to a
mood of more active intervention. Wilson heard of it in mid-ocean and, although thoroughly
disliking the Communistic philosophy, promptly dispatched a radio message to the effect
that the only course he would agree to was speedy withdrawal of all Allied troops from
Russian soil.
The British and French exerted great pressure on Mr. Wilson for Americans to join in a
general attack on Moscow. General Foch drew up plans for such an attack. Winston Churchill,
representing the British Cabinet, appeared before the Big Four on February 14, 1919, and
demanded a united invasion of Russia.
The Americans then experience a sudden change of heart. Not only that, they ponder the
large war debts owed by their allies to them. In an internal note by Tasker Bliss:
It is perfectly well known that every nation in Europe, except England, is bankrupt, and
that England would become bankrupt if she engaged on any considerable scale in such a
venture.
I.e.: "Hey, can you guys really afford that?" Hoover himself supplies additional
reasons, in a letter to Wilson (bear in mind that Hoover had considerable experience as an
engineer in Czarist Russia):
We have also to consider, what would actually happen if we undertook military
intervention. We should probably be involved in years of police duty, and our first act
would probably in the nature of things make us a party with the Allies to re-establishing
the reactionary classes. It also requires consideration as to whether or not our people at
home would stand for our providing power by which such reactionaries held their position.
Furthermore, we become a junior in this partnership of four. It is therefore inevitable
that we would find ourselves subordinated and even committed to politics against our
convictions.
Thus Wilson guaranteed the victory of the Bolsheviks. The Brits and French pulled their
support for the Whites.
@Vinnie O Hitler met with Molotov in Nov. 1940 to try to prevent war with the Soviet
Union. But Molotov pretty much spat in Hitler's eye, and that was that.
Not since his talks with the British before Munich, in ,
had Adolf Hitler heard such tough language as Molotov used on November and
.As Ribbentrop had done before him, Hitler harangued the Russian ministeras
though he were at a Party rally: if Russia wanted to share in the booty as the British
Empire fell apart, then now was the time to declare Soviet solidarity with the Tripartite
Pact powers. He sympathised, he said, with Russia's desire for an outlet to the high seas,
and suggested that she should expand southward from Batum and Baku toward the Persian Gulf
and India; Germany would expand into Africa. As for Russia's interest in the Dardanelles,
Hitler restated his willingness to call for the renegotiation of the Montreux Convention,
which governed the straits, to bring it into line with Moscow's defensive interests.
The demands which Molotov stated were shockers. Russia wanted another stab at Finland
– she intended to occupy and annex the whole country,which had, after all, been
assigned her by the pact which he had signed with Ribbentrop in Moscow. Hitler,
however, needed Finland's nickel and timber supplies. When Molotov announced Russia's
intention of inviting Bulgaria to sign a non-aggression pact which would permit the
establishment of a Soviet base near the Dardanelles, Hitler ironically inquired whether
Bulgaria had asked for such assistance; pressed later by Molotov for a reply to Soviet
terms, Hitler evasively answered that he must consult Mussolini! Each of Molotov's
conferences with Hitler was terminated by the warning of approaching British aircraft, and
his dinner at the Soviet embassy on the thirteenth ended abruptly for the same reason.
Ribbentrop invited Molotov to the concrete shelter at his home; here the Soviet foreign
minister revealed that Moscow could never entirely forgo an interest in the western
approaches to the Baltic either – the Kattegat and Skagerrak. When Ribbentrop told
his Führer of this, Hitler was stunned. 'He demanded that we give him military bases
on Danish soil on the outlets to the North Sea,' Hitler was to recall in the last week of
his life. 'He had already staked a claim to them. He demanded Constantinople, Romania,
Bulgaria, and Finland – and we were supposed to be the victors!'
While the public was deliberately fed the impression that the formal Nazi–Soviet
discussions had been harmonious and successful, within the chancellery there was no doubt
that they had reached the parting of the ways. Irrevocable and terrible in its finality,
the decision which Adolf Hitler
now took was one he never regretted, even in the abyss of ultimate defeat.
@Vinnie O Sure that's why Stalin amassed all his units on the border and was talking
about the necessity to fight Germany. You imply it was a one way street and that Hitler was
to blame, but despite the love towards the commies in this article Stalin does bear burden
for what happened too.
So in order to combat European revisionism, Parry gives us one long story about the Soviet
Union's honourable intentions towards its neighbours. One can hang any story onto the events
preceding the invasion of Poland, but the fact is as General Manstein wrote about the Polish
camapaign, the Poles were defeated before they started since they had to plan for war against
all comers due their invidious situation. Stalin stepped into Poland a mere 17 days after the
Germans. The Poles had no "hinterland" to retreat to. Under the hammer and anvil of the Nazis
and the Commies the Poles perished.
And Chamberlain like every one else in Europe understood that to effectively contain the
Germans, the Soviet Union has to be part of a united front. But like the gentleman he was, he
could not stomach the price that Uncle Joe wanted to extract, viz the extinction of the
independence of the East European nations. That Hitler wanted Bolshevism destroyed is a no
brainer, but Saint Stalin had his own plans to invade Europe picking up the pieces after the
Europeans had duked it out. In the event the German speed caught everyone by surprise,
including the bloody Stalin
But the article has value : For much of the embroidery around the death camps came from
Soviet accounts, and their later embellishments. Who knows, the same skepticism about the
Soviet Union will later filter into Holocaust worship.
The US/UK and France (Rothschild) are demonising Russia, not the EU.
The EU is probably under pressure to demonise Russia, however most EU countries are
normally doing well with Russia, they are anti-US/UK, considering all the US-UK led NATO
horrific crimes committed in the seven ME countries.
Germany in the grip of Anglo-Saxon war policies?
by Karl Müller
{Excerpts}
"The Europe of today is politically stable and well-off, it is capable of organising its
own defence. The European states have failed to do that for much too long." And: "By using
the financial means, which the USA could spare this way, they could concentrate on Asia
– a process, that was already under way during the Obama administration." And finally:
"In regard to Russia the USA need to pursue a new path of agreement, because otherwise we
will be driving the Russians even closer towards China."
"On 22 August News Agency Reuters reported: "Germany, France and Great Britain rejected US
President Donald Trump's proposal to once again admit Russia to the Circle of G7 countries.
On Wednesday evening, before meeting with British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, Chancellor
Angela Merkel said that in 2014 Russia had been excluded for definite reasons, and that those
reasons were still valid [ ]. A few days before the G7 Summit in France President Emmanuel
Macron declared his rejection of Russia's re-admittance as well. "I believe that Russia's
unconditional return would be a sign of the G7's weakness and a strategic mistake. Britain's
Prime Minister Johnson concurred in this opinion. [ ]"
"Up to 2023 the USA are planning to invest another two billion dollars only in their bases
in Rheinland Pfalz. Ramstein and Landstuhl have already been rebuilt and modernized for some
billion dollars and cannot be substituted in the short and long term."
This is an interesting yet complex issue. From my blog:
May 1, 2017 – Must Ukraine Return Volhynia?
Hillary Clinton's State Department funneled $5 billion to orchestrate a "revolution" to
overthrow the elected President of Ukraine in 2014. (See my June 7, 2016 blog post for
details.) Ukraine's President was ousted because he refused to support Ukraine joining the EU
and NATO, and violence spread throughout Ukraine as CIA funded factions fought for power.
Crimea was part of Russia for over a century until it was administratively attached to
Ukraine in 1954 by a Soviet premier to promote Soviet solidarity. Russians are the majority
people in Crimea and Russian is the common language, but they were not consulted. In 2014,
after years of Ukrainian political turmoil and an American coup in Kiev, Russia accepted a
request by the people of Crimea to rejoin Russia after 94% voted in favor. (See my Aug 8,
2016 blog post for details.) Russians and Crimeans were puzzled by intense American
opposition to this reannexation, and rightly concluded the Americans really wanted "NATO"
military bases in strategic Crimea.
For those concerned about European borders and justice, they should address a truly
outrageous annexation. In 1939, the Soviet Union invaded Poland and seized half of its land
while Soviet police massacred 22,000 influential Polish POWs and civilians. This area was
invaded by Germany two years later, which formed Ukrainian paramilitary units that murdered
over 100,000 Poles during the war. Entire Polish villages disappeared as Ukrainians massacred
everyone to include women and children, who were buried in mass graves. After the war, the
Polish regions of Volhynia and Eastern Galicia were formally annexed by Soviet Ukraine after
1.5 million Poles were forcibly deported. Over the next decade, another 1.5 million Poles
were deported by Ukraine to ethically cleanse these regions (noted in yellow below).
The West did nothing about this brutality because it occurred within the powerful Soviet
Union. However, that union broke up and Ukraine is weak and at odds with Russia. On July 22,
2016, the Parliament of Poland passed a resolution recognizing the massacres of ethnic Poles
in Volhynia and Galicia as genocide. Poland is now part of NATO and American troops are based
there. Thousands of Poles are still alive who were expelled from these regions. Homes and
land were seized from millions of Poles. Ukrainian war criminals remain at large.
This raises several questions. If Poland demands a return of its territory or compensation
for Poles, will powerful NATO support its demand? Will sanctions be imposed against Ukraine
for this genocide and illegal seizure of Polish territory? Since Crimea was attached to
Ukraine without a democratic vote, and the citizens of Crimea voted to rejoin Russia, should
sanctions against Russia be removed?
Informed people know these issues will never be addressed because NATO does not exist to
protect member states, but is a proxy arm of America's neocon empire trying to conquer the
world. However, as Poland's military grows stronger and Ukraine struggles, this issue may
arise, and crafty Russia may support a return of Poland's, Slovakia's, and Romania's seized
territories!
"... NATO has become an end run around the UN in legitimizing our dirty little wars. No wonder they are going after Tulsi. ..."
"... War and spooks. It makes it me absolutely disgusted to see intelligent, left-leaning people following obvious traps into xenophobia and fascism. People I love talking about Russian conspiracies, foreign "assets", etc. ..."
What was Hillary Clinton thinking? The 2016 Democratic nominee, for some reason, felt the
need to insert herself into the 2020 race with an attack on Tulsi Gabbard, an oddball
Democratic presidential contender who barely registered in polls. The congresswoman from
Hawaii is a completely discreditable candidate -- more on that in a moment -- but Clinton's
accusation that Gabbard is a tool of the Russians was so blunt and clumsy that it has added
new life to a primary bid that should never have existed in the first place. Within a day,
Gabbard was already fundraising off of it, a development as predictable as a sunrise.
Oh no! The great neo-liberal hope proves herself inept again, and the rest of the spooks get
antsy. Damn it Hillary, you're not supposed to directly say that. You're supposed to
imply it from unverifiable sources. Geez, you're making us all look like amateurs over
here.
Here we are again, watching the people that foiseted Her onto us in the first place,
gnashing their teeth because she can't play even the most elementary of politics.
Moreover, Clinton is also right that both Stein and Gabbard are favorites of the Russian
government, which has rushed social-media bots and state-controlled media to their defense at
various times. Stein even got a seat at a dinner with Vladimir Putin, an honor one might
think is a bit out of the weight class of a super-minor American candidate. The fact that
Stein was sitting at the same table as Putin, along with the retired general, future Donald
Trump appointee, and current felon Michael Flynn, should have raised alarm bells because
Putin never wastes a minute of his day on people who cannot be of use to him. But once Trump
was in the race, Russia focused its efforts on getting him elected, and Stein was left to do
what damage she could as a third-party spoiler.
And this is great! We're just going to repeat everything she said, embellish it, and pretend
like it's common knowledge! Brilliant!
Makes Kamala's answer the other day look especially telling. Well, of course ,
everyone knows that... But god, don't say that out loud!
The Atlantic Council of the United States was established in 1961 by former Secretaries
of State Dean Acheson and Christian Herter to bolster support for NATO. The name is
derivative of North Atlantic Council, the highest governing body of NATO.
+ On April 23, 1999, NATO rocketed the central studio of Radio Televisija Srbije (RTS),
the state-owned broadcasting corporation in Belgrade, destroying the building. Sixteen
civilian employees of RTS were killed and 16 wounded. Amnesty International concluded the
attack was a war crime.
+ In a Feb. 12, 2010 atrocity that was kept secret until March 13, US Special Forces
killed a teenage girl, a pregnant mother of 10, a pregnant mother of 6, a police officer
and his brother, and were accused of then trying to cover-up the killings by digging
bullets out of the victims' bodies, washing the wounds with alcohol and lying to superior
officers.
+ While bombing Libya in March 2011, NATO refused to aid a group of 72 migrants adrift
in the Mediterranean Sea. Only nine people on board survived. The refusal was condemned as
criminal by the Council of Europe.
+ On Nov. 26, 2011, NATO jets bombed and rocketed an allied Pakistani military base for
two hours, killing 26 Pakistani soldiers and wounding dozens more. NATO refuses to
apologize
War and spooks. It makes it me absolutely disgusted to see intelligent, left-leaning
people following obvious traps into xenophobia and fascism. People I love talking about
Russian conspiracies, foreign "assets", etc.
My wife is from Hawaii, and she used to respect Tulsi a great deal. It's heartbreaking for
me to watch her fall for this shit.
@Lookout
I think it's because she actually went to school for Political Science. She was in fact, an
intern in the Clinton administration.
Now, she left politics because she was disgusted by it.... I can only imagine how gross it
is up close and personal. But, I think like many women of her time, and a true feminist,
she's fallen for Hillary's victimization game.
When I told her I made my first political donation yesterday, she was excited. When I told
her it was to Tusi, for what Clinton had said, she became immediately combative. But when, I
in exasperation, yelled "I'M DOING IT TO DEFEND A WOMAN!" I think it finally clicked. I'm
hoping that maybe she can finally see that she is just a nasty, vindictive woman.
#2.1 I think
it's because she actually went to school for Political Science. She was in fact, an
intern in the Clinton administration.
Now, she left politics because she was disgusted by it.... I can only imagine how
gross it is up close and personal. But, I think like many women of her time, and a true
feminist, she's fallen for Hillary's victimization game.
When I told her I made my first political donation yesterday, she was excited. When I
told her it was to Tusi, for what Clinton had said, she became immediately combative. But
when, I in exasperation, yelled "I'M DOING IT TO DEFEND A WOMAN!" I think it finally
clicked. I'm hoping that maybe she can finally see that she is just a nasty, vindictive
woman.
Feminism isn't about saying women are better than men but saying women are as capable as
men.
Exactly right. My wife and I own a company. She's better at sales and customer service
than I am, so she does that. I'm better at marketing and technology issues, so I do that. We
each have strengths and weaknesses. The best policy for us, and I posit for society in
general, is to base decisions on quantifiable facts, not on gender.
#2.1.1 may
consider herself a true feminist, her unrelenting support of women as THE answer to our
problems says to me, in my own opinion, she's really no feminist. Feminism isn't about
saying women are better than men but saying women are as capable as men. To me, the
uttering of women who say, like some twit in the media a couple weeks ago, that "women
aren't corrupt" is actually a highly sexist thing to say. Women with real power in our
corrupt system are indeed as corrupt as any man is and seem fully capable of using their
corruption to get ahead. And there have been many women historically who proved that
capability rather well.
I have a couple of friends who are on the same wavelength in too many ways for me.
Both are younger than I am so some of that might be generational differences in
perception, but I think a lot of it is also the media hype of MeToo, Trump, etc. I get
extremely frustrated with them at times but I have learned lately not to even respond to
the latest outrage and keep reminding them, which both do not really like, that woman or
man, in this world, that choice matters about as much as the one between R and D...
Hillary and her disgusting minions sicken me with their sexism talk. They make an open
mockery of real sexism and they feel absolutely no shame doing it. Anything to get ahead
after all, they do not care how many real women they step on, bomb, and kill to get there
either.
@edg
generally, women just think a little different. It was a woman, accountant, that confronted
Ken Lay and brought down Enron. She had nothing to gain. It was a woman FBI agent that
noticed foreign nationals were taking flying lessons that didn't include landing an aircraft.
Her observations were dismissed. Men say, do this, you will prosper, women say do this, it's
the right thing to do. Because that's what they teach their kids. Yes, women can emulate men,
the glass ceiling omits that those standing on the top rung are standing on the fingers of
those below them. But damn it, we need a different way of thinking.
Feminism isn't about saying women are better than men but saying women are as
capable as men.
Exactly right. My wife and I own a company. She's better at sales and customer service
than I am, so she does that. I'm better at marketing and technology issues, so I do that.
We each have strengths and weaknesses. The best policy for us, and I posit for society in
general, is to base decisions on quantifiable facts, not on gender.
women are not shamed, objectified, exploited, deprived of choice, deprived of freedom,
deprived of opportunity, abused, or killed for being women.
#2.1.1 may
consider herself a true feminist, her unrelenting support of women as THE answer to our
problems says to me, in my own opinion, she's really no feminist. Feminism isn't about
saying women are better than men but saying women are as capable as men. To me, the
uttering of women who say, like some twit in the media a couple weeks ago, that "women
aren't corrupt" is actually a highly sexist thing to say. Women with real power in our
corrupt system are indeed as corrupt as any man is and seem fully capable of using their
corruption to get ahead. And there have been many women historically who proved that
capability rather well.
I have a couple of friends who are on the same wavelength in too many ways for me.
Both are younger than I am so some of that might be generational differences in
perception, but I think a lot of it is also the media hype of MeToo, Trump, etc. I get
extremely frustrated with them at times but I have learned lately not to even respond to
the latest outrage and keep reminding them, which both do not really like, that woman or
man, in this world, that choice matters about as much as the one between R and D...
Hillary and her disgusting minions sicken me with their sexism talk. They make an open
mockery of real sexism and they feel absolutely no shame doing it. Anything to get ahead
after all, they do not care how many real women they step on, bomb, and kill to get there
either.
#2.1.1 may
consider herself a true feminist, her unrelenting support of women as THE answer to our
problems says to me, in my own opinion, she's really no feminist. Feminism isn't about
saying women are better than men but saying women are as capable as men. To me, the
uttering of women who say, like some twit in the media a couple weeks ago, that "women
aren't corrupt" is actually a highly sexist thing to say. Women with real power in our
corrupt system are indeed as corrupt as any man is and seem fully capable of using their
corruption to get ahead. And there have been many women historically who proved that
capability rather well.
I have a couple of friends who are on the same wavelength in too many ways for me.
Both are younger than I am so some of that might be generational differences in
perception, but I think a lot of it is also the media hype of MeToo, Trump, etc. I get
extremely frustrated with them at times but I have learned lately not to even respond to
the latest outrage and keep reminding them, which both do not really like, that woman or
man, in this world, that choice matters about as much as the one between R and D...
Hillary and her disgusting minions sicken me with their sexism talk. They make an open
mockery of real sexism and they feel absolutely no shame doing it. Anything to get ahead
after all, they do not care how many real women they step on, bomb, and kill to get there
either.
Gabbard herself has already ruled out such a challenge, but that is beside the point.
Gabbard has now vowed to take her fight to the convention, where she might argue that the
nominee, whom Clinton will applaud and support, is just another tool of the Democratic,
neoconservative, neoliberal, warmongering, globalist establishment.
I sure hope that Tulsi gets a boost out of this nonsense. No matter what one may think of
her as a candidate, I am all for a bigger group of voices, and I am definitely on my feet
applauding Tulsi's response.
Correct me if this is wrong, but I saw a graphic on Twitter or Reddit last night that may
very well explain why Tulsi Gabbard was targeted by the Great White Failure: every one of the
major candidates were either Clinton state delegates or Clinton superdelegates - with the
exceptions of Bernie Sanders and Tulsi Gabbard. Also floating around was the Wikileaks email
from the Clinton Cabal to Tulsi, chastising her for resigning. Suddenly, the vicious and
vindictive swipe makes sense.
There was also lot of speculation online too about whether the Ghoul of Politics Past was
testing the smear job waters to see what would knock Tulsi, with the plan to debut the same
hits against Bernie Sanders. I can believe it.
Just to throw the question out there too: do you think other candidates should be asked
about this? I'm now of two minds. On one hand, I believe it's a fair question, and I
especially want to hear all of them demanding that Clinton provide proof of her pretty
serious allegations. Seems to me that no one has asked for the receipts yet. On the other,
the press shouldn't have time to be asking candidates what they think; they should all be
swarming Hillary Clinton, demanding to see her alleged evidence. A third part of me wonders
why we are still giving this human herpes any attention whatsoever. She should be relegated
to the same heap that Glenn Beck currently occupies, where no one gives a rat's ass about her
or her "opinions."
@Le
Frog
Based on Fmr. Sec. Clinton's libelous statement. The language was more direct and
absolute.
Rep. Gabbard should get a bump but she, and certainly Sen. Sanders, have bigger fish to
fry than jumping up and down every time Her rattles the car keys.
is a Donald Trump asset.
I sure hope that Tulsi gets a boost out of this nonsense. No matter what one may think
of her as a candidate, I am all for a bigger group of voices, and I am definitely on my
feet applauding Tulsi's response.
Correct me if this is wrong, but I saw a graphic on Twitter or Reddit last night that
may very well explain why Tulsi Gabbard was targeted by the Great White Failure: every
one of the major candidates were either Clinton state delegates or Clinton superdelegates
- with the exceptions of Bernie Sanders and Tulsi Gabbard. Also floating around was the
Wikileaks email from the Clinton Cabal to Tulsi, chastising her for resigning. Suddenly,
the vicious and vindictive swipe makes sense.
There was also lot of speculation online too about whether the Ghoul of Politics Past
was testing the smear job waters to see what would knock Tulsi, with the plan to debut
the same hits against Bernie Sanders. I can believe it.
Just to throw the question out there too: do you think other candidates should be
asked about this? I'm now of two minds. On one hand, I believe it's a fair question, and
I especially want to hear all of them demanding that Clinton provide proof of her pretty
serious allegations. Seems to me that no one has asked for the receipts yet. On the
other, the press shouldn't have time to be asking candidates what they think; they should
all be swarming Hillary Clinton, demanding to see her alleged evidence. A third part of
me wonders why we are still giving this human herpes any attention whatsoever. She should
be relegated to the same heap that Glenn Beck currently occupies, where no one gives a
rat's ass about her or her "opinions."
@OzoneTom
I would love to see a lawsuit from Jill Stein.
#4
Based on Fmr. Sec. Clinton's libelous statement. The language was more direct and
absolute.
Rep. Gabbard should get a bump but she, and certainly Sen. Sanders, have bigger fish
to fry than jumping up and down every time Her rattles the car keys.
...but it fits this conversation too
https://thegrayzone.com/2019/10/20/max-blumenthal-on-why-hillary-clinton... (22 min)
Max Blumenthal says that Clinton's comments reflect a continued effort by Democratic
neo-liberals to deflect responsibility for their loss to Trump in 2016; marginalize voices
like Gabbard and Stein's who challenge their pro-war, corporatist agenda; and preview their
potential future attacks on Bernie Sanders.
is a Donald Trump asset.
I sure hope that Tulsi gets a boost out of this nonsense. No matter what one may think
of her as a candidate, I am all for a bigger group of voices, and I am definitely on my
feet applauding Tulsi's response.
Correct me if this is wrong, but I saw a graphic on Twitter or Reddit last night that
may very well explain why Tulsi Gabbard was targeted by the Great White Failure: every
one of the major candidates were either Clinton state delegates or Clinton superdelegates
- with the exceptions of Bernie Sanders and Tulsi Gabbard. Also floating around was the
Wikileaks email from the Clinton Cabal to Tulsi, chastising her for resigning. Suddenly,
the vicious and vindictive swipe makes sense.
There was also lot of speculation online too about whether the Ghoul of Politics Past
was testing the smear job waters to see what would knock Tulsi, with the plan to debut
the same hits against Bernie Sanders. I can believe it.
Just to throw the question out there too: do you think other candidates should be
asked about this? I'm now of two minds. On one hand, I believe it's a fair question, and
I especially want to hear all of them demanding that Clinton provide proof of her pretty
serious allegations. Seems to me that no one has asked for the receipts yet. On the
other, the press shouldn't have time to be asking candidates what they think; they should
all be swarming Hillary Clinton, demanding to see her alleged evidence. A third part of
me wonders why we are still giving this human herpes any attention whatsoever. She should
be relegated to the same heap that Glenn Beck currently occupies, where no one gives a
rat's ass about her or her "opinions."
Representative Gabbard, We were very disappointed to hear that you would resign your
position with the DNC so you could endorse Bernie Sanders, a man who has never been a
Democrat before. When we met over dinner a couple of years ago I was so impressed by your
intellect, your passion, and commitment to getting things done on behalf of the American
people. For you to endorse a man who has spent almost 40 years in public office with very
few accomplishments, doesn't fall in line with what we previously thought of you. Hillary
Clinton will be our party's nominee and you standing on ceremony to support the sinking
Bernie Sanders ship is disrespectful to Hillary Clinton. A woman who has spent the vast
majority of her life in public service and working on behalf of women, families, and the
underserved. You have called both myself and Michael Kives before about helping your
campaign raise money, we no longer trust your judgement so will not be raising money for
your campaign.
Darnell Strom & Michael Kives
Ooh..bet that hurt.
These are the guys who represent lots of powerful people in government, the media and
Hollywood. If you want to go anywhere then you need them on your side.
is a Donald Trump asset.
I sure hope that Tulsi gets a boost out of this nonsense. No matter what one may think
of her as a candidate, I am all for a bigger group of voices, and I am definitely on my
feet applauding Tulsi's response.
Correct me if this is wrong, but I saw a graphic on Twitter or Reddit last night that
may very well explain why Tulsi Gabbard was targeted by the Great White Failure: every
one of the major candidates were either Clinton state delegates or Clinton superdelegates
- with the exceptions of Bernie Sanders and Tulsi Gabbard. Also floating around was the
Wikileaks email from the Clinton Cabal to Tulsi, chastising her for resigning. Suddenly,
the vicious and vindictive swipe makes sense.
There was also lot of speculation online too about whether the Ghoul of Politics Past
was testing the smear job waters to see what would knock Tulsi, with the plan to debut
the same hits against Bernie Sanders. I can believe it.
Just to throw the question out there too: do you think other candidates should be
asked about this? I'm now of two minds. On one hand, I believe it's a fair question, and
I especially want to hear all of them demanding that Clinton provide proof of her pretty
serious allegations. Seems to me that no one has asked for the receipts yet. On the
other, the press shouldn't have time to be asking candidates what they think; they should
all be swarming Hillary Clinton, demanding to see her alleged evidence. A third part of
me wonders why we are still giving this human herpes any attention whatsoever. She should
be relegated to the same heap that Glenn Beck currently occupies, where no one gives a
rat's ass about her or her "opinions."
Thomas M. Nichols
He closes the article with this tidbit -
As a former Republican who will vote for the Democratic nominee again in 2020, I hope
that I never have to talk about Tulsi Gabbard again. I can only hope that enough Democratic
Party leaders can convince Hillary Clinton to feel the same way.
Check out his book! -
The Death of Expertise: The Campaign against Established Knowledge and Why it Matters
(!!!!)
Technology and increasing levels of education have exposed people to more information
than ever before. These societal gains, however, have also helped fuel a surge in
narcissistic and misguided intellectual egalitarianism that has crippled informed debates
on any number of issues. Today, everyone knows everything: with only a quick trip through
WebMD or Wikipedia, average citizens believe themselves to be on an equal intellectual
footing with doctors and diplomats. All voices, even the most ridiculous, demand to be
taken with equal seriousness, and any claim to the contrary is dismissed as undemocratic
elitism. Tom Nichols' The Death of Expertise shows how this rejection of experts has
occurred: the openness of the internet, the emergence of a customer service model in higher
education, and the transformation of the news industry into a 24-hour entertainment
machine, among other reasons. Paradoxically, the increasingly democratic dissemination of
information, rather than producing an educated public, has instead created an army of
ill-informed and angry citizens who denounce intellectual achievement. When ordinary
citizens believe that no one knows more than anyone else, democratic institutions
themselves are in danger of falling either to populism or to technocracy or, in the worst
case, a combination of both.
@konondrum@konondrum
But I can't remember who. The big quote was something like, "In America every shopkeeper is
an expert."
Thomas M. Nichols
He closes the article with this tidbit -
As a former Republican who will vote for the Democratic nominee again in 2020, I
hope that I never have to talk about Tulsi Gabbard again. I can only hope that enough
Democratic Party leaders can convince Hillary Clinton to feel the same way.
Check out his book! -
The Death of Expertise: The Campaign against Established Knowledge and Why it Matters
(!!!!)
Technology and increasing levels of education have exposed people to more
information than ever before. These societal gains, however, have also helped fuel a
surge in narcissistic and misguided intellectual egalitarianism that has crippled
informed debates on any number of issues. Today, everyone knows everything: with only a
quick trip through WebMD or Wikipedia, average citizens believe themselves to be on an
equal intellectual footing with doctors and diplomats. All voices, even the most
ridiculous, demand to be taken with equal seriousness, and any claim to the contrary is
dismissed as undemocratic elitism. Tom Nichols' The Death of Expertise shows how this
rejection of experts has occurred: the openness of the internet, the emergence of a
customer service model in higher education, and the transformation of the news industry
into a 24-hour entertainment machine, among other reasons. Paradoxically, the
increasingly democratic dissemination of information, rather than producing an educated
public, has instead created an army of ill-informed and angry citizens who denounce
intellectual achievement. When ordinary citizens believe that no one knows more than
anyone else, democratic institutions themselves are in danger of falling either to
populism or to technocracy or, in the worst case, a combination of both.
@konondrum
This is just what I need: My worst of all fears confirmed.
It wasn't so long ago that "standing up to experts" was just something crank Texas
dentists got skewered by Stephen Colbert for...but now?
Thomas M. Nichols
He closes the article with this tidbit -
As a former Republican who will vote for the Democratic nominee again in 2020, I
hope that I never have to talk about Tulsi Gabbard again. I can only hope that enough
Democratic Party leaders can convince Hillary Clinton to feel the same way.
Check out his book! -
The Death of Expertise: The Campaign against Established Knowledge and Why it Matters
(!!!!)
Technology and increasing levels of education have exposed people to more
information than ever before. These societal gains, however, have also helped fuel a
surge in narcissistic and misguided intellectual egalitarianism that has crippled
informed debates on any number of issues. Today, everyone knows everything: with only a
quick trip through WebMD or Wikipedia, average citizens believe themselves to be on an
equal intellectual footing with doctors and diplomats. All voices, even the most
ridiculous, demand to be taken with equal seriousness, and any claim to the contrary is
dismissed as undemocratic elitism. Tom Nichols' The Death of Expertise shows how this
rejection of experts has occurred: the openness of the internet, the emergence of a
customer service model in higher education, and the transformation of the news industry
into a 24-hour entertainment machine, among other reasons. Paradoxically, the
increasingly democratic dissemination of information, rather than producing an educated
public, has instead created an army of ill-informed and angry citizens who denounce
intellectual achievement. When ordinary citizens believe that no one knows more than
anyone else, democratic institutions themselves are in danger of falling either to
populism or to technocracy or, in the worst case, a combination of both.
Will any of HER buddies address anything in Tulsi's tweet aside from Russia? I think not.
HER is going to have to take the "rot" comment on the chin because I'm sure they really
really don't want to have that conversation.
So, I am glad Tulsi opened that door and I hope she doesn't let up on it. Russiagate is,
after all, a symptom of the corruption in the party, just like Trump is.
@Lookout
I watched it yesterday and was amazed by his take on it, especially after he had harsh words
for Tulsi regarding her version of Medicare for All. To be sure, Time Black is a big Bernie
supporter, but his latest on Tulsi is excellent.
I was sorta confused about why Hillary did it. Mostly I thought to open door to attack
Bernie. In many ways that door is closed now given the reaction of the masses. I now think
Hillary's comments were meant to sideline not so much the candidate Tulsi but her messages of
anti-war and anti-regime change. I think her constant iteration just like Bernie's
constant iteration of m4a, was reaching people way beyond her poll numbers.
It boils down to this:
Atlantic Council (war mongers) = regime change and war is good. Losing ground.
Tulsi: regime change and war is bad. Winning ground.
Tulsi's influence goes beyond her poll numbers. She is thee most dangerous candidate to
the establishment because she is winning the ideological battle over foreign policy and
war.
@MrWebster
Nothing today should be about Her. It is straight from the Trump playbook. Allowing this
absurd slander to distract us from keeping our eyes on the prize is a win for Her.
Senator Sanders and Representative Gabbard are moving ahead on the front. They are
depending on the rest of us to resist on the flanks.
"Not me, Us!" is not just a slogan...
I was sorta confused about why Hillary did it. Mostly I thought to open door to attack
Bernie. In many ways that door is closed now given the reaction of the masses. I now
think Hillary's comments were meant to sideline not so much the candidate Tulsi but her
messages of anti-war and anti-regime change. I think her constant iteration just like
Bernie's constant iteration of m4a, was reaching people way beyond her poll
numbers.
It boils down to this:
Atlantic Council (war mongers) = regime change and war is good. Losing ground.
Tulsi: regime change and war is bad. Winning ground.
Tulsi's influence goes beyond her poll numbers. She is thee most dangerous candidate
to the establishment because she is winning the ideological battle over foreign policy
and war.
@MrWebster
Excellent comment that reflects my own view of what is going on here.
Just as Bernie's 2016 Presidential campaign has greatly changed the dommestic policy
landscape, the oligarchy and the MIC are seeing that Tulsi Gabbard's 2020 Presidential
campaign is beginning to take hold in changing the political landscape foreign policy wise.
The empire is coming apart and they are lashing back.
I was sorta confused about why Hillary did it. Mostly I thought to open door to attack
Bernie. In many ways that door is closed now given the reaction of the masses. I now
think Hillary's comments were meant to sideline not so much the candidate Tulsi but her
messages of anti-war and anti-regime change. I think her constant iteration just like
Bernie's constant iteration of m4a, was reaching people way beyond her poll
numbers.
It boils down to this:
Atlantic Council (war mongers) = regime change and war is good. Losing ground.
Tulsi: regime change and war is bad. Winning ground.
Tulsi's influence goes beyond her poll numbers. She is thee most dangerous candidate
to the establishment because she is winning the ideological battle over foreign policy
and war.
...something to do with HER server, wasn't it? But what I REALLY think is going on, and I
could be totally wrong, is that Bernie is considering Tulsi as his VP pick, when and if, and
this is to sow enough doubt and deceit about Tulsi that it wounds Bernie. But one thing I
know for sure: that Clinton hag is one evil bitch!
...something to do with HER server, wasn't it? But what I REALLY think is going on,
and I could be totally wrong, is that Bernie is considering Tulsi as his VP pick, when
and if, and this is to sow enough doubt and deceit about Tulsi that it wounds Bernie. But
one thing I know for sure: that Clinton hag is one evil bitch!
"... This is when it became clear it wasn't just political operatives pushing fake news about Russian influence, but that "respected" mass media would be leading the charge for them. The rest is pretty much history. MSNBC, CNN, The Washington Post, etc have been spewing outlandish Russiagate nonsense for three years straight, and despite the complete failure of special counsel Robert Mueller to find any evidence of Trump-Russia collusion, these agents of empire refuse to stop. ..."
"... Americans like to sneer at more transparently unfree societies around the world, but when you think about the disturbing implications of former spooks delivering news to the public, one can't help but conclude that mass media in 2019 looks like a gigantic propaganda campaign targeting U.S. citizens. Moreover, as can be seen by the recent attacks by Clinton and her allies in the media on Gabbard, they aren't easing up. ..."
"... Comey was a senior vice president for Lockheed Martin before returning to Washington ..."
"... Excuse me, the voting going on up there for sanctions on Russia for various bogus things has been pretty much unanimous and bipartisan. ..."
The corporate revolution will collapse if we refuse to buy what they are selling – their ideas, their version of history, their
wars, their weapons, their notion of inevitability.
– Arundhati Roy
Last week, Hillary Clinton called Tulsi Gabbard (and Jill Stein) Russian agents on a podcast. More
specifically :
"I'm not making any predictions, but I think they've got their eye on someone who's currently in the Democratic primary and
are grooming her to be the third-party candidate. She's the favorite of the Russians," said Clinton, apparently referring to Rep.
Gabbard, who's been accused of receiving support from Russian bots and the Russian news media. "They have a bunch of sites and
bots and other ways of supporting her so far." She added: "That's assuming Jill Stein will give it up, which she might not because
she's also a Russian asset. Yeah, she's a Russian asset -- I mean, totally. They know they can't win without a third-party candidate.
So I don't know who it's going to be, but I will guarantee you they will have a vigorous third-party challenge in the key states
that they most needed."
Tulsi subsequently responded to this slanderous accusation with a series of devastating blows.
Her tweets set off a firestorm, and even if you're as disillusioned by presidential politics as myself, you couldn't help but
cheer wildly that someone with a major political platform finally stated without any hint of fear or hesitation exactly what so many
Americans across the ideological spectrum feel.
Of course, this has far wider implications than a high profile feud between these two. The "let's blame Russia for Hillary's loss"
epidemic of calculated stupidity driven by Ellen-Democrats and their mouthpieces across corporate mass media began immediately after
the election. I know about it on a personal level because this website was an early target of the neoliberal-led new McCarthyism
courtesy of a ridiculous and libelous smear in the Washington Post over Thanksgiving weekend 2016 (see:
Liberty Blitzkrieg Included on Washington Post Highlighted Hit List of "Russian Propaganda" Websites) .
This is when it became clear it wasn't just political operatives pushing fake news about Russian influence, but that "respected"
mass media would be leading the charge for them. The rest is pretty much history. MSNBC, CNN, The Washington Post, etc have been
spewing outlandish Russiagate nonsense for three years straight, and despite the complete failure of special counsel Robert Mueller
to find any evidence of Trump-Russia collusion, these agents of empire refuse to stop. The whole charade seems more akin to an intelligence
operation than journalism, which shouldn't be surprising given the proliferation of former intelligence agents throughout mass media
in the Trump era.
Former CIA Director
John Brennan
(2013-17) is the latest superspook to be reborn as a TV newsie. He just
cashed in at
NBC News as a "senior national security and intelligence analyst" and served his first expert views on last Sunday's edition of
Meet the Press .
The Brennan acquisition seeks to elevate NBC to spook parity with CNN, which employs former Director of National Intelligence
James Clapper and former CIA Director
Michael Hayden
in a similar capacity.
Other, lesser-known national security veterans thrive under TV's grow lights. Almost too numerous to list, they include
Chuck Rosenberg
, former acting DEA administrator, chief of staff for FBI Director James B. Comey, and
counselor to former FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III;
Frank Figliuzzi , former chief of FBI counterintelligence;
Juan Zarate , deputy national security adviser under Bush, at NBC; and
Fran
Townsend , homeland security adviser under Bush, at CBS News.
CNN's bulging roster also includes former FBI agent Asha Rangappa
; former FBI agent James Gagliano
; Obama's former deputy national security adviser
Tony Blinken ; former House
Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers ; senior
adviser to the National Security Council during the Obama administration
Samantha Vinograd ; retired CIA operations officer
Steven L. Hall; and
Philip Mudd , also retired from the CIA.
Americans like to sneer at more transparently unfree societies around the world, but when you think about the disturbing implications
of former spooks delivering news to the public, one can't help but conclude that mass media in 2019 looks like a gigantic propaganda
campaign targeting U.S. citizens. Moreover, as can be seen by the recent attacks by Clinton and her allies in the media on Gabbard,
they aren't easing up.
Which brings us to the crux of the issue. Why are they doing this? Why is Clinton, with zero evidence whatsoever, falsely calling
a sitting U.S. Congresswoman, a veteran with two tours in Iraq, and someone polling at only 2% in the Democratic primary a "Russian
asset." Why are they so afraid of Tulsi Gabbard?
It's partly personal. Tulsi was one of only a handful of congressional Democrats to set aside fears of the Clintons and their
mafia-like network to endorse Bernie Sanders early in 2016. In fact, she
stepped
down from her position as vice-chairman of the Democratic National Committee to do so. This is the sort of thing a petty narcissist
like Hillary Clinton could never forgive, but it goes further.
Tulsi's mere presence on stage during recent debates has proven devastating for the Ellen Degeneres wing of the Democratic party.
She effectively ended neoliberal darling Kamala Harris' chances by simply telling the truth about her horrible record, something
no one else in the race had the guts to do.
In other words, Tulsi demolished Kamala Harris and put an end to her primary chances by simply telling the truth about her on
national television. This is how powerful the truth can be when somebody's actually willing to stand up and say it. It's why the
agents of empire -- in charge of virtually all major institutions -- go out of their way to ensure the American public is exposed
to as little truth as possible. It's also why they lie and scream "Russia" instead of debating the actual issues.
But this goes well beyond Tulsi Gabbard. Empire requires constant meddling abroad as well as periodic regime change wars to ensure
compliant puppets are firmly in control of any country with any geopolitical significance. The 21st century has been littered with
a series of disastrous U.S. interventions abroad, while the country back home continues to descend deeper into a neo-feudal oligarchy
with a hunger games style economy. As such, an increasing number of Americans have begun to question the entire premise of imperial
foreign policy.
To the agents of empire, dominant throughout mainstream politics, mega corporations, think-tanks and of course mass media, this
sort of thought crime is entirely unacceptable. In case you haven't noticed, empire is a third-rail of U.S. politics. If you dare
touch the issue, you'll be ruthlessly smeared, without any evidence, as a Russian agent or asset. There's nothing logical about this,
but then again there typically isn't much logic when it comes to psychological operations. They depend on manipulation and triggering
specific emotional responses.
There's a reason people like Hillary Clinton and her minions just yell "Russia" whenever an individual with a platform criticizes
empire and endless war. They know they can't win an argument if they debate the actual issues, so a conscious choice was made to
simply avoid debate entirely. As such, they've decided to craft and spread a disingenuous narrative in which anyone critical of establishment
neocon/neoliberal foreign policy is a Russia asset/agent/bot. This is literally all they've got. These people are telling you 2+2=5
and if you don't accept it, you're a traitorous, Putin-loving nazi with a pee pee tape. And these same people call themselves "liberal."
Importantly, it isn't just a few trollish kooks doing this. It's being spread by some of the most powerful people and institutions
in the country, including of course mass media.
This inane verbal vomit is considered "liberal" news in modern America, a word which has now lost all meaning. Above, we witness
a collection of television mannequins questioning the loyalty of a U.S. veteran who continues to serve in both Congress and the national
guard simply because she dared call out America's perpetually failing foreign policy establishment.
To conclude, it's now clear dissent is only permitted so long as it doesn't become too popular. By polling at 2% in the primary,
it appears Gabbard became too popular, but the truth is she's just a vessel. What's really got the agents of empire concerned is
we may be on the verge of a tipping point within the broader U.S. population regarding regime change wars and empire. This is why
debate needs to be shut down and shut down now. A critical mass of citizens openly questioning establishment foreign policy cannot
be permitted. Those on the fence need to be bullied and manipulated into thinking dissent is equivalent to being a traitor. The national
security state doesn't want the public to even think about such topics, let alone debate them.
Ultimately, if you give up your capacity for reason, for free-thought and for the courage to say what you think about issues of
national significance, you've lost everything. This is what these manipulators want you to do. They want you to shut-up, to listen
to the "experts" who destroy everything they touch, and to be a compliant subject as opposed to an active, empowered citizen. The
answer to such a tactic is to be more bold, more informed and more ethical. They fear truth and empowered individuals more than anything
else. Stand up tall and speak your mind. Pandering to bullies never works.
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For those of us who grew up during the Cold War going to Russia is intense. I have never been so scared in my life as when
that plane touched down at Pulkovo 2. And I though Dulles was a shithole.
Russians love art and they have fantastic museums and fantastic architecture. Food is a bit sketchy but you can make do. No
fat women there that I saw. In fact, you will see some of the most beautiful women in the world there. Trust me on that.
Pelosi is smart enough to know that all roads lead to Putin. But is she smart enough to know that're not just American and
its 'allied' Western 'roads', but now its all the roads in the world.
Because the world finally understands that Putin is the only peacemaker on the scene. And that most of the disputes the international
community is saddled with are a direct result of American foreign policy and the excesses of its economy.
The world is tired of being dragged through Hell at the whim of a handful of American neocon devotees of Paul Wolfowitz and
the fallacious Wolfowitz Doctrine which was credited with having won the Cold War for the West and has been in effect ever since.
Except there seems to be some doubt now who actually won the Cold War with America scrambling to get out of Syria, leaving
behind a symbolic force of a couple of thousand troops.
That's the reason for everything that's going on America today. Russia, under Putin, has turned the tables on Congress, the
neocons, the warmongers, and those politicians and elite who want the Middle East and its vast reserves of oil to continue to
be destabilized by intranational, neighborly hatreds, by terrorism and by America's closest ally, Israel to continue to expand
its borders with its policy of settlements. This problematic situation is scrupulously avoided in America and the West's MSM,
and can only be seen in foreign media. Which brings us back to Putin.
Is he following the strategies of Sun Tzu, who advises you to
'appear weak when you are strong and strong when you are weak.'
'all warfare is based on deception'
'victorious warriors win first and then go to war, while defeated warriors go to war first then try to win.'
Hillary Clinton is obviously testing the waters for a last-minute, swoop-in candidacy. She sees Biden deflating and realizes
there's nobody to keep the Democratic nomination firmly in corporate hands. She wants them to beg her, though.
Without Russia, ASSAD would be long gone and IRAN would have been bombed to oblivion, and Greater Israhell would have been
fulfilled and ruling over the MidEast.
In other words, Russia bashing by Jewish-controlled politicians and in Jewish-controlled Western media
is simply PAYBACK .
I am a Russian Agent. Well, not formally but act as one. Only in elections though as Russia forbids (after losing 30 million
dead in WW2) any military or violent interference. Agent may be too strong a word as my actions reflect the beauty of Russian
literature, music and philosophy. (qv Kropotkin, Rimsky Korsakoff etc. etc.) Maybe a spokesman?
In this coming election vote for the agent of your choice. Gabbard, Trump, (Cackles, hang on and wait for this one) or Biden
( on whom we await a conversion). This agency stuff is fun. Can't wait.
The quid pro quo for many Deep State bureaucrats comes after they are no longer in office as typified by jobs as "experts"
with the corrupt news networks. Comey was a senior vice president for Lockheed Martin before returning to Washington.
Trump is outing them all and they are out to destroy him.
If the Russians are so bad, why did we give them our Uranium? Hillary and corrupt Washington Swamp dwellers in action. How
many in Congress opposed the deal? We need Trump to be reelected to Make America Great Again.
I remember in the 80's Democrats would mercilessly lampoon and make fun of Conservatives for their (at the time) hard-line
stance against the Soviet Union and how we should just get over it: peace, love and b*llsh*t. My how times have changed.
You need a scorecard to keep track these days. Barry lampooned Mitt for speaking against the Russians, like they were the 'good
guys' (ahem, 'tell Vlad' and Kills power reset button) Make up your ******* minds people.
Thank you for bringing my attention to Russia. Had it not been for your constant denunciations, I probably would never have
investigated that nation to the extent that I have, and that would have been my loss. Allow me to explain.
As a permanent student of human history and culture, I've traveled to, and studied many different nations, from Japan, China
and Thailand, to Europe, Latin America and the Middle East, but somehow I managed to completely miss Russia. Of course I was familiar
with the Western narrative concerning communism and the USSR - I grew up with that - but I never fully understood Russian culture
until, by your actions, you forced me to look into it.
I've since studied their history intently, and have studied their language to the point where I can at least make myself understood.
I've spoken to Russian expats, read numerous books, watched their TV shows, listened to their music, and have kept a close eye
on current events, including the coup in Ukraine and Russia's response to that event. At this point I feel well enough prepared
to travel to Russia and I'm looking forward to my upcoming trip with great anticipation.
I operate on the basic premise that I'm nobody special - that there are thousands of people just like me with a deep interest
in human affairs, who, like myself, have been prompted to investigate a culture that, for various reasons, has been largely overlooked
in the West. So, on my own and their behalf I thank you for providing the impetus to focus our attention in that regard. It's
probably not what you intended, but it is what it is. Thanks to you, many hundreds, if not thousands of people have now undertaken
a study of Russia and her people, and that can only be a good thing, as the more we know about each other, the less we have to
fear, and the less likely we are to come into conflict with one another.
Bravo well written and right on the mark. If Tulsi wasn't a gun grabber and openly supported the 2nd Amendment she would be
a front runner, only a few steps behind Trump. And by the way, don't trust those 2% Polls. We all know the polls are pure ********.
When one Colonel Gary Powers was shot down in his USAF U2 spy plane in 1960 and captured alive he was asked by his then KGB
interrogators what the difference was between the Republican and Democratic parties.......and he admitted to being at a loss to
explain that there was any fundamental difference at all.
Therein lies the root problem with the American political system. All through the process it arrives at the same outcomes and
it doesnt matter who you vote for.
It could be argued that it is in effect a one party system as both are indistinguishable from each other ultimately as they
push the America PLC agenda.
The entire system is held captive by secretive and "invisible" unelected groups who call the shots and if you push too hard
they have you killed one way or another.....all the esoteric secret societies of any significance are represented.
The question therefore is this; Is America any different to China other than the wallpaper coverings?
To paraphrase Mark Twain; If voting really mattered they wouldn't let you do it.
Those on the fence need to be bullied and manipulated into thinking dissent is equivalent to being a traitor
This is true with Trumptards on this comments board. They unquestionably follow lies, manipulative, and hollow Trump doctrine
without thinking.
Just yesterday there was and idiot spewing out that 'Assange was treasonous' before engaging his cerebral matter to realise
you cannot be a traitor against a country that's not yours.
In keeping with professional journalistic ethics, The Times also reached out to
experts on fascism, fascist terrorism, terrorist fascism, fascist-adjacent Assad-apologism,
Hitlerism, horrorism, Russia, and so on, to confirm Gabbard's guilt-by-association with the
people The Times had just associated her with. Brian Levin, Director of the CSU Center
for the Study of Hate and Extremism, confirmed that Gabbard has "the seal of approval" within
goose-stepping, Hitler-loving, neo-Nazi circles. The Alliance for Securing Democracy (yes, the
one from the previous paragraph) conducted an "independent analysis" which confirmed that RT
("the Kremlin-backed news agency") had mentioned Gabbard far more often than the Western
corporate media (which isn't backed by anyone, and is totally unbiased and independent, despite
the fact that most of it is owned by a handful of powerful global corporations, and at least
one CIA-affiliated oligarch). Oh, and Hawaii State Senator Kai Kahele, who is challenging
Gabbard for her seat in Congress, agreed with The Times that Gabbard's support from
Jew-hating, racist Putin-Nazis might be a potential liability.
"Clearly there's something about her and her policies that attracts and appeals to these
type of people who are white nationalists, anti-Semites, and Holocaust deniers."
But it's not just The New York Times , of course. No sooner had Clinton finished
cackling than the corporate media launched into their familiar Goebbelsian piano routine,
banging out story after television segment repeating the words "Gabbard" and "Russian asset."
I've singled out The Times because the smear piece in question was clearly a warm-up for
Hillary Clinton's calculated smear job on Friday night. No, the old gal hasn't lost her mind.
She knew exactly what she was doing, as did the editors of The New York Times , as did
every other establishment news source that breathlessly "reported" her neo-McCarthyite
smears.
As I noted in my previous essay ,
2020 is for all the marbles, and it's not just about who wins the election. No, it's mostly
about crushing the "populist" backlash against the hegemony of global capitalism and its happy,
smiley-faced, conformist ideology. To do that, the neoliberal establishment has to
delegitimize, and lethally stigmatize, not just Trump, but also people like Gabbard, Bernie
Sanders, Jeremy Corbyn and any other popular political figure (left, right, it makes no
difference) deviating from that ideology.
Ask yourself, what do Trump, Sanders, Corbyn, and Gabbard have in common? No, it's not their
Putin-Nazism it's the challenge they represent to global capitalism. Each, in his or her own
way, is a symbol of the growing populist resistance to the privatization and globalization of
everything. And thus, they must be delegitimized, stigmatized, and relentlessly smeared as
"Russian assets," "anti-Semites," "traitors," "white supremacists," "fascists," "communists,"
or some other type of "extremists."
Gabbard, to her credit, understands this, and is focusing attention on the motives
and tactics of the neoliberal establishment and their smear machine. As I noted in
an essay last year , "the only way to effectively counter a smear campaign (whether
large-scale or small-scale) is to resist the temptation to profess your innocence, and,
instead, focus as much attention on the tactics and the motives of the smearers as
possible ." This will not save her, but it is the best she can do, and I applaud her for
having the guts to do it. I hope she continues to give them hell as they finish off her
candidacy and drive her out of office.
... ... ...
Ask them whether their smear machine is working... if you can get them off the phone with
their brokers, or whoever is decorating their summer places in the Hamptons or out on
Martha's
Vineyard .
Or ask the millions of well-off liberals who are still, even after Russiagate was exposed as an
enormous hoax based on absolutely nothing , parroting this paranoid official narrative and
calling people "Russian assets" on Twitter. Or never mind, just pay attention to what happens
over the next twelve months. In terms of ridiculous
official propaganda , spittle-flecked McCarthyite smears, and full-blown psychotic mass
Putin-Nazi hysteria, it's going to make the last three years look like the Propaganda Special
Olympics.
* * *
C. J. Hopkins is an award-winning American playwright, novelist and political satirist
based in Berlin. His plays are published by Bloomsbury Publishing (UK) and Broadway Play
Publishing (USA). His debut novel, ZONE 23 , is
published by Snoggsworthy, Swaine & Cormorant Paperbacks. He can be reached at cjhopkins.com or consentfactory.org .
She is absolutely in the best position to talk about foreign policy having been there in the
trenches and personally knowing horrors or war. I've seen bits of those Fox videos and she
was admirable there. Being a veteran probably counts for something in small towns where most
Americans live.
I wasn't following her on social media so not sure how she fares there.
Bernie, on the other hand, knows how to campaign and has very good domestic policy and he
used to be popular in swing states, certainly better than Clinton.
So two of them would be my dream ticket. I feel Warren and Biden would be a loss of
another four years or even longer.
While the mainstream liberal media remains firmly in the pocket of the Clintons' propaganda machine, spewing russophobic accusations
at any and every one who dares question the establishment and military-industrial complex line, there are some - on the left - that
are willing to step up and defend Tulsi Gabbard against the latest delusional suggestion from Hillary that she is a 'Russian asset'.
So now Crooked Hillary is at it again! She is calling Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard "a Russian favorite," and Jill Stein "a Russian
asset." As you may have heard, I was called a big Russia lover also (actually, I do like Russian people. I like all people!).
Hillary's gone Crazy!
What the circular firing squad left undone, will be accomplished by infighting between Clintonites and "moderates" ( a too
positive concept). May the Deluge drown you all in 2020.
...Tulsi served two tours of duty in the Middle East, and she continues her service as a Major in the Army National Guard.
Tulsi's 2005 deployment was a 12-month tour at Logistical Support Area Anaconda in Iraq, where she served in a field medical unit
as a specialist with a 29th Support Battalion medical company. She was awarded the Meritorious Service Medal at the end of this
tour.
Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Massachusetts Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren are reportedly developing a close
political friendship that might prove pivotal to deciding the Democratic presidential nomination.
Both have kept in touch since Warren announced her decision to seek the Democratic nomination last February, NBC News reported
Saturday.
"Hillary Clinton would absolutely have influence over a number of delegates to this convention," Deb Kozikowski, the vice-chairwoman
of the Massachusetts Democratic Party, told NBC, referring to the possibility that Clinton could help Warren secure delegates
if there is no clear nominee heading into the Democratic National Convention next summer .
One Democratic strategist told NBC that Clinton has been watching and approving of Warren's campaign as the senator has unveiled
a series of increasingly progressive policy proposals.
"... And then there is the Great Hillary Clinton caper. In an interview last week Hillary claimed predictably that Donald Trump is "Vladimir Putin's dream," and then went on to assert that there would be other Russian assets emerging, including nestled in the bosom of her own beloved Democratic Party ..."
"... Tulsi responded courageously and accurately "Great! Thank you @HillaryClinton . ..."
"... Tulsi has in fact been attacked relentless by the Establishment since she announced that she would be running for the Democratic nomination. Shortly before last Tuesday's Democratic candidate debate the New York Times ..."
"... quid pro quos ..."
"... Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is ..."
There was what might be described as an extraordinary amount of nonsense being promoted by
last week's media. Unfortunately, some of it was quite dangerous. Admiral William McRaven, who
commanded the Navy Seals when Osama bin Laden was captured and killed and who has been riding
that horse ever since, announced that if Donald Trump continues to fail to provide the type of
leadership the country needs, he should be replaced by whatever means are necessary. The
op-ed entitled "Our Republic is Under Attack by the President" with the subtitle "If
President Trump doesn't demonstrate the leadership that America needs, then it is time for a
new person in the Oval Office" was featured in the New York Times, suggesting that the Gray
Lady was providing its newspaper of record seal of approval for what might well be regarded as
a call for a military coup.
McRaven's exact words, after some ringing praise for the military and all its glorious deeds
in past wars, were that the soldiers, sailors and marines now must respond because "The America
that they believed in was under attack, not from without, but from within."
McRaven then elaborated that "These men and women, of all political persuasions, have seen
the assaults on our institutions: on the intelligence and law enforcement community, the State
Department and the press. They have seen our leaders stand beside despots and strongmen,
preferring their government narrative to our own. They have seen us abandon our allies and have
heard the shouts of betrayal from the battlefield. As I stood on the parade field at Fort
Bragg, one retired four-star general, grabbed my arm, shook me and shouted, 'I don't like the
Democrats, but Trump is destroying the Republic!'"
It is a call to arms if there ever was one. Too bad Trump can't strip McRaven of his pension
and generous health care benefits for starters and McRaven might also consider that he could be
recalled to active duty by Trump and court martialed under the Uniform Code of Military
Justice. And the good admiral, who up until 2018 headed the state university system in Texas,
might also receive well merited pushback for his assessment of America's role in the world over
the past two decades, in which he was a major player, at least in terms of dealing out
punishment. He wrote ""We are the most powerful nation in the world because we try to be the
good guys. We are the most powerful nation in the world because our ideals of universal freedom
and equality have been backed up by our belief that we were champions of justice, the
protectors of the less fortunate."
Utter bullshit, of course. The United States has been acting as the embodiment of a rogue
nation, lashing out pointlessly and delivering death and destruction. If McRaven truly believes
what he says he is not only violating his oath to defend the constitution while also toying
with treason, he is an idiot and should never have been allowed to run anything more demanding
than a hot dog stand. Washington has been systematically blowing people up worldwide for no
good reasons, killing possibly as many as 4 million mostly Muslims, while systematically
stripping Americans of their Bill of Rights at home. "Good guys" and "champions of justice"
indeed!
And then there is the Great Hillary Clinton caper. In an
interview last week Hillary claimed predictably that Donald Trump is "Vladimir Putin's
dream," and then went on to assert that there would be other Russian assets emerging, including
nestled in the bosom of her own beloved Democratic Party . She said, clearly suggesting
that it would be Tulsi Gabbard, that "They're also going to do third-party again. I'm not
making any predictions, but I think they've got their eye on someone who's currently in the
Democratic primary and are grooming her to be the third-party candidate. She's the favorite of
the Russians. They have a bunch of sites and bots and other ways of supporting her so far."
Clinton explained how the third-party designation would work, saying of Jill Stein, who ran
for president in 2016 as a Green Party candidate, "And that's assuming Jill Stein will give it
up, which she might not because she's also a Russian asset. Yeah, she's a Russian asset -- I
mean, totally. They know they can't win without a third-party candidate. So I don't know who
it's going to be, but I will guarantee you they will have a vigorous third-party challenge in
the key states that they most needed."
Tulsi responded courageously and accurately "Great! Thank you @HillaryClinton . You, the queen of warmongers,
embodiment of corruption, and personification of the rot that has sickened the Democratic Party
for so long, have finally come out from behind the curtain. From the day I announced my
candidacy, there has been a concerted campaign to destroy my reputation. We wondered who was
behind it and why. Now we know -- it was always you, through your proxies and powerful allies
in the corporate media and war machine, afraid of the threat I pose. It's now clear that this
primary is between you and me. Don't cowardly hide behind your proxies. Join the race
directly."
Tulsi has in fact been attacked relentless by the Establishment since she announced that
she would be running for the Democratic nomination. Shortly before last Tuesday's Democratic
candidate debate the New York Timesran an
article suggesting that Gabbard was an isolationist, was being promoted by Russia and was
an apologist for Syria's Bashar al-Assad. In reality, Gabbard is the only candidate willing to
confront America's warfare-national security state.
The Hillary Clinton attack on Gabbard and on the completely respectable Jill Stein is to a
certain extent incomprehensible unless one lives in the gutter that she and Bill have wallowed
in ever since they rose to prominence in Arkansas. Hillary, the creator of the private home
server for classified information as well as author of the catastrophic war against Libya and
the Benghazi debacle has a lot to answer for but will never be held accountable, any more than
her husband Bill for his rapes and molestations. And when it comes to foreign interference,
Gabbard is being pilloried because the Russian media regards her favorably while the Clinton
Foundation has taken
tens of millions of dollars from foreign governments and billionaires seeking quid pro
quos , much of which has gone to line the pockets of Hillary, Bill and Chelsea.
Finally, one comment about the Democratic Party obsession with the Russians. The media was
enthusing last Friday over a photo of Speaker Nancy Pelosi standing up across a table from
President Trump and pointing at him before walking out of the room. The gushing regarding how a
powerful, strong woman was defying the horrible chief executive was both predictable and
ridiculous. By her own admission Pelosi's
last words before departing were "All roads lead to Putin." I will leave it up to the
reader to interpret what that was supposed to mean.
Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National
Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that
seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is
councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its
email is[email protected]
While Mayor Pete was a little evasive on actually talking down the "Russian asset"
accusation, he did question it, saying that "statements like that ought to be backed by
evidence."
"I don't know what the basis is for that," he said.
"But I consider her to be a competitor. I respect her service. I also have very different
views than she does, especially on foreign policy, and I would prefer to have that argument
in terms of policy which is what we do at debates and what we're doing as we go forward."
Another 2020 presidential hopeful, former Texas Rep. Beto O'Rourke, also dismissed
the Gabbard claim , insisting the focus of the presidential campaign should be on the economy,
climate change and other issues affecting Americans.
"That's not correct. Tulsi is not being groomed by anyone. She is her own person," he told
reporters after delivering a keynote address Saturday at the Alabama Democratic Conference
Semi-Annual Convention in Birmingham.
"Obviously (she) has served this country, continues to serve this country in uniform, in
Congress, as a candidate for presidency so I think those facts speak for themselves."
" Tulsi Gabbard deserves much more respect and thanks than this. She literally just got
back from serving our country abroad."
And now, having been cheated of his chance against Hillary in 2016 - running to her side
like a loyal party comrade after the DNC practically ran him out of the party - a
post-heartattack Bernie Sanders - perhaps with little left to lose - has finally come out
swinging at Clinton.
Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Massachusetts Democratic Sen. Elizabeth
Warren are reportedly developing a close political friendship that might prove pivotal to
deciding the Democratic presidential nomination.
Both have kept in touch since Warren announced her decision to seek the Democratic
nomination last February, NBC News reported Saturday.
"Hillary Clinton would absolutely have influence over a number of delegates to this
convention," Deb Kozikowski, the vice-chairwoman of the Massachusetts Democratic Party, told
NBC, referring to the possibility that Clinton could help Warren secure delegates if there is
no clear nominee heading into the Democratic National Convention next summer .
One Democratic strategist told NBC that Clinton has been watching and approving of
Warren's campaign as the senator has unveiled a series of increasingly progressive policy
proposals.
"... "I'm not making any predictions, but I think they've got their eye on somebody who is currently in the Democratic primary and are grooming her to be the third-party candidate." ..."
"... The Times piece goes on to list an assortment of unsavory, extremist, white supremacist, horrible, neo-Nazi-type persons that Tulsi Gabbard has nothing to do with, but which Hillary Clinton, the Intelligence Community, The Times , and the rest of the corporate media would like you to mentally associate her with. ..."
So, it looks like that's it for America, folks. Putin has gone and done it again. He and his conspiracy of Putin-Nazis have "hacked,"
or "influenced," or "meddled in" our democracy. Unless Admiral Bill McRaven and his special ops cronies can ginny up
a last-minute
military coup , it's four more years of the Trumpian Reich, Russian soldiers patrolling the streets, martial law, concentration
camps, gigantic banners with the faces of Trump and Putin hanging in the football stadiums, mandatory Sieg-heiling in the public
schools, National Vodka-for-Breakfast Day, death's heads, babushkas, the whole nine yards.
We probably should have seen this coming.
That's right, as I'm sure you are aware by now, president-in-exile Hillary Clinton has discovered Putin's diabolical plot to steal
the presidency from Elizabeth Warren, or Biden, or whichever establishment puppet makes it out of the Democratic primaries. Speaking
to former Obama adviser and erstwhile partner at AKPD Message and Media David
Plouffe, Clinton revealed
how the godless Rooskies intend to subvert democracy this time:
"I'm not making any predictions, but I think they've got their eye on somebody who is currently in the Democratic primary
and are grooming her to be the third-party candidate."
She was referring, of course, to Tulsi Gabbard, sitting Democratic Member of Congress, decorated Major in the Army National Guard,
and long shot 2020 presidential candidate. Apparently, Gabbard (who reliable anonymous sources in the Intelligence Community have
confirmed is a member of some kind of treasonous, Samoan-Hindu, Assad-worshipping cult that wants to force everyone to practice yoga)
has been undergoing Russian "grooming" at a compound in an undisclosed location that is probably in the basement of Mar-a-Lago, or
on Sublevel 168 of Trump Tower.
In any event, wherever Gabbard is being surreptitiously "groomed" (presumably by someone resembling
Lotte Lenya in From Russia With Love ),
the plan (i.e., Putin's plan) is to have her lose in the Democratic primaries, then run as a third-party "spoiler" candidate, stealing
votes from Warren or Biden, exactly as Jill Stein (who, according to Clinton, is also "totally a Russian asset") stole them from
Clinton back in 2016, allowing Putin to install Donald Trump (who, according to Clinton, is still being blackmailed by the FSB with
that "kompromat" pee-tape) in the White House, where she so clearly belongs.
Clinton's comments came on the heels of a preparatory smear-piece in The New York Times ,
What, Exactly, Is Tulsi Gabbard Up To?
, which reported at length on how Gabbard has been "injecting chaos" into the Democratic primaries . Professional "disinformation
experts" supplied The Times with convincing evidence (i.e., unfounded hearsay and innuendo) of "suspicious activity" surrounding
Gabbard's campaign. Former Clinton-aide Laura Rosenberger (who also just happens to be the Director of the
Alliance for Securing Democracy , "a bipartisan transatlantic
national security advocacy group" comprised of former Intelligence Community and U.S. State Department officials, and publisher of
the
Hamilton 68 dashboard) "sees Gabbard as a potentially useful vector for Russian efforts to sow division."
The Times piece goes on to list an assortment of unsavory, extremist, white supremacist, horrible, neo-Nazi-type persons that
Tulsi Gabbard has nothing to do with, but which Hillary Clinton, the Intelligence Community, The Times , and the rest of the corporate
media would like you to mentally associate her with.
Richard Spencer, David Duke, Steve Bannon, Mike Cernovich, Tucker Carlson, and so on. Neo-Nazi sites like the Daily Stormer .
4chan, where, according to The New York Times , neo-Nazis like to "call her Mommy."
In keeping with professional journalistic ethics, The Times also reached out to experts on fascism, fascist terrorism, terrorist
fascism, fascist-adjacent Assad-apologism, Hitlerism, horrorism, Russia, and so on, to confirm Gabbard's guilt-by-association with
the people The Times had just associated her with. Brian Levin, Director of the CSU Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism, confirmed
that Gabbard has "the seal of approval" within goose-stepping, Hitler-loving, neo-Nazi circles. The Alliance for Securing Democracy
(yes, the one from the previous paragraph) conducted an "independent analysis" which confirmed that RT ("the Kremlin-backed news
agency") had mentioned Gabbard far more often than the Western corporate media (which isn't backed by anyone, and is totally unbiased
and independent, despite the fact that most of it is owned by a handful of powerful global corporations, and at least one CIA-affiliated
oligarch). Oh, and Hawaii State Senator Kai Kahele, who is challenging Gabbard for her seat in Congress, agreed with The Times that
Gabbard's support from Jew-hating, racist Putin-Nazis might be a potential liability.
"Clearly there's something about her and her policies that attracts and appeals to these type of people who are white nationalists,
anti-Semites, and Holocaust deniers."
But it's not just The New York Times , of course. No sooner had Clinton finished cackling than the corporate media launched into
their familiar Goebbelsian piano routine, banging out story after television segment repeating the words "Gabbard" and "Russian asset."
I've singled out The Times because the smear piece in question was clearly a warm-up for Hillary Clinton's calculated smear job on
Friday night. No, the old gal hasn't lost her mind. She knew exactly what she was doing, as did the editors of The New York Times
, as did every other establishment news source that breathlessly "reported" her neo-McCarthyite smears.
As I noted in my previous essay
, 2020 is for all the marbles, and it's not just about who wins the election. No, it's mostly about crushing the "populist" backlash
against the hegemony of global capitalism and its happy, smiley-faced, conformist ideology. To do that, the neoliberal establishment
has to delegitimize, and lethally stigmatize, not just Trump, but also people like Gabbard, Bernie Sanders, Jeremy Corbyn and any
other popular political figure (left, right, it makes no difference) deviating from that ideology.
In Trump's case, it's his neo-nationalism.
In Sanders and Corbyn's, it's socialism (or at least some semblance of social democracy).
In Gabbard's, it's her opposition to the Corporatocracy's ongoing efforts to restructure and privatize the Middle East (and
the rest of the entire planet), and their using the U.S. military to do it.
Ask yourself, what do Trump, Sanders, Corbyn, and Gabbard have in common? No, it's not their Putin-Nazism it's the challenge they
represent to global capitalism. Each, in his or her own way, is a symbol of the growing populist resistance to the privatization
and globalization of everything. And thus, they must be delegitimized, stigmatized, and relentlessly smeared as "Russian assets,"
"anti-Semites," "traitors," "white supremacists," "fascists," "communists," or some other type of "extremists."
Gabbard, to her credit, understands this, and is
focusing attention on the motives and tactics
of the neoliberal establishment and their smear machine. As I noted in
an
essay last year , "the only way to effectively counter a smear campaign (whether large-scale or small-scale) is to resist the
temptation to profess your innocence, and, instead, focus as much attention on the tactics and the motives of the smearers as possible
." This will not save her, but it is the best she can do, and I applaud her for having the guts to do it. I hope she continues to
give them hell as they finish off her candidacy and drive her out of office.
Oh, and if you're contemplating sending me an email explaining how these smear campaigns don't work (or you spent the weekend
laughing about how Hillary Clinton lost her mind and made an utter jackass of herself), maybe check in with Julian Assange, who is
about to be extradited to America, tried for exposing U.S. war crimes, and then imprisoned for the remainder of his natural life.
And, if Katharine is on holiday in Antigua or somewhere, or having tea with Hillary in the rooftop bar of the
Hay-Adams
Hotel , you could try Luke Harding (who not only writes and publishes propaganda for The Guardian , but who wrote a whole
New York Times
best-seller based on nothing but lies and smears). Or try Marty Baron, Dean Baquet, Paul Krugman, or even Rachel Maddow, or any
of the other editors and journalists who have been covering the Putin-Nazi "
Attack on America ," and keeping us apprised of who is and isn't a Hitler-loving "Russian asset."
Ask them whether their smear machine is working... if you can get them off the phone with their brokers, or whoever is decorating
their summer places in the Hamptons or out on
Martha's Vineyard
.
Or ask the millions of well-off liberals who are still, even after
Russiagate was exposed as an enormous hoax
based on absolutely nothing , parroting this paranoid official narrative and calling people "Russian assets" on Twitter. Or never
mind, just pay attention to what happens over the next twelve months. In terms of
ridiculous official
propaganda , spittle-flecked McCarthyite smears, and full-blown psychotic mass Putin-Nazi hysteria, it's going to make the last
three years look like the Propaganda Special Olympics.
* * *
C. J. Hopkins is an award-winning American playwright, novelist and political satirist based in Berlin. His plays are published
by Bloomsbury Publishing (UK) and Broadway Play Publishing (USA). His debut novel,
ZONE 23 , is published by Snoggsworthy,
Swaine & Cormorant Paperbacks. He can be reached at cjhopkins.com or
consentfactory.org .
This post generated over 2K comment on zero hedge...
Looks like Tulsi masterfully capitalized on Hillary mistake. after Russiagate the change of being Russian agent does not have the
same byte as before and now can even be played to one's advantage as a sign of anti neoliberal establishment orientation. Which is what
Tulsi did.
Tulsi would be a powerful Secretary of State I think, if she did not win the nomination...
Notable quotes:
"... "If you stand up to the rich and powerful elite and the war machine, they will destroy you and discredit your message... ," says Gabbard, who said she's suffered smears " from day one of this campaign. " ..."
"... Great! Thank you Hillary Clinton," Gabbard tweeted late on Friday afternoon. " You, the queen of warmongers, embodiment of corruption, and personification of the rot that has sickened the Democratic Party for so long, have finally come out from behind the curtain ." ..."
"... "From the day I announced my candidacy, there has been a concerted campaign to destroy my reputation. We wondered who was behind it and why. Now we know -- it was always you, through your proxies and powerful allies in the corporate media and war machine, afraid of the threat I pose." Gabbard added. ..."
"... And now, Gabbard has capitalized on Hillary's hubris and unchallenged conspiracy theory to fundraise and increase her visibility. ..."
"... For comparison, a real protest looks like Gilet Jaunes. Some people started protesting because they are being disenfranchised by their own government. They were already in real pain long before Macron went backward on all his campaign promises. ..."
"Toe The Line Or Be Destroyed": Tulsi Gabbard Dismantles Establishment 'Hit-Job' In Viral Video by
Tyler Durden Sun, 10/20/2019 - 16:57 0 SHARES
Tulsi Gabbard unleashed her latest counterattack to the establishment hit-job against her, after Hillary Clinton suggested she's
an Russian asset.
"If you stand up to the rich and powerful elite and the war machine, they will destroy you and discredit your message...
," says Gabbard, who said she's suffered smears " from day one of this campaign. "
In a Sunday tweet accompanied by a video which has nearly 450,000 views on Twitter (and 18,000 on YouTube) as of this writing,
Gabbard writes "Hillary & her gang of rich, powerful elite are going after me to send a msg to YOU: "Shut up, toe the line, or be
destroyed." But we, the people, will NOT be silenced."
Hillary & her gang of rich, powerful elite are going after me to send a msg to YOU: "Shut up, toe the line, or be destroyed."
But we, the people, will NOT be silenced. Join me in taking our Democratic Party back & leading a govt of, by & for the people!
http:// tulsi.to/take-it-back
Last week, Clinton told Democratic operative and podcast host David Plouffe that "Russians" were "grooming" a female Democratic candidate
- clearly referring to Gabbard.
"I'm not making any predictions but I think they've got their eye on somebody who is currently in the Democratic primary and are
grooming her to be the third-party candidate," Clinton said, in apparent reference to Gabbard, a Hawaii Army National Guard major
who served in Iraq. " She's the favorite of the Russians. They have a bunch of sites and bots and other ways of supporting her so
far. "
Great! Thank you Hillary Clinton," Gabbard tweeted late on Friday afternoon. " You, the queen of warmongers, embodiment of
corruption, and personification of the rot that has sickened the Democratic Party for so long, have finally come out from behind
the curtain ."
"From the day I announced my candidacy, there has been a concerted campaign to destroy my reputation. We wondered who was
behind it and why. Now we know -- it was always you, through your proxies and powerful allies in the corporate media and war machine,
afraid of the threat I pose." Gabbard added.
And now, Gabbard has capitalized on Hillary's hubris and unchallenged conspiracy theory to fundraise and increase her visibility.
People are seeing entirely too much into this. Seriously this is nothing but some crazy old crone, extremely jealous of someone
else and wanting revenge, honestly all I see is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xrUEjpHbUMM
. No political scam, not grand strategy, just a really jealous vengeful old crone, HRC can see Tulsi Gabbard winning and in infuriates
her, fills her with jealousy fueled rage, Tulsi in every way better than Hillary, smarter, more popular, prettier (never forget
this can really freak out women) and younger (ohh the rage) and HRC blames Tulsi and Jill for HRC's arrogant public failure.
History will think extremely poorly of Hillary Rodham Clinton, extremely poorly.
Consider what is occurring here. Citizen Hillary has started a media circus with 1 of the 12 - or is it 16? - "candidates"
the spy infested DNC is fielding. The C_A MSM mouthpieces are shilling this white noise, blocking out any more important, more
difficult reporting if not analysis of world events they don't want in the news.
World Events like the Clinton, Obama, Biden, Kerry, Pelosi, Feinstein and Schiff scandals in Ukraine and China, how
well things are going in Syria and who the real villains there have been, how well negotiations are going with China, how the
Syrian refugee crisis is being settled in the best way for all concerned and how the C_A plan to start WW3 has been exposed.
The C_A can repeat this op another 11 Times. This is good because they are lazy and stupid, but even so you can expect them
to **** it up in some way every time. Evil has recruiting problems. Remember Hillary laughing about obliterating civilization
in Libya. Remember the corpse of Gadafi being dragged through the street by her mercs. Remember who stole Libya's gold, and Ukraine's
gold.
Consider all these "best" pictures of Gabbard. The method is obvious: Don't listen to the pettiness and low news value of this
PR stunt, just look at the cutie. This fits the media op signature of the Tavistock faggots on loan to Soros. Here are a few more:
BLM: Look at us. We all black! Don't listen to our demands, we still working on them, but whoever you are we coming for your
stuff.
Antifa: Look at us. We all revolutionaries! We like to rumble! Don't listen to our message. We don't have one. We're really
a lot of fun. Come to us, children, or we'll mess you up.
Naked woman protests: We are women! Every day we pretend to be smart but we're really emotionally unbalanced fools! REEEEEE...
Our message is, we need to be taken care of like babies. When you take off your clothes to protest, you've already lost.
For comparison, a real protest looks like Gilet Jaunes. Some people started protesting because they are being disenfranchised
by their own government. They were already in real pain long before Macron went backward on all his campaign promises. The
government of France has been bought and paid for from top to bottom by a few rich Jews and they are destroying civilization just
like Hillary did Libya, only they are in the subversion stage. The bombing is still to come. If you doubt me, dig for stories
about who Macron is meeting with, who he takes orders from. This is a peek into the real criminals behind the current form of
the EU. Thousands of people in the street. A few big protests got the imagination of the world, giving Macron ulcers. Good. They
got solidarity. Then Macron started sending in the thugs and gestapo. Then he sent in EU troops suited up for urban warfare. Both
the optics and the message of this are devastating to the cabal, worldwide.
IMO the best thing to do is to follow this circus and all that follow loosely. If you can't turn it around on them, for instance
pointing out that Gabbard is CFR and her positions are folly, do not give it the clicks (((they))) expect. At least screw up their
stats, make their psychological warfare "experts" lose their jobs or at least work day and night to keep up, until they melt down
in pools of their own saliva.
What this stunt is, is "opening a second media front". They created this meaningless drivel to hide the news that is favorable
to Trump and good for everybody in the world, and bad for the cabal. This is all they got. This is the best they can do. They
have nothing to offer but lies, threats and tyranny. As Hillary said, her policy is to keep them dumb, keep them poor and keep
them hungry. They are all gangsters.
Consider how cheap it is to do an op like this. That is the signature of the DS. They like cheap ops because they can do so
many.
The best we can do is open second fronts right back at them. Expose errors, omissions and lies in their fake news, as well
as what their lies are meant to conceal. It is fun to watch when the first slavos of their campaigns immediately fall apart and
get thrown back at them. Sometime real news gets out.
Tomorrow is the Canadian election. It will be a good message to them if Trudeau gets destroyed.
Brexit deadline is coming up. Pelosi swore that if they Brexit she will do all the crimes she can to obstruct US-UK trade.
Pretty sure she used up whatever stolen credibility she had with that admission of lawless tyranny.
Point is, Brexit will have a significant meaning to Americans and gangsters like her will be in the spotlight. We want good
will and trade with the UK. If this is obstructed, Pelosi has already said she's responsible and obstructing trade will have criminal
consequences on the US side. Learn all you can, keep track and if you get the chance, share any damning facts you find.
Liza
says: October 15,
2019 at 4:11 pm GMT 100 Words @eah Yes,
indeed. He is a loose cannon. Don't those people who are still kissing the hem of Trump's
garments remember all that stuff he said during his campaign? Sure, we all know that
politicians lie in order to get elected – but nothing on this level. Like the Scorpion
and Frog poem, or at least his version of it (the Snake). Read More
"... How did the United States become so involved in Ukraine's torturous and famously corrupt politics? The short answer is NATO expansion <= maybe something different? I like pocketbook expansion.. NATO Expansion provides cover and legalizes the private use of Presidential directed USA resources to enable a few to make massively big profits at the expense of the governed in the target area. ..."
"... Hypothesis 1: NATO supporters are more corrupt than Ukraine officials. ..."
"... Hypothesis 2: NATO expansion is a euphemism for USA/EU/ backed private party plunder to follow invade and destroy regime change activities designed to dispossess local Oligarchs of the wealth in NATO targeted nations? Private use of public force for private gain comes to mind. ..."
"... A lot of intelligence agency manipulation and private pocketbook expanding corruption can be hidden behind NATO expansion.. Please prove to me that Biden and the hundreds of other plunders became so deeply involved in Ukraine because of NATO expansion? ..."
"... As it is right now, the most likely outcome of the Western initiative in Ukraine will be substantially lower living standards than there would be otherwise for most Ukrainians. ..."
"... The US actions in Ukraine are typical, not exceptional. Acting as an Empire, the US always installs the worst possible scum in power in its vassals, particularly in newly acquired ones. ..."
"... Has he forgotten the historical conversation of Nuland and Payatt picking the next president of Ukraine "Yats is our guy" and "Yats" actually emerging as the president a week later ? None of these facts are in any way remotely compatible with passive role professor Cohen ascribes to the US. ..."
"... We don't know what happens next, but we know the following: Ukraine will not be in EU, or Nato. It will not be a unified, prosperous country. It will continue losing a large part of its population. And oligarchy and 'corruption' is going to stay. ..."
"... Another Maidan would most likely make things even worse and trigger a complete disintegration. Those are the wages of stupidity and desperation – one can see an individual example with AP, but they all seem like that. ..."
Thanks for your sharing you views about Prof Cohen, a most interesting and principled
man.
Only after reading the article did I realize that the UR (that's you) also provided the
Batchelor Show podcast. Thanks.
I've been listening to these broadcasts over their entirety, now going on for six or so
years. What's always struck me is Cohen's level-headeness and equanimity. I've also detected
affection for Kentucky, his native state. Not something to be expected from a Princeton / NYU
academic nor an Upper West Side resident.
And once again expressing appreciation for the UR!
How did the United States become so involved in Ukraine's torturous and famously corrupt
politics?
The short answer is NATO expansion <= maybe something different? I like pocketbook
expansion..
NATO Expansion provides cover and legalizes the private use of Presidential directed USA
resources to enable a few to make massively big profits at the expense of the governed in the
target area.
Behind NATO lies the reason for Bexit, the Yellow Jackets, the unrest in Iraq and Egypt,
Yemen etc.
Hypothesis 1: NATO supporters are more corrupt than Ukraine officials. Hypothesis 2: NATO expansion is a euphemism for USA/EU/ backed private party plunder to
follow invade and destroy regime change activities designed to dispossess local Oligarchs of
the wealth in NATO targeted nations? Private use of public force for private gain comes to
mind.
I think [private use of public force for private gain] is what Trump meant when Trump said
to impeach Trump for investigating the Ukraine matter amounts to Treason.. but it is the
exactly the activity type that Hallmarks CIA instigated regime change.
A lot of intelligence agency manipulation and private pocketbook expanding corruption can
be hidden behind NATO expansion.. Please prove to me that Biden and the hundreds of other
plunders became so deeply involved in Ukraine because of NATO expansion?
The key question is what is the gain in separating Ukraine from Russia, adding it to NATO,
and turning Russia and Ukraine into enemies. And what are the most likely results, e.g. can
it ever work without risking a catastrophic event?
There are the usual empire-building and weapons business reasons, but those should
function within a rational framework. As it is right now, the most likely outcome of the
Western initiative in Ukraine will be substantially lower living standards than there would
be otherwise for most Ukrainians. And an increase in tensions in the region with
inevitable impact on the business there. So what exactly is the gain and for whom?
The Washington-led attempt to fast-track Ukraine into NATO in 2013–14 resulted in
the Maidan crisis, the overthrow of the country's constitutionally elected president Viktor
Yanukovych, and to the still ongoing proxy civil war in Donbass.
Which exemplifies the stupidity and arrogance of the American
military/industrial/political Establishment -- none of that had anything to do with US
national security (least of all antagonizing Russia) -- how fucking hypocritical is it to
presume the Monroe Doctrine, and then try to get the Ukraine into NATO? -- none of it would
have been of any benefit whatsoever to the average American.
According to a recent govt study, only 12% of Americans can read above a 9th grade level.
This effectively mean (((whoever))) controls the MSM controls the world. NOTHING will change
for the better while the (((enemy))) owns our money supply.
There was NO "annexation" of Crimea by Russia. Crimea WAS annexed, but by Ukraine.
Russia and Crimea re-unified. Crimea has been part of Russia for long than America has
existed – since it was taken from the Ottoman Empire over 350 yrs ago. The vast
majority of the people identify as Russian, and speak only Russian.
To annex, the verb, means to use armed force to seize sovereign territory and put it under
the control of the invading forces government. Pretty much as the early Americans did to
Northern Mexico, Hawaii, etc. Russia used no force, the Governors of Crimea applied for
re-unification with Russia, Russia advised a referendum, which was held, and with a 96%
turnout, 97% voted for re-unification. This was done formally and legally, conforming with
all the international mandates.
It is very damaging for anyone to say that Russia "annexed" Crimea, because when people
read, quickly moving past the world, they subliminally match the word to their held
perception of the concept and move on. Thus they match the word "annex" to their conception
of the use of Armed Force against a resistant population, without checking.
All Cohen is doing here is reinforcing the pushed, lying Empire narrative, that Russia
invaded and used force, when the exact opposite is true!!
@Carlton
Meyer One wonders if Mr. Putin, as he puts his head on the pillow at night, fancies that
he should have rolled the Russian tanks into Kiev, right after the 2014 US-financed coup of
Ukraine's elected president, which was accomplished while he was pre-occupied with the Sochi
Olympics, and been done with it. He had every justification to do so, but perhaps feared
Western blowback. Well, the blowback happened anyway, so maybe Putin was too cautious.
The new Trump Admin threw him under the bus when it installed the idiot Nikki Haley as UN
Ambassador, whose first words were that Russia must give Crimea back. With its only major
warm water port located at Sevastopol, that wasn't about to happen, and the US Deep State
knew it.
Given how he has been so unfairly treated by the media, and never given a chance to enact
his Russian agenda, anyone who thinks that Trump was 'selected' by the deep state has rocks
for brains. The other night, on Rick Sanchez's RT America show, former US diplomat, and
frequent guest Jim Jatras said that he would not be too surprised if 20 GOP Senators flipped
and voted to convict Trump if the House votes to impeach.
The deep state can't abide four more years of the bombastic, Twitter-obsessed Trump, hence
this Special Ops Ukraine false flag, designed to fool a majority of the people. The smooth
talking, more warlike Pence is one of them. The night of the long knives is approaching.
The US actions in Ukraine are typical, not exceptional. Acting as an Empire, the US
always installs the worst possible scum in power in its vassals, particularly in newly
acquired ones.
The "logic" of the Dem party is remarkable. Dems don't even deny that Biden is corrupt,
that he blatantly abused the office of Vice-President for personal gain. What's more, he was
dumb enough to boast about it publicly. Therefore, let's impeach Trump.
These people don't give a hoot about the interests of the US as a country, or even as an
Empire. Their insatiable greed for money and power blinds them to everything. By rights,
those who orchestrated totally fake Russiagate and now push for impeachment, when Russiagate
flopped miserably, should be hanged on lampposts for high treason. Unfortunately, justice
won't be served. So, we have to be satisfied with an almost assured prospect of this
impeachment thing to flop, just like Russiagate before it. But in the process incalculable
damage will be done to our country and its institutions.
Those who support the separation of Kosovo from Serbia without Serbian consent cannot
argue against separation of Crimea from Ukraine without the consent of Kiev regime.
On the other hand, those who believe that post-WWII borders are sacrosanct have to
acknowledge that Crimea belongs to Russia (illegally even by loose Soviet standards
transferred to Ukraine by Khrushchev in 1956), Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and Soviet Union
should be restored, and Germany should be re-divided.
At least now I know why Ukraine is so essential to American national security. It's so even
more of my and my families' taxes can pay for a massive expansion of Nato, which means
American military bases in Ukraine. Greenland to the borders of China.
We're encircling the earth, like those old cartoons about bankers.
@Ron
Unz I had to stop listening after the 10th min. where the good professor (without any
push-back from the interviewer) says:
Victor Yanukovich was overthrown by a street coup . at that moment, the United States
and not only the United States but the Western European Governments had to make a decision
would they acknowledge the overthrow of Yannukovic as having been legitimate, and therefore
accept whatever government emerged, and that was a fateful moment within 24hours, the
governments, including the government of president Obama endorsed what was essentially a
coup d'etat against Yanukovich.
Has the good Professor so quickly forgotten about Victoria Nuland distributing cookies
with John McCain in the Maidan as the coup was still unfolding? Her claim at the think tank
in DC where she discusses having spent $30million (if I remember correctly) for foisting the
Ukraine coup ?
Has he forgotten the historical conversation of Nuland and Payatt picking the next
president of Ukraine "Yats is our guy" and "Yats" actually emerging as the president a week
later ? None of these facts are in any way remotely compatible with passive role professor
Cohen ascribes to the US.
These are not simple omissions but willful acts of misleading of fools. The good
professor's little discussed career as a resource for the secret services has reemerged after
seemingly having been left out in the cold during the 1st attempted coup against Trump.
No, the real story is more than just a little NATO expansion as the professor does
suggest, but more directly, the attempted coup that the US is still trying to stage in Russia
itself, in order to regain control of Russia's vast energy resources which Putin forced the
oligarchs to disgorge. The US desperately wants to achieve this in order to be able to
ultimately also control China's access to those resources as well.
In the way that Iraq was supposed to be a staging post for an attack on Iran, Ukraine is
the staging post for an attack on Russia.
The great Russian expert stirred miles very clear of even hinting at such scenarios, even
though anyone who's thought about US world policies will easily arrive at this logical
conclusion.
What about the theft of Ukraine's farmland and the enserfing of its rural population? Isn't
this theft and enserfing of Ukrainians at least one major reason the US government got
involved, overseeing the transfer of this land into the hands of the transnational banking
crime syndicate? The Ukraine, with its rich, black soil, used to be called the breadbasket of
Europe.
Consider the fanatical intervention on the part of Victoria Nuland and the Kagans under
the guise of working for the State Dept to facilitate the theft. In a similar fashion,
according to Wayne Madsen, the State Dept. has a Dept of Foreign Asset Management, or some
similar name, that exists to protect the Chabad stranglehold on the world diamond trade, and,
according to Madsen, the language spoken and posters around the offices are in Hebrew, which
as a practical matter might as well be the case at the State Dept itself.
According to an article a few years ago at Oakland Institute, George Rohr's NCH Capital,
which latter organization has funded over 100 Chabad Houses on US campuses, owns over 1
million acres of Ukraine farmland. Other ownership interests of similarly vast tracts of
Ukraine farmland show a similar pattern of predation. At one point, it was suggested that the
Yinon Plan should be understood to include the Ukraine as the newly acquired breadbasket of
Eretz Israel. It may also be worth pointing out that now kosher Ivy League schools'
endowments are among the worst pillagers of native farmland and enserfers of the indigenous
populations they claim to protect.
@Mikhail
Well, if we really go into it, things become complicated. What Khmelnitsky united with Russia
was maybe 1/6th or 1/8th of current Ukraine. Huge (4-5 times greater) areas in the North and
West were added by Russian Tsars, almost as great areas in the South and East taken by Tsars
from Turkey and affiliated Crimean Khanate were added by Lenin, a big chunk in the West was
added by Stalin, and then in 1956 moron Khrushchev "gifted" Crimea (which he had no right to
do even by Soviet law). So, about 4/6th of "Ukraine" is Southern Russia, 1/6th is Eastern
Poland, some chunks are Hungary and Romania, and the remaining little stub is Ukraine proper.
@anon
American view always was: "yes, he is a son of a bitch, but he is our son of a bitch". That
historically applied to many obnoxious regimes, now fully applies to Ukraine. In that Dems
and Reps always were essentially identical, revealing that they are two different puppets run
by the same puppet master.
Trump is hardly very intelligent, but he has some street smarts that degenerate elites
have lost. Hence their hatred of him. It is particularly galling for the elites that Trump
won in 2016, and has every chance of winning again in 2020 (unless they decide to murder him,
like JFK; but that would be a real giveaway, even the dumbest sheeple would smell the
rat).
@follyofwar
The only reason I can imagine that Putin/Russia would want to "take over" Ukraine and have
this political problem child back in the family might be because of Ukraine's black soil.
But it is probably not worth the aggravation.
Russia is building up its agricultural sector via major greenhouse installations and other
innovations.
@AP
Well, you are a true simpleton who repeats shallow conventional views. You don't ever seem to
think deeper about what you write, e.g. if Yanukovitch could beat anyone in a 1-on-1 election
than he obviously wasn't that unpopular and that makes Maidan illegal by any standard. You
say he could beat Tiahnybok, who was one of the leaders of Maidan, how was then Maidan
democratic? Or you don't care for democracy if people vote against your preferences?
Trade with Russia is way down and it is not coming back. That is my point – there
was definitely a way to do this better. It wasn't a choice of 'one or the other' –
actually EU was under the impression that Ukraine would help open up the Russian market. Your
either-or wasn't the plan, so did Kiev lie to EU? No wonder Ukraine has a snowball chance in
hell of joining EU.
@Skeptikal
Russia moved to the first place in the world in wheat exports, while greatly increasing its
production of meat, fowl, and fish. Those who supplied these commodities lost Russian market
for good. In fact, with sanctions, food in Russia got a lot better, and food in Moscow got
immeasurably better: now it's local staff instead of crap shipped from half-a-world away.
Funny thing is, Russian production of really good fancy cheeses has soared (partially with
the help of French and Italian producers who moved in to avoid any stupid sanctions).
So, there is no reason for Russia to take Ukraine on any conditions, especially
considering Ukraine's exorbitant external debt. If one calculates European demand for
transplantation kidneys and prostitutes, two of the most successful Ukrainian exports,
Ukraine will pay off its debt – never. Besides, the majority of Russians learned to
despise Ukraine due to its subservient vassalage to the US (confirmed yet again by the
transcript of the conversation between Trump and Ze), so the emotional factor is also
virtually gone. Now the EU and the US face the standard rule of retail: you broke it, you own
it. That infuriates Americans and EU bureaucrats more than anything.
@Sergey
Krieger "Demography statistic won't support fairy tales by solzhenicin and his kind."
-- What's your point? Your post reads like an attempt at saying that Kaganovitch was white
like snow and that it does not matter what crimes were committed in the Soviet Union because
of the "demography statistic" and because you, Sergey Krieger, are a grander person next to
Solzhenitsyn and "his kind." By the way, had not A. I. S. returned to Russia, away from the
coziness of western life?
S.K.: "You should start research onto mass dying of population after 1991 and subsequent
and ongoing demographic catastroph in Russia under current not as "brutal " as soviet
regime."
@AP
Maidan was an illegal coup that violated Ukrainian constitution (I should say all of them,
there were too many) and lots of other laws. And that's not the worst part of it. But it
already happened, there is no going back for Ukraine. It's a "yes or no" thing, you can't be
a little bit pregnant. We can either commiserate with Ukraine or gloat, but it committed
suicide. Some say this project was doomed from the start. I think Ukraine had a chance and
blew it.
@AnonFromTN
I usually refrain from labelling off-cycle changes in government as revolutions or coups
– it clearly depends on one's views and can't be determined.
In general, when violence or military is involved, it is more likely it was a coup. If a
country has a reasonably open election process, violently overthrowing the current government
would also seem like a coup, since it is unnecessary. Ukraine had both violence and a coming
election that was democratic. If Yanukovitch would prevent or manipulate the elections, one
could make a case that at that point – after the election – the population could
stage a ' revolution '.
AP is a simpleton who repeats badly thought out slogans and desperately tries to save some
face for the Maidan fiasco – so we will not change his mind, his mind is done with
changes, it is all about avoiding regrets even if it means living in a lie. One can almost
feel sorry for him, if he wasn't so obnoxious.
Ukraine has destroyed its own future gradually after 1991, all the elites there failed,
Yanukovitch was just the last in a long line of failures, the guy before him (Yushenko?) left
office with a 5% approval. Why wasn't there a revolution against him? Maidan put a cherry on
that rotting cake – a desperate scream of pain by people who had lost all hope and so
blindly fell for cheap promises by the new-old hustlers.
We don't know what happens next, but we know the following: Ukraine will not be in EU,
or Nato. It will not be a unified, prosperous country. It will continue losing a large part
of its population. And oligarchy and 'corruption' is going to stay.
Another Maidan would most likely make things even worse and trigger a complete
disintegration. Those are the wages of stupidity and desperation – one can see an
individual example with AP, but they all seem like that.
@AP
You intentionally omitted the second part of what I wrote: 'a reasonably democratic
elections', neither 18th century American colonies, nor Russia in 1917 or Romania in 1989,
had them. Ukraine in 2014 did.
So all your belly-aching is for nothing. The talk about 'subverting' and doing a
preventive 'revolution' on Maidan to prevent 'subversion' has a very Stalinist ring to it. If
you start revolutionary violence because you claim to anticipate that something bad might
happen, well, the sky is the limit and you have no rules.
You are desperately trying to justify a stupid and unworkable act. As we watch the
unfolding disaster and millions leaving Ukraine, this "Maidan was great!!!" mantra will sound
even more silly. But enjoy it, it is not Somalia, wow, I guess as long as a country is not
Somalia it is ok. Ukraine is by far the poorest large country in Europe. How is that a
success?
@Beckow
True believers are called that because they willfully ignore facts and logic. AP is a true
believer Ukie. Ukie faith is their main undoing. Unfortunately, they are ruining the country
with their insane dreams. But that cannot be helped now. The position of a large fraction of
Ukrainian population is best described by a cruel American saying: fool me once, shame on
you, fool me twice, shame on me.
@AnonFromTN
You are right, it can't be helped. Another saying is that it takes two to lie: one who lies,
and one to lie to. The receiver of lies is also responsible.
What happened in Ukraine was: Nuland&Co. went to Ukraine and lied to them about '
EU, 'Marshall plan', aid, 'you will be Western ', etc,,,'. Maidanistas swallowed it
because they wanted to believe – it is easy to lie to desperate people. Making promises
is very easy. US soft power is all based on making promises.
What Nuland&Co. really wanted was to create a deep Ukraine-Russia hostility and to
grab Crimea, so they could get Russian Navy out and move Nato in. It didn't work very well,
all we have is useless hostility, and a dysfunctional state. But as long as they serve
espresso in Lviv, AP will scream that it was all worth it, 'no Somalia', it is 'all normal',
almost as good as 2013 . Right.
@AP
I don't disagree with what you said, but my point was different:
lower living standards than there would be otherwise for most Ukrainians
Without the unnecessary hostility and the break in business relations with Russia the
living standards in Ukraine would be higher. That, I think, noone would dispute. One can
trace that directly to the so-far failed attempt to get Ukraine into Nato and Russia out of
its Crimea bases. There has been a high cost for that policy, so it is appropriate to ask:
why? did the authors of that policy think it through?
@AP
I don't give a flying f k about Yanukovitch and your projections about what 'would be growth'
under him. He was history by 2014 in any case.
One simple point that you don't seem to grasp: it was Yanuk who negotiated the association
treaty with EU that inevitably meant Ukraine in Nato and Russia bases out of Crimea (after a
decent interval). For anyone to call Yanuk a 'pro-Russian' is idiotic – what we see
today are the results of Yanukovitch's policies. By the way, the first custom restrictions on
Ukraine's exports to Russia happened in summer 2013 under Y.
If you still think that Yanukovitch was in spite of all of that somehow a 'Russian
puppet', you must have a very low opinion of Kremlin skills in puppetry. He was not, he was
fully onboard with the EU-Nato-Crimea policy – he implemented it until he got
outflanked by even more radical forces on Maidan.
@Beckow
Well, exactly like all Ukrainian presidents before and after him, Yanuk was a thief. He might
have been a more intelligent and/or more cautious thief that Porky, but a thief he was.
Anyway, there is no point in crying over spilled milk: history has no subjunctive mood.
Ukraine has dug a hole for itself, and it still keeps digging, albeit slower, after a clown
in whole socks replaced a clown in socks with holes. By now this new clown is also a
murderer, as he did not stop shelling Donbass, although so far he has committed fewer crimes
than Porky.
There is no turning back. Regardless of Ukrainian policies, many things it used to sell
Russia won't be bought any more: Russia developed its own shipbuilding (subcontracted some to
South Korea), is making its own helicopter and ship engines, all stages of space rockets,
etc. Russia won't return any military or high-tech production to Ukraine, ever. What's more,
most Russians are now disgusted with Ukraine, which would impede improving relations even if
Ukraine gets a sane government (which is extremely unlikely in the next 5 years).
Ukraine's situation is best described by Russian black humor saying: "what we fought for
has befallen us". End of story.
@Peter
Akuleyev How many millions? It is same story. Ukraine claims more and more millions dead
from so called Hilodomor when in Russia liberals have been screaming about 100 million deaths
in russia from bolsheviks. Both are fairy tales. Now you better answer what is current
population of ukraine. The last soviet time 1992 level was 52 million. I doubt you got even
40 million now. Under soviet power both ukraine and russia population were steadily growing.
Now, under whose music you are dancing along with those in Russia that share your views when
die off very real one is going right under your nose.
By now this new clown is also a murderer, as he did not stop shelling Donbass, although
so far he has committed fewer crimes than Porky.
Have you noticed that the Republicans, while seeming to defend Trump, never challenge the
specious assertion that delaying arms to Ukraine was a threat to US security? At first I
thought this was oversight. Silly me. Keeping the New Cold War smoldering is more important
to those hawks.
Tulsi Gabbard flipping to support the impeachment enquiry was especially disappointing.
I'm guessing she was under lots of pressure, because she can't possibly believe that arming
the Ukies is good for our security. If I could get to one of her events, I'd ask her direct,
what's up with that. Obama didn't give them arms at all, even made some remarks about not
inflaming the situation. (A small token, after his people managed the coup, spent 8 years
demonizing Putin, and presided over origins of Russiagate to make Trump's [stated] goal of
better relations impossible.)
Not really. Ukies are wonnabe Nazis, but they fall way short of their ideal. The original
German Nazis were organized, capable, brave, sober, and mostly honest. Ukie scum is
disorganized, ham-handed, cowardly, drunk (or under drugs), and corrupt to the core. They are
heroes only against unarmed civilians, good only for theft, torture, and rape. When it comes
to the real fight with armed opponents, they run away under various pretexts or surrender.
Nazis should sue these impostors for defamation.
Yanukovych signed an internationally brokered power sharing agreement with his main
rivals, who then violated it. Yanukovych up to that point was the democratically elected
president of Ukraine.
Since his being violently overthrown, people have been unjustly jailed, beaten and killed
for politically motivated reasons having to do with a stated opposition to the
Euromaidan.
Yanukovych refrained from using from using considerably greater force, when compared to
others if put in the same situation, against a mob element that included property damage and
the deaths of law enforcement personnel.
In the technical legal sense, there was a legit basis to jail the likes of Tymoshenko. If
I correctly recall Yushchenko offered testimony against Tymoshenko. Rather laughable that
Poroshenko appointed the non-lawyer Lutsenko into a key legal position.
@Beckow
The undemocratic aspect involving Yanukovych's overthrow included the disproportionate number
of Svoboda members appointed to key cabinet positions. At the time, Svoboda was on record for
favoring the dissolution of Crimea's autonomous status
@AP
Grest comment #159 by Beckow. Really, I'm more concerned with the coup against POTUS that's
happening right now, since before he took office. The Ukraine is pivotal, from the Kiev
putschists collaborating with the DNC, to the CIA [pretend] whistleblowers who now subvert
Trump's investigation of those crimes.
Tragic and pitiful, the Ukrainians jumped from a rock to a hard place. Used and abandoned
by the Clinton-Soros gang, they appeal to the next abusive Sugar-Daddy. Isn't this FRANCE 24
report fairly objective?
Revisited: Five years on, what has Ukraine's Maidan Revolution achieved?
@AP
This from BBC is less current. (That magnificent bridge -the one the Ukies tried to sabotage-
is now in operation, of course.) I'm just trying to use sources that might not trigger you.
@AP
"Whenever people ask me how to figure out the truth about Ukraine, I always recommend they
watch the film Ukraine on Fire by director @lopatonok and executive produced by
@TheOliverStone. The sequel Revealing Ukraine will be out soon proud to be in it."
– Lee Sranahan (Follow @stranahan for Ukrainegate in depth.)
" .what has really changed in the life of Ukrainians?"
@Malacaay
Baltics, Ukrainians and Poles were part of the Polish Kingdom from 1025-1569 and the
Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth 1569-1764.
This probably explains their differences with Russia.
Russia had this area in the Russian Empire from 1764-1917. Russia called this area the
Pale of Settlement. Why? This Polish Kingdom since 1025 welcomed 25000 Jews in, who later
grew to millions by the 19th century. They are the Ashkenazis who are all over the world
these days. The name Pale was for Ashkenazis to stay in that area and not immigrate to the
rest of Russia.
The reasoning for this was not religious prejudice but the way the Ashkenazis treated the
peasants of the Pale. It was to protect the Russian peasants. This did not help after 1917. A
huge invasion of Ashkenazis descended all over Russia to take up positions all over the
Soviet Union.
Ukraine US is like the Pale again. It has a Jewish President and a Jewish Prime
Minister.
Ukraine and Poland were both controlled by Tartars too. Ukraine longer than Russia. Russia
ended the Tartar rule of Crimea in 1783. The Crimean Tartars lived off raiding Ukraine,
Poland, and parts of Russia for Slav slaves. Russia ended this Slav slave trade in 1783.
But its not just the US that is a war machine. Bourne's statement equally applies to _all_
states everywhere, past present and future.
If any state appears to not be making war on other countries at any particular time,
its only because it is too busy making war on its own citizens [ eg taxes, drug laws,
weapons/gun laws, religion laws, speech laws, environmental laws etc.etc. etc.], and has not
yet created enough fake money via its central bank to enable it to debt-fund consistent
overseas aggressions against others.
Wars by the US will never end because arms manufactures own Trump. Almost one half of the
US budget goes for the security of the state, domestic and abroad. New weapon development
would come to a halt if the US was not threatened. Fake news about China and Russia planning
to attack the US keeps the arms industry humming. Over a million national security workers
and their families would be devastated if Trump stopped fighting fake wars. God bless
imagined threat of wars.
This has strengthened the possibility of the revival of the Islamic State in Iraq and
the Levant (ISIL or ISIS). There are around 10,000 such ISIS fighters currently lodged in
prisons run by the SDF.
And with this, "the war on terror" is guaranteed to go on, and on, and on..
Just in case you hadn't heard the good news, the last man from the president's foreign
policy "team" still standing, Trump whisperer Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, recently left
National Security Advisor John Bolton in the dust.
June 27, 2018 Harvard Research Scholar Explains How America Created Al-Qaeda & The
ISIS Terror Group
It's truly amazing how much the consciousness of the planet has changed within the past 5
years alone, and it's not just happening within one topic, but in several different areas
ranging from health to geopolitics and everything in-between.
What Trump wants to do and what he can do are two very different things. The MIC/Zionist rot
in DC is way too deep and entrenched for any one man to tackle.
Trump could make all his Schiffty problems go away by bombing Iran. Overnight, the man
would be lauded as the president we need and that aging hack Pelosi would suddenly drop that
phony impeachment hearing.
Trump is finding out that when making foreign policy, the safest route to take is to first
ask, "Is this good for Israel?"
I have always contended that the best way to use Trump is to support his ego. Let's
inundate him with praise for withdrawing from the Kurdish/Turkish quagmire. Sure, he hasn't
vacated Syria yet, however, he has no choice but to vacate or be evacuated. His ego will
opt for the former
@DESERT
FOX Exactly, with thousands of ISIS,ISIL(American/Israeli proxy forces)types now being
freed due to Turkey's incursions into Syria, these "rebels" will be free to re-group and
fight another day. Hence the need for American forces to STAY deployed in the Area. This is
nothing more than a distraction move by Trump, which will result in the opposite "intended"
actions of American forces being withdrawn from Syria. This will also guarantee the "need"
for a strong Soviet presence in Syria.
America/Israel/Russia have always wanted the partitioning of Syria, the only point of
contention between America/Israel and Russia was whether Assad was to be forced from power or
would be allowed to remain President as a puppet of Putin and the Russians. Syria was to
never remain a sovereign nation.
The US still hasn't acknowledged the Armenian Massacre by the Turks. Why should it care
about Kurds. US is the nation that said killing 500,000 kids in Iraq was worth it.
Syria, Iraq, Libya are now less of a threat to Israel than ever before so that is a kind
of peace.
Not really. All are still standing and not under US control. Iraq now leans even more
toward Iran and Syria toward Russia ..and that outcome in these countries has made Israel's
goal of destroying Iran much harder and less likely .
The curtailment of the Kurds, Israel's long time friends and proxy , is another blow to
Israel's plot.
It appears to me that Putin's idea is to force everyone back into their own countries and
borders .he may have shared that plan with Trump and that may have resulted in turning Turkey
loose to do that job.
@WJ
Right. But as Giraldi always points out, Trump almost attacked Venezuela. He said mean
words and rattled sabres! As opposed to Obama, who said no mean words ('cause he upheld the
"dignity of the office") but sent the fighter jets into Libya and turned that country from a
stable, secular regime into a human trafficking warzone. And also got an ambassador killed.
Here are some of Giraldi's gems from April 2011:
Libya is a humanitarian mission
it [the invasion] has no clearly stated objective except to protect Libyan
civilians
it is now clear that the rebels do not have any military organization to speak of and
Gaddafi has the whip hand
Nice analysis there, Mr. CIA lifer and Obama lickspittle. I can only assume Giraldi was
part of the crack CIA team of Sovietologists who were utterly blindsided when the Soviet
Union broke up. It's amazing how much slack he's given around here for his anti-Israel stuff.
It's like Teflon for him.
@Priss
Factor Agree, and the ZUS has killed millions in Iraq and Afghanistan and Libya and
Syria, for their zionist masters, the only lives the ZUS cares about is zionists.
@NoseytheDuke
The only question you failed to address is what was the true motives of Putin's intervention
into the whole mess. A few good points:
As in Ukraine, Putin will stay in Syria until it no longer suits him. He has no
long-term strategic goals beyond creating chaos and weakening the alliances of the free
world wherever possible. This allows him to play the big man on the international stage, an
essential element of his domestic appeal. 24/7 propaganda and Soviet nostalgia have turned
Putin's invasion into a domestic hit in Russia. In contrast, Russians have no interest in
Syria or Assad, but who cares what they want? Unlike the leaders of Europe, the U.S., and
other democratic countries, Putin doesn't have to worry about how popular his foreign
adventures are at home. There are no checks and balances in the Russian government, no free
media to criticize him, and no popularity polls that matter more than ranks of well-armed
riot police.
Licks for Giraldi: Giraldi has been careless but not where he lists Trumps lies about ending
'silly' wars. from what Trump has actually done compared to what he says about ending
America's wars he is a liar of clear and complete proportions
"the military the only real source of pride the only thing Americans feel they excel at"
An insightful point. Politicians support the military and its deployments for economic
reasons, but the support of the public might derive from "what else is there?" Examples of
institutional and private-sector failure abound in the news over recent years, and every day.
The Boeing Max. The hotel collapse. 250,000 deaths per year from medical negligence. Power
shutoffs. Useless college. The dive boat. A relaxed performance standard. The demise of
meritocracy and rationality. During Katrina, every agency except the Coast Guard went into
gridlock. There are remaining islands of expertise, but the unraveling is contagious.
The dirty, filthy hand of the Jew is all over America's Mideast policy. Israel backs ISIS in
Syria with weapons. The Israeli-Occupied Government in Washington D.C. has even protected
ISIS in Syria at times. The Jew-owned media gives no credit to Iran and Russia for defeating
Jew and American-supported terrorists inside Syria. Now the Jew-owned government is aching
for war with Iran, which is not a threat to Gentile America.
The goal was to topple Assad. Remember Obama? Assad must go? Assad and the Assad regime
are still there. The losers are the U.S., Israel, Saudi Arabia and Turkey.
Replacing Assad was an Globalist goal, heavily pushed by Erdogan. We also remember the
failed presidency of Barak Hussein that never represented the citizens of the U.S. So it
would be more precise to say that:
-- George Soros, Erdogan, Obama, Wahhabism, and the Globalists are losing.
-- Putin, Trump, Assad, and Populism are winning.
The real test will be Putin getting all other foreign troops & proxies to leave. The
Globalist agenda is to keep the fight between Iran (Shia) and Turkey (Sunni) going, when they
both leave combatants in Syria. Hopefully, Putin will be able to fully rout the Globalists
and move out both Turkish and Iranian agitators.
@Johnny
Walker Read Maybe you don't know who the author of that article is .Garry Kasparov
Kasparov might be great at chess but in Russia he was big fail as a politician .couldn't
get any votes on his campaign to make Russia like America. He went into a self-imposed exile
in the West. claiming Putin ruined his political campaigning.
Now everything Putin does infuses all Kasparov's punditry
Kasparow's love for Bolton should clue you to what he is about.
Garry Kasparov (@Kasparov63) · Twitter
As I said about Bolton entering the Trump admin nearly 3 years ago, you may not agree with
his views as much as I generally do, but he puts US interests first, not Trump's. Can't say
same about Pompeo & the rest.
31 mins ago
The short story on Syria, Turkey, USAISRAEL, Russia –
Turkey-Syria offensive: Russia vows to prevent clashes with Assad forces
BBC
Takeaways
THEN .
"When the US decided to equip and train Syrian Kurds, as well as some Arabs, to fight IS,
they were aware of a potential problem, that their would-be Kurdish allies were regarded as
terrorists by their Nato ally, Turkey. Washington turned a blind eye to a problem that could
be kicked into the future. Now the future is here, and it has blown up."
NOW .
"On Sunday the Kurds announced a deal with the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad,
agreeing that its troops could advance into the zone that had not been controlled by Damascus
since 2012, right up to the border with Turkey. That is a big victory for the regime. The
troops moved quickly out of bases they maintained in the north-east. Assad loyalists dug out
regime flags.
It was a disastrous day for American Middle East policy. The alliance with the Kurds, and the
security guarantee safeguarding their self-governing slice of Syria, gave the Americans a
stake in the war's endgame. It was also a way of pushing against the backers of the Assad
regime: Russia and Iran. The departure of the Americans, and the advance of the Syrian army,
are victories for them too.
European governments, rattled in the way that happens when the problems of the Middle East
come knocking at their doors, are calling on Turkey to stop the offensive. Some Nato members
can see a nightmare scenario unfolding, with Syria, backed by Russian power, potentially
facing off against Turkey, a fellow Nato member. The Russians say they are in regular contact
with Turkey. But in a fluid, violent theatre of war. the chances for misperception, mistakes
and escalation are always present.
Perhaps what has happened in the last week simplifies the endgame of the Syrian war. Two
major players, the Americans and the Kurds, look to be out of the picture. And President
Assad, along with his allies from Russia and Iran, continue to solidify their victory in
Syria's catastrophic war."
WHAT IS BEING LEFT OUT OF THE CURRENT COMBING THRU THE ASHES OF THE SYRIAN WAR IS THE FACT
SAUDI STARTED THE WHOLE FUCKING SYRIAN WAR.
The discussion, if one might even call it that, regarding the apparent President Donald
Trump decision to withdraw at least some American soldiers from Syria has predictably
developed along partisan, ideologically fueled lines.
Not too sure where this partisan line is, Dr. G.
It looks like they're screeching from both sides of the isle.
Both powerful Republican Liz Cheney and Hillary called the pull out "sickening".
While Republican Senator Rand Paul applauds the decision, Tulsi Gabbard condemns it.
As for 'ideological', we all know that ideologically, the vast majority of all
congress-critters (99+%) from both sides of the isle, are motivated by the ideology of
doing "what's good for the Jew$"
NATO agreement stipulates that if an alliance member is threatened, other members must
support it in its defense. Turkey has not made that claim, but it is completely
plausible that it should do so .
Are you joking, Dr. G?
Hasn't Turkey been engaged in waging an aggressive war on Syria these last few years?
Wouldn't Turkey demanding military aid from NATO, (for a "threat" from the Kurds or
Syria), amount to the US demanding NATO aid for a "threat" from Iran?
IOW, it's Turkey that has been the murderous aggressor, and the Kurds and Syrians their
victims. Not to mention that Turkey's military could make mince-meat out of the Kurdish
"threat" in a New York minute.
So it seems to me that the only thing holding Turkey back, is orders from the ZUSA and
Russia. Russia is certainly a large part of this equation, IMHO.
did not understand the Turkish mindset regarding the Kurdish threat, which they regard
as existential.
'Existential'?
Would a limited autonomy Kurdish state on Turkey's southern border, perhaps incorporating
a small swath of Turkey, be the end of Turkey's existence?
When Nazi Germany invaded Poland, the world demanded that Germany sacrifice some of its
territory as recompense for its aggressive military imperialism.
If I were in a position to do so, I'd hand Syria a slice of Israel's and Saudi Arabia's
and Turkey's territory – as a punishment for their depraved attacks on an innocent and
unthreatening Syria.
Definitely the Hatay province, which arguably belongs to Syria anyways.
I'm sure Turkey would call that an existential! calamity, but I'd tell them 'karma's a
bitch'.
Finally, there is one other important issue that should be observed. Donald Trump's
actual record on ending useless wars is not consistent with his actions. He has sent more
soldiers to no good purpose in support of America's longest war in Afghanistan, has special
ops forces in numerous countries in Asia and Africa, has threatened regime change in
Venezuela, continues to support Saudi Arabia and Israel's bloody attacks on their neighbors
and has exited to from treaties and agreements with Russia and Iran that made armed
conflict less likely. And he has five thousand American soldiers sitting as hostages in
Iraq, a country that the United States basically destroyed as a cohesive political entity
and which is now experiencing a wave of rioting that has reportedly killed hundreds. Trump
is also assassinating more foreigners using drones based mostly on profile targeting than
all of his predecessors. These are not the actions of a president who seriously wants to
end wars
I remain you most loyal fan, Dr. G. But I confess this sounds to me like you think the
situation above started on the day of Trump's inauguration.
He inherited those things by the former ZUS regimes.
He has tried over and over again to disengage, only to be dragged back by the screeching
from the members of his own party. Not to mention the ((media)).
There are a lot of reasons to condemn the actions of Trump. The Golan Heights, for
instance. But it seem glaringly obvious to me at least, that Trump is not ideologically
committed to Eternal Wars.
As you put it, he threatened regime change in Venezuela.
He wanted to have talks with the Taliban, (and the whole deepstate and their ((media))
screeched)
He "continues to support Saudi Arabia" but as Pat Buchannan points out.. "The Saudis
got the message when the U.S., in response to a missile and drone strike from Iran or
Iranian-backed militias, which shut down half of Riyadh's oil production, did
nothing.
Said Washington, this is between Saudi Arabia and Iran."
And he has five thousand American soldiers sitting as hostages in Iraq, a country that
the United States basically destroyed as a cohesive political entity and which is now
experiencing a wave of rioting that has reportedly killed hundreds
You really do make it sound like all that is his fault.
I love your work Dr. G. And consider you one of the very best, most honorable and most
courageous writers out there.
But I confess, (like so many others!), it seems like to me that you have an irrational,
personal hatred for Donald Trump that colors your perspective.
IMHO.
I didn't have time to write this response well, have to go. Hope it's not too off
base..
@animalogicMore information on Trump & drone attacks would be useful & welcome.
There is a gigantic problem in America. It makes us dysfunctional. Certain news cannot get
to the American people.
Everyone in the know gets it – do not go to the NY Times with anti-Israel news. Do
NOT buck the AIPAC agenda – period. The darkest element of the ADL will be at your door
within minutes. The US government will soon follow.
It is obvious – when it comes to Jew matters, US government employees fear for their
jobs, if not their lives. Same for the MSM.
US President Donald Trump has lambasted American broadcaster ABC News for airing a video from
Knob Creek Gun Range in the town of West Point, Kentucky, claiming that the network used
footage from the facility to depict a Turkish attack on Kurdish civilians in northern Syria.
Trump called the mistake "a big scandal" and "a real disgrace".
"A big scandal at @ABC News. They got caught using really gruesome FAKE footage of the
Turks bombing in Syria. A real disgrace", the president wrote on Twitter early Tuesday
morning.
@renfro
The Crimean Peninsula was annexed by the Russian Federation in February–March 2014.
Despite all the protests about Crimea, the Donbass invasion using asymmetric tactics with
Putin out outright denying responsability, Ukraine is a vital interest for Putin, and he
would have been willing to confront America and Nato there because it is his home ground and
advantage. But Russia is powerful enough to; Putin only went into Syria after Obama decided
not to overthrow Assad. No one particularly cares about Syria and neither do they care about
the Kurds (despite them having as good a case as the Palestinians to be given a state) and
that is why jumped up Turkey can get away with invading Syria and attacking Kurds, just like
they INVADED Cyprus.
This whole thing is probably a a storm in a teacup, but if Turkey gets into trouble they
know, because they were already told very clearly over Cyprus, that if they play Lone Ranger,
Nato does not have their back. Doing something Israel is not happy about and Turkey
threatening to get their own nuclear weapons because Israel has them is not very good
diplomacy from Turkey's point of view. It is begining to experience delusions of its own
importance.
@renfroIt appears to me that Putin's idea is to force everyone back into their own countries and
borders .he may have shared that plan with Trump and that may have resulted in turning Turkey
loose to do that job.
Here is a very good video – Putin being interviewed. They asked him hard questions.
He came across as being very rational.
@steinbergfeldwitzcohen
People! The internet is there for you to verify/debunk any statement you question. Running a
website is a lot of work, why don't you guys collect the information you demand from Mr. Unz,
and share with us?
Or are you looking at others to supply you with ready-made opinions?
@onebornfree
Thanks for the link about Mr.Bourne and you correct about his statement applying to ALL
states.
They are more like progressive, merciful and humanitarian slave owners.
Be free
I wonder why the "high IQ" westerners have never deemed it fit to study their undeniable mass
psychopathy.
If they were indeed as smart as claimed, they would begin to admit it, and given the claim
to their innate highly civilised humanitarian inclinations *cough* , they would come to the
conclusion that this world needs less of their cursed kind.
Since that is not going to happen, I guess nature has its way
@Rev.
Spooner The point he makes is extremely vague. No specificity. None. Yet 10's of
thousands are dead. Ok, how about some evidence.
Why don't you go back to kindergarten, Rev?
@SafeNow
The support of the public for the military derives from constant and pervasive propaganda
particularly through movies and TV shows , David Sirota calls it the "Military
Entertainment
Complex".
Zero Hedge : " Documents expose how Hollywood promotes war on behalf of the Pentagon , CIA
& NSA ".
@Johnny
Walker Read I was making a rhetorical point. I don't think the U.S. can decouple from the
Middle East.
I do, however, think that Trump wants value for blood and treasure.
Long-term, America simply lacks the financial strength to continue to project power. The
MIC costs the U.S. a tremendous amount of money. Budget to the MIC will continue to be
slashed over time. The Deep State in the U.S. will contract simply due to financial
realities.
Israel will be less and less of a priority.
The next financial crisis is already beginning. The U.S. has a massive debt ratio relative to
the Money Supply. It is now 5:1. Good luck with that. It will be needed.
@Whitewolf
Yes, lack of talent and totall inane radical left wing proposals whiped up by the AOC wing
and swallowed by all the candidates 'hook, line and stinker '.
@OscarWildeLoveChild
After JFK's assassination, every successive president is/was shown a film clip of JFK's head
exploding from an angle nobody's ever seen.
It doesn't matter what party they're from; they'll tow TPTB's line. All of them.
US Foreign Policy = Occupied Palestine Foreign Policy.
That's all that's wrong with US foreign policies in a nutshell.
@Bragadocious
Whether he or his father served is irrelevant. Carter was in the Naval Academy, Reagan and
Bush 43 were in the reserves. Clinton had none and neither did Roosevelt, Hoover, Coolidge,
Harding, or Wilson.
What is telling, is the "alleged bone spurs", and "Trump's surname was changed from the
original German Drumpf".
An allegation is an unproven accusation. What Giraldi is stating, is that Trump's physician
falsified records. You think old man Trump sent Donnie for a megadollar military academy
education so he could avoid the military?
As for Drumpf, I was acquainted with a couple of Schmidts who became Smith, a Bryjolfson who
became Byron, a Pachkowski who became Berry and, no one says Roosevelt's name was changed
from Rosenfeld. The snide commentary doesn't help.
I have said all along, that there is a lot not to like about Trump, but let's keep it in the
realm of reality. Whether he wants to end the stupid wars or not, he will never be allowed
to, as long as Giraldi's old employer is in business and making up non-existent bullshit
"threats to American interests", whatever they are.
@Sean
"Doing something Israel is not happy about and Turkey threatening to get their own nuclear
weapons because Israel has them is not very good diplomacy from Turkey's point of view"
Israel is known to puff and bluff . It is grandiose polemic or rabid canine barking. It
was not exposed by the west . But the west now knows it ,thanks to Hizbullah
@anon
Getting women to work had nothing to do with their 'liberation.'
Even though my mom had her own [private] school, my dad's salary was enough to provide for
all 5 of us, go on annual holidays abroad and put three kids through college, loan-free.
To TPTB, it's better to tax 2 people instead of 1.
To them it's just a number game, like the 'Torches of Freedom' gambit, all spiel, smoke
and mirrors, to fool us gullible idiots into believing we do have a say
We should really start to use our guns and rifles to free the country and rid it of the
rot that's smothering it.
Oh, look, another Cartra$$hian selfie butt shot on Instagram!!!!!!
It's very old habit.Very much ingrained . It is also generational . Increasingly and suddenly
religious also as the feckless toothless Evangelicals are rooting for 1 second fame .
But here is a short chronology–
1 Plans for mayhem in Syria have been on the imperial table since the 1950s (Operation
Straggle).
2 US general Wesley Clark gave the game away years ago when he revealed US intentions in
the Middle East after 9/11: seven countries were to be invaded
3 Seymour Hersh gave the game away too in his 2007 New Yorker article: "The Redirection".
In this piece he revealed how the US were hooking up once again with the Saudi/Sunni
fundamentalists in and around Syria.
4 France's ex-foreign minister Roland Dumas also gave the game away when he revealed that the
British State (a definite CIA asset) was preparing for a war on Syria two years before the
start of the Syrian Holocaust in 2011.
"This operation [in Syria]," said the former French foreign minister Roland Dumas in June,
"goes way back. It was prepared, pre-conceived and planned."
As we recently learned from former French Foreign Minister Dumas, it was also about that
time, that actors in the United Kingdom began planning the subversion of Syria with the help
of "rebels"' (Christof Lehmann, Interview with Route Magazine)
Between 2006 to 2010, the US spent 12 million dollars in order to support and instigate
demonstrations and propaganda against the Syrian government. 6,3 million dollars was funneled
to the Movement for Justice and Development, a Syrian dissident organization based in London.
The Movement operated the Barada satellite channel
@Johnny
Walker Read Quote: "America/Israel/Russia have always wanted the partitioning of Syria "
Reply: Kindly allow me to correct your statement.
"America/Israel have always wanted the partitioning of Syria "
Russia has a wet entrance into the Med via Syria.
Perhaps you've dozed off a bit over the past few years, but Russia has been destroying and
killing the FUKZUIS 'war' machine goons in Syria [aka the takfiri terrorist].
They're assisting in getting the country back [on its feet] as a whole again.
@anon
I'll keep it short. You can find the beginnings back in the 2012 coverage.
In 2012 Saudi sent Saudi Prince Bandar to Syria to be in charge of helping Syrian rebels
bring down Assad, an ally of Riyadh's biggest regional rival Iran.
They were originally created, set up and armed and financed by Saudi.
The Saudis were then joined by Israel and Qatari and finally by the US under Obama.
A new twist appeared in the Saudi rebels war with Assad when ISI appeared and joined the
fight.
This scared Saudi shitless as they thought this ISI version of ALQ might be a threat to them
and lead to an invasion of Saudi as ALQ always saw it as a' westernerized' Saudi.
Everyone doubled down on both fighting Assad and fighting ISI ..which was a FUBAR if there
ever was one.
Then enter the proxies, the Kurds, the PPK terrorist group all fighting for their own
agendas within and under cover of the original war on Assad.
What could possibility go wrong in all this? LOL
Then enter Russia. Which gave some pause to the US in how far they wanted to go to throw
Assad out for Saudi and Israel and open a gateway to get Iran.
So now we are headed to the ending of the Saud and others Syrian adventure which is probably
best expressed by the fable of the fox and his shadow.
"A fox arose in the morning and saw his large shadow cast in the morning sun and said " I
will have a camel for lunch today'. The fox hunted all day for the camel without success. As
he paused in the afternoon setting sun he saw his shadow was much smaller and said "A mouse
will do after all."
In 1992, Alexandra Zapruder began to collect diaries written by children during
the Holocaust. These diaries speak eloquently of both hope and despair.
[Alexandra said:] "Anne Frank's diary was the first diary that was published. And her
voice was so powerful that it captured the voices of all the children and all the people
who had been killed. That's the way it's framed. And that by reading her diary and sort of
taking her into our hearts, we could redeem her life. . . ." [US Holocaust Memorial Museum
https://www.ushmm.org/confront-antisemitism/antisemitism-podcast/alexandra-zapruder
]
Alexandra Zapruder is the author of Twenty-Six Seconds: A Personal History of the
Zapruder Film.
Her grandfather was Abraham Zapruder, who took a twenty-six second home movie of President
John F. Kennedy's assassination[1] -- now known as the Zapruder film.( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandra_Zapruder
]
From a strategic point of view it is very noteworthy to observe that Kurdish troops are
fully positioned east of the Euphrates River. The Kurds are allies of Israel and a vital
proxy implemented to fracture Syria along the lines envisioned for Greater Israel (Oded Yinon
Plan).
It is perceived that Russia is an ally of Syria. However, Putin has not prevented Kurdish
troops from establishing themselves firmly within Syrian territory.
Israel along with their diaspora will never relent until their abomination of "Eretz
Yisrael" is achieved. It's not an accident that the ISIS flag is marked "All Jew."
@NoseytheDuke
Washingtonsblog : " Balkanizing the Middle East – The real goal of America and Israel :
shatter Iraq and Syria into many small pieces "
Thomas Harrington : " One of the prime goals of every empire is to foment ongoing internecine
conflict in the territories whose resources and/or strategic outposts they covet "
Sanchez : " Plan B is to Balkanize Israel is endorsing its plan B for Syria just when its
enemies are making it clear that its plan A (Assad must go) is not happening anytime soon ."
Pro-Israel America launched Tuesday endorsing 27 candidates -- 14 Democrats and 13
Republicans. All have long histories of working with the American Israel Public Affairs
Committee to advance the brand of pro-Israel legislation it favors. Its endorsements on its
website praise the named lawmakers for their actions favoring the legislative agenda closely
identified with the lobby: funding for Israel's defense, sanctions on Iran and its regional
proxies, and bills that seek to counter the boycott Israel movement.
They include Sens. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., and Chris Coons, D-Del.; Rep. Steny Hoyer,
D-Md., the majority leader in the U.S. House of Representatives, and Rep. Kevin McCarthy,
R-Calif., the minority leader; Rep. Eliot Engel, D-N.Y., the chairman of the House Foreign
Affairs Committee, and Rep. Michael McCaul, R-Texas, that committee's ranking Republican.
here are all of them listed .make sure you don't vote for one:
@barr
Blaming Saudi or Turkey or UAE has possibly some validity but as far as far the effect of the
independent move by any of them is concerned , it has less than zero effect on Syria on its
own.
It is like a hypothetical scenario where Florida and Alabama are independent countries .
Rest of America is splintered into 50 different states and Canada is trying to get rid of
Cuban regime for 50 years and only in last 5 years Florida and Alabama have joined the scheme
under dubious circumstances of pressure bribery and blackmail.
@NoseytheDuke
Israel was more powerful and also more favorite of the west across ideological drive until
2003
It is not a normal country . Somewhere that guilt and remorse of stealing and killing have
left a mark on its psyche . It doesn't know how to settle and be normal
It doesn't know the meaning of the power, advantage or gain . The paranoia drives to more
dangerous world of fear and insecurity . It can't rest . Even if it is left alone, he talks
to itself and bangs it head against wall . Recent election is the manifestation of more
madness . It's begging jaunt to Russia and screaming through US media show how badly weakened
the country is.
The countries that bow to Israel – UK, USA, Egypt, Saudi are finding themselves also
badly weakened ,
A seed was planted in 2006 in Lebanon . That tree is growing taller and establishing roots
, Israel will be a shrub hiding in the shadow of that tree in a few years time.
Soviet and Russia were both almost destroyed by Jews . Now they look for the Russian shadow
to hide .
@renfro
A pack of lions can bring down an adult elephant at night when they have the advantage, but
they are careful not to choose a really big strong one. Russia is fighting in the Ukraine its
traditional heartland and what H. Mackinder called the Heartland of the World Island. A
victory in Syria that only came because Obama chose to not crush Assad with a couple of days
of air raids is hardly evidence of the Empire falling.
The real meaning of Trump is the facing of the threat from China, and if the neocons want
to play games in the Middle East so what? There is a fight coming with China and it is a
match for the West led by giant Bull Elephant America, Backward ME shitholes all together
could not take down America in a thousand years.
And what were the Kurds in Iraq called?
Didn't Saddam use some type of gas on them and that's why we were siding with them? Who told
about the incubator babies, maybe some other terrorist group?
@renfro
Mmmm, okay, you must have meant something like 'organized shooting' when you said, "SAUDI
STARTED THE WHOLE FUCKING SYRIAN WAR." Sorry I bit on false advertising.
As you see from 'barr' at #119 above, your starting point is months, years, even decades
too late. For a fact (I've met some of the Syrians who met with Robert Ford in Damascus, now
here and still lobbying for regime-change), the US was meddling, encouraging, prompting the
anti-Assadists well before the 2011 demonstrations.
@Daniel
Rich Putin is not the nice guy we have been told he is. He is in Syria for a reason, and
that is not simply because he wants Syria returned to al-Assad. Syria is only one cog in the
wheel. World wide Communism marches on, if you hadn't noticed. https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=19&v=4sKxkY0Tz5s
LOL. My favourite rapid US evacuation was the CIA flying off the roof of the Saigon
Embassy while the Viet Kong were busting in through the door and running up the stairs.
who benefits from these wars – isn't it just one small but powerful segment of
America – AIPAC. Isn't it time to call these wars by the honest truthful term –
"AIPAC Wars?"
Except the main beneficiary of these wars is George Soros and his anti-Semitic Globalist
movement.
Soros intentionally orchestrated the ultra-weak, time limited JCPOA treaty to create a
nuclear arms race among Iran, SA, Turkey, and possibly other MENA nations. That way he and
his buddies with MIC investments could profit by selling weapons to all sides.
So let's put in everyone's face with a factual term
Trump confuses tweeting with taking action. How many times has he mentioned 'birthright
citizenship' and then done nothing about it?
A: Every time.
If Trump drives too hard, too early and the case arrives at the Supreme Court while it is
split 5-4 in favor of 'birthright citizenship' Is that a win? Or, a loss?
There is a huge difference between 'failed action' and 'successful action'.
Given the proven hostility of the deep state establishment, it makes a great deal of sense
to lay groundwork now (via tweets), but only launch the correct constitutional action once
the courts are prepared to support it.
With class, Philip Giraldi amused me by his article's mere title, "Trump wants to end the
"Stupid Wars?"
Oh yea! Thanks, Phil , & please continue with offering dashes of intelligent,
dissident, & unflappable humor. Haha. For example, "Trump's surname was changed from the
original German Drumpf and if there were any Drumpfs at Normandy, they were undoubtedly on
the German side."
(Zigh) The insatiable global tag team, M.I.C. and The Land of Bilk & Money , want "Big
Time" and more stupidly unnecessary & immoral wars. (Zigh) One sure path to a 2nd term
for President Bonespur is for him to get off the "low energy" Turkey/Syria skirmish, &
get on with real war against Iran , for Israel.
Thanks, Phil! Fyi, I think Senator Lindsey Graham wants to get Bolton back in The Blue
& White House, and sanction Camp Mar a Lago.
P.S.: For all commenters assembled here, linked below is Stephen Colbert's satiric
covering of President Drumpf's having followed Israel's yonder (fallen) , and establishing a
US Space Force Command! To that, Colbert quipped, "Trump can not join it because of his
galactic bonespur."
@9/11
Inside job Seven Nations to Destroy for the nine eleven false flag. Wesley Clark
mentioned the seven – Iraq, Libya, Sudan, Somalia, Syria, Lebanon, and Iran.
Seven Nations to Destroy for Yahweh's Israel – Deut. 7:1-2 –
Tanakh/OT.
Iraq 2003 invaded Purim – shattered in pieces
Libya 2011 invaded Purim – shattered in pieces
How four other nations on the list that were destroyed.
Somalia –
Since 2006 it has been a mess with Israel/US Al-Qaeda running the show.
Bizarre article about US/Israel terrorists "worried" about the environment.
Somalia-based militant group Al-Shabab has reportedly announced a ban on the use of
single-use plastic bags in territories under its control.
The Al-Qaeda-affiliated organization, which has been blamed for thousands of deaths
since its inception in 2006, dubbed plastic a "serious threat to the well-being of both
humans and animals," the BBC reported, citing Al-Shabab's radio station Radio Andalus.
It even mentions that Osama Bin Laden, the puppet of Israel/US, was "worried" about the
environment too. It makes one wonder if this Climate Change thing and Imperialism terror are
connected.
Bin Laden wrote that Americans needed to save Obama from corporate and other nefarious
influences to empower him to "save humanity from the harmful gases that threaten its
destiny."
He added that the world would be better off fighting climate change than waging what he
claimed was a war against Islam.
Sudan
Divided in two in 2011. Israel/US is pushing for more divisions.
Asked about his demand for protection during his meeting with Putin, al-Bashir said we
wanted to highlight "the big U.S. pressure and conspiracy" on Sudan in Darfur crisis and
the huge pressure exerted on his government to separate the South Sudan.
"Now we have information that the American quest is to divide the Sudan into five
countries If we do not find protection and security. America took the world leadership and
devastated the Arab world. (See) what happened in Afghanistan, what happened in Iraq, what
happened in Syria, what happened in Yemen and what happened in Sudan," said al-Bashir.
Lebanon
Invaded by Israel in the summer of 2006. It made a mess out of Lebanon. Israel had a lot
of trouble fighting off Hezbollah. This is the reason that Israel fears going into Lebanon
again. After this adventure, Golems like US and its friends are the go to for Israel's war
adventures.
Initially, both Israel and Hezbollah claimed victory in the war, with Nasrallah
declaring that Hezbollah had achieved a "divine, historic and strategic victory". Some
international observers saw the fact that Hezbollah had survived the Israeli assault,
despite the asymmetrical power balance, as a PR victory for the group. According to
Reuters, the Lebanese government estimated direct war damage at $2.8 billion, and lost
output and income for 2006 at $2.2 billion. The economy also shrank five per cent, with
tourism effectively halted.
Six of the seven were messed up, destroyed. It leaves only Iran left. Iran is in the
"news" everyday for this reason.
Trump is flawed, ok then, but we had Clinton as the alternative. She would have been ten
times worse so what choice did the American people have? He's rolling up the Obama-Clinton
project in Syria which was a huge atrocity. Can you imagine the bloodbath that would have
ensued had the US backed jihadi cannon fodder actually succeeded in overthrowing Assad? It's
not a one man show and Trump has to go along with much of what has been taking place. Much of
this has been imposed upon the American people as well as on Trump.
The brave Turks have been fighting a thirty year war against the "terrorist" Kurdish PKK. Why
so long? Maybe the Turks oppress them? There has to be a reason the Kurds have been resisting
for so long. But yet the mighty Turks are going to defeat the Kurds of Syria even as they
can't defeat the ones living in their own country? Perhaps they'll take on the inferior
Syrian army at the same time. After all, they're a big NATO ally with lots of weapons to dump
on lightly armed foes. Reality is they haven't fought anyone in a hundred years so who knows
how well they'd do.
Quit calling Afghanistan a "war". It's an occupation with anti-guerilla operations going on.
Apparently they don't like being occupied so they fight on.
Trump's name is Trump, not Drumpf. Or do we now refer to people by the family name used a
hundred years ago, or why not five hundred years ago?
Excerpt from
"Trump Mistake: Allowing Turkish Invasion of Northern Syria"
by Joel Skousen (there is no direct link to it but it is/was on his website World Affairs Brief ):
This week in a telephone conversation with Turkish dictator Recep Erdogan he [President
Trump] assented to Erdogan's demand from over a year ago to let them enter Turkey and
establish a buffer zone where Turkey can resettle the hundreds of thousands of Syrian
refugees that have burdened Turkey since the beginning of the US-created terror attacks on
Syria. But as part of that strategy, and without emphasizing that to Trump, Erdogan intends
to drive out or destroy the Syrian Kurds which occupy northern Syria. Erdogan calls them
terrorists because the US-backed YPG Kurds are affiliated with the homegrown Kurdistan
Workers Party (PKK) which represents about 20% of the Turkish population, and which has
been fighting for independence from Turkey. So while the Turkish Foreign Minister plays lip
service to Syrian sovereignty, Turkey has already begun the invasion and occupation of
northern Syria. While Trump claims he is fulfilling a campaign promise to remove troops
from Syria, this isn't really a pullout at all since only two observation posts in the path
of the Turkish invasion are pulling out. There are thousands of other US troops elsewhere
in Syria protecting US-backed terrorist rebels.
@Johnny
Walker Read H.E. Mr. Putin has clearly stated it's up to the Syrian population to choose
who leads them, not him.
Tartus has a port Russia needs and uses.
Khmeimim Air Base is also needed and used by the Russian AF.
These are military strategic assets and used to counter balance the FUKZUS 'war' machine's
bases dotted around the ME region. Of course, those you don't mention.
No president actually controls the government, least of all Trump. The Deep State controls
the government. Trump is a an interloper. Why does one have to remind the author of this
elementary fact? The threat to destroy the economy of Turkey was made by Stephen Israel
Mnuchin. Trump had to make noises as if it was his "decision" when in fact he had nothing to
do with it. What Trump wants to do, and what he can do, are entirely different things. And
anyone who has anything to do with Americans knows what happened to all the previous allies.
Mnuchin has clued in those Turks who may have had illusions.
@renfro
very bad US is indeed . It continues to sabotage ,cast evil eye,try to strangle ,and continue
to punish Cuba . That long history is really long punctuated by half hearted Obama attempt
.
Once empire decided a project,it becomes , NASA , Present Danger , PNAC or NED . The project
goes on losing the aim . The project goes on because the vested interest
,employees,pensioner,glory seeking men, arm merchant, politicians and expatriate find means
to rake up profit and launder dishonest living into honest lifestyle . Name is changed when
it suits the project . Aim is not lost. It becomes the final destination . It never stops
energegizing the dishonest, looter,profit seekers, and opportunists . Often the brains that
gather under the flag are not that intelligent or ideologically certain.
Money and corruption drive them.
It's truly amazing how much the consciousness of the planet has changed within the past
5 years alone, and it's not just happening within one topic, but in several different areas
ranging from health to geopolitics and everything in-between.
Going broke happens slowly at first, then quickly. The Western cities are going broke, as
are those in the Third World. Nothing else changes peoples minds like having their basic
income reduced or eliminated.
All the promises (including self-governmement and freedom and equality) have turned out to
be lies, smoke. Computers, which were supposed to be a seamless adjunct to human existence, a
source of education and information, and a liberation from the bad parts of part of reality,
have turned into (poor but cheap) entertainment, gossip, a drug substitute, and a propaganda
source. The result is shock and horror, sometimes followed by violent psychosis [1] (e.g.
antifa).
Once again, I recommend "Marat/Sade"
(1967). It gives you a feel for what a revolution is like once the revolution gets going.
Note the movie's final scene, which almost breaks the "fourth wall" convention. It was made
during our last revolution, and the director wanted to record the spirit of what he had
seen.
@Art I
like it, very catchy, original, Art said: "AIPAC Wars."
Oh yea, Art, thanks, and a "spade is a spade" when one manages to get the hell out of the
AIPAC shade.
Unfortunately tonight, millions of process estranged Amerikan Democrat & GOP voters
are now "beamed up" to an AIPAC-approved strange & hostile telescreen's DebateLand.
(Zigh) Across aisle, including a possible Beaming Bloomberg entry, , "winnable" 2020
presidential nomination contestants shall pick & choose, finagle & sell, an either/or
USrael foreign policy posture, as regrettably follows:
1.) The Zio-Democrat War to end the deplorable Trump's stupid call to end all Amerika's
endless Wars just for the paltry good of gradually achieving Greater Israel's unending
endgame. or,
2.) The Zio-GOP's War to end all Democrat Party hopefuls' stupid call to end all US endless
wars just because a lefty AIPAC-Branch put an Israel Labor Party "bug in their ear" about
having lowly dead-ender 'Merikan workers fucking pay for it.
Thanks again, Art, and "Good night America."*
* Phil Giraldi inhabits Sinatra's City That Never Sleeps.
The next financial crisis is already beginning. The U.S. has a massive debt ratio
relative to the Money Supply. It is now 5:1. Good luck with that. It will be needed.
Agree.
And the financial debt must be augmented by degradation of physical infrastructure
(especially in cities and city support infrastructure) and the degradation of human capital
by importation of low IQ populations and effective destruction of education. And the capital
misallocation that continues today.
The world will be surprised at what happens when the US power projection ends, as global
trade will end with it.
The brave Turks have been fighting a thirty year war against the "terrorist" Kurdish
PKK. Why so long? Maybe the Turks oppress them? There has to be a reason the Kurds have
been resisting for so long.
Turkish birth rate low (lower in cities than in hinterlands), Kurdish birth rate high.
Kurds replace Turks in a few decades. Kurds don't follow Turkish cultural norms, nor Turks
follow Kurdish. Kurds don't want to wait a few decades, want power _now_ (c.f. Black Power
and Whiteness in USA). Kurds use destructive commando raides ("terrorism") to get power now.
Turks don't like that, respond with same.
Long term: demography wins barring very large change.
Please correct parts of this that are wrong. I'm not following this conflict closely.
Latest TruNews godcast, E. Michael Jones: The Deception Facing the Church by Christian
Zionism
YT Description:
Today on TruNews, Dr. E. Michael Jones joins us to talk about the influence of modern
Christian Zionism upon the American Church, and how that has led to a dramatic
radicalization of US foreign policy in favor of one nation, Israel.
Prof. Jones takes the deluded xian Zionists to task, calling them "useful idiots." My
favourite passage starts @ 18:58:
.. which means you got a lot of Christians who don't understand the gospel. Because
there are plenty of Christians out there who are Christian Zionists. It's a simple fact of
life. I think it can be traced to Jewish influence in our culture Jewish influence over the
publishing industry, for example. How did the Scofield Bible end up being published by
Oxford University Press? Because it's a great scholarly work? No! Because of people like
Mr. Untermeyer pulled strings. This is the way this happened. It's the biggest issue facing
American politics, right now. The role that Zionism is playing right now, in corrupting the
government of the United States, in diverting American resources into a quagmire in the
Middle East, which doesn't serve the interests of the American people at all and is all
done in the name of Israel.
@Counterinsurgency
I'm kind of having a mental barrier with this now.
There is a guy in Vancouver who predicted the 2008 financial crisis, Jensen I believe (he
wrote to the Bank of Canada and a list of people in 2006). He argues that the fundamentals
are even worse now due to the failure to finance these foreign adventures and other factors
(expenditures on domestic expenses not matching tax income, etc.).
I haven't even taken the time to consider the knock on effects. Mentally, I've been more
focused on having to sit through the screaming match that is going to occur over who is to
blame and the lying that will go on with respect to needing to move to a sound money system
but having bankers et al try to argue for a rollover into a new currency. It is going to be
ugly, I can feel it. It will provide an opportunity for some serious structural change and
constitutional amendments. A whole host of reforms are open when you have a debt induced
currency collapse. I just know it could be really ugly and I've been dreading thinking
through how this will play out. I keep thinking that I never expected to live in a time like
this; I think back to being a teenager during the Reagan years and, despite the Cold
War-nuclear war scenario hanging over our heads, it seemed a much more optimistic time.
I am not optimistic. I'm very worried.
@Robjil
Somalia under a failing Siad Barre regime was going to the dogs with various warlords
cannibalising each other. Then the Americans were told in the flush of victory in the Gulf in
1991, that they should just kick the door in to save the dumb Muslims. It is not the fault of
the late senior Bush that Somalia is compounded of that specimen of humanity that emerges
like clockwork when African tribalism is married to Islamic fanaticism (but is there any
other kind?) . The Americans were minding their own business, but were told that it was the
humanitarian thing (and furthermore quite cheap to boot) to do at little cost to themselves
to save Muslim chillun'.
Afghanistan was no better : The idiot, the younger George Bush instead of bombing the the
hell out of Al-Queda and leaving was instead misled by mystagogues of various hues, including
his own self into sinking lives and treasure in a vain attempt to civilise the Afghans.
The truth is the further you keep away from Muslims, the better it is for your health and
sanity, notwithstanding the parallel machinations of various neocohens, for Islam is a
pernicious religion that breeds insanity, intolerance and bloodshed all by itself.
E. Michael Jones: a very wise man. He believes in free speech and is hated by Jews who, of
course, label him an 'anti-semite'. I would argue they are 'truth averse' fanatical
maniacs.
He makes a good case that 'Christian Zionism' is a heresy. I don't believe he uses that term
BUT I do.
It's just another bubbling that is bursting.
What will they do besides scream and throw tantrums? Is it time for another false flag 911
type event?
What the media never really exposed was how Syria, and every Middle East country that has
been attacked by the DeepStateZio monster, has seen the oldest Christian communities on the
planet under attack. Strange pattern. The rise of Islamic fundamentalism, initiated by the
British alliance with the Wahabi's and the Saud Family and furthered by the CIA/Mossad in
Afghanistan, has corresponded with the destruction and diasporas of the world's oldest
Christian communites.
Somehow, Europe has ended up with a bunch of Muslims when these Christians would have fit
into their societies much better.
I think that none of this just 'happened'. I strongly suspect that if we were to kick over
some rocks we would find the usual suspects: the Khazar/Black Nobility Alliance.
@renfro
How?????????????????????????????????????????
,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,
I do think it was Mc Cain.
Concerning historically lazy Saudis I am entirely confident that they were only taking care
of payroll.
( I am not entirely confident but there is a possibility that CIA did channel some profits
from Afghanistan poppy fields for this noble cause.
@Counterinsurgency
Quote: "The world will be surprised at what happens when the US power projection ends, as
global trade will end with it."
Reply: Given the vast sums of money set aside to implement China's 1 belt 1 road project,
[IMO] the global dollar trade will turn into a trickle over time, but the global trade will
not nosedive along with it.
Too much a stake for the multinationals [not necessary a good thing, but alas].
Damascus had supported U.S. intelligence operations after 9/11 and it was Washington
that soured the relationship beginning with the Syria Accountability Act of 2003, which
later was followed by the Syrian War Crimes Accountability Act of 2015, both of which were,
at least to a certain extent, driven by the interests of Israel.
It's very challenging to come up with any foreign policy initiatives that do not serve
Zionist Israel's interests, first and foremost. Israeli interests have defined American
foreign policy objectives in the ME for much of the post-WWII era. Not at Israel's behest,
but on Israel's instructions and demands via pro-Zionist lobbies and the infestation of the
Administration with Israel First officials, Israeli citizens and spies. Add to that the
Israel First MSM.
@ivan
Is it methamphetamine instead of regular fentanyl ? Anyway, this logic and perverted emotion
make sense to you. Unfortunately it will reinforce your decision to switch . Business will
sure be coming back from China to rural America.
@A123 I
respectfully disagree on this particular matter. There is no US law bestowing birthright
citizenship. All that would change is recognition of what the law really says.
Trump waiting to win another 4 (still a gamble) AND for RBG's animatronics to fizzle out
AND for her replacement to not be another skunk like Roberts is foolish.
There is no underwater 38th-dimensional quantum chess being played here, and we still have
no wall.
Oops, I posted this under another writer. (Small wonder I got no answer.) Since then, someone
else remarked that at the end of WWI this land (northern Syria) was taken from Turkey. So
this is a long grievance, with deep sense of entitlement.
Rurik wrote, " .the Americans (Obama regime), created ISIS- with the intention that they
use Libya's stolen arms caches to hack and slaughter their way across Syria "
Yes, and that's why I'm skeptical of dumping of Erdogan. How eager was he for this
conflict? Did the Obama CIA promise him N. Syria for his complicity? Doubtless assuring that
Assad would fall quickly! Or maybe they dangled EU membership, if he joined the team.
Maybe Phil can enlighten us:
We know that Robert Ford, US Embassador to Syria, was meeting privately with Syrian "civil
society" activists before the 2011 demonstrations.
-- Was Erdogan/Turkey also involved in infiltrating, inflaming those anti-Assad
elements?
-- How did Turkey involvement begin?
-- Was the CIA actively involved in Syria before the fall of Libya?
C'mon guys.
Using prior military service as some sort of litmus test to the right to critique involvement
and opinion sharing today plays to an audience mentality that encourages blind
patriotism.
There really are no necessary wars these days as they are all being fought for the banker
elite which holds no loyalty to country though it plays on ppl's ignorance to use such
loyalties for propaganda purposes.
There is no justification for US troops to be all over the world as a banker mercenary force
and this site acknowledges 911 was an Israeli- internationalist false flag which removes all
justifications for the meddling in Israeli neighbor's internal affairs.
Tolerating this to get air time with magazines that lie for power is encouraging this
negative behavior for personal advantage in a country and world striving to control the most
minute areas of our lives.
Going along to get along only brings the eternal boot down of the forehead forever@!
The fact that none of these bickering forces are targeting Israel who always was the
catalyst for the divisions there, is a huge clue that we and Israel are the problem causers
primarily. Of course we need false flags to excite the population to support the fake war on
terror within the US and Europe (as well as justify the reverse colonialism going on). Jews
for hundreds of years have counted on stupid goyim to do the fighting but now that Israel is
a supposed stand alone nation, that should be harder to accomplish but apparently total
corporate media control keeps the truth hidden from 85% of the public.
Reply: Given the vast sums of money set aside to implement China's 1 belt 1 road
project, [IMO] the global dollar trade will turn into a trickle over time, but the global
trade will not nosedive along with it.
I actually hadn't thought of that. Now that you point it out, of course the dollar trade
will decrease. Negative interest rates are, in a way, saying that nobody wants US Dollars
anymore, and trades that are not in US Dollars are being actively sought. The decrease will
happen a bit before the USN becomes ineffective. And that will be hard on the
multi-nationals, but I can't say I have much sympathy. They were firmly behind the move of
Western manufacturing to East Asia – what did they think would happen?
But I do disagree over the assertion that global trade will remain about as it is.
The New Silk Road. Interesting topic.
Well, first of all it's a reasonable thing for the PRC to do. Historically, the Silk
Road has paid off for China, at least in terms of precious metals, and being dependent on a
single transportation mode for one's raw materials is strategically undesirable. It's a
good move. It's also an attempt to realize McKinder's proposed making the World Island into
a unified state[1].
But a couple of points:
a) New Silk Road is much more expensive than sea transport [2]. If sea lanes are cut
off, China's raw materials costs increase by several times.
b) New Silk Road recapitulates the interaction of European empires of the 1800s through
1900s with ethnicities along the Silk Road. The Europeans were resented and eventually
ejected. The Chinese are having similar problems.
China has loaned money to various nations which have then spent that money on immediate
consumption and are attempting to repudiate the debt. The Chinese (who have no compunctions
about debt repudiation through currency devaluation) are apparently taking over completion
of the Silk Road facilities for which the natives can no longer pay (having spent the money
on other things). Local rulers are saying that this makes the Chinese foreign invaders (on
a very low level so far). Just like the Europeans.
Chinese society also does not mix well with either Islamic or African tribal society, yet
the Silk Road crosses both cultural territories.
So far as I know, the Chinese takeover of the Panama Canal since the US evacuation has gone
well. Last I heard, a few years back, Panama had started teaching Chinese in its public
schools. Chinese operations in South and Meso America are increasing, however, and I know
little about how they are going.
The nice thing about policed sea lanes is that shippers don't have to worry much about
the natives. Piracy is and has been a problem, but so far not a serious one. New Silk Road
goes overland, and that has (historically) always led to security problems with the locals,
whoever the locals may be.
So: Let's suppose that the USN were to become ineffective. Only the part of the Silk
Road guarded by the Russian Federation would remain secure. The rest would be subject to
local raids and extortion from the local government. Note that raw materials costs would
increase drastically for everybody (because of less shipping), so local governments and
bandits would have motives for confiscating goods.
This would be especially the case in Africa, which is largely dependent on food imports.
That conflict could become severe, as China is increasingly dependent on Africa for raw
materials (as is the rest of the world).
In other words, sole reliance on the New Silk Road (should that ever be necessary) would
be expensive in terms of shipping and in terms of security / warfare costs. China's
bellicose policy is, IMHO, counterproductive. China should be positioning itself to police
the sea lanes cooperatively but reluctantly with a declining USN, gradually assuming the
mantle of worldwide protection of the sea lanes that China needs so badly. Current efforts
to be able to interdict the sea lanes are not in the PRC's interest, as the PRC needs these
sea lanes open. It's sort of like developing a hyperbomb to make the Sun go nova. Under
what circumstances would you use such a device? Under what circumstances would China want
to cease shipping by sea?
So, what's likely to happen? The USN will decline because it needs recapitalization due
to age and a changing threat, and the US is instead devoting its income to debt repayment
and immediate social stability expenditures. The PRC, which has never been a naval power,
will still attempt to keep global trade alive. When that fails, the PRC will trade more
with the Russian Federation It will also take what sea and land it has, make an
expeditionary force out of it, and deploy it in some trading zones (possibly in countries
that have resources China needs) rather than see its population starve and itself
overthrown. That's the standard response from any H. Sap. political organization. Things
will get very messy.
And please remember that I'm like the weatherman: I report, I don't cause.
@Stan
Israel is a shitty little country but its treatment of the Palestinians is side issue for the
West, just as the way the Kurds are treated is unfortunate but hardly our responsibility. A
confrontation with burgeoning China beckons, and America needs to be united. Going off on
tangents to play Santa to peoples who lost the geopolitical game and are without a state
would weaken the West,
@Daniel
Rich What part of BOTH the US and Russia are only there to serve their own
interest don't people understand. My only point is Russia is not there out of the goodness of
their hearts. People who claim Russia is fighting the globalist juggernaut and is only in
Syria to "fight ISIS/ISL" and to make Syria "safe for Democracy" aren't seeing the big
picture. Russia is working hand in hand with China to make sure America is reduced to a
second rate global power. Assad has become nothing more than Putin's puppet on a string.
Syria will need money for re-construction, thanks to Russia destroying much of their
infrastructure, that money more than likely will come from China(China's version of "Economic
Hit Men"). All the while, lurking in the back ground, that little shit stain known as Israel.
This report will present the reality of Russia's Syrian campaign. Russia launched air
strikes on hospitals, water treatment plants, and mosques. Russia used cluster bombs.
Russia almost exclusively targeted non-ISIS targets. These are the truths that Russia will
not admit, and the truths that must be understood when negotiating with Russia as a
potential partner.
It's all about the "Belt and Road Initiative". There are no good guy's in this mess, and
the real losers in this conflict are the citizens of Syria. Russia is a main partner in
"Globalization".
One of the main problems of the People's Republic is to connect the "Belt" with the
"Road". For China it is crucial to be able to bypass the choke points represented by the
straits that separate the South China Sea from the Indian Ocean (Malacca, Sunda and Lombok)
that, being controlled by the US, prevent the Chinese maritime power to fully develop. A
first important asset in this sense is represented by the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor,
which connects by land Eastern China to the port of Gwadar in Pakistan, in turn connected
to the String of Pearls.
Why Syria?
In this perspective, Syria becomes a crucial junction within the BRI: a possible
development of its transport and port infrastructures, properly connected with each other
and with the Belt and Road Initiative, would allow China a further maritime outlet for its
land trade and a formidable trade post in the Mediterranean. A further advantage is
represented by the increased quantity of goods that China could deliver into the
Mediterranean, overcoming the further bottleneck of the Suez Canal.
Syria also has at least two important factors that represent opportunities to be
exploited by Beijing: the country's urgent need to obtain funds to be allocated to
reconstruction and development and the simultaneous disengagement of the United States from
the Middle East, an empty space not filled by the EU. Syria is therefore an extremely
interested and receptive partner to the proposals of the Chinese government, which finds
itself at the same time freed from any diplomatic controversy that could slow down its
action.
@Counterinsurgency
Chinese seem very naive in their willingness to deal with and trust black Africans and other
third worlders to honour deals and not be corrupt, etc. I suspect it will all turn sour for
them eventually.
@Abdul
Alhazred Thank you for that video. I've never been so proud of a U.S. president in my
life, as I was watching that video. He may have been cynically pandering to people like me,
but I don't care. Even if he was pandering, he said what he said.
More on Trump by Shamir's recent article:
What is much worse for Israel, is Trump's intent to leave the region. There is a good
chance you haven't seen relevant tweets of the President, for the MSM doomed to surround it
by the wall of silence. That is what the President said while ordering withdrawal:
"Fighting between various groups that has been going on for hundreds of years. USA
should never have been in Middle East. The stupid endless wars, for us, are ending! The
United States has spent EIGHT TRILLION DOLLARS fighting and policing in the Middle East.
Thousands of our Great Soldiers have died or been badly wounded. Millions of people have
died on the other side. GOING INTO THE MIDDLE EAST IS THE WORST DECISION EVER MADE IN THE
HISTORY OF OUR COUNTRY! Now we are slowly & carefully bringing our great soldiers
& military home. Our focus is on the BIG PICTURE!"
Just for this recognition "GOING INTO THE MIDDLE EAST IS THE WORST DECISION EVER MADE IN
THE HISTORY OF OUR COUNTRY" and for this promise "The stupid endless wars, for us, are
ending!" Trump deserves to be re-elected and remembered as the most courageous and
independent US President since Richard Nixon.
His efforts on withdrawing from the Middle East remind of Nixon's hard struggle to leave
Vietnam and to make peace with Russia and China. If he succeeds in this endeavour, he will
be rewarded by the American people in 2020..
If he succeeds, then he sure will have my support!
One of the main instigators of the Syrian imbroglio – Saudi Arabia – had
been beaten in Yemen and is no longer eager for battle; ditto Qatar and UAE. Europe is less
keen on removing "bloody dictators" than it was. CIA, Jewish Lobby and Clintonite Democrats
would keep Syria boiling, but mercifully they are not in full command in Washington. .
@A123
What is allegedly being built is the same worthless fence. The wall prototypes couldn't
legally be used per a clause in one of the terrible spending bills hastily signed by "Master
Negotiator" Trump.
Better than cacklin' cankles? Yes, but so is my last bowel movement.
Even if we got a real wall, Orangemeister wants legal gimmegrants in record numbers. We
just can't effing win.
Don't you think Trump was a tad premature in announcing "Only I can fix," to all these
problems?
Chinese seem very naive in their willingness to deal with and trust black Africans and
other third worlders to honour deals and not be corrupt, etc. I suspect it will all turn
sour for them eventually.
Every high value PRC project in Africa seems to come with as suspiciously large number of
military age, ethnic Han Chinese staff.
The PRC colonization effort is informed by the lessons of former Euro colonies. They have
built-in measures to make them very hard to displace. And, should they eventually be forced
out, the locals will get nothing but destroyed and poisoned lands.
@geokat62
Know more News with Adam News covers the Christian Zionist story. He is still on you
tube.
Jones was banned from that platform recently. He can still be heard on bitchute as well as
his own website, Culturewars.com
the Americans (Obama regime), created ISIS- with the intention that they use Libya's
stolen arms caches to hack and slaughter their way across Syria "
Yes, and that's why I'm skeptical of dumping of Erdogan. How eager was he for this
conflict? Did the Obama CIA promise him N. Syria for his complicity? Doubtless assuring
that Assad would fall quickly! Or maybe they dangled EU membership, if he joined the
team.
I have a metric that I use.
If a person or action is in anyway aligned with Israel, then that person or action is
suspect, at best.
Insofar as Erdogan has been aligned with Israel and its interests and agendas (the
destruction and carving up of Syria)- is the degree to which he has been a malefactor on the
world's stage.
/
Vs. the degree to which he's opposed to Israel's nefarious agendas;
– he's demonstrated actual statesmanship.
So that's my metric. That's why generally I don't have to pour over the minutia of every
action or issue with a fine tooth comb, rather I just ask, 'is this person or action aligned
with Israel's agenda.. (genocide, theft, murder, hegemony, strife ), and the question always
seems to answer itself!
Just consider the Obama regime. When I approved of what Obama was doing- peace with Iran-
it was when he was in Israel's crosshairs.
When I disapproved of Obama's treasons, it was when his actions were perfectly aligned
with Israel – destruction of Libya, destruction of Syria and so forth.
It really is a near perfect, if not perfect metric.
When Trump is betraying America and Americans, is when he's serving Israel – open
borders, drones, sanctions on Iran and Russia and others..
When he's acting like an actual American president, in the service of this nation, is when
he's in direct opposition to Israel's agenda – ending the Eternal Wars, making videos
about dead American soldiers, firing Bolton, talking about nationalism at the UN..
I'm really sort of waiting for this test to ever fail, it's been so reliably perfect for
so long.
So if you want to know if Erdogan is acting in good faith, just check to see if what he's
doing pleases Israel, and you'll know all you need to know!
Is a Kurdish state a good thing?
Well, what does the 'metric' say?
Is Turkey's incursion into Syria a good thing?
Here, a mouthpiece of Zion posits 'no'.
The Turkish government is no longer interested in helping Syrians liberate themselves
from Assad's murderous regime.
The video is very powerful, and this video linked in this link features Trump's speaking
with attendant images of the families of the soldiers and what they have to go through
.because of the lies of the warmongers.
@Rurik
As Commander in Chief tRump wanted to kill Syria President Basher Assad for having gassed his
own people & having to be restrained by his Generals, Amerikans now see another side to
their president which Rurik observed on video & gushed: "I've never been so proud of a
U.S. president in my life, as I was watching that video. He may have been cynically pandering
to people like me, but I don't care. Even if he was pandering, he said what he said Thank
God. Peace."
Am sincerely glad you're "happy," Rurik, that Trumpstein moved to shed some of his
Adelson/Netantahu skin implants. Nonetheless, & I don't want to be a GOP Likud-Party
pooper, but am sticking with Philip Giraldi's advisory to, "Let's see what he actually
does."
At any rate, linked below (& fyr in ), is Brother Nathanael's latest video. In order
to stave off our nation's descent into Greater Sodom & Gomorrah, it's understandable to
me how Bro Nat prefers "The Chosen One" to continue as ZUS president over his uber-liberal
& decadent Zio-Democrat opponents.
Thanks Rurik, and enjoy the good times of tRump's proclamation of an end to endless wars
for Greater Israel while it lasts!
"Israel is a shitty little country but its treatment of the Palestinians is side issue
for the West . . . A confrontation with burgeoning China beckons"
Israel's overall shiftiness IS not at all a "side issue" to USA, it is at the heart of US
FP dysfunction.
According to the video below, Israel is firmly on board and participating in China's
rise.
The wonderful context is, it's not up to Trump. It's not up to the US government. The world
will squeeze the CIA regime out of Syria. Russian doctrine of coercion to peace works equally
well on degenerate great powers, with the minor filip of face-saving subterfuge for routed US
functionaries.
Lindsay Graham gets to shake his tiny fist ineffectually at a sneering NATO ally instead
of shaking his tiny fist ineffectually at a nuclear power with overwhelming hypersonic
nonballistic missile capability. Much safer.
@Wally
The only way to change this cast of filthy charACTORs we have running this country is to have
a "NONE OF THE ABOVE" box located prominently at the bottom of every ballot. One I
would take the time and effort needed to check.
@Cloak And
Dagger Trump's problem is that he has very little support for his MAGA agenda in his own
party. People like Lindsey Graham who support him here and there will not hesitate to turn on
him if he takes positions that offend Sheldon Adelson. Trump's none-too-sophisticated,
none-too-affluent base is opposed by the media, academe, Wall Street, Silicon Valley, the FBI
and CIA, and the Rainbow Coalition assemblage of minority voices. Even Fox News (apart from
Tucker) opposes Trump's agenda even as it defends Trump against spurious charges of colluding
with the Russians. For example, Hannity regularly charges the Democrats with being in league
with Putin, in effect conceding that the Russians are evil enemies. Yet Trump's MAGA proposal
was detente and friendly cooperation with (now-Christian) Russia.
At the end of the day, the 4D Chess view seems more right than wrong. While Trump's
commitment to the right is both shallow and wavery, in the present setting he cannot do more
than hold the enemy at bay and wait for reinforcements to show up. That means it's up to US,
his supporters, to find ways to weigh in on his side. As the fascists used to say, a bundle
of sticks can be strong even if the individual sticks are weak.
@Sean
My question to you is: a confrontation between who or what and China? To the extent that
America collapses into a post-Christian, post-European congeries of plutocrats and their
commercial interests, such a confrontation has no clear shape. The evolving character of
American society has been put on the table by the Trump/populist revolution, and the role of
Jews in our cultural evolution is part of that even if it is taboo to discuss it. The issue
over the Palestinians is the only way to challenge the successful assumption of moral carte
blanche by the secular Jewish community, which Jewish thought leaders have parlayed into an
effective assault on freedom of speech and assembly (particularly in Europe but also here),
and a campaign to stigmatize whiteness, Christianity, and the nuclear family.
Conclusion: The issue of Palestine is a proxy for the larger issue of whether secular
Judaism deserves its current status as moral hegemon. It is the only way to raise this issue
that is not instantly dismissed as neo-Nazism.
@SolontoCroesus
SolontoCroesus wrote: "Israel's overall shiftiness IS not at all a "side issue" to USA, it is
at the heart of US FP dysfunction.
According to the video below, Israel is firmly on board and participating in China's rise."
To All commenters,
Above, when SolontoCroesus speaks, I listen & learn.
When President Bonespur speaks, it pains to listen, & I can potentially become
deceived.
Will likely get friendly fire from Rurik, but I truly wish he reads your comment &
astutely watches the very informative linked Talpiot video. Hurts when I see good men (like
him) gush while listening to "The Chosen One's" tear jerking words.
Thanks for your patriotic servus, S2C!
P.S.: Behind D.C.'s Blue & White House curtain, Treasury Secretary Mnuchin licks his
choppers in anticipation of effectual ZUS sanctions, & the Chinese communist government's
finally granting Goldman Sachs Group permission to do "untethered" investment business" in
the mainland; the largest consumer market on the planet.
@Sean'Israel is a shitty little country but its treatment of the Palestinians is side issue for
the West, just as the way the Kurds are treated is unfortunate but hardly our responsibility.
A confrontation with burgeoning China beckons, and America needs to be united. Going off on
tangents to play Santa to peoples who lost the geopolitical game and are without a state
would weaken the West,'
As usual you've being dishonest. You agree Israel is a 'shitty little country' -- but
manage to insinuate we should continue to support it.
After all, we don't have to spend a penny to 'play Santa' to the Palestinians (as if we
had nothing to do with their expulsion.). It's the Israelis we subsidize and protect, not the
Palestinians.
In fact, we can help the Palestinians and save money too! Yank Israel off our tit and we
get to have our cake and eat it too. The Palestinians get their home back, and we save
billions every year. All we have to do is to stop funding their tormentors,
If a person or action is in anyway aligned with Israel, then that person or action is
suspect, at best.'
It is always wrong to support Israel.
In 2008, I voted for McCain instead of Obama. I told myself they'd both be equally
supportive of Israel, but I knew deep down inside that was a lie.
I voted for McCain because he wasn't black. That doesn't bother me. What bothers me is
that I allowed some other consideration to seduce me into supporting Israel -- however
trivially and as it turned out ineffectually.
If you establish 911 was a fraud then subsequent war on terror is a fraud. The West will
exhaust themselves waging war against Islam and the Muslims despite killing millions of
people. They will dig their own graves and cast themselves in hell fire for eternal damnation
for subscribing to Santa Claus lies and Jesus died for their evils by supporting the money
changer's ideology for greater Israel project to usher in their Anti-Christ as their Messiah.
Anti-Christ Dajjal will take them for a ride to hell. He will play them "By way of Deception"
just as they are playing the rest of the world "By way of Deception wage wars." So how many
of us are willing to sell our souls in exchange for the worldly gains and pay a penalty for
eternal damnation?
gush while listening to "The Chosen One's" tear jerking words.
"I've never been so proud of a U.S. president in my life, as I was watching that video.
"
Gushing?
Perhaps, I suppose, depending on your definition.
But when's the last time you heard a Z.U.S. president speak of the war dead with
compassion and pathos? Hell, when's the last time you heard them speak of these tragic
victims of American f0lly (treason and war crimes), and their families- at all?
He was saying 'enough of this madness!'
And from what I understand, American troops are indeed vacating Syrian bases.
BTW, leaving for a few days, so keep up the good fight, Brother Chuck!
@Wally
Wally likes to cheap shot P.G., haha, and once again futilely asked him: "Has Giraldi ever
stated which current candidate is his preference vs. Trump?"
Get on the ball, wailing Wall! (zzZigh) Likely, even some knowledgeable CODAH associates
will inform that YOU'LL get what Supremacist Jews give you.
Haha. The Zionized D.N.C. is presently fretting over which Jewish Lobby-approved
presidential 2020 candidate they should give to their "base" voters. Haha. Liberal tribe
chieftains are confident that even Mayor Pete Buttigieg will make incumbent, Trumpstein,
Tweet-out "endless" sweat on election night.
Nonetheless, had Amerika a real choice, , Ron Paul would be my #1 "anti-Chosen One"
alternative. Refer to his article below, wailing Wall?
Yet Trump's MAGA proposal was detente and friendly cooperation with (now-Christian)
Russia.
That's why the NeoCohens hate Putin so much, for re-establishing Russian Christian
Orthodoxy as the 'national' religion. Trump, on the other hand, admires Putin for his
nationalism and wants white Christian Russia to be friends with nominally Christian
America. Unfortunately he must bow down to the Satanic anti Christ power brokers, the Cabal,
that keeps him in power and checks his nationalist leanings. Hopefully he will overcome this
in a second term but I've been saying that about presidents for years!
@ChuckOrloski
Thanks ChuckOrloski.
Undeserved, tho -- I was just being a shepherd guiding the flock to other people's good work,
a practice I learned from your comment style.
I don't want to be in the business of educating you on un-American actions undertaken by
"Z.U.S. presidents." You really know better, but since Jacques Sheete, peace be upon him, is
M.I.A., I will now do my best.
No doubt, Trumpstein is different. Please pause momentarily and consider how he very
recently wanted to sell/provide nuclear weapons systems to Saudi Arabia. Fyi, and lucky for
the entire Middle East's general population, Trump's lack of "compassion" was overuled by
those higher in the ZUS's Blue & White House Lowerarchy. (Note: He ain't "The Decider,"
he is the ever useful & divisive Zion Tweet-Chord)
So given the U.R. Moderator sword is not activated, linked down below, is a joint radio
show, hosted by Dr. David Duke & Ryan Dawson. Ideally, this action will take the job of
trying to educate YOU from off my shoulders, Rurik. No reading needed, & just carefully
listen!
Fyi, Dr. Duke and Mr. Dawson will provide the means by which an anti-Zionist &
patriotic American can resist the evil sway dished-out daily by our "Homeland's" Zionist
Corporate Media. These largely demonized gentlemen/scholars explain how Zionized Republicans
& Democrats are curiously "on the same page" when it comes to humanely protecting the
Kurds.
But when it comes to supporting & defending The Land of Bilk & Money, they unite.
Yippie! On other hand, and when it comes to actually helping the restless & sorry lot of
dumb goyim working Amerikans, they fight like , er, "Tom and Jerry." (Zigh) Why Trumpstein
even moved to kill the underachieving & oft unaffordable "Affordable Care Act," a.k.a.,
Obamacare.
Enjoy your time off, my Brother Rurik, and I suggest, at minimum, partial evacuation from
the dug-in Jewish Corporate Media "bases."
@Rurik'That's a very honest act of self-reflection, Colin.
I voted for Ron Paul, (If I recall, I wrote in his name).
I would have preferred the racist commie to the war mongering scumbag, but only because by
then I understood the nature of McCain all too well '
Now you're reminding me of 2012. Of course, I was going to vote for Obama over Israel's
man-in-the-White House-to-be. An unpleasant choice, but there it was
So my wife and I were down in Alameda at a winery. Somewhat incongruously, the server was
right-wing, and started praising Romney. I stayed tactful, as I didn't want to kill my buzz,
but my wife -- who is easily influenced -- came out of there going 'Romney number one.
Yeah -- I'm going to vote for him!'
In an unusual display of wisdom, I bit my tongue. We'll see how this plays out
You need to understand my wife comes from a poor background. If you want to meet 'the
working poor,' go see her relatives.
So the very next day, Romney comes out with his '49%' remark. It was classic.
@Johnny
Walker Read Right. This happens every so often. I am not recommending de Sade or any of
his works.
I'm recommending the movie:
"The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the
Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade ", play 1963, movie 1967 [1].
The movie has very little to do with the writings of the original Marquis de Sade [2], but it
does do a good job of showing the spirit of revolutions.
de Sade had a good reputation with the revolutionaries. He was elected a delegate to the
French National Convention, but fell during the Reign of Terror [3]. He really did direct
publicly presented plays at Charenton starting in 1803, but was eventually arrested and
denied paper and pen in 1809. Died 1815, and several large manuscripts were subsequently
burned by his son, who apparently thought that de Sade had done quite enough harm
already.
Insofar as tje video has anything to do with the real de Sade, it is that the director
(fictional de Sade) manages to stage a small revolution himself in the final scene, _after_
demonstrating that the audience is little more sane than de Sade is ("15 glorious years"
scene). As in the link given by Read [4], de Sade acts as the philosophical godfather of
revolution and revolt as an end in itself.
The really pathetic attempt by ABC to pass off Kentucky gun range footage as a Syrian
conflict zone is a good example of the consequences of Congress' horrible 2013 decision
(that you may not have heard of) to totally legalize domestic propaganda. @_whitneywebb
In the age of legal, weaponized propaganda directed against the American people, false
narratives have become so commonplace in the mainstream media that they have essentially
become normalized, leading to the era of "fake news" and "alternative facts."
The bad and ugly shepherds persistently hit vulnerable & trusting Unzers with their
"best shot." For one example, the currently M.I.A. commenter, Maven Sam Shama.
Subsequently, I see no valid reason why intelligent & good men -- like you! -- should
not give their "best shot" and attempt to support & rescue lost sheeple who regularly
appear here.*
* Some lost sheep simply like it that way, and therefore, bad shepherds, for one example,
the featherweight commenter "Sean," get lots of practice at misguiding the flock.
@steinbergfeldwitzcohen
Right, what to do is the question now that everybody has been taken by surprise.
I'd say that the advice "get out of debt, get out of the major cities" is fairly good, and
fairly obvious, and has been so for some time. As to income, I just don't know. You might try
linking up to some group (non-Left) that seems to be cohesive and has _some_ plan of action
that isn't too weird. Under stress, cohesive groups can survive better than individuals.
You might also remember the rule of thumb that prophets can predict either what or when,
but not both. It's obvious that the US in general and cities in particular are in severe
decline, but _when_ the current system will cast off much of the population it now supports
is simply not known. Abandon it too soon and you end up extremely poor, so a sharp break is
extremely risky. I'd say that retiring debt, hardening your house against home invasion, and
finding some group as above, would be about all that would be justified right now. If your
neighborhood is deteriorating, it might be a good idea to go to another one that isn't, since
the deterioration is unlikely to reverse itself. If you're in with an ethnic group that
doesn't like your ethnic group, it might be a good idea to displace, if only to avoid the
unpleasantness.
@jack
daniels The current US system / world order will end within the next decade no matter
what Trump does. Trump is trying to shut it down with minimal casualties and replace it with
something viable, which is a good thing to do, but if Trump were to vanish tomorrow the
current US system / world order would still end within the next decade, maybe two decades if
things went very badly wrong.
Trump has the wind at his back, he's trying to do things that would do themselves (although
not as well) and that's why the appearance of 4D Chess. But, as you point out, Trump leads a
very small force of government officials, and would lose without the strength given by his
supporters. Continued support, in word and in deed, should reduce casualties (to include
Trump and his family) during the current transition.
MEANWHILE, Millions Hungry and Food Insecure in the US
"According to the US Department of Agriculture in 2018, food insecurity affects 37 million
Americans, including over 11 million children -- the numbers likely way understated."
"Around 40 million Americans experience hunger annually."
"At least 15 million US households endure food insecurity."
"Hunger is caused by poverty and inadequate financial resources, a nationwide
problem."
"Around 45 million Americans rely on food stamps, an eroding program providing inadequate
help."
"1 in 6 American children may not know where their next meal is coming from."
"22 million children in America rely on the free or reduced-price lunch they receive at
school, but as many as 3 million children still aren't getting the breakfast they need."
@Rurik
I applaud the sentiment too.
I'm hearing rumours that Trump has put a thousand troops into Saudi Arabia and claimed they
are paying for it.
Is it now America's lot to be not just Israel's but SA's mercenaries?
2020 can't come fast enough. I'd love to see a Trump super majority and some serious
reform.
It's pretty clear the Evangelical Zionist's are Israelis' b@tches.
America, it seems, must not only reclaim itself but also it's religion. EV is a heresy and
the leaders are on their knees f@llating Israel. It is disgusting to watch.
Yes, I agree, having trucks and trains go overland and via various countries comes with
the risk of conflicts erupting between 2 or more states participating in Chinese projects.
China burnt itself badly in Libya, where Hillary " We Came, We Saw, He Died! Haw, haw,
haw " Rotham Clingon ran amok.
China is actively setting up routes via the attic as well, so I think China carefully
weighs all its options, but doing business comes with certain risks, those are
unavoidable.
When I was in Africa [The Gambia and there about], I noticed a lot of Chinese merchandise
being sold all over the place. I heard stories of some Chinese being attacked and/or murdered
elsewhere in Africa, but haven't dealt with any Chinese businessman myself or heard their
stories in person.
Having been on that vast continent doesn't make me an expert whatsoever, but I see Africa
become a huge anchor around the world's neck. Can't use a single brush to paint entire
nations, I know, but what I saw didn't look good.
side note : I didn't live in a hotel with armed guards, I lived in a compound with
Africans, so it's not that I have no up close experience. Furthermore, I was always treated
with kindness, respect and warmth.
Executive order 12333, 1981, prohibits the CIA from spying on American citizens on domestic
soil, or internationally, except as incidental to terrorist investigations outside the US of
A.
The POTUS is the first citizen.
Why has no one in any part of the press, right, left, or center pointed out this simple
fact?
Also, there is no "transcript" of any conversation between Trump and any other head of
state. Because there is no recording or verbatim typed record (such as a court reporter would
make) due to diplomatic protocols agreed by all parties.
There are only informal notes taken by witnesses at the time of the call. (Unless Snowden
is correct about the private contractors working for the NSA).
As for anti Russian propaganda, look first to the UK, who have been at it for several
hundred years, and who are in the habit of knighting American Republican presidents who take
orders from the square mile and Downing street, or whitehall and Balmoral castle.
The new cold war is an international project aimed at demonising Putin, who god knows is
no saint, but who is also no dummy. Unlike the image Trump likes to cultivate. Has anyone
noticed how clumsy the CIA has gotten lately? Or, how hysterical the press has become on
their behalf?
Executive order 12333, 1981, prohibits the CIA from spying on American citizens on
domestic soil, or internationally, except as incidental to terrorist investigations outside
the US of A.
The POTUS is the first citizen.
Why has no one in any part of the press, right, left, or center pointed out this simple
fact?
Has anyone noticed how clumsy the CIA has gotten lately? Or, how hysterical the press
has become on their behalf?
You answered your own questions. The law is for sheeple, Deep State does not give a hoot
about the laws, constitution, and the rest of the niceties.
@AnonFromTN
Limpet bombs on Japanese tanker, in the arabian sea, failed coup in Vn, Skripal case, etc.
Are the clumsy examples i was thinking of. They behave as if there is no internet. Not sure
if they are even aware that everything they do is being watched and evaluated from 100
different points of view.
But yeah, i know, most questions do contain an intrinsic answer.
So Democrats so jealously protecting Biden and whitewashing him they are only spinning
their wheels.
Slow wit Biden has no chance in hell to beat Trump. Trump will demolish him in every
debate.
Only Elizabeth Warren has a good chance to beat Trump. She is intelligent and authority
personality not like Biden, and she has clean record not like Hillary. Some of her ideas are
not worked out in detail, but they are of right direction. So I would assume that majority of
women will be voting for her. And that could make a difference
Only Elizabeth Warren has a good chance to beat Trump.
I would assume that majority of women will be voting for her. And that could make a
difference
Liz Warren is a lecturer and scolder. While she polls well with college educated white
women she does not have a great deal of appeal to minority and non-college white women. Her
appeal to male voters is not good across the board. She does not produce the emotional appeal
necessary to drive turnout.
Also, her false claims of American Indian background makes her an easy mark for Trump's
tactics.
IMHO, If the Dems want to beat Trump, their only option is Tulsi Gabbard. However the DNC
establishment hates her. It is hard seeing how she gets the nomination.
@Ilyana_Rozumova
On the presidential campaign prospects of Elizabeth Warren, Ilyana_Rozumova offered: "Some of
her ideas are not worked out in detail, but they are of right direction."
Hello, Ms. _Rozumova.
(Zigh) Re, above; So long as Elizabeth's evolving "ideas" continue to lean toward the
direction of the Western Wall, she might beat Likud's Chosen One, Trump.
Thanks for offering such a well worked out and "decent" delusion!
Selah, Former - unclean but authoritative DNC Chairman, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, bolts
after having corralled The Bern's 2016 votes.
@Art
When congress claps its hands off, in a naked admiration for the leader of Occupied
Palestine, during 29 standing ovations, it was like a 'When do we leave Stalin's deathbed'
moment to me.
In most foreign countries MAGA = Make America Go Away.
I'd say, 'Take the country back and fly one flag."
@A123
In a country where celebrity status and showmanship are placed on the altar of normalcy,
people who actually make sense are not very well understood [not referring to Warren here].
"... "Over 18 years, the United States has spent $4.9 trillion on wars, with only more intractable violence in the Middle East and beyond to show for it," she added. "That's nearly the $300 billion per year over the current system that is estimated to cover Medicare for All (though estimates vary)." ..."
"... cancellation of current plans to develop more nuclear weapons, saving $20 billion a total nuclear weapons ban, saving $43 billion ending military partnerships with private contractors, saving $364 billion production cuts for the F-35 -- a military plane with 900 performance deficiencies, according to the Government Accountability Office -- saving $17.7 billion a shift of $33 billion per year, currently used to provide medical care to veterans, servicemembers, and their families, to Medicare for All's annual budget. ..."
"... "The public rejects the predominant, fear-based framing and policies; instead, they want to see a revamped, demilitarized American foreign policy focused on international cooperation, human rights, and peacebuilding," wrote Data for Progress. ..."
Yves here. For those of you who have friends and colleagues who would go on tilt if you tried educating them about MMT, a simpler
approach to persuade them that Medicare for All is affordable is to sell them on another worthy goal, cutting the military-surveillance
state down to size.
Even then, I still encourage you to set them up for a later conversation about MMT: "Even if you accept the idea that taxes pay
for spending, which actually isn't true for the Federal government, we can still get the money for Medicare for All by ."
Note also that the Pentagon has various black budgets, an "official" one and covert ones.
By Julia Conley, staff writer for Common Dreams. Originally published at
Common Dreams
The Institute for Policy Studies on Thursday shared the results of extensive research into how the $750 billion U.S. military
budget could be significantly slashed, freeing up annual funding to cover the cost of Medicare for All -- calling into question the
notion that the program needs to create any tax burden whatsoever for working families.
Lindsay Koshgarian, director of the National Priorities Project at the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS), took aim in a
New York Times op-ed at a "chorus of scolds" from both sides of the aisle who say that raising middle class taxes is the
only way to pay for Medicare for All. The pervasive claim was a primary focus of Tuesday night's debate, while Medicare for All proponents
Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) attempted to focus on the dire need for a universal healthcare program.
At the Democratic presidential primary debate on CNN Tuesday night, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) was
criticized
by some opponents for saying that "costs will go down for hardworking, middle-class families" under Medicare for All, without using
the word "taxes." Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), on the other hand, clearly stated that taxes may go up for some middle class families
but pointed out that the increase would be more than offset by the fact that they'll no longer have to pay monthly premiums, deductibles,
and other medical costs.
"All these ambitious policies of course will come with a hefty price tag," wrote Koshgarian. "Proposals to fund Medicare for All
have focused on raising taxes. But what if we could imagine another way entirely?"
"Over 18 years, the United States has spent $4.9 trillion on wars, with only more intractable violence in the Middle East and
beyond to show for it," she added. "That's nearly the $300 billion per year over the current system that is estimated to cover Medicare
for All (though estimates vary)."
"While we can't un-spend that $4.9 trillion," Koshgarian continued, "imagine if we could make different choices for the next 20
years."
Koshgarian outlined a multitude of areas in which the U.S. government could shift more than $300 billion per year, currently used
for military spending, to pay for a government-run healthcare program. Closing just half of U.S. military bases, for example, would
immediately free up $90 billion.
"What are we doing with that base in Aruba, anyway?" Koshgarian asked.
Other areas where IPS identified savings include:
cancellation of current plans to develop more nuclear weapons, saving $20 billion a total nuclear weapons ban, saving $43 billion
ending military partnerships with private contractors, saving $364 billion production cuts for the F-35 -- a military plane with
900 performance deficiencies, according to the Government Accountability Office -- saving $17.7 billion a shift of $33 billion
per year, currently used to provide medical care to veterans, servicemembers, and their families, to Medicare for All's annual
budget.
"This item takes us well past our goal of saving $300 billion," Koshgarian wrote of the last item.
As Koshgarian published her op-ed in the Times , progressive think tank Data for Progress released
its own report showing that a majority
of Americans support a "progressive foreign policy" far less focused on decades-long on-the-ground wars, establishing military bases
around the world, drone strikes, and arms sales.
"The public rejects the predominant, fear-based framing and policies; instead, they want to see a revamped, demilitarized American
foreign policy focused on international cooperation, human rights, and peacebuilding," wrote Data for Progress.
"Voters want to see U.S. funding go to domestic needs such as healthcare, or to other national security tools like diplomacy,
instead of to the Pentagon and more endless war," according to the report.
Polling more than 1,000 ppl with YouGov, Data for Progress found that 73 percent of Democratic primary voters ranked numerous
issues -- including economic challenges and the climate -- as more important to them than national security and military funding.
Progressive national security proposals proved popular with respondents, including closing Guantanamo Bay, ending arms sales to
Saudi Arabia, and leveraging military aid to Israel to force it to adopt better human rights policies toward Palestinians.
"There is a clear appetite for progressive reforms to U.S. foreign policy," wrote Data for Progress.
In her op-ed, Koshgarian acknowledged that remaking the U.S. military as a truly "defense-based institution, rather than a war
machine and A.T.M. for private contractors, will require major changes."
But, she wrote, "that's no excuse for continuing to spend hundreds of billions in ways that make our world more dangerous and
deny us the ability to seriously invest in things like jobs, healthcare, education, and all that makes our lives better."
I would love to see it, but I strongly doubt this would happen in my lifetime. The Pentagon budget seems to be one of those
political "third rail" issues like Social Security.
Many people are so paranoid that I think it constitutes a mass hysteria; others are propagandized into 24×7 jingoism. I'm not
talking concepts here, I deal with pro-military people almost daily. Its the glorifying and fetishizing of the military that bothers
me.
Most if not all pro-military types are also deeply conservative; bring up *any* social program and they will wonder how to
pay for it.
I don't know, how many "third rail" type taboos has Trump danced on and become more popular because he did? I think the average
voter would be *extremely* receptive to a well-crafted message promoting the redirection of resources away from forever foreign
wars and bases to concrete material benefits for Americans. I don't even think it'd be a hard sell, once the pearls had been gathered
up.
What's so maddening about this question is the fact that we know that the military budget is probably much more than 750 billion
per year, but we can never know how much more, because the government is expressly allowed to hide and even fake spending totals.
What matters is whether the goods and services are there for them to buy with that money, and this is where real wealth lies.
Governments can create all the money they want, but if they create too much you will get inflation, or hyper-inflation if they
type in too many zero's when creating money.
Money has no intrinsic value; its value comes from what it can buy.
Banks create money from loans and that's easy too, just type the numbers in.
They can dash wildly into the latest fad, like the dot.com boom, and finance it with money they create out of nothing.
What could possibly go wrong?
Bankers do need to ensure the vast majority of that money gets paid back, and this is where they keep falling flat on their
faces.
Banking requires prudent lending, that is all there is to it.
If someone can't repay a loan, they need to repossess that asset and sell it to recoup that money. If they use bank loans to
inflate asset prices they get into a world of trouble when those asset prices collapse.
"It's nearly $14 trillion pyramid of super leveraged toxic assets was built on the back of $1.4 trillion of US sub-prime
loans, and dispersed throughout the world" All the Presidents Bankers, Nomi Prins.
When this little lot lost almost all its value overnight, the Western banking system became insolvent. Wall Street can turn
a normal asset price bubble into something that will take out the global economy using leverage.
Bankers create money out of nothing and the monetary system requires that nearly all that money they loaned out gets paid back.
Bank credit is a claim on future prosperity, and when you realise all that debt can't be paid back, a financial black hole
opens up, as it did in 2008.
When governments create too much money you tend to see it in consumer price inflation.
When banks create too much money you tend to see it in asset price inflation.
We see inflation in asset prices as good and consumer price inflation as bad.
The asset price boom will crash the economy, but no one realises while it's happening.
They believed in the markets and neoclassical economics in the 1920s and after 1929 they had to reassess everything. They had
placed their faith in the markets and this had proved to be a catastrophic mistake.
This is why they stopped using the markets to judge the performance of the economy and came up with the GDP measure instead.
In the 1930s, they pondered over where all that wealth had gone to in 1929 and realised inflating asset prices doesn't create
real wealth, they came up with the GDP measure to track real wealth creation in the economy.
The transfer of existing assets, like stocks and real estate, doesn't create real wealth and therefore does not add to GDP.
The real wealth creation in the economy is measured by GDP.
Inflated asset prices aren't real wealth, and this can disappear almost over-night, as it did in 1929 and 2008.
Real wealth creation involves real work, producing new goods and services in the economy.
Banking requires prudent lending, that is all there is to it. Sound of the Suburbs
100% private banks with 100% voluntary depositors means we (the general public) wouldn't have to give a flip if banks lent
prudently or not since we would have an additional but risk-free payment system consisting of debit/checking accounts for all
who want one at the Central Bank (or Treasury) itself.
Moreover without government privileges and without captive depositors and unable to hold the economy hostage via a SINGLE payment
system that must work through them, you can rest assured that banks WOULD lend prudently or go under, like they should, if they
don't.
So what is required is 100% private banks with 100% voluntary depositors and that situation has NEVER before existed in history
so it cannot be said to have failed.
When governments create too much money you tend to see it in consumer price inflation. Sound of the Suburbs
Because the DEMAND for fiat is suppressed in that only depository institutions may use it in the private sector.
Fix that injustice and eliminate all other privileges for banks and then government should be able to create much MORE fiat
for the general welfare since banks would be much LESS able to create deposits for the private welfare of themselves and for the
so-called "worthy" of what is, currently, the public's credit but for private gain.
if they [governments] create too much you will get inflation
Is this true, or is it an economist's assumption? Here's the other thought:
Capitalism embraces borrowing for investment. Real estate development is an example. Borrowing involves an assumption of paying
back more than was borrowed, but at a future date. When that future date arrives, it is in the borrower's best interest if the
face value dollars are wroth less in spending power that the face value of the loan. You stated that, but the link to inflation
is fuzzy. Bank credit is a claim on future prosperity
Rather than the government's causality, and a nebulous prosperity, it may be the borrower's CFO who then decides to raise consumer
prices to keep up with expenses. The borrowed dollars came from a banker-created asset, but the inflation is tied to a direct
result similar to the so-called "wage-price spiral." In this case, the "interest-price spiral" that is not visibly tied to the
supply of money.
I've got a new disconnect. I understand and appreciate how MMT works. It is the only way, imo, for a sovereign country to pay
for the social costs of a good society. And, of course, the government does not charge itself interest, does not expect to be
"paid back" at all. The tradeoff for the government is the betterment of society. So if your neighbor loans you $500 and you tell
him you'll pay him back as soon as your check comes in and with some interest that seems fair bec. you're dealing with two private
budgets. But when a licensed bank loans you money for a new house under the terms that you pay it back over 30 years with interests
that amounts to triple the original cost of the house – then you are not dealing as one private person to another. You are then
dealing with usury. Made legal by the private financial industry. This private industry does not use its own money – it uses the
government's money by a computer click. And the government then lets it profiteer on this tiny transaction of apples and oranges
to the degree that over time the money "earned" by the private bank accumulates and topples the steady state of the economy. At
that point there's no place left to invest that "private" profit and the whole financial system goes haywire in a panic not to
"lose" money. Money that should never have been given to them in the first place. It's an oxymoron – demanding that money be paid
back with interest when it's not your money in the first place and you do nothing to stabilize your profligate profiteering. Nothing.
Just a thought.
Zimbabwe found it all too easy to create so much money they caused hyper-inflation.
Yes, after destroying their Ag Industry, and having no Ag products to export, because Mugabe and his party assumed all the
white farmers just sat around drinking beer while the dark farm workers did all the work.
After Mugabe took the land, there was no collateral for the farmers to get loans for the next planting season.
Who knew that managing the farm was so much work? /s
Inflation in Zimbabwe first came from shortages, especially food, as things looted rhe country of 4x and mismanaged the economy,
like farm price controls under cost of production.
Historically shortages cause high inflation.
"In her op-ed, Koshgarian acknowledged that remaking the U.S. military as a truly 'defense-based institution, rather than a
war machine and A.T.M. for private contractors, will require major changes.'"
Interesting. Beyond cost cutting, what exactly would it take to remake the military into a true defense-based institution ?
How would assets be deployed? What weapons systems would be prioritized and ultimately receive funding? What doctrines would need
to change to flip from an offensive mindset to a defensive mindset? What alliances would we maintain and what alliances would
we discard?
I see that the article offers some examples, but I think crafting a progressive foreign policy would entail answering these
kinds of more fundamental military questions. Cost cutting is a laudable goal but it strikes me that there's much more to it if
real transformation is desired.
As a civil servant working for the Department of Defense, I can tell you that this would be a difficult shift in priorities
for Congress to accept. It all comes down to the defense industry political donations they receive year after year, and the jobs
the defense industry provides their constituents (no matter how meager or sub-optimal). Since defense spending is basically this
nation's sole industrial policy, I think that finding employment for displaced workers (whether defense civil servants or contractors)
is the biggest hurdle to address; a green new deal would solve the problem. We'd also need political campaign reform to force
Congress off of the teet of defense industry political contributions.
Finding employment for displaced defense civil servants or contractors? We've done that before . . . we tell them to train
for the jobs of the future as we did for manufacturing workers and leave it at that. The same goes for the parasites working in
health insurance companies, pharmacy benefit management and healtcare administration when M4A becomes a reality.
I have no sympathy for those people nor care for their well being as they deliberately, and with malice aforethought, make
life meaner for us all.
I remember when the defense/aerospace industry collapsed in Southern California in the early 1970's as the Vietnam war was
winding down.
Tech jobs were scarce.
The political sphere is well aware of potential job loss due to defense cutbacks.
I have mentioned before, the relatively liberal CA Senator Barbara Boxer fought to preserve Mare Island Naval Shipyard, in
Vallejo, CA, when it was slated to be shut down in the 1990's.
One could suggest that Vallejo has not fully recovered.
It is a tragedy of immense proportions, as I believe a future historian will remark that the USA, a nation that in its 200
+ year history had only one large deadly war on its soil (the internal Civil War), re-titled its WWII "War Department" as "Defense
Department" and then consumed tremendous resources in its purported defense for the next 70+ years.
A recent discussion with someone, that I regard as a "Northern California Liberal", about Trump's pullout of Syria further
re-enforced that the resistance to ANY change in the MIC in the USA is formidable.
He was sure that Trump would be deservedly impeached because he was pulling out of Syria and abandoning our allies, the Kurds.
And he is old enough to remember Vietnam.
The USA news media and entertainment industries (big sports/Hollywood) are fully on board with the righteous USA "war is good"
meme.
Given how the USA economy has restructured much employment and lifelihoods in costly sectors (finance, education, medicine,
military) it is difficult for me to see how there would be political will to downsize the military to any extent as "good paying"
jobs of politically powerful people would be lost.
Many of the manufacturing jobs have been moved overseas.
There is some hope for policy redirection in the Administration's recent Turkey-Syria-Kurd action. If there really is a shift
away from foreign nation building and away from endless wars over endless enmities, then that could lead to redirection and reduction
of military budgets. Watching the defenders of those engagements fall all over themselves recently has reconfirmed my notion that
they are not acting in the best interests of their constituents. Meanwhile, the sun rose today.
The current defense spending and growth of national debt
more or less "prove" the validity of MMT. This has supported the channeling of resources and energy into military activity (and
profits for enterprizes). Something similar is happening with healthcare; maybe it's inelastic
demand. (The similar something is ever-increasing costs.)
Healthcare at the moment seems to be outside of
the scope of current uses of MMT. But there are major
cost-control issues with it nonethess.
In what direction will things head if healthcare is
swept under the government MMT umbrella in the form of medicare for all? Will the government negotiate prices
with providers (hospitals, staff, pharma)? Certainly military procurement is no leading light.
While cutting the bloated Pentagon's budget is a very good idea, why is no one talking about the fringe benefit that is employer
provided healthcare? I do believe a sizable fraction of folks on private insurance (maybe 40%?) get their health coverage through
a fringe benefit from their employer. If that coverage is no longer necessary under universal coverage, it seems contractually
that the money spent on the fringe benefit should go to the employees. That money is enough to pay for their insurance under universal
coverage, so the employer pays it to the employee, the government taxes part of that to pay for the universal healthcare and everyone
is better off. The employee, due to savings in the system, ends up with more money in pocket. The employer is out from under the
ever increasing costs of the fringe benefit (plus can now claim to be paying higher salaries), and, well, the insurance companies
are left behind to pick up "expanded coverage" for those wanting to pay for it.
This and "defense" spending cuts could pay for the whole system easily, no?
The relative value of small business based jobs would increase with a functional health care system. There would be an outflow
of employees from jobs with healthcare benefits.
With single payer, looking for a less stressful job becomes an alternative. Big employers know this.
It also means people may retire earlier if they don't need their employer-provided health insurance.
Health insurance becomes a minor consideration in selecting which employer to work for.
Companies and state/local governments that provide health care coverage in retirement should see their liabilities for that
plummet as healthcare costs drop and public insurance improves.
COULD employers give the surplus to employees?
Technically, yes.
WOULD employers give the surplus to employees?
Not in this age of activist stockholders seeking new sources of "revenue." Everywhere. Benefits are simply a "cost." Human Resources
is a "cost center." Defined benefits that averaged out the risk among many have segued to defined contribution that is no more
than a tax-abated savings account. Risk has monetary value, but risk invisibly is shifting more and more to the individual.
After the last Democratic debate, it is safe say anti-war Progressivism is dead. Everyone was frothing at the mouth to prove
how much they care for the Kurds, and our nation's honor, and that we should stay in the ME. Except Tulsi, but her response fell
flat with the audience, and judging by my Left friends/family on Facebook, fell flat with them too. Having the same position as
Trump is a death sentence. My faith in my fellow citizens is at quite a low ebb.
Cheer up. No matter what you used to think of Lindsay Graham, he is setting the pace for a representative to think for him/herself.
Commentators reported surprise that he was "formerly in Trump's corner." Think about how easily we accept that the future is secured
by a majority in either house. The outrageous president is inspiring elected Republicans to analyze issues (imagine!). Even if
it is cold and calculated to influence their own voters, let's begin to applaud and encourage those who seem to think for them/ourselves.
We don't suffer from a lack of ideas in this area; no, we lack the ability (political will) to accomplish it. Thus, another
exercise in mental masturbation.
we lack the ability (political will) to accomplish it. Carl
A Citizen's Dividend would be the camel's nose under the tent since the less wasted by government, the more that could be distributed
to citizens to counter price deflation.
And it's only justice that all fiat creation, beyond that created for government to spend for the general welfare, be in the
form of an equal Citizen's Dividend.
Funny you should mention Europe since an equal Citizen's Dividend for all Euro zone citizens would be a way to eliminate austerity
that even Germany might not object to since Germans would receive it too.
For example, Italy gives the unemployed 500 euros per month and tries to find them any sort of job. I think you're a little
behind. But by all means, keep tilting at windmills.
i was just thinking about that this am while finishing my fence like in alaska.
i figger that after 40+ years of declining or stagnant wages, a majority of us are owed some frelling back-pay.
but "dividend" works just as well.
a majority of us are owed some frelling back-pay. Amfortas the hippie
The Citizen's Dividend would vary as required to counter price deflation but during the period when the banks are progressively
de-privileged, it would have to be quite high to provide for the conversion of bank deposits to fiat deposits at the Central Bank
– with the banks, by necessity, having to borrow the needed fiat from citizens.
Its still the wrong set of arguments. The problem in the US is not that Medicare-for-All would require new taxes that need
funding. The problem is that the US spends twice per capita on healthcare what the average OECD country spends. The US spends
more public tax money on healthcare per capita than Canada does, and Canada insures the entire population.
We can pay for our entire military budget as it exists if we simply drop our per capita healthcare spending to less than what
Switzerland pays. Name one other thing that costs more in the US than in Switzerland.
Americans simply cannot comprehend how exorbitantly expensive and unequal the US healthcare system is compared to the rest
of the developed world.
While I gladly accept the results of these surveys, I question the reasons they seem to have garnered from the public. To most
citizens, lower taxes mean much more than non-aggresive foreign policy and peaceful diplomacy. If the question was phrased in
such a way that respondents were replying to the lower cost AND the concomitant peace-oriented habits that should (would?) come
from it, then it is an issue whether they agreed with both statements. Further, this reorientation of spending would have to be
bully-pulpited quite strongly to educate the US as to its long-term benefits since most of us have been prepped to be anxious
about foreign nations and the paranoia of saving us from the evil dictator "X". Oh, yes, peace should come, but compare the Syria
brou-ha-ha to what would descend upon us when peace broke out. The elites won't disappear.
Bizarre. The question is: How can we afford something that's half as expensive as what we're already paying? I wouldn't expect
that level of insanity from someone in a straitjacket yet it's a commonplace in these discussions.
Even worse: the argument that government is financially constrained. It's not "tax & spend," it can't be. Where would taxpayers
get dollars to pay those taxes if government didn't spend them first?
So it must be "spend first & then ask for some back in taxes." This is how reality works. And what do we call the dollar financial
assets left in the economy, not retrieved by taxes? a) The dollar financial assets of the citizens, i.e. their savings or (same
thing) b) National 'Debt'
National 'Debt' is completely unlike household debt. It's like bank debt. If you have a bank account, that's your asset, but
to the bank, it's a liability. It's the money they owe you. It's their debt.
Now imagine a mob of depositors marching down to the bank to demand it reduce the size of its debt (i.e. make their accounts
smaller) Crazy? Yes, but that's the austerian line of talk.
Finally, the inflationistas: "If you just print money, you'll have [gasp][hyper-]inflation!" This is the finest quality bullshit,
and people spout it practically without prompting. The truth: The Fed extended $16 – $29 trillion in credit to cure the frauds
of the financial sector in 2007-8. I defy anyone to find a measurement of inflation that says there was any then.
Was there central-bank-run-amok inflation in the classical cases (Weimar, Zimbabwe). Nope. Not even there. Yes they did print
lots of Deutchmarks and Zimbabwe currency, but only after a shortage of good occurred that actually caused the inflation.
Just printing money, especially if there's spare capacity, does not cause inflation. You need a bidding war for some commodity
that's become scarce (like oil in the '70s). So Weimar had the burden of war reparations, a balance of payments problem, and when
they delayed sending some telephone poles to France, the French military shut down the German equivalent of Ohio (the Ruhr). Shortages
led to the hyperinflation. Similarly, the Rhodesian colonists left Zimbabwe, which had previously fed itself, and food shortages
led to the hyperinflation.
The Cato study of 56 hyperinflationary episodes in human history also validates the above. In *no* case did a central bank
"run amok" and print too much to kick off the hyperinflation. Always the cost push of a shortage of goods drove it.
Gosh, it's all so simple. We just need to take on the military industrial complex, the medical industrial complex, and our
corrupt political system all at the same time.
Researchers Detail How Slashing the Social Security and Medicare Budgets Could Pay for More Pointless Wars While Creating the
Progressive Wall Street Bailouts Americans Want.
"... "Along with the wreckage of the family, we are seeing record levels of depression and mental illness, dispirited young people, soaring suicide rates, increasing numbers of angry and alienated young males, an increase in senseless violence, and a deadly drug epidemic," he said. ..."
Share U.S. Attorney General
William Barr raised concerns about the increase in secularism in society in a speech on
Oct. 11, speaking about how that has contributed to a number of social issues plaguing
communities across the nation.
Barr, who
delivered his remarks to students at the University of Notre Dame's law school, drew
attention to the comprehensive effort to drive away religion and traditional moral systems in
society and to push secularism in their place.
"We see the growing ascendancy of secularism
and the doctrine of moral relativism," Barr said.
He said that the forces of secularism are using mass media and popular culture, the
promotion of greater reliance on government intervention for social problems, and the use of
legal and judicial institutions to eliminate traditional moral norms.
Barr explored several of the consequences of "this moral upheaval," highlighting its effect
on all parts of society.
"Along with the wreckage of the family, we are seeing record levels of depression and
mental illness, dispirited young people, soaring suicide rates, increasing numbers of angry and
alienated young males, an increase in senseless violence, and a deadly drug epidemic," he
said.
"Over 70,000 people die a year from drug overdoses," he said. "But I won't dwell on the
bitter results of the new secular age. Suffice it to say that the campaign to destroy the
traditional moral order has coincided, and, as I believe, has brought with it, immense
suffering and misery."
Barr said religion has come under increasing attack over the past 50 years, underscoring how
secularists are using society's institutions to systematically destroy religion and stifle
opposing views.
"Secularists and their allies have marshaled all the forces of mass communication, popular
culture, the entertainment industry, and academia in an unremitting assault on religion and
traditional values. These instruments are used not only to affirmatively promote secular
orthodoxy but also to drown out and silence opposing voices," he said.
He said that people are moving away from "micro-morality" observed by Christians, a system
of morality that seeks to transform the world by focusing on their own personal morality and
transformation. Instead, he said the modern secularists are pushing a "macro-morality," which
focuses on political causes and collective actions to address social problems.
"In the past, when societies are threatened by moral chaos, the overall social costs of
licentiousness and irresponsible personal conduct become so high that society ultimately
recoils and reevaluates the path it is on," Barr said.
"But today, in the face of all the increasing pathologies, instead of addressing the
underlying cause, we have cast the state in the role as the alleviator of bad consequences. We
call on the state to mitigate the social costs of personal conduct and irresponsibility. So the
reaction to growing illegitimacy is not sexual responsibility but abortion; the reaction to
drug addiction is safe injection sites."
"The call comes for more and more social programs to deal with this wreckage, and while we
think we are resolving problems, we [actually] are underwriting them."
He also pointed out how the law has been used to "break down traditional moral values and
establish moral relativism as the new orthodoxy," giving the example of how laws have been used
to aggressively force religious people and entities to subscribe to practices and policies that
are antithetical to their faith .
"The forces of secularism have been continually seeking to eliminate the laws that reflect
traditional moral norms," he said.
Barr also highlighted the role of religion in society, saying it promotes moral discipline
while it influences people's conduct.
"Religion also helps promote moral discipline in society. We're all fallen. We don't
automatically conform our conduct to moral rules, even when we know that they're good for us.
But religion helps teach, train, and habituate people to want what's good," he said.
"It doesn't do this primarily by formal laws -- that is, by coercive power -- it does this
through moral education and by framing society's informal rules -- the customs and traditions
which reflect the wisdom and experience of the ages. In other words, religion helps frame a
moral culture within society that instills and reinforces moral discipline."
"... Liz Warren is a lecturer and scolder. While she polls well with college educated white women she does not have a great deal of appeal to minority and non-college white women. Her appeal to male voters is not good across the board. She does not produce the emotional appeal necessary to drive turnout. ..."
"... Also, her false claims of American Indian background makes her an easy mark for Trump's tactics. ..."
@renfro
I believe that the Israeli /Anglo Zionist goal was to either 1) destroy Iran or 2) being Iran
back into the Western orbit as a vassal state tied to the dollar.
Those two goals which once may have been attainable are no longer so.
Even Pentagon war planners know that their children would have to fight Iran and that war
with Iran would prove 100x tougher than Iraq.
China's Silk Road Offers seems to offer economic growth without vassal state status
@Counterinsurgency
I understand, and I am aware that you operate at a higher level of intelligence than most
here (including myself). I look forward to your insight's, although at times it takes me a
bit to comprehend your message. Keep up the good fight.
@jack
daniels Cutting Israel lose to feel morally pure, would would be nice, but cost plenty
and in my opinion too much. Feeling good about oneself is hardly worth destruction of the
anti China alliance before it even got off the launch pad . The Israel Lobby are a pain, but
we need them, because we need everyone all pulling together for the fight that is coming. Yes
it makes you feel dirty, but we are down here with the filth and worms not in an ivory tower
I believe that the Israeli /Anglo Zionist goal was to either 1) destroy Iran or 2) being
Iran back into the Western orbit as a vassal state tied to the dollar. Those two goals
which once may have been attainable are no longer so.
The goal of the civilized world is stop Iran from destabilizing and threatening the world.
Iranian al'Hezbollah occupies Lebanon and undermines the legitimate government. Iran is
trying to infiltrate Syria so it can be driven into failure like Lebanon. Iran is developing
nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles to deliver them.
Iran can easily rejoin the civilized world of of it stops the violence against its
neighbors. Alas, Ayatollah Khameni is a sociopath. He does not care about the suffering of
the Iranian workers trying to survive in a collapsing economy. (1)
The Iranian rial official rate is set at 42,000 rials to the U.S. dollar, but its market
rate stood at around 115,000 against the dollar on Tuesday, according to foreign exchange
website Bonbast.com.
Iran's economy is expected to shrink by 9.5% this year, the International Monetary Fund
(IMF) said, down from a previous estimate of a 6% contraction, as the country feels the
impact of tighter U.S. sanctions.
@Daniel
Rich Thanks for your reply! Africans and Black people from the Caribbean can be kind,
respectful, and warm as long as their societies are intact.
I'd imagine that Donald Rich is familiar with these works and more, but here's a brief
popular literature / internet search for material concerning trading in sub-Saharan Africa
and the Third World in general:
and the Africans (indeed, third world countries worldwide) seem to have only one way of
coping. Looking at it from that angle, the Vietnam War was about throwing out the Chinese
businessmen and the French/Americans who were supporting them. See Chua's discussion of this
in _The World on Fire_
The universal group preference seems to be living in a society that the group has developed
for itself over a society that produces more goods and longer lives but is run by
foreigners.
@Counterinsurgency
A kick-off observation: Counterinsurgency's "screen name" is intriguing, and it suggests, to
me, a fellowship beyond that of a single commenter.
Broken Scranton greetings, Counterinsurgency!
Your following words make ominous sense but I cannot place my arms around what you
precisely mean when zeroing in upon "The current US system / world order."
Questions sprout from even keen ambiguity, so I politely ask you to provide an improved
definition of, "The current US system / world order." Hm. Is it in part the "US" maintaining
it's shaky reserve currency distinction, and it's attack/sanction every country that deserves
such?
And regarding the "US world order," one pauses to recognize that such is now become a
downsized & disputed residual of President G.H.W. Bush's "New World Order"
proclamation.
And then, a reader (like me!) becomes rather dazzled by a quasi-Nostradamus/Protocols of
Zion style prediction that all "will end within the next decade no matter what Trump does.
Trump is trying to shut it down with minimal casualties, and replace it with something
viable." Hm. Something "viable," eh, like City of Scranton's position, in the E.R.? Haha,
(Zigh)
No doubt alluring & as Johnny Walker Read attested in comment #229, "I am aware that
you (Counterintelligence) operate at a higher level of intelligence than most here (including
myself)." In addition, you comment as if operating with greater awareness & confidence of
what the hell is really going down. Impressive, !
But regarding noble & brotherly Amerikans who are willing to work toward a semblance
of national unity & salvation, there's a problem, Counterinsurgency.
The awesome ZUS government "system" prioritizes feeding the wealthy; for easy examples,
themselves, friends, oligarchs, multinational corporations, and of course Israel & the
M.I.C. (Zigh) Consequently, employed but oft still struggling average Amerikan subjects get
scraps which fall from off the national budget's indebted banquet table.
The USA population now endures an advanced engineered-experiment where a nation becomes
characterized by Haves & Have Not; in parable language, a "Rich Man & Lazarus"
divide.
Agreed, you're spot-on correct on Trump's main Executive job as limitation of casualties
during "the transition." Nonetheless, I respectfully suggest a crystal ball tune-up because,
& very regrettably, "the wind at Trump's back" blows from Tel Aviv, London, and AIPAC
headquarters.
Thanks, Counterinsurgency, and can you please offer a sunshine response?
@Counterinsurgency
Reasonably, and to Daniel Rich, Counterintelligence explained: "Africans and Black people
from the Caribbean can be kind, respectful, and warm as long as their societies are intact."
Above, & as you're aware, "societies" originate in packs/tribes." * In general, &
for lack of a better word, such entities permit themselves to be governed.
In the America where I grew up, there was a saying that "fish rot from the head."
Now, Counterintelligence, I indulge the word "fish" as a metaphor for submerged Amerikan
human beings. Okay? Fyi, haha, Jews are fisherman for consumable pools of 'Merikan Shabbos
goy carp.
When either packs/tribes or nations become governed by distorted & selfish leaders,
the collective entity rots & such process typically starts from the "head."
Now we arrive at Amerika's dreaded fate, and one which you described as President tRump's
managing a gradual engineered "transition." (Zigh) No doubt, the throwaway fish rots from the
head? Thanks, Counterintelligence!
P.S.: Sometimes during particularly glum "Homeland" moments, & instead of the tribe's
actual imposed governance, , I wish my country was ruled by the first ten (10) "kind" people
who are listed in Somalia's Yellow Pages.
* Try Jewish author, Elias Canetti's remarkable book, "Packs and Tribes."
Andrew Zimmern, the Jewish chef and celebrity who does a TV program called "bizarre foods,"
visited Syria in 2011 (season 6, episode 1) before the start of the civil war. Zimmern was
pretty apprehensive about the visit and says so at the beginning but he was won over by the
kindness and humanity of the Syrian people and the beauty of the country. It is a tragedy
what has happened there. I don't know how long the link below will be available, but see the
show for yourself.
I did not study US constitution.
I do have a question:
When Trump will be impeached, and Trump loose support in Senate and so he will be removed
from presidency, will he still be entitled to run in next election?
I did not study US constitution. I do have a question: When Trump will be impeached, and
Trump loose support in Senate and so he will be removed from presidency, will he still be
entitled to run in next election?
Your hypothetical will not happen. There is no chance of a Senate Conviction & Removal
during an election year. Then resulting internal fight would also wipe out the Republicans in
the House and Senate.
_____
That being said. The answer to your constitutional question is, "Yes". Neither House
impeachment nor Senate conviction is a bar to serving as President.
The only requirements to serve as U.S. President are found in two places:
Article II, Section I, Clause 5
No person except a natural born citizen, or a citizen of the United States, at the time
of the adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the office of President; neither
shall any person be eligible to that office who shall not have attained to the age of
thirty five years, and been fourteen Years a resident within the United States.
Amendment 22
No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice, and no person
who has held the office of President, or acted as President, for more than two years of a
term to which some other person was elected President shall be elected to the office of the
President more than once.
"Let's see what he actually does " , it appears that he's shuffling forces around and even
adding to them as John Feffer describes in his article : " Trump's Endless Wars" which
appears in the most recent edition of Informed Comment .
Feffer : " In fact , the Trump administration has deployed an additional 14,000 US forces to
the Middle East since the Spring , compare that to the 1000 troops he is withdrawing from
Northern
Syria . The President seems more intent on starting fires than ending them ."
@ChuckOrloski"the wind at Trump's back" blows from Tel Aviv, London, and AIPAC
headquarters.
Chuck -- thanks for the AIPAC mention.
AIPAC is a small but powerful political tribe within our nation. Clearly, we cannot leave
Syria because of AIPAC. When it comes to foreign policy – it rules America. Only 60
members of congress voted to leave Syria. Some 375 members voted with AIPAC, while most
Americans want us to leave. Is that not stunning? What political power.
No informed American can like AIPAC. It is time that we pacifically target AIPAC as a
coercive organization. Clearly, it is in the wrong – it is vulnerable. Those in
congress who support it like lemmings – also need condemnation.
p.s. Going after AIPAC has the added benefit of not attacking all Jews.
@TGDZimmern was pretty apprehensive about the visit and says so at the beginning but he was
won over by the kindness and humanity of the Syrian people and the beauty of the country.
The same is said by people who visit Iran. Rick Steves Travels Program – did a Iran
video – he had the same generous reaction about Iran.
Interestingly, Art recommended: "Going after AIPAC has the added benefit of not attacking all
Jews."
Agreed, Art, but with one major caveat.
As you know, the late-President JFK and Attorney General RFK wanted AIPAC's predecessor to
register as a foreign agent. ! Fyi, the young Illinois Congressman, Donald Rumsfeld,
articulated his opposition in writing to Bobby.
These days, invulnerable AIPAC must simply remind all standing ZUS presidents &
members of our Knesset Congress West about the severe risks involved in attacking AIPAC.
(Note: Regrettably, AIPAC doesn't hesitate to expel even Jewish Senators; for one example,
groping Al Franken, who also non amusingly "spilled the beans" about his family's having
received Odigo warning messages just prior to the 9/11 Manhattan-based attacks)
Thanks & my respect, Art!
P.S.: Sincerely wish RobinG was around so that I could be bitten, badgered, & charged
with defeatism.
So Democrats so jealously protecting Biden and whitewashing him they are only spinning
their wheels.
Slow wit Biden has no chance in hell to beat Trump. Trump will demolish him in every
debate.
Only Elizabeth Warren has a good chance to beat Trump. She is intelligent and authority
personality not like Biden, and she has clean record not like Hillary. Some of her ideas are
not worked out in detail, but they are of right direction. So I would assume that majority of
women will be voting for her. And that could make a difference
Only Elizabeth Warren has a good chance to beat Trump.
I would assume that majority of women will be voting for her. And that could make a
difference
Liz Warren is a lecturer and scolder. While she polls well with college educated white
women she does not have a great deal of appeal to minority and non-college white women. Her
appeal to male voters is not good across the board. She does not produce the emotional appeal
necessary to drive turnout.
Also, her false claims of American Indian background makes her an easy mark for Trump's
tactics.
IMHO, If the Dems want to beat Trump, their only option is Tulsi Gabbard. However the DNC
establishment hates her. It is hard seeing how she gets the nomination.
@Ilyana_Rozumova
On the presidential campaign prospects of Elizabeth Warren, Ilyana_Rozumova offered: "Some of
her ideas are not worked out in detail, but they are of right direction."
Hello, Ms. _Rozumova.
(Zigh) Re, above; So long as Elizabeth's evolving "ideas" continue to lean toward the
direction of the Western Wall, she might beat Likud's Chosen One, Trump.
Thanks for offering such a well worked out and "decent" delusion!
Selah, Former - unclean but authoritative DNC Chairman, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, bolts after
having corralled The Bern's 2016 votes.
@Art
When congress claps its hands off, in a naked admiration for the leader of Occupied
Palestine, during 29 standing ovations, it was like a 'When do we leave Stalin's deathbed'
moment to me.
In most foreign countries MAGA = Make America Go Away.
I'd say, 'Take the country back and fly one flag."
@A123
In a country where celebrity status and showmanship are placed on the altar of normalcy,
people who actually make sense are not very well understood [not referring to Warren here].
So the ADL banned Red Ice & The Blue & White Gulag Roundup, Inc. is comin' to my
hometown soon, eh?
Da, Rodnoy brat geokat! Am delighted that "we," who regularly assemble here at U.R.
Comment-Department, have an ancillary threat warning system. Thank you, geo.
P.S.: Were Ron Unz whimsically responsive & less civilized, I would lobby for a
color-coded Zionist threat-level banner that constantly flashes atop the daily U.R. article
masthead, and flexibly changes according to dire political circumstance; i.e., fluctuates
from a pale Zion Red to a flaming Zion Red. One color needed, (Zigh)
@Cloak And
Dagger It is interesting that it has been a one way street. What could be happening is
that we are witnessing the growing great divide between American and Israeli Jewry. In
America the white man is the racist. Trump is associated with white nationalist in America.
Jews believe people of European descent can't be nationalist but the Israelis are going past
the American Jews' comfort zone with their openly racist policies. American Jewish kids don't
get conscripted in order to shoot brown kids and to help take their homes from them. In
Israel they do. In Israel the Jews are racist and are proud of it. There is a disconnect.
They encourage American Jews to visit and to feel connected with Israel but they don't have
them take up arms and shoot Palestinian kids as a right of passage. Jews in America are a
minority with a lot of political power but in Israel they rule and everyone else is a second
class citizen. What we are seeing on the left is the effects of this growing divide in the
experiences of the two populations. If Trump was Jewish they'd make him King of Israel.
Also many American Jews who are fine with Israeli racialism value the bipartisan
consensus. Trump will come and go but they hope that will last a very longtime. Netanyahu has
ruffled feathers by throwing his lot with Trump. Now that he maybe is down for the count they
hope that the new Israeli leader can project the right image and use the right rhetoric to
quell the rebellion on the American Left while continuing Israel's racist policies. They use
Trump's troop removal as proof that Netanyahu was wrong to support Trump regardless of all
the gifts Trump has bestowed onto Israel. Israel loves all those gifts but what they really
want is for Americans to die fighting Iran for them in order to weaken Hezbollah. Trump has
yet to do that but even if he did they'd still try to remove him from office.
@barr
What do you think of this? Pepe correctly identifies the "cultural misunderstanding" by
US/NATO. I just have a hard time believing that the Turks, right next door and with a forever
history, could be so deluded about Syria. Oh well, human folly.
It should be observed that the Syrian incursion by the American military, which was
initiated by President Barack Obama and his band of lady hawks during the so-called "Arab
Spring" of 2011, was illegal from the gitgo. Syria did not threaten the United States, quite
the contrary. Damascus had supported U.S. intelligence operations after 9/11 and it was
Washington that soured the relationship beginning with the Syria Accountability Act of 2003,
which later was followed by the Syrian War Crimes Accountability Act of 2015, both of which
were, at least to a certain extent, driven by the interests of Israel.
When American soldiers first arrived in Syria the U.S. War Powers act was ignored, making
the incursion illegal. Nor was there any mandate authorizing military intervention emanating
from any supra-national agency like the United Nations. The excuse for the intervention was
plausibly enough to destroy ISIS, but the reality was much more complex, with U.S. forces in
addition seeking to limit Iranian and Russian presence in Syria while also bringing about
regime change. The objectives were from the start unattainable as Iran and Russia were
supporting the Syrian Army in doing most of the hard fighting against ISIS while the regime of
President Bashar al-Assad was not threatened by a so-called democratic alternative which only
existed in the minds of Samantha Powers and Susan Rice.
Unwilling to see large numbers of Americans coming home in caskets, the United States
inevitably began to search for proxies to carry out the fighting on the ground and wound up
willy-nilly arming, training and otherwise supporting terrorists, to include the al-Qaeda
affiliate al-Nusra. The Kurdish Syrian Democratic Forces eventually became the principal tool
of U.S. military, but it must be observed that the Kurds in all likelihood had no illusions
about the staying power of their American patrons. They were fighting Syrian forces as well as
ISIS because they were seeking to carve out their own homeland of Kurdistan from the ruins of
the Syrian state. Their expansion into northern Syria, aided by the U.S., was at the expense of
the local population, which was overwhelmingly not Kurdish. Their occupation of that area was
not reported honestly in the U.S. media, but other sources suggest that their behavior was
often brutal.
So the lament about abandoning one's Kurdish allies has a kernel of truth, but the Senator
Lindsey Graham response, to include sanctioning Turkey, should be considered to be little more
than a dangerous misstep that would lead to acquiring a new and more powerful enemy. And, of
course, the argument in favor of leaving the Kurds to their fate found its most ridiculous
expression from the mouth of Donald Trump himself, who, up until recently had praised the Kurds
as friends who had "fought and died for us." Trump is now observing
that "they [the Kurds] didn't help us in the Second World War, they didn't help us with
Normandy." As President Trump did not serve his country in Vietnam due to alleged bone spurs
and his father Fred likewise did not serve in the military, the comment is particularly ironic.
Trump's surname was changed from the original German Drumpf and if there were any Drumpfs
present at Normandy they were undoubtedly on the German side.
Finally, there is one other important issue that should be observed. Donald Trump's actual
record on ending useless wars is not consistent with his actions. He has sent more soldiers to
no good purpose in support of America's longest war in Afghanistan, has special ops forces in
numerous countries in Asia and Africa, has threatened regime change in Venezuela, continues to
support Saudi Arabia and Israel's bloody attacks on their neighbors and has exited to from
treaties and agreements with Russia and Iran that made armed conflict less likely. And he has
five thousand American soldiers sitting as hostages in Iraq, a country that the United States
basically destroyed as a cohesive political entity and which is now experiencing a wave of
rioting that has reportedly killed hundreds. Trump is also assassinating more foreigners using
drones based mostly on profile targeting than all of his predecessors. These are not the
actions of a president who seriously wants to end wars even if one does not consider the
economic warfare that is currently taking place through the use of sanctions that is reportedly
killing tens of thousands.
So should one take Donald Trump seriously when he says he wants to end the pointless wars?
Perhaps not, but even giving him the benefit of the doubt, he should be judged by his actions,
not by his words and, apart from the withdrawal of a handful of soldiers from the actual front
lines in Syria, nothing has changed. It is quite possible that nothing will change.
Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest,
a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a
more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is
councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its
email is[email protected]
The Turkish Army, which is one of the most powerful in NATO, will do whatever is
necessary to crush them. Trump should have realized that before he started talking.
IDK, Phil. I am not sure that he didn't. My sense is that he has been pandering to the
neocons in the hope of a compromise that would allow him to deliver enough of his campaign
promises to permit his re-election. I think hiring Bolton was just such a move –
thinking that keeping his enemies closer would permit him more control.
Recently, he has expressed frustration with his staff and I speculate that he has come to
realize that pandering to the jews is going to be a one-way street. He has given them a score
of concessions, including Jerusalem and the Golan Heights. He hasn't received anything in
return, except for the onslaught of palace coups, one after the other, orchestrated by the
very same zionist forces in both parties.
My hypothesis is that the man, narcissistic as he is, has reached the end of his tether.
Faced with the potential to not get re-elected, he has mounted a counteroffensive against
them. He, rightly, believes that the people who got him elected are the only ones who can get
him re-elected. So, his recent tweets are both an attempt to recapture us to his side, while
at the same time slapping the zionists across their faces with a show of power, as he is
won't to do in business negotiations where he feels that he has been betrayed.
I could be completely wrong as I try to pry into his mind.
So should one take Donald Trump seriously when he says he wants to end the pointless
wars? Perhaps not, but even giving him the benefit of the doubt, he should be judged by his
actions, not by his words and, apart from the withdrawal of a handful of soldiers from the
actual front lines in Syria, nothing has changed. It is quite possible that nothing will
change.
It serves us naught to take this pessimistic stance in the absence of a replacement
candidate. I have always contended that the best way to use Trump is to support his ego.
Let's inundate him with praise for withdrawing from the Kurdish/Turkish quagmire. Sure, he
hasn't vacated Syria yet, however, he has no choice but to vacate or be evacuated. His ego
will opt for the former.
Trump is also assassinating more foreigners using drones based mostly on profile targeting
than all of his predecessors.
These are not the actions of a president who seriously wants to end wars even if one does not
consider the economic warfare that is currently taking place through the use of sanctions
that is reportedly killing tens of thousands
-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --
Mr. Giraldi,
Could you please elaborate on the first point: the use of drones. Who and where?
Secondly, economic warfare: are you referring to Iran or Venezuela? Could you
elaborate?
@A123
NATO members will not help the New Ottoman Empire "offensive".
-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --
Wow, Israeli is really terrified. What will they do when the U.S. decouples from the Middle
East completely? It's pretty clear that, short of running to Russia and fellating Putin, Bobo
the Clown of Tel Aviv has no plan.
Tic Toc.
The fact of the matter is that President Donald Trump is a Corrupt "Crypto Jew" in spite of
the American people may think Trump is as he was chosen by the Elite to serve and protect
Israel and churn profits for Elite owned and controlled Armaments industry in promoting wars
against the Best interests of the citizens of United States of America.
If Washington withdraws its military, spooks and mercenaries the Syrian Curds will go back to
being Syrians. Syria, Iran, Russia and Turkey will negotiate the peace. The U.S., Israel,
Saudi Arabia and Turkey will have been defeated in their war against Assad. Syria, unlike
Iraq and Libya will remain standing.
Everyone loves to hate on Erdogan. I was hoping for a more nuanced view than [he] "is just
crazy enough to do that." Remember when George Galloway called him "a lion," awestruck at his
reaction to the Israeli murders of Turks on the boat to Gaza? Is it true that Turkey has made
tremendous economic gains under his administration? He has much support, as shown by the
[popular] squelching of attempted coup.
I've just never understood why he facilitated the chaos on his border, harboured the White
Helmets, probably murdered Serena Shim, etc. And now, what will he do with his jihadi proxy
army? As far as his threats to release migrants to Europe, I have no sympathy for EU
countries who've been part of the war on the ME. What goes around, comes around. Same for the
Kurds.
There have been some suggestions that the Kurds could make nice with the Damascus
government and rely on the protection of the Syrian Army to deter the Turks, an option that
they have already begun to exercise.
The Kurds have caved. Plus our radical Islamic rebels are going over, with our equipment
etc to the Ass man.
Updated Oct. 14, 2019 6:48 pm ET. WSJ
ISTANBUL -- Syrian troops entered areas that have been outside their control for years on
Monday, after a quickly forged pact between Kurdish forces and the Syrian government to
confront a Turkish military campaign reshaped alliances in Syria.
That pact transformed the Kurds, an erstwhile partner of the U.S. in the fight against
Islamic State, into a force more closely aligned with Russia and Iran, as the U.S. began
withdrawing its troops from northeastern Syria.
Until recently, thousands of U.S.-backed fighters had trained at a military base in the
town of Ain Eissa. After the Syrian military arrived on Monday morning, soldiers raised the
tricolor Syrian flag in the town center.
The US gets out of the way, and Assad, who won the Civil War, immediately settles with the
Kurds and Nustra.
So, it wasn't many troops, but we had successfully prevented Assad from absorbing
(voluntarily) two groups in the Civil War. Meaning we (US) alone was preventing settlement.
The. deep state has thwarted Trump's intentions to leave for 3 years.
"Or the Turks might be willing to escalate their own offensive to take on the inferior Syrian
Army and the Kurds together." It is a stretch without careful analysis.
Many people said the same about the world's most cowardice army, the Israeli. There is an
agreement between the parties and Erdogan will comply. The Kurds are the West-Israel proxy
terrorists. They proved their usefulness many times.
But in pursuing their aspirations for self-rule, Syria's Kurds risked overreach and
miscalculation. American officials have long made clear in meetings and public comments
that U.S. military backing never amounted to an endorsement of Kurdish political
ambitions.
In December, U.S. envoy to Syria James Jeffrey likened the partnership with the SySo he
rian Kurds to a "transactional relationship for a specific goal."
Trump got it basically right -- time to leave and we never promised Kurds a Rose
Garden.
His bumbling ruling decrees via Twitter stem from the lack of loyal staff. His decisions
are ignored or subverted when he goes through channels. So he announces it and works from
there. This is the 3rd Time Trump has announced withdrawal from Syria. Although the neocon
press and Hawkish politicians howled.
Trump also implemented the Pivot to Asia (an Obama failure) by engaging China
diplomatically through efforts at trade reform. Much more nuanced that fortifying bases.
Its never pretty, but Trump tends to stubbornly pursue a less warlike agenda.
The mideast is where everybody backstabs everybody recalling the CIA used to deliver
renditioned prisoners to Assad to be tortured along lines a bit more than 'enhanced'
interrogations (karma could be a b *** h.) The soup only gets thicker as the pot boils down.
Remember those NATO nukes kept at Incirlik?
Why had NATO (the USA particularly) sat on its hands these past 3+ years? It's not like no
one was aware there could be a serious problem with 50 (or more) tactical nukes in the hands
of the paranoid narcissist Erdogan:
@A123
"that is, the goods and services produced by the economy -- rises faster than the money
created, so there is no inflation, and rises faster than the debt created, so the country's
debt burden doesn't increase."
"The long term prospects for peace are still there. A return to the status quo ante. Russia
remains as guarantor of the peace and all other foreign fighters and their proxies exit the
nation."
Spot on.
Given cast-iron assurances re the PKK & it's Syrian cousins that Nth Syria will cease to
be a zone for organising attacks (or any kind of nefarious Kurdish behaviour) on Turkey, I
think Erdogan would likely consider a withdrawal of his forces.
i think there are few unknowns between Russia, Turkey, Syria; the plan seems to be to get
ISIS, SDF, the PYD/YPD without regard to who is supporting them. Unleash ISIS, even those in
prisons so they can move against Assad to be destroyed ? Those trapped in Idlib can either
commit suicide or wait for the executioner. I have no facts, but by observing that the
sanctions warfare is directed at those who intend to destroy ISIS, SDF, PYD/YPD and Israelis
and Iranians visiting in Syria I conclude Russia and Turkey have skunked the Pentagon (maybe
Trump is also in on it?) .
Russia and Syria have agreed to stand by while Turkey engages in some target practice at
unwanted visitors in Syria? Invade Syria even North Western Iraq.. rid the world of pesky,
trouble making, fake news head chopping face book and Twitter super stars, destroy all traces
of Kurds, remove all non Syrian others threatening the Ottoman, Syrian Turf. Don't look now,
but Iran seems to be on the Turkey list of non Syrians ?. ..After the area is cleared Assad's
problem, will be, what if Turkey (Erdogan) refuses to return to Turkey, and that return to
Turkey promise has probably been be guaranteed to Assad by Russia.
I read a Russian statement somewhere last year [early 2018], in which they unequivocal said
there would never be an autonomous Kurdish state. They [the Kurds] could stick to some of
their customs, but legally and lawfully they would fall on Damascus' rule/s.
Trump's foreign policy constitutes an egregious betrayal of his election platform which was
to "stay neutral" on Israel/Palestine, withdraw remaining troops and avoid any further
entanglements. He reneged on all pledges.
The recent announcement that he was withdrawing troops from Syria was followed the next
day by an announcement of 2,000 US troops being deployed to Saudi Arabia to protect that
country from Iran. Say what?
It was totally predictable five years ago that Turkey was in Israel's gunsights, and as
usual Israel tends to destroy others by proxy. They can sit back and savor Turkey destroying
more of Syria, while US sanctions destroy more of Turkey.
The waves of death and destruction that have hammered the Middle East for the last seventy
years are all symptoms of one problem and that is the illegitimate "state of Israel".
Most Americans seem obsessed with stupid wars. For example the vast majority of people in the
UK see the Iraq War as a catastrophic mistake and despise Tony Blair, yet in the US most
people still seem to see the Iraq War as a good thing. The mentality is far apart.
Americans seem a very insecure people, projecting military power is all they really have.
If America is not constantly embroiled in a war somewhere then most Americans feel they have
nothing to be proud of. I would go as far to say that the military is the only real source of
pride in America, it's the only thing Americans feel they undeniably excel at.
There are no "stupid wars", every slaughter of millions was long time in planning and was
based on greed and racism of the "master" races vs. "subhumans".
USA corporation, can not and will not survive without WARS.
Complete "economy" is a WAR machine, USA corporations has WEAPONIZED it ALL.
It is nice to dream, even HollyWood supports and promotes it.
Whiskey Rebellion me think was the Birthday of citizen USA and blessed it's associates
with representation by corrupt and greedy anointed by others rushing to become corrupt and
greedy.
Trump has shown himself to be completely unreliable on every important issue; I do not
see why it will be different this time -- his desire for approval from the Establishment is
apparently far stronger than any principles he may hold -- you can see this in practically
everything he does, perhaps most notably in his constant bleating about black and Hispanic
unemployment -- he simply can't be trusted.
On the other hand Trump has not started any new wars (so far). He is also resisting the elite
of Deep State (MIC) and the mdia, probably in his own weird way by making confusing
statements keeping them off balance. No body knows we are all simply speculating. Time will
tell.
@WorkingClass
Not really. The goal all along was not to "take" Syria so much as to destroy it and leave it
in fragments. Mission accomplished! Syria, or at east large swathes of it has been reduced to
rubble, its economy is gutted and its people are scattered to the winds. The US had no goals
there to begin with and has just been acting in the service of its "great friend and ally"
Israel. Your tax dollars at work.
Syria, Iraq, Libya are now less of a threat to Israel than ever before so that is a kind
of peace. Solitudenum facient, pacem appellant said Tacitus. They make desolation and call it
peace.
@Europe
natonalist I agree. Worship of the military is surely modern America's most cringeworthy
and repellent aspect. The war hero is the American equivalent of the medieval saint, and you
can't even blame the Jews for it. It's clearly a whitey thing. Get a few bullets shot at you
by some primitive and soon to be obliterated savages and you can live large on your war
stories for the rest of your comfortably pensioned days. The sad thing is that there are no
wars for the US military to fight these days except those they create themselves.
America, an exceptionally immature, warlike and stupid nation. And they worship Jesus! Who
of course will just laugh when he presses the button and sends them all into the lake of fire
without a second thought.
@Cloak And
Dagger Interesting, I've been mulling over this possibility recently and was thinking
about it earlier as a potential outcome-based upon basic game theory.
What I don't understand is, if there be an alleged discreet hidden super-hand of
power controlled by the Jewish elite, and Trump seemed to be doing their bidding (moving the
Embassy), where are all the "compromising photos" and "Blasey Ford's" for the Warren's and
Biden's of the world? Certainly some damaging (and likely private) material, or "witnesses"
from the past exist, against those who attack Trump? Certainly the Mossad and/or other hidden
forces have such information, that could protect Trump. Here's a guy with a (now) Jewish
daughter and a Jewish son-in-law, doing positive things for Israel and the Jewish elite in
the US/West, and yet, he has been subject to continual attacks, as have those around him, and
now he is facing impeachment?
I don't see Israel getting it any better if Warren is elected (certainly not by her base,
which is turning more toward a BDS worldview). It just makes me think their power is not as
great as conspiracy theorists alleged, or in the alternative (perhaps likely) their "power"
is superseded by an even greater hidden force of elites. If their power is as awesome and
infiltrating as alleged, why isn't he president for life at this point? Using the media,
politics, blackmail, international banking, this guy could usher in Israel as the capital of
the universe, but yet none of that is happening. He is betrayed at every corner and faces
removal from office, disgrace (for actually being the removed, i.e. the other side actually
"winning" against him), and probably the destruction of any chance Ivanka and Jared had of
becoming the first couple, in the future.
So perhaps as you offer, he's going for broke and just doing whatever he wants or wanted
to do in the beginning. Time will tell. Strange times indeed.
@Contraviews
, Contraviews said: "He (Trump) is also resisting the elite of Deep State (MIC) and the mdia,
probably in his own weird way by making confusing statements keeping them off balance."
No! Zionist Jews & Israel are keeping you and almost all of Amerika "off balance."
Refer to Jerusalem Post article (linked below) and you will distinguish "confusing
statements" by Trump from the reality of mandatory ZUS endless ME wars since 9/11.
Everybody should be happy Uncle Sam is getting out of Syria. Look at the disasters the US
created in Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, etc. and all the money wasted which could have been
better spent here at home.
Much of what's being said in the MSM has to do with the American narrative that Turkey and
Syria are bad guys for the unspoken reason that they have opposed the zionist enterprise.
What American national interest justified the occupation and dismemberment of Syria? Why
should we support terrorist groups like the PPK against NATO member Turkey? Why should we
ally with al-Qaeda affiliate HTS for israel's benefit?
@anon
Good point about DJT needing to use Twitter to announce his decisions since they'd otherwise
be thwarted or outright ignored going through normal channels. But, how can he actually be
against these wars when they're contrasted with his embarrassing servility toward Israel,
which in actuality is an enemy state responsible for Lavon, Liberty, and 9/11, not to mention
it's theft of our technology that's used against us by Israel's intel tech companies for
profit and communications espionage at the deepest levels of our government? The canard about
other, overriding strategic interests doesn't hold water since the $trillions wasted on these
wars could have secured our economic and military interests a hundredfold through trade and
cultural interaction. As much as I want to trust DJT and would stand with him and the
deplorables at the barricades if necessary, I cannot overcome my repugnance at his support
for Israel, knowing as he now must know that Israel did 9/11.
The reason America was pushed into the mideast wars was the attack on the WTC 911 by Israel
and traitors in the ZUS government and this attack was blamed on the Arabs and America was
tricked into attacking Afghanistan and Iraq and Syria, all this for Israels goal of greater
Israel, and all this at the cost of millions in lives and 7 trillion and counting in
taxpayers money.
To top off the deception, AL CIADA aka ISIS is a creation of the CIA and the Mossad and
MI6, and these are the real terrorists!
The Kurdish-dominated Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) announced a deal with the Syrian
government of president Bashar al-Assad to resist the ongoing Turkish invasion. Syrian forces
have already moved into Kobane and Manbij. If Turkey continues with its push southwards into
Syria, a war between the Turkish and Syrian forces seems imminent.
As per the deal signed on October 13, the SDF will dissolve its Autonomous Administration
of North and East Syria, also known as Rojava, and hand over the control of cities, such as
Kobane and Manbij to the Syrian government. Talks between the SDF and the Syrian government
were facilitated by the Russians at their Syrian base at Hmeimim in Latakia.
Turkey and its ally, the Free Syrian Army – many of whose members were directly
affiliated to Al Qaeda and other extremist groups – continue their offensive and
atrocities. The FSA has reportedly already illegally executed 13 people. The victims include
Hervin Khalaf, leader of the Future Syria Party, and her two drivers.Turkey launched
'Operation Peace Spring' on October 9. The operation has already led to the death of around
60 Kurdish and 18 Turkish fighters. It has already caused the displacement of more than
130,000 people.
How has the discussion predictably developed along partisan lines? Trump said he wants out of
Syria. That united the war mongers in the house and senate because war means massive profits
to the military industrial complex and congress works for them. Trump said something that
affects the bottom line of the rich and they reacted predictably.
@A123
You can google and watch what Assad told the Kurds in a press conference. It will contradict
part of your statement. The Kurds risked and lost. Great warriors, but weak diplomats and
strategists.
1BEIRUT, LEBANON (11:50 A.M.) – The Syrian Arab Army (SAA) has taken over the U.S.
military base in Manbij after entering the city last night.
According to a military source in the Aleppo Governorate, the Syrian Arab Army has
deployed several units to Manbij as they look to block any potential Turkish offensive to
capture the city.
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On Tuesday, the Anna News Agency reported from Manbij, as they showed the deployment of
the Syrian Army and their eventual take over of the U.S. military base there. -- AMN news
.
2 A stunning development in the key northern Syrian city of Manbij -- the Pentagon has
confirmed a planned handover to Russian military forces is underway amid a Turkish military
assault on the region. This also hours after President Trump tweeted that Assad "wants
naturally to protect the Kurds" and that the problem should be left to local powers.
Late Monday the main US base in Manbij was filmed empty of US forces, and American convoys
were also spotted hastily pulling out of the city as Syrian national forces entered,
following Sunday's historic deal between the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) and
the Assad government. Newsweek reports the developments follows:
I think Russia has allowed Turkey to attack Syria to satisfy Turke's main objective of
rooting out the Kurd on the condition of returning the territory to Syria . It has given Kurd
the bleak choice of oblivion or self preservation . America suffers from PTSD . The flashback
of Saigon on the roof top reappeared again . It ran. Good a sensible job by Trump.
@WJ The
machinations people are making on this topic are truly stunning when it's clear Trump is
doing the right thing. Today are reports that US positions and bases in N. Syria have been
turn keyed over the Assad and Russian forces. Trump IS Protecting the Kurds, just not with
American blood, as he promised.
The one thing Turkey has always wanted is a broken Syria so it can gobble up the remnants.
Past US (and many current) leaders and Democrats were complicit in this by funneling cash and
weapons to Syrian opposition, which directly led to the rise of Isis and deaths of thousands
– can you say evil?
I have hope that Trumps current actions will bring an end to thus war for good –
Turkey was OK to beat up on some kurds but war with Russia is something else.
@OscarWildeLoveChild
imho Jewish power keeps Trump on a perpetual short leash (Schiff is this month's designee to
'walk the dog') until Iran is wrecked.
[edit: renfro commented on Giraldi's earlier thread reminding readers that Israel has a
major interest in the Kurds, their territory, which is oil rich. Remember the proposals to
divide Iraq into three ]
Warren -- BDS is one thing, but her agenda to tax >$50million -- that's the part people
hear & cheer: Hooray! Soak the rich!
The next thing she says is, "Use the money to pay for universal child care, universal
kindergarten, increase pay for child care workers."
This gets cheers from millennials struggling to keep two people employed and kids cared
for.
But think about how drastically anti-family those proposals are.
TOTALLY turn over the care of our children to the loving embrace of the federal government
aka the Frankfurt school
The combined synthesis of social theory and psychoanalysis thus allows resituating on
new bases the Marxist optimism according to which the working class, due to its position in
the relations of production, is disposed to adopt a point of view scientifically based on
reality as well as promote legitimate forms of action.
Knowledge of the forms of the becoming-adult of humanity conceived by Freud, in the form
of a theory of passage through different stages that must result in an assumed genital
sexuality, leads to the recognition of a working class that is believed to be less
encumbered by typically bourgeois prejudices and perversities.
@NoseytheDuke
The goal was to topple Assad. Remember Obama? Assad must go? Assad and the Assad regime are
still there. Where is Saddam Hussein? Where is Muammar Gaddafi? After seven years of war in
Syria the victors are Syria, Iran and Russia. The losers are the U.S., Israel, Saudi Arabia
and Turkey. The real losers of course are the dead and the maimed. The widows and orphans.
And the millions who have been displaced and have become refugees. All are victims of
Imperial aggression. And the real winners of course are the war profiteers who have grown
fatter and fatter since 9/11.
@J. O.
Step 1 in ending hunger in America:
Stop importing hungry foreigners who can't earn a living here.
Do that and somebody might take you seriously. As it is, you're morally despicable.
Liza
says: October 15,
2019 at 4:11 pm GMT 100 Words @eah Yes,
indeed. He is a loose cannon. Don't those people who are still kissing the hem of Trump's
garments remember all that stuff he said during his campaign? Sure, we all know that
politicians lie in order to get elected – but nothing on this level. Like the Scorpion
and Frog poem, or at least his version of it (the Snake). Read More
"... Russia hating is the lynchpin of oligarchic deepstate MIC MSM propaganda. Take that away and the fat cats are revealed as the naked face of evil that they are. Hating Russia (and China) supposedly justifies all their crimes. ..."
The transcript of President Trump's July 25 telephone conversation with Ukraine's recently
elected president, Volodymyr Zelensky, has ignited the usual anti-Trump bashing in American
political-media circles, even more calls for impeachment, with little, if any, regard for the
national security issues involved. Leave aside that Trump should not have been compelled to
make the transcript public and ask: Which, if any, foreign leaders will now feel free to
conduct personal telephone diplomacy with an American president directly or indirectly, of the
kind that helped end the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, knowing that his or her comments might
become known to domestic political opponents? Consider instead only the following undiscussed
issues:
§ Even if former vice president Joseph Biden, who figured prominently in the
Trump-Zelensky conversation, is not the Democratic nominee, Ukraine is now likely to be a
contested, and poisonous, issue in the 2020 US presidential election. How did the United States
become so involved in Ukraine's torturous and famously corrupt politics? The short answer is
NATO expansion, as some of us who opposed that folly back in the 1990s warned would be the
case, and not only in Ukraine. The Washington-led attempt to fast-track Ukraine into NATO in
2013 -- 14 resulted in the Maidan crisis, the overthrow of the country's constitutionally
elected president Viktor Yanukovych, and to the still ongoing proxy civil war in Donbass. All
those fateful events infused the Trump-Zelensky talk, if only between the lines.
§ Russia shares centuries of substantial civilizational values, language, culture,
geography, and intimate family relations with Ukraine. America does not. Why, then, is it
routinely asserted in the US political-media establishment that Ukraine is a "vital US national
interest" and not a vital zone of Russian national security, as by all geopolitical reckoning
it would seem to be? The standard American establishment answer is: because of "Russian
aggression against Ukraine." But the "aggression" cited is Moscow's 2014 annexation of Crimea
and support for anti-Kiev fighters in the Donbass civil war, both of which came after, not
before, the Maidan crisis, and indeed were a direct result of it. That is, in Moscow's eyes, it
was reacting, not unreasonably, to US-led "aggression." In any event, as opponents of eastward
expansion also warned in the 1990s, NATO has increased no one's security, only diminished
security throughout the region bordering Russia.
§ Which brings us back to the Trump-Zelensky telephone conversation. President Zelensky
ran and won overwhelmingly as a peace-with-Moscow candidate, which is why the roughly $400
million in US military aid to Ukraine, authorized by Congress, figured anomalously in the
conversation. Trump is being sharply criticized for withholding that aid or threatening to do
so, including by Obama partisans. Forgotten, it seems, is that President Obama, despite
considerable bipartisan pressure, steadfastly refused to authorize such military assistance to
Kiev, presumably because it might escalate the Russian-Ukrainian conflict (and Russia, with its
long border with Ukraine, had every escalatory advantage). Instead of baiting Trump on this
issue, we should hope he encourages the new peace talks that Zelensky has undertaken in recent
days with Moscow, which could end the killing in Donbass. (For this, Zelensky is being
threatened by well-armed extreme Ukrainian nationalists, even quasi-fascists. Strong American
support for his negotiations with Moscow may not deter them, but it might.)
§ Finally, but not surprisingly, the shadow of Russiagate is now morphing into
Ukrainegate. Trump is also being sharply criticized for asking Zelensky to cooperate with
Attorney General William Barr's investigation into the origins of Russiagate, even though
the role of
Ukrainian-Americans and Ukraine itself in Russiagate allegations against Trump on behalf of
Hillary Clinton in 2016 is now well-documented
.
We need to know fully the origins of Russiagate, arguably the worst presidential scandal in
American history, and if Ukrainian authorities can contribute to that understanding, they
should be encouraged to do so. As I've argued repeatedly, fervent anti-Trumpers must decide
whether they loathe him more than they care about American and international security. Imaging,
for example, a Cuban missile -- like crisis somewhere in the world today where Washington and
Moscow are militarily eyeball-to-eyeball, directly or through proxies, from the Baltic and the
Black Seas to Syria and Ukraine. Will Trump's presidential legitimacy be sufficient for him to
resolve such an existential crisis peacefully, as President John F. Kennedy did in 1962?
Stephen F. Cohen is a professor emeritus of Russian studies and politics at New York
University and Princeton University. A Nation contributing editor, his most recent book War
With Russia? From Putin & Ukraine to Trump & Russiagate is available in paperback and
in an ebook edition. His weekly conversations with the host of The John Batchelor Show, now in
their sixth year, are available at www.thenation.com.
Trump is an agent of the Deep State, playing good cop to the bad cop Deep State. I have been
saying this since mid April 2017. His multitude of actions belie his promises. Trump is a
quisling to his supporters.
Here is an excellent article that comports with my view of Trump.
I am puzzled why Cohen is permitted to publish in the Nation. Is it due to his marriage
to its publisher or to the magazine's remnant infatuation with the Soviet state? Just
asking.
The whole situation is a rather ironic
Prof. Cohen is certainly one of America's most eminent Russia scholars, and I think that
for decades he was regarded as one of the most left-leaning ones, regularly denounced for his
leftism by all the Neocons and other rightwingers. I remember I used to see him on the PBS
Newshour, sometimes paired with a conservative critic of the Soviets. I'd guess that past
history plus being married to the publisher of The Nation is what gives him his
residual foothold there.
I'd suspect that if someone had told him a couple of decades ago that by the late 2010s
he'd be blacklisted from the MSM and denounced as a "Russian agent," he probably would have
been greatly saddened at the disheartening turn in American society, but not totally shocked.
He probably would have regarded such a scenario as having a 10% possibility.
But if someone would have told him that the people denouncing and blacklisting him would
have been the *liberal Democrats* and some of their most "excitable" elements would be
accusing him of being a "Neo-Nazi White Supremacist Russian Agent" he would have thought the
entire country had gone on LSD.
It's sad that our entire country has gone on LSD
The whole situation is actually a perfect parallel to the various past American purges
I've often covered in my articles:
Russia is the excuse for US actions in the Ukraine as it was in the ME.
What is America without a big bad boogeyman like Russia?.
Certainly not a “Superpower’ defending the world.
Without enemies like Russia we would be nothing but big rich country.
And all the Neos and Zios and politicians would have to use Viagra instead of war to squirt
out their poison.
A lot of countries like the Ukraine have gotten a lot of US taxpayer money by
‘standing up to a Russian takeover’….and are laughing all the way to
their bank.
How did the United States become so involved in Ukraine’s torturous and famously
corrupt politics?
The short answer is NATO expansion <= maybe something different? I like pocketbook
expansion..
NATO Expansion provides cover and legalizes the private use of Presidential directed USA
resources to enable a few to make massively big profits at the expense of the governed in
the target area.
Behind NATO lies the reason for Bexit, the Yellow Jackets, the unrest in Iraq and Egypt,
Yemen etc.
Hypothesis 1: NATO supporters are more corrupt than Ukraine officials.
Hypothesis 2: NATO expansion is a euphemism for USA/EU/ backed private party plunder to
follow invade and destroy regime change activities designed to dispossess local Oligarchs
of the wealth in NATO targeted nations? Private use of public force for private gain comes
to mind.
I think [private use of public force for private gain] is what Trump meant when Trump
said to impeach Trump for investigating the Ukraine matter amounts to Treason.. but it is
the exactly the activity type that Hallmarks CIA instigated regime change.
A lot of intelligence agency manipulation and private pocketbook expanding corruption
can be hidden behind NATO expansion.. Please prove to me that Biden and the hundreds of
other plunders became so deeply involved in Ukraine because of NATO expansion?
It is more than ironic that the Dems (and their like-minded cronies in Big Media) are up in
arms over Trump’s attempt in find ‘dirt’ about Joe Biden when the
‘dirt’ looks and smells like actual corruption. Have laws been broken? Was
Biden selling influence through his son? Stranger things have happened. At the very least,
it looks as though Joe Biden crossed an ethical line. This will likely cost him the
nomination.
Similarly, the news media should–if it was doing its job–pursue leads that
would help find the source behind the missing server and the Fake News that helped justify
the toxic and duplicitous ‘Russiagate’ investigation. But they’d rather
pursue Trump instead. I have never witnessed a more partisan and bloodthirsty Fourth
Estate.
Why is the media so utterly uninterested in finding out who/how the fake
Putin-Trump ‘conspiracy’ was cooked up in the first place? Doesn’t it
make sense the Trump would want to find out more? Justice demands it. False intelligence
can sow chaos and start wars.
Consider, for instance, the manufactured lies (Saddam’s phantom WMD, links to 911,
etc) that were used to justify Zio-America’s annihilation of Iraq. What intelligence
agency cooked up these falsehoods? Who spoon-fed these fairy tales to G.W. Bush and Colin
Powell?
Not only have these questions never been answered, they are seldom even asked! The Deep
State has gone rogue. And Big Media is covering it up.
This whole ridiculous drama may profit the Dem’s in the longer term — that is,
by removing that corrupt, dementia ridden nit-wit Biden from the presidential
competition.
As president, Biden would be a greater sock puppet than even GWB…of course,
“sock puppet” maybe just what the Dem’s want….
The key question is what is the gain in separating Ukraine from Russia, adding it to NATO,
and turning Russia and Ukraine into enemies. And what are the most likely results, e.g. can
it ever work without risking a catastrophic event?
There are the usual empire-building and weapons business reasons, but those should
function within a rational framework. As it is right now, the most likely outcome of the
Western initiative in Ukraine will be substantially lower living standards than there would
be otherwise for most Ukrainians. And an increase in tensions in the region with inevitable
impact on the business there. So what exactly is the gain and for whom?
@Ron Unz Thanks to Tucker Carlson’s show, some folks on the left like Cohen, Mate
and Greenwald, are more likely to get air time on Fox News than MSNBC and CNN.
The current CIA talking point is that it is illegal for the President to seek foreign
assistance for his campaign. One might also slant it that the President of the United
States has an obligation to the people who elected him to require an allied, friendly
government to reopen the investigation of Biden because there is adequate reason to suspect
that the Democrats are running yet another corrupt criminal for President. Incidentally,
this puts Zelensky in a very awkward position, as one of the backers of his transition from
sitcom star to President of Ukraine was a principal in Burisma
It is not the threat of impeachment that will energize Trump’s base; it is the
grotesque, constant character assassination in the (largely CIA manipulated) media that
will return him to the White House. The American people have a sense of fairness. They have
always been of better character than the reprobates we are allowed to vote for. Whatever
happened to trusting the democratic process, instead of using intelligence assets to
engineer domestic regime change?
History is not made by nice guys. Trump has torn a big hole in the tissue of lies about
what this country is and what it stands for, and that is too much for those who make their
living deceiving us.
Russia hating is the lynchpin of oligarchic deepstate MIC MSM propaganda. Take that
away and the fat cats are revealed as the naked face of evil that they are. Hating Russia
(and China) supposedly justifies all their crimes.
The Washington-led attempt to fast-track Ukraine into NATO in 2013–14 resulted in
the Maidan crisis, the overthrow of the country’s constitutionally elected president
Viktor Yanukovych, and to the still ongoing proxy civil war in Donbass.
Which exemplifies the stupidity and arrogance of the American
military/industrial/political Establishment — none of that had anything to do with US
national security (least of all antagonizing Russia) — how fucking hypocritical is it
to presume the Monroe Doctrine, and then try to get the Ukraine into NATO? — none of
it would have been of any benefit whatsoever to the average American.
Looks like our stable genius" pushed Putin against Erdogan and sided with Erdogan in the
process.
Notable quotes:
"... The U.S. has seven NATO allies on the Med -- Spain, France, Italy, Croatia, Albania, Greece and Turkey, and two on the Black Sea, Romania and Bulgaria. We have U.S. forces and bases in Afghanistan, Iraq, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Oman and Djibouti. Russia has no such panoply of bases in the Middle East or Persian Gulf. ..."
"... There is first President Erdogan, who is demanding a 20-mile deep strip of Syrian borderland to keep the Syrian Kurds from uniting with the Turkish Kurds of the PKK. Erdogan wants the corridor to extend 280 miles, from Manbij, east of the Euphrates, all across Syria, to Iraq. ..."
"... Then there is Bashar Assad, victorious in his horrific eight-year civil war, who is unlikely to cede 5,000 square miles of Syrian territory to a permanent occupation by Turkish troops. ..."
"... The Syria of which Putin is now supposedly king contains Hezbollah, al-Qaida, ISIS, Iranians, Kurds, Turks on its northern border and Israelis on its Golan Heights. Five hundred thousand Syrians are dead from the civil war. Half the pre-war population has been uprooted, and millions are in exile in Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan and Europe. ..."
"... Our foreign policy elites have used Trump's decision to bash him and parade their Churchillian credentials. But those same elites appear to lack the confidence to rally the nation to vote for a war to defend what they contend are vital American interests and defining American values. ..."
"... Endless demonization of Putin by the elitist press is pure idiocy. Putin's aim is no different from any decent leader. Do the best for your countrymen and countrywomen; yet without harming others. ..."
"... The answer lies in the Military Industrial Complex (MIC). Sadly, today's USA revenue to large extent dependent on militaristic revenue; even though most of that revenue ends up in the coffers of the MIC, supported by the media that is sustained by the MIC. Yet, I still believe that with a bit of pain Americans can turn around this horrid situation. ..."
"... The war in Syria and the growth of ISIS was entirely the result of actions by the Obama administration - and it is an outrage that no one in a position of power, not even Donald Trump, has called the Democrats out on this. ..."
"... Oh yeah, Name you seem to have forgotten Obama authorizing CIA training the moderate rebels (AKA Al qaida or moderate head choppers). By the way we handed the ME at least to Iran when Bush invaded Iraq under the false pretenses. Saintly Obama wanted to look forward but not backward on the false pretenses and he in turn engaged on the same BS as Bush. When history is written in a few years all this will come out. ..."
"... ISIS formed in the chaos that was the Iraq War, neat how you guys never accept blame for anything. ..."
"... The people who are obsessed w/staying in Syria, just for the sake of denying Russia a 'victory', at admitting that they just want to be a spoiler. They want to keep Syria partitioned into two weak states and not allow it to reform into a single state and heal. ..."
"... Our imperialists must have misread Tacitus, because it seems they aspire to making peaceful deserts. ..."
"... Putin is trusted in the middle east (and in most of the rest of the world) because he is an intelligent, consistent and respected world leader. Now compare this to the clown show of US politicians (Republican and Democrat). ..."
"... No serious person can say that US politicians are better than Putin, which is also the reason Putin is so demonized by the US political elite. ..."
"Russia Assumes Mantle of Supreme Power Broker in the Middle East," proclaimed Britain's
Telegraph .
The article began:
"Russia's status as the undisputed power-broker in the Middle East was cemented as Vladimir
Putin continued a triumphant tour of capitals traditionally allied to the U.S."
"Donald Trump Has Handed Putin the Middle East on a Plate" was the title of yet another
Telegraph column. "Putin Seizes on Trump's Syria Retreat to Cement Middle East Role,"
declared the Financial Times .
The U.S. press parroted the British: Putin is now the new master of the Mideast. And woe is
us.
Before concluding that Trump's pullout of the last 1,000 U.S. troops in Syria is America's
Dunkirk, some reflection is needed.
Yes, Putin has played his hand skillfully. Diplomatically, as the Brits say, the Russian
president is "punching above his weight."
He gets on with everyone. He is welcomed in Iran by the Ayatollah, meets regularly with Bibi
Netanyahu, is a cherished ally of Syria's Bashar Assad, and this week was being hosted by the
King of Saudi Arabia and the royal rulers of the UAE. October 2019 has been a triumphal
month.
Yet, consider what Putin has inherited and what his capabilities are for playing power
broker of the Middle East.
He has a single naval base on the Med, Tartus, in Syria, which dates to the 1970s, and a new
air base, Khmeimim, also in Syria.
The U.S. has seven NATO allies on the Med -- Spain, France, Italy, Croatia, Albania,
Greece and Turkey, and two on the Black Sea, Romania and Bulgaria. We have U.S. forces and
bases in Afghanistan, Iraq, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Oman and Djibouti. Russia has no such
panoply of bases in the Middle East or Persian Gulf.
We have the world's largest economy. Russia's economy is smaller than Italy's, and not a
tenth the size of ours.
And now that we are out of Syria's civil war and the Kurds have cut their deal with
Damascus, consider what we have just dumped into Vladimir Putin's lap. He is now the man in the
middle between Turkey and Syria.
He must bring together dictators who detest each other. There is first President
Erdogan, who is demanding a 20-mile deep strip of Syrian borderland to keep the Syrian Kurds
from uniting with the Turkish Kurds of the PKK. Erdogan wants the corridor to extend 280 miles,
from Manbij, east of the Euphrates, all across Syria, to Iraq.
Then there is Bashar Assad, victorious in his horrific eight-year civil war, who is
unlikely to cede 5,000 square miles of Syrian territory to a permanent occupation by Turkish
troops.
Reconciling these seemingly irreconcilable Syrian and Turkish demands is now Putin's
problem. If he can work this out, he ought to get the Nobel Prize.
"Putin is the New King of Syria," ran the op-ed headline in Thursday's Wall Street
Journal.
The Syria of which Putin is now supposedly king contains Hezbollah, al-Qaida, ISIS,
Iranians, Kurds, Turks on its northern border and Israelis on its Golan Heights. Five hundred
thousand Syrians are dead from the civil war. Half the pre-war population has been uprooted,
and millions are in exile in Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan and Europe.
If Putin wants to be king of this, and it is OK with Assad, how does that imperil the United
States of America, 6,000 miles away?
Wednesday, two-thirds of the House Republicans joined Nancy Pelosi's Democrats to denounce
Trump's decision to pull U.S. troops out of Syria and dissolve our alliance with the Kurds. And
Republican rage over the sudden abandonment of the Kurds is understandable.
But how long does the GOP believe we should keep troops in Syria and control the
northeastern quadrant of that country? If the Syrian army sought to push us out, under what
authority would we wage war against a Syrian army inside Syria?
And if the Turks are determined to secure their border, should we wage war on that NATO ally
to stop them? Would U.S. planes fly out of Turkey's Incirlik air base to attack Turkish
soldiers fighting in Syria?
If Congress believes we have interests in Syria so vital we should be willing to go to war
for them -- against Syria, Turkey, Russia or Iran -- why does Congress not declare those
interests and authorize war to secure them?
Our foreign policy elites have used Trump's decision to bash him and parade their
Churchillian credentials. But those same elites appear to lack the confidence to rally the
nation to vote for a war to defend what they contend are vital American interests and defining
American values.
If Putin is king of Syria, it is because he was willing to pay the price in blood and
treasure to keep his Russia's toehold on the Med and save his ally Bashar Assad, who would have
gone under without him.
Who dares wins. Now let's see how Putin likes his prize.
Patrick J. Buchanan is the author of Nixon's White House Wars: The Battles That Made
and Broke a President and Divided America Forever.
Endless demonization of Putin by the elitist press is pure idiocy. Putin's aim is no
different from any decent leader. Do the best for your countrymen and countrywomen; yet
without harming others. At a recent interview with Arabic media a UAE journalist tried to
drive a wedge between Russia and Iran in favor of Saudi Kingdom by challenging Putin to
condemn Iran for alleged attacks on Saudi oil installations by Iran.
To which Putin
skillfully replied: "Russia will never be friends 'with one country against another' in the
Middle East". Nor would Putin condemn Iran unless he was presented with clear evidence - not
just accusations - of Iran's guilt. Point in case: Putin does it better than others; sure,
but why is that bad?
Oh of course envy and fear of one being exposed for inept leadership.
Time long overdue to shake hands with Putin and Russia.
https://www.rt.com/russia/o...
I haven't a concern for Russia in the middle east.
Russia is doing the US the biggest unasked favor proving where our friends and allies
loyalties in the middle east lay by forcing them to make choices in the face of shifting
alliances that they wouldn't reveal if the US continued its presence.
Russia is depopulating and it has choke points with China, with Central Asia, with the
middle east and Europe. Russia will eventually not have the population to defend all these
choke points and will eventually withdraw and focus on its own national security. At that
time, I think its possible to see Russia shift its relationship in eastern Europe while
distancing itself from Chinese expansionism that might one day want its old north pacific
territories back (like what is today Vladivostok and Sakhalin).
Depopulating? Where did you get that from? Population decrease in Russia stopped. By the
latest stats it is just about breaking even (death rates = birth rates). Moreover, population
is growing albeit very slowly. Sorry but Russkies won't die out like extinct species. As far
as its own national security; well, the old notion of "Russia is, more or less, a giant gas
station pretending to be a real country." is as dead as Senator McCain, who pretended to know
something about Russia; alas he was sadly and dangerously uninformed.
https://www.forbes.com/site...
The US has troops and a base or more in Syria?
I don't see any Syrian army bases in the US...
And, the US is telling/demanding where the Syrian army come and goes in...Syria?
What the hell is wrong with this picture?
You know!?
Oh, now hypocrite neo-con enabler Pelosi and some of the freaky other politicians are
concerned with human lives in Syria? Ha ha
But...not about the lives of children dying in Yemen and Afghanistan and Gaza?
How come?
And, the US is telling Turkey what it had better do with it's border? Also, friends and enemies o' mine,just which entity, nation and group is not a US ally?
Ally? What does that mean?
As if the American people know the hell that words means anymore and as if there's even a
meaning to that. And the American people do not watch the news, read magazines (news) as they
did before.
They don't know what is going on in the world, they gave up.
People under 50 automatically tune world news out, thanks mostly to the phonies at CNN and
the major, basically neo-con supporting networks confusing the public, purposely so that they
don't see the misery that is in the nations of the MId-East thanks to US invasions and
bombings. Just look at cnn-they spend all day talking about what Trump or some politician
said, no coverage of battles overseas, unless it benefits the continuing spinning of the news
for intervention and so on.
The US won't get a grip and stop threatening nation after nation
(while Russia does not) and so, people all over the world are thinking,
you now what, look at how dumb Americans are that they allow people from Obama, Hillary,
Schumer, Pelosi, Graham and more to conduct foreign policy that makes enemies for America
daily. And don't forget Cheney and that group, too from before. These people are actually an
insult to America.
Compare how the leaders of Russia and America talk and conduct themselves.
Russia has Lavrov, the gentleman diplomat, the US has Pompeo and the likes of Bolton and
Kushner, the Israeli lobbyist and the Presidents son in law.
How does a so-called Republic allow the President to have his daughter and Kushner, her
husband, to be security/foreign policy advisers. You're really losing it, America.
"But those same elites appear to lack the
confidence to rally the nation to vote for a war to defend what they
contend are vital American interests and defining American values."
No, they don't lack "confidence". They've got all the confidence in the world. What they
lack is competence, integrity, and credibility with the American people and the rest of the
world. They have dragged America through the mud in the Middle East for nearly two decades.
They transformed the once proud American military and diplomatic corps into a customer
service operation for Israel and Saudi Arabia.
We don't need more lectures and directives about "our interests" and "Western values" that
always turn out to be Israeli and Saudi Arabian interests and values. We need new foreign
policy elites, free of the current elite's miserable record of failure, corruption, and
subordination to foreign interests. Above all, we need to get out of the Mideast swamps that
the younger Bush and Obama pushed us into, bring our troops back to America, start defending
America and American interests again.
How simple and true what U've said. Sounds like a sound position and logical too. So why is
this not happening? The answer lies in the Military Industrial Complex (MIC). Sadly, today's
USA revenue to large extent dependent on militaristic revenue; even though most of that
revenue ends up in the coffers of the MIC, supported by the media that is sustained by the
MIC. Yet, I still believe that with a bit of pain Americans can turn around this horrid
situation.
The war in Syria and the growth of ISIS was entirely the result of actions by the Obama
administration - and it is an outrage that no one in a position of power, not even Donald
Trump, has called the Democrats out on this.
Oh yeah, Name you seem to have forgotten Obama authorizing CIA training the moderate rebels
(AKA Al qaida or moderate head choppers). By the way we handed the ME at least to Iran when
Bush invaded Iraq under the false pretenses. Saintly Obama wanted to look forward but not
backward on the false pretenses and he in turn engaged on the same BS as Bush. When history
is written in a few years all this will come out.
The people who are obsessed w/staying in Syria, just for the sake of denying Russia a
'victory', at admitting that they just want to be a spoiler. They want to keep Syria
partitioned into two weak states and not allow it to reform into a single state and heal.
Trump is indeed our Dorian Gray, he is just outwardly reflecting our narcissism, 'if we
don't get to do it then no one else can'.
Obvious Pat we have no consistent foreign policy in the region since we inherited the mantle
from the Brit Empire post WW 2. Oil and Israel were a marketable justification for our wars
and changing partners ( regime change ), for a long time. Now neither is relevant. We have
all the fossil fuels we need, and Israel is all powerful.. Long term I doubt the Russians
will make a difference, in the Muslim quest to resurrect the Ottoman Empire. We have lost too
many of our sons and daughters. get out.
Trump is a genius.
At the moment, Syria is a poisoned chalice to anyone accepting responsibility for it.
Russia is only there because they cannot get a naval base in any other Mediterranean
country.
When, or if peace is achieved in Syria, it will be the US that swoops in to market the
brands the Arabs love. The Syrians won't be buying Russian products.
Name an American brand the "Arabs love": Toyota, Lexis, Rollex, Sony, Nikon, Panasonic,
Samsung, iPhone (made in China)? Which one(s). While their infrastructure and basic
technology are and will continue to be Russian.
Putin is trusted in the middle east (and in most of the rest of the world) because he is an
intelligent, consistent and respected world leader. Now compare this to the clown show of US
politicians (Republican and Democrat).
No serious person can say that US politicians are better than Putin, which is also the
reason Putin is so demonized by the US political elite.
The Middle East is home to oil, terrorism, access points for maritime transportation (The Red
Sea, The Bosphorus, Suez Canal, Persian Gulf). It is strategically important. It was a
mistake for Obama to leave Iraq before there was a stable situation and it is a mistake for
Trump to leave before there is a stable situation.
To say, "Just let them all fight it out" is foolhardy and likely just a rationalization
for your mistake to support the narcissistic fool in the White House.
I don't think Putin is going to be unhappy about it. The various powers of the ME will now go
to him for favors, and he will get favors in return. I doubt US interests will be among them.
Putin said, I've got your no fly zone right here. After Russian deployment of the SA400's,
america had no choice but to begin withdrawal.
And kind of missing from Buchanan's list of
putin friends, is erdogan himself.
So, it will be interesting to see what happens now. Putin
holds all the cards and is in the best position of anybody on the planet to broker a deal
between assad and erdogan. Part of that deal will likely be very bad for those who threw
their lot in with the US.
Turkey is not a small country and has an enormous military.
Buchanan himself said that we should stay out of Syria and let the Turks deal with ISIS.
But
they were too smart for that, and had their own coup to worry about. I have always thought
that the US should have brokered a homeland for the kurds. It would have been hard, but now
it is impossible.
Turkey is now a client state of Russia much more than a member of NATO. At
least in appearance. They now buy SA400's and SU-57's from mother russia.
Who supplies and
maintains your best weapon systems indicates who your real allies are. What has the US lost?
I would say we lost anybody across the globe that we ever hoped would ally with us against
the new sino-russian superpower. Russia has unlimited space and resources. China has
unlimited people and no limits on its technical growth and markets. The US? We are the
biggest debtor third world nation that has ever existed. But hey, we have the most stable
genius as our president, and the sky is the limit for what he will accomplish other than
permanent tax cuts for corporations. Right? The right again.
Except for 2 wrongs, they
wouldn't even exist. Can faith overcome inconvenient truth? Real faith probably could by
accepting inconvenient truth. But real faith is mostly dead. It was replaced with tax free
religiosity and assault weaponry sponsored by corporate fascist government. I watched it
happen. And his story is being rewritten in days or weeks instead of years and decades.
It's not often that I would agree with Pat B. Essentially never.
But on this point, yes. If Putin wants the Middle East, by all means proceed.
That region has been messing up our politics for literally my whole life - It is most
decidedly not a Promised Land for the United States. Let the Saudis and the
Iranians and the Russians and the Turks fight it out. It should be lovely. The Israelis call
sell weapons to all of them.
Thank you for this small bit of obvious wisdom, Mr. Buchanan. Your insights are very common
sensical here, and thus, most valuable. Too bad they will mostly fall on the deaf ears of our
moronic "Elites".
I believe Obama said that Putin would be overwhelmed in Syria. However, Putin has overseen an
excellent strategy of picking an area of insurgents, militarily pounding them, then offering
them free passage to a safe area (Idlib). After doing this across Syria, he and Assad now
have all of the jihadist groups in one place where they can pound them senseless or just sit
back and wait for them to start shooting each other.
Trump did not screw up the Kurds' clearing of ISIS above the Euphrates. Now he has given
Putin and Assad the results of that. I expect the PA team will stabilize that area in short
order.
So, Idlib and NW Syria will be a cauldron for a while. Now Al Tanf is the only insurgent
holdout. Be interesting to see how that unfolds.
Lest Trumpland forget, there is a reason we got involved in the region. Jihadists can and
will use neglect to later come after us.
Putin shows us how its done. 3 billion or so, find good Muslims (anyone other than Sunni
islamists) and help them blow up, conquer, and occasionally repress the bad Muslims.
We spent several TRILLION ourselves and thousands of American lives for nothing. We never
had a single achievable objective in any of these conflicts.
Donald is a moron for selling out the Kurds, who it cost nothing to back, to Turkey but
the DC elites made this inevitable by refusing to cut a deal with Assad for the Kurds. He's
been the only realistic option for a long time now.
Russia is the excuse for US actions in the Ukraine as it was in the ME.
What is America without a big bad boogeyman like Russia?. Certainly not a "Superpower'
defending the world. Without enemies like Russia we would be nothing but big rich
country.
And all the Neos and Zios and politicians would have to use Viagra instead of war to
squirt out their poison.
A lot of countries like the Ukraine have gotten a lot of US taxpayer money by 'standing up
to a Russian takeover' .and are laughing all the way to their bank.
But if someone would have told him that the people denouncing and blacklisting him would
have been the *liberal Democrats* and some of their most "excitable" elements would be
accusing him of being a "Neo-Nazi White Supremacist Russian Agent" he would have thought
the entire country had gone on LSD.
It's quite ironic that the party that was in power when it was revealed that the NSA was
spying on every US citizen (and a ton of foreigners) – an obvious violation of the 4th
Amendment – now want to moan about the unconstitutionality of this phone call.
@Dennis
Gannon "If we ever get a dictator in the USA, I would not be surprised to see everyone in
the lying mainstream media wind up in a gulag."
If we ever get a dictator in the USA, he will owe his dictatorship to the lying mainstream
media. But that of course doesn't mean he won't turn on them. But it's more likely he'll
enjoy their continued support.
Ran into a Ukie from Odessa yesterday on a beach i go to i go to Saigon n Vung Tau. He told
me all about how Putin set up the Maidan in Kyiv, in order to invade and take Crimea. He was
doing a great propaganda act, for this American, until I told him I live in Crimea. I gave
some info how the US did Kyiv, then he stormed off. The Ukie nationalist are super
brainwashed. Spacibo Unz Rev.
"... As it is right now, the most likely outcome of the Western initiative in Ukraine will be substantially lower living standards than there would be otherwise for most Ukrainians. ..."
"... The US actions in Ukraine are typical, not exceptional. Acting as an Empire, the US always installs the worst possible scum in power in its vassals, particularly in newly acquired ones. ..."
"... Has he forgotten the historical conversation of Nuland and Payatt picking the next president of Ukraine "Yats is our guy" and "Yats" actually emerging as the president a week later ? None of these facts are in any way remotely compatible with passive role professor Cohen ascribes to the US. ..."
"... We don't know what happens next, but we know the following: Ukraine will not be in EU, or Nato. It will not be a unified, prosperous country. It will continue losing a large part of its population. And oligarchy and 'corruption' is going to stay. ..."
"... Another Maidan would most likely make things even worse and trigger a complete disintegration. Those are the wages of stupidity and desperation – one can see an individual example with AP, but they all seem like that. ..."
Thanks for your sharing you views about Prof Cohen, a most interesting and principled
man.
Only after reading the article did I realize that the UR (that's you) also provided the
Batchelor Show podcast. Thanks.
I've been listening to these broadcasts over their entirety, now going on for six or so
years. What's always struck me is Cohen's level-headeness and equanimity. I've also detected
affection for Kentucky, his native state. Not something to be expected from a Princeton / NYU
academic nor an Upper West Side resident.
And once again expressing appreciation for the UR!
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Comments
How did the United States become so involved in Ukraine's torturous and famously corrupt
politics?
The short answer is NATO expansion <= maybe something different? I like pocketbook
expansion..
NATO Expansion provides cover and legalizes the private use of Presidential directed USA
resources to enable a few to make massively big profits at the expense of the governed in the
target area.
Behind NATO lies the reason for Bexit, the Yellow Jackets, the unrest in Iraq and Egypt,
Yemen etc.
Hypothesis 1: NATO supporters are more corrupt than Ukraine officials.
Hypothesis 2: NATO expansion is a euphemism for USA/EU/ backed private party plunder to
follow invade and destroy regime change activities designed to dispossess local Oligarchs of
the wealth in NATO targeted nations? Private use of public force for private gain comes to
mind.
I think [private use of public force for private gain] is what Trump meant when Trump said
to impeach Trump for investigating the Ukraine matter amounts to Treason.. but it is the
exactly the activity type that Hallmarks CIA instigated regime change.
A lot of intelligence agency manipulation and private pocketbook expanding corruption can
be hidden behind NATO expansion.. Please prove to me that Biden and the hundreds of other
plunders became so deeply involved in Ukraine because of NATO expansion?
The key question is what is the gain in separating Ukraine from Russia, adding it to NATO,
and turning Russia and Ukraine into enemies. And what are the most likely results, e.g. can
it ever work without risking a catastrophic event?
There are the usual empire-building and weapons business reasons, but those should
function within a rational framework. As it is right now, the most likely outcome of the
Western initiative in Ukraine will be substantially lower living standards than there would
be otherwise for most Ukrainians. And an increase in tensions in the region with
inevitable impact on the business there. So what exactly is the gain and for whom?
The Washington-led attempt to fast-track Ukraine into NATO in 2013–14 resulted in
the Maidan crisis, the overthrow of the country's constitutionally elected president Viktor
Yanukovych, and to the still ongoing proxy civil war in Donbass.
Which exemplifies the stupidity and arrogance of the American
military/industrial/political Establishment -- none of that had anything to do with US
national security (least of all antagonizing Russia) -- how fucking hypocritical is it to
presume the Monroe Doctrine, and then try to get the Ukraine into NATO? -- none of it would
have been of any benefit whatsoever to the average American.
According to a recent govt study, only 12% of Americans can read above a 9th grade level.
This effectively mean (((whoever))) controls the MSM controls the world. NOTHING will change
for the better while the (((enemy))) owns our money supply.
There was NO "annexation" of Crimea by Russia. Crimea WAS annexed, but by Ukraine.
Russia and Crimea re-unified. Crimea has been part of Russia for long than America has
existed – since it was taken from the Ottoman Empire over 350 yrs ago. The vast
majority of the people identify as Russian, and speak only Russian.
To annex, the verb, means to use armed force to seize sovereign territory and put it under
the control of the invading forces government. Pretty much as the early Americans did to
Northern Mexico, Hawaii, etc. Russia used no force, the Governors of Crimea applied for
re-unification with Russia, Russia advised a referendum, which was held, and with a 96%
turnout, 97% voted for re-unification. This was done formally and legally, conforming with
all the international mandates.
It is very damaging for anyone to say that Russia "annexed" Crimea, because when people
read, quickly moving past the world, they subliminally match the word to their held
perception of the concept and move on. Thus they match the word "annex" to their conception
of the use of Armed Force against a resistant population, without checking.
All Cohen is doing here is reinforcing the pushed, lying Empire narrative, that Russia
invaded and used force, when the exact opposite is true!!
@Carlton
Meyer One wonders if Mr. Putin, as he puts his head on the pillow at night, fancies that
he should have rolled the Russian tanks into Kiev, right after the 2014 US-financed coup of
Ukraine's elected president, which was accomplished while he was pre-occupied with the Sochi
Olympics, and been done with it. He had every justification to do so, but perhaps feared
Western blowback. Well, the blowback happened anyway, so maybe Putin was too cautious.
The new Trump Admin threw him under the bus when it installed the idiot Nikki Haley as UN
Ambassador, whose first words were that Russia must give Crimea back. With its only major
warm water port located at Sevastopol, that wasn't about to happen, and the US Deep State
knew it.
Given how he has been so unfairly treated by the media, and never given a chance to enact
his Russian agenda, anyone who thinks that Trump was 'selected' by the deep state has rocks
for brains. The other night, on Rick Sanchez's RT America show, former US diplomat, and
frequent guest Jim Jatras said that he would not be too surprised if 20 GOP Senators flipped
and voted to convict Trump if the House votes to impeach.
The deep state can't abide four more years of the bombastic, Twitter-obsessed Trump, hence
this Special Ops Ukraine false flag, designed to fool a majority of the people. The smooth
talking, more warlike Pence is one of them. The night of the long knives is approaching.
The US actions in Ukraine are typical, not exceptional. Acting as an Empire, the US
always installs the worst possible scum in power in its vassals, particularly in newly
acquired ones.
The "logic" of the Dem party is remarkable. Dems don't even deny that Biden is corrupt,
that he blatantly abused the office of Vice-President for personal gain. What's more, he was
dumb enough to boast about it publicly. Therefore, let's impeach Trump.
These people don't give a hoot about the interests of the US as a country, or even as an
Empire. Their insatiable greed for money and power blinds them to everything. By rights,
those who orchestrated totally fake Russiagate and now push for impeachment, when Russiagate
flopped miserably, should be hanged on lampposts for high treason. Unfortunately, justice
won't be served. So, we have to be satisfied with an almost assured prospect of this
impeachment thing to flop, just like Russiagate before it. But in the process incalculable
damage will be done to our country and its institutions.
Those who support the separation of Kosovo from Serbia without Serbian consent cannot
argue against separation of Crimea from Ukraine without the consent of Kiev regime.
On the other hand, those who believe that post-WWII borders are sacrosanct have to
acknowledge that Crimea belongs to Russia (illegally even by loose Soviet standards
transferred to Ukraine by Khrushchev in 1956), Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and Soviet Union
should be restored, and Germany should be re-divided.
At least now I know why Ukraine is so essential to American national security. It's so even
more of my and my families' taxes can pay for a massive expansion of Nato, which means
American military bases in Ukraine. Greenland to the borders of China.
We're encircling the earth, like those old cartoons about bankers.
@Ron
Unz I had to stop listening after the 10th min. where the good professor (without any
push-back from the interviewer) says:
Victor Yanukovich was overthrown by a street coup . at that moment, the United States
and not only the United States but the Western European Governments had to make a decision
would they acknowledge the overthrow of Yannukovic as having been legitimate, and therefore
accept whatever government emerged, and that was a fateful moment within 24hours, the
governments, including the government of president Obama endorsed what was essentially a
coup d'etat against Yanukovich.
Has the good Professor so quickly forgotten about Victoria Nuland distributing cookies
with John McCain in the Maidan as the coup was still unfolding? Her claim at the think tank
in DC where she discusses having spent $30million (if I remember correctly) for foisting the
Ukraine coup ?
Has he forgotten the historical conversation of Nuland and Payatt picking the next
president of Ukraine "Yats is our guy" and "Yats" actually emerging as the president a week
later ? None of these facts are in any way remotely compatible with passive role professor
Cohen ascribes to the US.
These are not simple omissions but willful acts of misleading of fools. The good
professor's little discussed career as a resource for the secret services has reemerged after
seemingly having been left out in the cold during the 1st attempted coup against Trump.
No, the real story is more than just a little NATO expansion as the professor does
suggest, but more directly, the attempted coup that the US is still trying to stage in Russia
itself, in order to regain control of Russia's vast energy resources which Putin forced the
oligarchs to disgorge. The US desperately wants to achieve this in order to be able to
ultimately also control China's access to those resources as well.
In the way that Iraq was supposed to be a staging post for an attack on Iran, Ukraine is
the staging post for an attack on Russia.
The great Russian expert stirred miles very clear of even hinting at such scenarios, even
though anyone who's thought about US world policies will easily arrive at this logical
conclusion.
What about the theft of Ukraine's farmland and the enserfing of its rural population? Isn't
this theft and enserfing of Ukrainians at least one major reason the US government got
involved, overseeing the transfer of this land into the hands of the transnational banking
crime syndicate? The Ukraine, with its rich, black soil, used to be called the breadbasket of
Europe.
Consider the fanatical intervention on the part of Victoria Nuland and the Kagans under
the guise of working for the State Dept to facilitate the theft. In a similar fashion,
according to Wayne Madsen, the State Dept. has a Dept of Foreign Asset Management, or some
similar name, that exists to protect the Chabad stranglehold on the world diamond trade, and,
according to Madsen, the language spoken and posters around the offices are in Hebrew, which
as a practical matter might as well be the case at the State Dept itself.
According to an article a few years ago at Oakland Institute, George Rohr's NCH Capital,
which latter organization has funded over 100 Chabad Houses on US campuses, owns over 1
million acres of Ukraine farmland. Other ownership interests of similarly vast tracts of
Ukraine farmland show a similar pattern of predation. At one point, it was suggested that the
Yinon Plan should be understood to include the Ukraine as the newly acquired breadbasket of
Eretz Israel. It may also be worth pointing out that now kosher Ivy League schools'
endowments are among the worst pillagers of native farmland and enserfers of the indigenous
populations they claim to protect.
@Mikhail
Well, if we really go into it, things become complicated. What Khmelnitsky united with Russia
was maybe 1/6th or 1/8th of current Ukraine. Huge (4-5 times greater) areas in the North and
West were added by Russian Tsars, almost as great areas in the South and East taken by Tsars
from Turkey and affiliated Crimean Khanate were added by Lenin, a big chunk in the West was
added by Stalin, and then in 1956 moron Khrushchev "gifted" Crimea (which he had no right to
do even by Soviet law). So, about 4/6th of "Ukraine" is Southern Russia, 1/6th is Eastern
Poland, some chunks are Hungary and Romania, and the remaining little stub is Ukraine proper.
@anon
American view always was: "yes, he is a son of a bitch, but he is our son of a bitch". That
historically applied to many obnoxious regimes, now fully applies to Ukraine. In that Dems
and Reps always were essentially identical, revealing that they are two different puppets run
by the same puppet master.
Trump is hardly very intelligent, but he has some street smarts that degenerate elites
have lost. Hence their hatred of him. It is particularly galling for the elites that Trump
won in 2016, and has every chance of winning again in 2020 (unless they decide to murder him,
like JFK; but that would be a real giveaway, even the dumbest sheeple would smell the
rat).
@follyofwar
The only reason I can imagine that Putin/Russia would want to "take over" Ukraine and have
this political problem child back in the family might be because of Ukraine's black soil.
But it is probably not worth the aggravation.
Russia is building up its agricultural sector via major greenhouse installations and other
innovations.
@AP
Well, you are a true simpleton who repeats shallow conventional views. You don't ever seem to
think deeper about what you write, e.g. if Yanukovitch could beat anyone in a 1-on-1 election
than he obviously wasn't that unpopular and that makes Maidan illegal by any standard. You
say he could beat Tiahnybok, who was one of the leaders of Maidan, how was then Maidan
democratic? Or you don't care for democracy if people vote against your preferences?
Trade with Russia is way down and it is not coming back. That is my point – there
was definitely a way to do this better. It wasn't a choice of 'one or the other' –
actually EU was under the impression that Ukraine would help open up the Russian market. Your
either-or wasn't the plan, so did Kiev lie to EU? No wonder Ukraine has a snowball chance in
hell of joining EU.
@Skeptikal
Russia moved to the first place in the world in wheat exports, while greatly increasing its
production of meat, fowl, and fish. Those who supplied these commodities lost Russian market
for good. In fact, with sanctions, food in Russia got a lot better, and food in Moscow got
immeasurably better: now it's local staff instead of crap shipped from half-a-world away.
Funny thing is, Russian production of really good fancy cheeses has soared (partially with
the help of French and Italian producers who moved in to avoid any stupid sanctions).
So, there is no reason for Russia to take Ukraine on any conditions, especially
considering Ukraine's exorbitant external debt. If one calculates European demand for
transplantation kidneys and prostitutes, two of the most successful Ukrainian exports,
Ukraine will pay off its debt – never. Besides, the majority of Russians learned to
despise Ukraine due to its subservient vassalage to the US (confirmed yet again by the
transcript of the conversation between Trump and Ze), so the emotional factor is also
virtually gone. Now the EU and the US face the standard rule of retail: you broke it, you own
it. That infuriates Americans and EU bureaucrats more than anything.
@Sergey
Krieger "Demography statistic won't support fairy tales by solzhenicin and his kind."
-- What's your point? Your post reads like an attempt at saying that Kaganovitch was white
like snow and that it does not matter what crimes were committed in the Soviet Union because
of the "demography statistic" and because you, Sergey Krieger, are a grander person next to
Solzhenitsyn and "his kind." By the way, had not A. I. S. returned to Russia, away from the
coziness of western life?
S.K.: "You should start research onto mass dying of population after 1991 and subsequent
and ongoing demographic catastroph in Russia under current not as "brutal " as soviet
regime."
@AP
Maidan was an illegal coup that violated Ukrainian constitution (I should say all of them,
there were too many) and lots of other laws. And that's not the worst part of it. But it
already happened, there is no going back for Ukraine. It's a "yes or no" thing, you can't be
a little bit pregnant. We can either commiserate with Ukraine or gloat, but it committed
suicide. Some say this project was doomed from the start. I think Ukraine had a chance and
blew it.
@AnonFromTN
I usually refrain from labelling off-cycle changes in government as revolutions or coups
– it clearly depends on one's views and can't be determined.
In general, when violence or military is involved, it is more likely it was a coup. If a
country has a reasonably open election process, violently overthrowing the current government
would also seem like a coup, since it is unnecessary. Ukraine had both violence and a coming
election that was democratic. If Yanukovitch would prevent or manipulate the elections, one
could make a case that at that point – after the election – the population could
stage a ' revolution '.
AP is a simpleton who repeats badly thought out slogans and desperately tries to save some
face for the Maidan fiasco – so we will not change his mind, his mind is done with
changes, it is all about avoiding regrets even if it means living in a lie. One can almost
feel sorry for him, if he wasn't so obnoxious.
Ukraine has destroyed its own future gradually after 1991, all the elites there failed,
Yanukovitch was just the last in a long line of failures, the guy before him (Yushenko?) left
office with a 5% approval. Why wasn't there a revolution against him? Maidan put a cherry on
that rotting cake – a desperate scream of pain by people who had lost all hope and so
blindly fell for cheap promises by the new-old hustlers.
We don't know what happens next, but we know the following: Ukraine will not be in EU,
or Nato. It will not be a unified, prosperous country. It will continue losing a large part
of its population. And oligarchy and 'corruption' is going to stay.
Another Maidan would most likely make things even worse and trigger a complete
disintegration. Those are the wages of stupidity and desperation – one can see an
individual example with AP, but they all seem like that.
@AP
You intentionally omitted the second part of what I wrote: 'a reasonably democratic
elections', neither 18th century American colonies, nor Russia in 1917 or Romania in 1989,
had them. Ukraine in 2014 did.
So all your belly-aching is for nothing. The talk about 'subverting' and doing a
preventive 'revolution' on Maidan to prevent 'subversion' has a very Stalinist ring to it. If
you start revolutionary violence because you claim to anticipate that something bad might
happen, well, the sky is the limit and you have no rules.
You are desperately trying to justify a stupid and unworkable act. As we watch the
unfolding disaster and millions leaving Ukraine, this "Maidan was great!!!" mantra will sound
even more silly. But enjoy it, it is not Somalia, wow, I guess as long as a country is not
Somalia it is ok. Ukraine is by far the poorest large country in Europe. How is that a
success?
@Beckow
True believers are called that because they willfully ignore facts and logic. AP is a true
believer Ukie. Ukie faith is their main undoing. Unfortunately, they are ruining the country
with their insane dreams. But that cannot be helped now. The position of a large fraction of
Ukrainian population is best described by a cruel American saying: fool me once, shame on
you, fool me twice, shame on me.
@AnonFromTN
You are right, it can't be helped. Another saying is that it takes two to lie: one who lies,
and one to lie to. The receiver of lies is also responsible.
What happened in Ukraine was: Nuland&Co. went to Ukraine and lied to them about '
EU, 'Marshall plan', aid, 'you will be Western ', etc,,,'. Maidanistas swallowed it
because they wanted to believe – it is easy to lie to desperate people. Making promises
is very easy. US soft power is all based on making promises.
What Nuland&Co. really wanted was to create a deep Ukraine-Russia hostility and to
grab Crimea, so they could get Russian Navy out and move Nato in. It didn't work very well,
all we have is useless hostility, and a dysfunctional state. But as long as they serve
espresso in Lviv, AP will scream that it was all worth it, 'no Somalia', it is 'all normal',
almost as good as 2013 . Right.
@AP
I don't disagree with what you said, but my point was different:
lower living standards than there would be otherwise for most Ukrainians
Without the unnecessary hostility and the break in business relations with Russia the
living standards in Ukraine would be higher. That, I think, noone would dispute. One can
trace that directly to the so-far failed attempt to get Ukraine into Nato and Russia out of
its Crimea bases. There has been a high cost for that policy, so it is appropriate to ask:
why? did the authors of that policy think it through?
@AP
I don't give a flying f k about Yanukovitch and your projections about what 'would be growth'
under him. He was history by 2014 in any case.
One simple point that you don't seem to grasp: it was Yanuk who negotiated the association
treaty with EU that inevitably meant Ukraine in Nato and Russia bases out of Crimea (after a
decent interval). For anyone to call Yanuk a 'pro-Russian' is idiotic – what we see
today are the results of Yanukovitch's policies. By the way, the first custom restrictions on
Ukraine's exports to Russia happened in summer 2013 under Y.
If you still think that Yanukovitch was in spite of all of that somehow a 'Russian
puppet', you must have a very low opinion of Kremlin skills in puppetry. He was not, he was
fully onboard with the EU-Nato-Crimea policy – he implemented it until he got
outflanked by even more radical forces on Maidan.
@Beckow
Well, exactly like all Ukrainian presidents before and after him, Yanuk was a thief. He might
have been a more intelligent and/or more cautious thief that Porky, but a thief he was.
Anyway, there is no point in crying over spilled milk: history has no subjunctive mood.
Ukraine has dug a hole for itself, and it still keeps digging, albeit slower, after a clown
in whole socks replaced a clown in socks with holes. By now this new clown is also a
murderer, as he did not stop shelling Donbass, although so far he has committed fewer crimes
than Porky.
There is no turning back. Regardless of Ukrainian policies, many things it used to sell
Russia won't be bought any more: Russia developed its own shipbuilding (subcontracted some to
South Korea), is making its own helicopter and ship engines, all stages of space rockets,
etc. Russia won't return any military or high-tech production to Ukraine, ever. What's more,
most Russians are now disgusted with Ukraine, which would impede improving relations even if
Ukraine gets a sane government (which is extremely unlikely in the next 5 years).
Ukraine's situation is best described by Russian black humor saying: "what we fought for
has befallen us". End of story.
@Peter
Akuleyev How many millions? It is same story. Ukraine claims more and more millions dead
from so called Hilodomor when in Russia liberals have been screaming about 100 million deaths
in russia from bolsheviks. Both are fairy tales. Now you better answer what is current
population of ukraine. The last soviet time 1992 level was 52 million. I doubt you got even
40 million now. Under soviet power both ukraine and russia population were steadily growing.
Now, under whose music you are dancing along with those in Russia that share your views when
die off very real one is going right under your nose.
By now this new clown is also a murderer, as he did not stop shelling Donbass, although
so far he has committed fewer crimes than Porky.
Have you noticed that the Republicans, while seeming to defend Trump, never challenge the
specious assertion that delaying arms to Ukraine was a threat to US security? At first I
thought this was oversight. Silly me. Keeping the New Cold War smoldering is more important
to those hawks.
Tulsi Gabbard flipping to support the impeachment enquiry was especially disappointing.
I'm guessing she was under lots of pressure, because she can't possibly believe that arming
the Ukies is good for our security. If I could get to one of her events, I'd ask her direct,
what's up with that. Obama didn't give them arms at all, even made some remarks about not
inflaming the situation. (A small token, after his people managed the coup, spent 8 years
demonizing Putin, and presided over origins of Russiagate to make Trump's [stated] goal of
better relations impossible.)
Not really. Ukies are wonnabe Nazis, but they fall way short of their ideal. The original
German Nazis were organized, capable, brave, sober, and mostly honest. Ukie scum is
disorganized, ham-handed, cowardly, drunk (or under drugs), and corrupt to the core. They are
heroes only against unarmed civilians, good only for theft, torture, and rape. When it comes
to the real fight with armed opponents, they run away under various pretexts or surrender.
Nazis should sue these impostors for defamation.
Yanukovych signed an internationally brokered power sharing agreement with his main
rivals, who then violated it. Yanukovych up to that point was the democratically elected
president of Ukraine.
Since his being violently overthrown, people have been unjustly jailed, beaten and killed
for politically motivated reasons having to do with a stated opposition to the
Euromaidan.
Yanukovych refrained from using from using considerably greater force, when compared to
others if put in the same situation, against a mob element that included property damage and
the deaths of law enforcement personnel.
In the technical legal sense, there was a legit basis to jail the likes of Tymoshenko. If
I correctly recall Yushchenko offered testimony against Tymoshenko. Rather laughable that
Poroshenko appointed the non-lawyer Lutsenko into a key legal position.
@Beckow
The undemocratic aspect involving Yanukovych's overthrow included the disproportionate number
of Svoboda members appointed to key cabinet positions. At the time, Svoboda was on record for
favoring the dissolution of Crimea's autonomous status
@AP
Grest comment #159 by Beckow. Really, I'm more concerned with the coup against POTUS that's
happening right now, since before he took office. The Ukraine is pivotal, from the Kiev
putschists collaborating with the DNC, to the CIA [pretend] whistleblowers who now subvert
Trump's investigation of those crimes.
Tragic and pitiful, the Ukrainians jumped from a rock to a hard place. Used and abandoned
by the Clinton-Soros gang, they appeal to the next abusive Sugar-Daddy. Isn't this FRANCE 24
report fairly objective?
Revisited: Five years on, what has Ukraine's Maidan Revolution achieved?
@AP
This from BBC is less current. (That magnificent bridge -the one the Ukies tried to sabotage-
is now in operation, of course.) I'm just trying to use sources that might not trigger you.
@AP
"Whenever people ask me how to figure out the truth about Ukraine, I always recommend they
watch the film Ukraine on Fire by director @lopatonok and executive produced by
@TheOliverStone. The sequel Revealing Ukraine will be out soon proud to be in it."
– Lee Sranahan (Follow @stranahan for Ukrainegate in depth.)
" .what has really changed in the life of Ukrainians?"
@Malacaay
Baltics, Ukrainians and Poles were part of the Polish Kingdom from 1025-1569 and the
Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth 1569-1764.
This probably explains their differences with Russia.
Russia had this area in the Russian Empire from 1764-1917. Russia called this area the
Pale of Settlement. Why? This Polish Kingdom since 1025 welcomed 25000 Jews in, who later
grew to millions by the 19th century. They are the Ashkenazis who are all over the world
these days. The name Pale was for Ashkenazis to stay in that area and not immigrate to the
rest of Russia.
The reasoning for this was not religious prejudice but the way the Ashkenazis treated the
peasants of the Pale. It was to protect the Russian peasants. This did not help after 1917. A
huge invasion of Ashkenazis descended all over Russia to take up positions all over the
Soviet Union.
Ukraine US is like the Pale again. It has a Jewish President and a Jewish Prime
Minister.
Ukraine and Poland were both controlled by Tartars too. Ukraine longer than Russia. Russia
ended the Tartar rule of Crimea in 1783. The Crimean Tartars lived off raiding Ukraine,
Poland, and parts of Russia for Slav slaves. Russia ended this Slav slave trade in 1783.
Great! Thank you @HillaryClinton . You, the queen of warmongers, embodiment of corruption, and
personification of the rot that has sickened the Democratic Party for so long, have finally
come out from behind the curtain. From the day I announced my candidacy, there has been a
...
Tulsi Gabbard 1:20 PM - 18 Oct 2019
... concerted campaign to destroy my reputation. We wondered who was behind it and why.
Now we know -- it was always you, through your proxies and ...
Tulsi Gabbard 1:20 PM - 18 Oct 2019
... powerful allies in the corporate media and war machine, afraid of the threat I pose.
It's now clear that this primary is between you and me. Don't cowardly hide behind your
proxies. Join the race directly.
The current CIA talking point is that it is illegal for the President to seek foreign
assistance for his campaign. One might also slant it that the President of the United States
has an obligation to the people who elected him to require an allied, friendly government to
reopen the investigation of Biden because there is adequate reason to suspect that the
Democrats are running yet another corrupt criminal for President. Incidentally, this puts
Zelensky in a very awkward position, as one of the backers of his transition from sitcom star
to President of Ukraine was a principal in Burisma
It is not the threat of impeachment that will energize Trump's base; it is the grotesque,
constant character assassination in the (largely CIA manipulated) media that will return him
to the White House. The American people have a sense of fairness. They have always been of
better character than the reprobates we are allowed to vote for. Whatever happened to
trusting the democratic process, instead of using intelligence assets to engineer domestic
regime change?
History is not made by nice guys. Trump has torn a big hole in the tissue of lies about
what this country is and what it stands for, and that is too much for those who make their
living deceiving us.
"... I suspect that Gabbard has very little chance of beating Trump because he is also campaigning - quite successfully - against 'endless wars', and Gabbard is too radical for most Americans. ..."
"... This sparks some interesting questions, such as, exactly who are party members, and how do they become members? The actual structure and functioning of political parties in the US is seldom discussed, and I wonder why that is. "Opaque" seems to be a good description ..."
"... The primary voting system is a huge financial subsidy to the two officially approved parties, which are, of course, merely two branches of the Business Party. ..."
"... Good for Tulsi. I love the way she punches. She not only decked Clinton in one, but she got a lot of other important points across at the same time. ..."
"... Whenever she tries to curve her stance close to the establishment, she comes off as someone who is running for Secretary of State or Secretary of Defense; as someone with her eyes on a high status job in the establishement. ..."
"... Hillary Clinton can't be thrown out of the Dem party because she in a sense IS the Dem party as it stands now, a long way from its roots. The Dem party now has been fully integrated into the bureaucracy, the intelligence services and the corporate media similar to how Tony Blair in the UK took the Labour Party to be deeply embedded in the UK establishment. ..."
"... Hillary is still around because she literally owns the Democrat party. Follow the funding: in 2016, almost all of it flowed through HRC. Not just the presidential, but the state and significant part of the local. ..."
Hillary Clinton appeared to suggest that Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hawaii) is the "favorite of the Russians" to win the 2020 presidential
election and is being groomed by Moscow to run as a third-party candidate against the eventual Democratic nominee.
...
The Russians already have their "eye on somebody who's currently in the Democratic primary and are grooming her to be the third-party
candidate," she said, in an apparent reference to Gabbard.
"She's the favorite of the Russians. They have a bunch of sites and bots and other ways of supporting her, so far," Clinton
told David Plouffe, the podcast's host and the campaign manager for former President Obama's 2008 campaign.
"And that's assuming Jill Stein will give it up, which she might not because she's also a Russian asset," Clinton added, referring
to the 2016 Green Party presidential candidate.
The responses were appropriate:
Tulsi Gabbard @TulsiGabbard - 22:20 UTC
· Oct 18, 2019
Great! Thank you @HillaryClinton. You, the queen of warmongers, embodiment of corruption, and personification of the rot that
has sickened the Democratic Party for so long, have finally come out from behind the curtain. From the day I announced my candidacy,
there has been a ...
... concerted campaign to destroy my reputation. We wondered who was behind it and why. Now we know -- it was always you, through
your proxies and ...
... powerful allies in the corporate media and war machine, afraid of the threat I pose.
It's now clear that this primary is between you and me. Don't cowardly hide behind your proxies. Join the race directly.
The Streisand effect of Clinton's shoddy remark will help Tulsi Gabbard with regards to name recognition. It will increase her
poll results. With Joe Biden faltering and Elizabeth Warren increasingly exposed as a phony Clinton copy, Bernie Sanders could become
the Democrats leading candidate. Then the “favorite of the Russians” smear will be applied to him.
Clinton should be suspended from the Democratic Party for damaging it's chances to regain the White House. But the Democratic
establishment would rather sabotage the election than to let one of the more progressive candidates take the lead.
Voters do not like such internal squabble and shenanigans. The phony Ukrainegate 'impeachment inquiry' is already
a gift for Trump. Messing with the candidate field on top
of that will inevitably end with another Trump presidency.
and Suspend her from what? a lamp post? That's a little bit harsh.
Hillary is actually doing something constructive for the first time in her career - by giving a boost to Tulsi Gabbard who
is the only candidate who challenges the military industrial complex, which has probably caused more death and destruction than
anyone else in history.
I suspect that Gabbard has very little chance of beating Trump because he is also campaigning - quite successfully - against
'endless wars', and Gabbard is too radical for most Americans.
But none of the other Democratic candidates stand a chance of beating Trump either. The two front-runners are medically unfit
for any important challenging job - Biden (senility) and Sanders (recent heart attack/stroke?).
Tulsi is urging Hillary to "enter the race" !! Hillary is foaming at the mouth with desire to enter the 2020 race. Is Tulsi
working for Hillary?
Behind the scenes it was decided to make HunterBidenGate the pretext for a Trump impeachment. This, it
was thought, would damage Trump AND Biden and make way for the resurrection of Hillary Clinton. There were so many other pretexts
available but they chose this one.
"Clinton should be suspended from the Democratic Party"
This sparks some interesting questions, such as, exactly who are party members, and how do they become members? The actual
structure and functioning of political parties in the US is seldom discussed, and I wonder why that is. "Opaque" seems to be a
good description. Even a quick review of the Wikipedia entry reveals little.
As best I can tell, a person is a party member by checking the box on the voter registration form. The few times I have registered,
I did not check a box for any party. It is none of the state's business who I associate with or vote for.
It is also not the state's business to supervise and fund the selection of party candidates. But that is what happens in the
US. The primary voting system is a huge financial subsidy to the two officially approved parties, which are, of course, merely
two branches of the Business Party.
"It didn't come much clearer nor more explicit than when Gabbard fired up the Democratic TV debate this week. It was billed
as the biggest televised presidential debate ever, and the Hawaii Representative told some prime-time home-truths to the nation:
"Donald Trump has blood of the Kurds on his hands, but so do many of the politicians in our country from both parties who have
supported this ongoing regime-change war in Syria that started in 2011 along with many in the mainstream media who have been championing
and cheer-leading this regime-change war."
The 38-year-old military veteran went on to denounce how the US has sponsored Al Qaeda terrorists for its objective of overthrowing
the government in Damascus."
Good for Tulsi. I love the way she punches. She not only decked Clinton in one, but she got a lot of other important points
across at the same time. The way she tries to finesse her stances on Iran, India and Israel is disturbing though.
Whenever she tries to curve her stance close to the establishment, she comes off as someone who is running for Secretary
of State or Secretary of Defense; as someone with her eyes on a high status job in the establishement.
When she's forthright, punches hard and says the things that many people are thinking but few dare say - as she did in her
statement on Syria, but didn't in her statement on Iran - she comes off as the first real candidate for President that I've seen
in my lifetime (I don't count the likes of Dennis Kucinich, who never seemed to actually want to win).
If Tulsi is serious about doing the world good, this is the path she needs to take. Speak the truths no one else is willing
to say; punch hard; stick with it. Yeah and be willing to die for it. If they can't stop you, which I don't think they can, they'll
come gunning for you...
Finally, at last, foreign affairs (i.e wars) has made it into a presidential campaign, and by a veteran, with veterans currently
being sanctified in the U.S. The women (Tulsi, Jill and Hillary) are getting down and dirty, too, which is always a good thing
and a feature of politics in time past, as in the Truman era. President Harry Truman: "If you can't stand the heat, get out of
the kitchen. If you cannot handle the pressure, you should not remain in a position where you have to deal with it."
Let's hope that they get into the details of Hillary's failures, including Libya, Somalia, and especially Syria. Let's get
it on! In the last election she never was forced to answer for her specific failures. Now's the time.
Hillary Clinton can't be thrown out of the Dem party because she in a sense IS the Dem party as it stands now, a long way
from its roots. The Dem party now has been fully integrated into the bureaucracy, the intelligence services and the corporate
media similar to how Tony Blair in the UK took the Labour Party to be deeply embedded in the UK establishment.
What Trump has successfully done from the right that Sanders/Gabbard (like Corbyn in the UK) are struggling to do from the
left is to attack the establishment that's in a permanent state of warfare abroad and at home against its "enemies" and unfettered
capitalism at home For a brief moment it was hoped by progressives that Obama - who defeated the faces of the establishment, Clinton
and McCain in 2008 - would really fight the establishment but he ended up becoming more of a celebrity politician like Trudeau
who talked a good game but was unable to effect real change on the ground which of course led to a large number or African Americans
not voting in 2016 and a lot of white blue collar Obama 2008 voters going for Trump.
The corporate media which has been totally corrupted and infiltrated by intelligence agencies - quote openly versus covertly
as in the past - is going to make every effort to shut down not just Gabbard but Sanders and ensure that Warren - a wannabe feel-gooder
like Obama - be completely neutered to effect real change.
Hillary is still around because she literally owns the Democrat party. Follow the funding: in 2016, almost all of it flowed
through HRC. Not just the presidential, but the state and significant part of the local.
"... Clinton's claims, made without the slightest effort at factual substantiation, are an attempt to criminalize the anti-war statements of the two candidates as treasonous. ..."
"... Clinton's attacks on Gabbard and Stein make clear once again that the Democrats' assertions of "Russian meddling" in the 2016 election were primarily aimed not at Trump, but at the anti-war and anti-capitalist sentiments that led millions of people to refuse to vote for her in 2016. They underscore how the Democrats have appropriated the McCarthyite tactics historically associated primarily with the Republican right. ..."
"... As a central part of their anti-Russia campaign, Clinton and the Democrats promoted the media effort to poison public opinion against journalist Julian Assange by slandering him as a "Russian agent," preparing the way for the Trump administration to indict him on bogus sedition charges and secure his imprisonment in London under conditions that threaten his life. ..."
"... "That's assuming Jill Stein will give it up, which she might not, because she's also a Russian asset," Clinton said. "Yes, she's a Russian asset, I mean, totally. They know they can't win without a third-party candidate." ..."
"... Gabbard replied to Clinton's slander on Twitter by declaring, "Thank you @HillaryClinton. You, the queen of warmongers, embodiment of corruption, and personification of the rot that has sickened the Democratic Party for so long, have finally come out from behind the curtain." Gabbard's performance in this week's Democratic presidential debate no doubt put her in Clinton's crosshairs. Gabbard vowed, "As president, I will end these regime-change wars," and "would make sure that we stop supporting terrorists like Al Qaeda in Syria, who have been the ground force in this ongoing regime-change war." ..."
"... Gabbard's true statement that the United States -- with Clinton as secretary of state under Obama -- had allied with forces linked to Al Qaeda in the drive to overthrow the Syrian government was passed over in total silence by the rest of the candidates and the CNN and New York Times moderators. It was then blacked out in the post-debate media coverage of the event. ..."
"... In an earlier debate, Gabbard said the greatest geopolitical danger facing the United States was the threat of nuclear war -- another taboo in the broadcast media, which routinely demands that the United States "stand up" to Russia without mentioning what a military confrontation with the nuclear-armed country would look like. ..."
Hillary Clinton, the widely despised former Democratic Party presidential candidate, has
slandered two of her political opponents -- Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard and 2016 Green Party
presidential candidate Dr. Jill Stein -- as traitors and Russian spies.
The World Socialist Web Site has fundamental political differences with both Ms.
Gabbard and Dr. Stein. But Clinton's claims, made without the slightest effort at factual
substantiation, are an attempt to criminalize the anti-war statements of the two candidates as
treasonous.
Clinton's attacks on Gabbard and Stein make clear once again that the Democrats' assertions
of "Russian meddling" in the 2016 election were primarily aimed not at Trump, but at the
anti-war and anti-capitalist sentiments that led millions of people to refuse to vote for her
in 2016. They underscore how the Democrats have appropriated the McCarthyite tactics
historically associated primarily with the Republican right.
As a central part of their anti-Russia campaign, Clinton and the Democrats promoted the
media effort to poison public opinion against journalist Julian Assange by slandering him as a
"Russian agent," preparing the way for the Trump administration to indict him on bogus sedition
charges and secure his imprisonment in London under conditions that threaten his life.
At the same time, in the name of countering the supposed menace of Russian "fake news," the
Democrats pressured Google to slash search traffic to left-wing political websites and insisted
that Facebook and Twitter delete left-wing accounts with millions of followers.
In a podcast interview published Thursday, Clinton told former Obama adviser David Plouffe,
"I think they've got their eye on somebody who is currently in the Democratic primary and are
grooming her to be the third-party candidate." Implicitly but clearly referring to Gabbard,
Clinton continued, "She's the favorite of the Russians."
"They have a bunch of sites and bots and other ways of supporting her," Clinton added.
Asked later if the former secretary of state was referring to Gabbard in her comment,
Clinton spokesman Nick Merrill told CNN, "If the nesting doll fits "
Clinton then went on to make her strongest assertion yet that Jill Stein was a "Russian
asset."
"That's assuming Jill Stein will give it up, which she might not, because she's also a
Russian asset," Clinton said. "Yes, she's a Russian asset, I mean, totally. They know they
can't win without a third-party candidate."
Gabbard replied to Clinton's slander on Twitter by declaring, "Thank you @HillaryClinton.
You, the queen of warmongers, embodiment of corruption, and personification of the rot that has
sickened the Democratic Party for so long, have finally come out from behind the curtain."
Gabbard's performance in this week's Democratic presidential debate no doubt put her in
Clinton's crosshairs. Gabbard vowed, "As president, I will end these regime-change wars," and
"would make sure that we stop supporting terrorists like Al Qaeda in Syria, who have been the
ground force in this ongoing regime-change war."
Gabbard's true statement that the United States -- with Clinton as secretary of state under
Obama -- had allied with forces linked to Al Qaeda in the drive to overthrow the Syrian
government was passed over in total silence by the rest of the candidates and the CNN and
New York Times moderators. It was then blacked out in the post-debate media coverage of
the event.
In an earlier debate, Gabbard said the greatest geopolitical danger facing the United States
was the threat of nuclear war -- another taboo in the broadcast media, which routinely demands
that the United States "stand up" to Russia without mentioning what a military confrontation
with the nuclear-armed country would look like.
Toward the end of Thursday's interview, Clinton implicitly called for censorship. She
condemned the growth of internet news outlets, which have broadened the number and range of
sources of information available to the population.
"I think it's a lot harder for Americans to know what they're supposed to believe," she
said. In the 1970s, with only three major national newspapers, "It was a much more controllable
environment."
Jill Stein advocates the reform of capitalism and is an opponent of Marxism. She has stated
that she is opposed to "state socialism." Tulsi Gabbard, a veteran of the Iraq war and major in
the Hawaii National Guard, describes herself as a "hawk" in many aspects of US foreign
policy.
Nevertheless, it is clear that the statements they have made in opposition to the wars in
Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Syria correspond to the sentiments of the overwhelming majority of
the American people, who see these wars of aggression launched on the basis of lies, which have
killed and maimed millions, as a criminal squandering of lives and resources.
Clinton, speaking for a rabidly pro-war faction of the American financial oligarchy and the
military-intelligence establishment, sees these sentiments as treasonous and argues for their
criminalization.
Her statements make clear once again that the working class has no stake in the struggle
between the Trump faction and his opponents in the Democratic Party and intelligence apparatus.
Trump, relying on fascistic appeals to his right-wing base, is seeking to turn the United
States into a personalist dictatorship. But Clinton's faction does not oppose his concentration
camps for immigrants or his pro-corporate agenda. Rather, it opposes Trump on the grounds that
he is "soft" on Russia and insufficiently aggressive in waging America's wars.
Isn't it funny that the Clinton trolls were weaponizing her gender in the last election,
screaming "sexist!" at anyone who criticized her for her actual policies and corrupt
practices, slandering Sanders supporters as "Bernie Bros", and to the point of Albright
claiming there was a special place in hell for women who didn't support her, while the Queen
of Warmongering, who was besties with Trump, married to Bill, took cash from Weinstein, and
flew with Epstein (all serial rapists) gets to baselessly smear women as treasonous spies
without a peep from the liberal feminists, metoo-ers, and media mouthpieces? And, for a
cherry on top, she's on tour for a book called "Gutsy Women"!
Gabbard, after deftly doing a front-stabbing number on Bad Cop Harris, torpedoing Saint
Obomber's "legacy" with his bungled attempt to surf AQ to regime-change in Syria and rightly
ripping the agitprop rags NYT and CNN some fresh axeholes, has indeed now flushed out the
deranged Alien Queen, wildly spitting globs of steaming molecular acid at the one who dared
wound her drones.
She raises some ugly home truths rarely heard from bourgeois politicians at this level
and, having busted the media blackout to get back in the debates, for her troubles is now
receiving what amount to transparent public death threats from a top Mafiosa desperate to
evade any proper scrutiny of her own and the Party's many warcrimes.
Regardless of the rest of her politics, one has to recognise Gabbard's personal bravery in
tackling dangerous predators like this and hope she has an extremely dedicated 24/7 armed
personal protection detail, to ward off the elevated risk of Arkancide.
""I think it's a lot harder for Americans to know what they're supposed to believe," she
said. In the 1970s, with only three major national newspapers, "It was a much more
controllable environment.""
This is a true voice of bourgeois democracy, of course.
" 'That's assuming Jill Stein will give it up, which she might not, because she's also a
Russian asset,' Clinton said. 'Yes, she's a Russian asset, I mean, totally. They know they
can't win without a third-party candidate.' "
"We came, we saw, he died." -- Clinton on Khaddafy
But can you guess who uttered the following quote(hint: it is not the "white nationalist"
Donald Trump, who unlike some public figures is politically apt enough not to say "white
people" aloud):
"Senator Obama's support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening
again, and whites in both states who had not completed college are supporting me." *
The capitalist Democratic Party is a loudmouthed, racist buffoon.
* working hard when not hardly working--but maybe it's not just whites
The vile, vindictive nature of Mrs Clinton has reached new lows as her seeming unaccepting
the loss of the '16 election to shift the blame to anyone but her. She is why we have Trump.
She really needs to fade away and quit meddling in our elections.
"Thank you @HillaryClinton. You, the queen of warmongers, embodiment of corruption, and
personification of the rot that has sickened the Democratic Party for so long, have finally
come out from behind the curtain." - An Interview with Tulsi Gabbard regarding the role of
HIllary Clinton, the military-industrial complex, and her anti-war stance here. To my
surprise, she makes the clear connection that Clintons claim that she is a 'russian asset' is
aimed also at demonizing all Americans who oppose the war-regime.
https://www.youtube.com/wat...
"... Clearly, Gabbard may have real problems with Donald Trump as president but she's learned very quickly from him that the best way to deal with Hillary and her media quislings is to attack them without mercy. ..."
"... Gabbard throws down the gauntlet here outing Hillary as the mastermind behind the DNC strategy of allowing the current crop of future losers to fall all over themselves to alienate as many centrist voters as possible. ..."
"... She emerged from that debate as the only candidate with any moral compass capable of pointing in a single direction. Warren made a fool of herself responding with bromides about leaving in the 'rightt way' indistinguishable from any other presidential puppet of the last twenty years. ..."
"... The people Gabbard is up against are even more ruthless since Hillary intends to win, whereas the Republicans in 2008 were fighting for the right to lose to her at the time. ..."
"... Gabbard's rise in popularity among Trump voters and centrists is born of the same exhaustion the American people have with endless wars for globalism. She is Trump's Kryptonite. ..."
"... The party she represents is irrelevant. By wrapping herself in the mantle of the front-runner for the nomination is not delusional, it's the most strategic thing she's done to date. ..."
"... Join my Patreon to assist me in helping you expose the frauds and liars whose perversions of truth threaten the fabric of civil society. Install the Brave Browser to make it harder for them to track you and marginalize similar voices. ..."
Clearly, Gabbard may have real problems with Donald Trump as president but she's learned very quickly from him that the
best way to deal with Hillary and her media quislings is to attack them without mercy.
Gabbard throws down the gauntlet here outing Hillary as the mastermind behind the DNC strategy of allowing the
current crop of future losers to fall all over themselves to alienate as many centrist voters as possible.
This paves the way for Hillary to swoop in on her broom, pointed hat in hand, and declare herself the savior of the
Democratic Party's chances to defeat Donald Trump next November.
Remember that leading up to the debate Gabbard was going to boycott the event because it was such a corrupted event
and stage-managed to showcase the chosen 'front-runners' -- Joe Biden and Elizabeth Warren.
It makes sense to me that she decided at the last minute to join the debate after the Times piece just to ensure she
got the national platform to openly call out the corruption in the same breath as attacking Trump for his, to this
point, disastrous foreign policy mistakes.
She emerged from that debate as the only candidate with any moral compass capable of pointing in a single direction.
Warren made a fool of herself responding with bromides about leaving in the 'rightt way' indistinguishable from any
other presidential puppet of the last twenty years.
This is two debates in a row where Gabbard came out blazing at the front-runner, claiming a moral and ethical high
ground on foreign policy that, at just over half the age of her rivals, that shows a maturity well beyond her years.
Her calling Hillary the "Queen of Warmongers" is so self-evidently true that it will reverberate far beyond Twitter
into votes.
And it tells Hillary that Gabbard has zero fear of her and her political machine.
You can't cow a person without fear who has nothing to lose.
Bullies like Hillary never learn that lesson until they are humiliated beyond recognition.
Moreover, when you look at this sequence of events it's clear that the DNC, Hillary and everyone else close to the
corridors of power fear Gabbard's rise. If they weren't they wouldn't be putting out smears in the New York Times.
They wouldn't be spending millions on social media trolls to discredit her in the public fora.
The first rule of politics is "You never attack down."
Well, Hillary attacked down. The Times attacked down. The DNC, by gaming the debate rules, attacked down. And that
spells disaster for anyone who does it.
This was the exchange that ended Rudy's political career. 150 seconds of truth-telling that ignited a movement which
culminated in the election of Donald Trump.
Gabbard is following that same course. The difference between her and Dr. Paul is that she's less polite. But as to
their moral clarity there is little difference. And she shouldn't be polite. The stakes are higher today than they were
in 2008.
The people Gabbard is up against are even more ruthless since Hillary intends to win, whereas the Republicans in 2008
were fighting for the right to lose to her at the time.
Gabbard's rise in popularity among Trump voters and centrists is born of the same exhaustion the American people have
with endless wars for globalism. She is Trump's Kryptonite.
The party she represents is irrelevant. By wrapping herself in the mantle of the front-runner for the nomination is
not delusional, it's the most strategic thing she's done to date.
It's also becoming more and more realistic as the days go on.
Because by responding to Hillary's ham-fisted
attempts to position herself as the voice of reason, Gabbard clarifies for everyone just how sick and
bile-filled Hillary is by outing her as the delusional one.
And reminding everyone that Hillary is the architect of the very policies in the Middle East that Trump is
now taking heat for trying to unwind.
Gabbard knows what the plan is. She was there in 2016 when Hillary stole the nomination from Bernie Sanders
and quit her position in the DNC because of it.
Even Trump knows that foreign policy and foreign entanglements will be the big ticket issue for this
election cycle.
Why?
Because Gabbard has single-handedly made it so.
Trump is already running against her by pulling back from Syria, looking for peace options in Afghanistan,
firing John Bolton while using proxies and, yes, Vladimir Putin to assist him in fixing his myriad mistakes of
the first thirty months of his presidency.
Hillary trying to position herself as the one who can save the Middle East from Trump's bumbling is
laughable and Gabbard just laughed in Hillary's face.
Calling everyone who voices any dissent from foreign or domestic policy orthodoxy a Russian agent is a
losing proposition. It belies reality and what people see with their own eyes.
Americans want better relations with Russia now World War III. Trump's popularity has risen since he backed
off on starting a war with Iran.
The media spent four years marginalizing Dr. Paul. The RNC stole the nomination from him just as surely as
the DNC stole the nomination from Bernie. As the people in the U.K. are finding out, their votes don't matter.
Democracy doesn't matter, only the fever dreams of the soulless and the power mad who think they run the
world. Look at what Hillary has become, not what you remember her to be.
She's a tired, sick, fragile woman whose bitterness and evil is literally eating her up from the inside out.
Have you noticed that she hasn't been photographed standing up for months?
She's the epitome of everything wrong with America and, in fact, the world and Tulsi Gabbard just stood up
and laughed at her for still thinking she was the Emperor when in reality she's The Joker.
Join my Patreon
to assist me in helping you expose the frauds and liars whose
perversions of truth threaten the fabric of civil society.
By now this new clown is also a murderer, as he did not stop shelling Donbass, although
so far he has committed fewer crimes than Porky.
Have you noticed that the Republicans, while seeming to defend Trump, never challenge the
specious assertion that delaying arms to Ukraine was a threat to US security? At first I
thought this was oversight. Silly me. Keeping the New Cold War smoldering is more important
to those hawks.
Tulsi Gabbard flipping to support the impeachment enquiry was especially disappointing.
I'm guessing she was under lots of pressure, because she can't possibly believe that arming
the Ukies is good for our security. If I could get to one of her events, I'd ask her direct,
what's up with that. Obama didn't give them arms at all, even made some remarks about not
inflaming the situation. (A small token, after his people managed the coup, spent 8 years
demonizing Putin, and presided over origins of Russiagate to make Trump's [stated] goal of
better relations impossible.)
The "logic" of the neoliberal MSM is remarkable. They don't even deny that Biden is corrupt,
that he blatantly abused the office of Vice-President for personal gain. What's more, he was dumb
enough to boast about it publicly. Therefore, let's impeach Trump.
It is more than ironic that the Dems (and their like-minded cronies in Big Media) are up in
arms over Trump's attempt in find 'dirt' about Joe Biden when the 'dirt' looks and smells
like actual corruption. Have laws been broken? Was Biden selling influence through his son?
Stranger things have happened. At the very least, it looks as though Joe Biden crossed an
ethical line. This will likely cost him the nomination.
Similarly, the news media should–if it was doing its job–pursue leads that
would help find the source behind the missing server and the Fake News that helped justify
the toxic and duplicitous 'Russiagate' investigation. But they'd rather pursue Trump instead.
I have never witnessed a more partisan and bloodthirsty Fourth Estate.
Why is the media so utterly uninterested in finding out who/how the fake
Putin-Trump 'conspiracy' was cooked up in the first place? Doesn't it make sense the Trump
would want to find out more? Justice demands it. False intelligence can sow chaos and start
wars.
Consider, for instance, the manufactured lies (Saddam's phantom WMD, links to 911, etc)
that were used to justify Zio-America's annihilation of Iraq. What intelligence agency cooked
up these falsehoods? Who spoon-fed these fairy tales to G.W. Bush and Colin Powell?
Not only have these questions never been answered, they are seldom even asked! The Deep
State has gone rogue. And Big Media is covering it up.
This whole ridiculous drama may profit the Dem's in the longer term -- that is, by removing
that corrupt, dementia ridden nit-wit Biden from the presidential competition.
As president, Biden would be a greater sock puppet than even GWB of course, "sock puppet"
maybe just what the Dem's want .
It is not complicated !!!!
All payments to Biden son were channel of bribery to Democratic administration.
Anybody can understand it.
So impeachment attempt of Trump is actually coverup of Democratic misdeeds .
Russia hating is the lynchpin of oligarchic deepstate MIC MSM propaganda. Take that away and
the fat cats are revealed as the naked face of evil that they are. Hating Russia (and China)
supposedly justifies all their crimes.
"... For those who don't speak fluent neoconservative, "isolationist" here means taking even one small step in any direction other than continued military expansionism into every square inch of planet Earth, and "We are becoming isolationist" here means "We have hundreds of military bases circling the globe, our annual military budget is steadily climbing toward the trillion-dollar mark, and we are engaged in countless undeclared wars and regime change interventions all around the world." ..."
"... a war criminal with a blood-soaked legacy of mass murder, torture and military expansionism telling Trump that he is endangering peace with his "isolationism" ..."
"... Nobody actually believes that US foreign policy is under any threat of anything remotely resembling isolationism. The real purpose of this buzzword is to normalize the forever war and drag the Overton window so far in the direction of ghoulish hawkishness that the opposite of "war" is no longer "peace", but "isolationism". By pulling this neat little trick, the propagandists of the political/media class have successfully made endless war seem like a perfectly normal thing to be happening and any small attempt to scale it back look weird and freakish, when the truth is the exact opposite. War is weird, freakish and horrific, and peace is of course normal. This is the only healthy way to see things. ..."
Humanity was treated to an important lecture on peace at a recent event for the NIR School of the Heart by none other than Ellen
Degeneres BFF and world-renowned peace expert George W Bush.
"I don't think the Iranians believe a peaceful Middle East is in their national interest," said the former president according
to The Washington Post 's Josh Rogin, whose
brief Twitter thread on the subject appears
to be the only record of Bush's speech anywhere online.
"An isolationist United States is destabilizing around the world," Bush said during the speech in what according to Rogin was
a shot at the sitting president.
"We are becoming isolationist and that's dangerous for the sake of peace."
For those who don't speak fluent neoconservative, "isolationist" here means taking even one small step in any direction other
than continued military expansionism into every square inch of planet Earth, and "We are becoming isolationist" here means "We have
hundreds of military bases circling the globe, our annual military budget is steadily climbing toward the trillion-dollar mark, and
we are engaged in countless undeclared wars and regime change interventions all around the world."
It is unclear why Bush is choosing to present himself as a more peaceful president than Trump given that by this point in his
first term Bush had launched not one but two full-scale ground invasion wars whose effects continue to ravage the Middle East to
this very day, especially given the way both presidents appear to be in furious agreement on foreign policy matters like Iran. But
here we are.
From a certain point of view it's hard to say which is stranger:
(A) a war criminal with a blood-soaked legacy of mass murder, torture and military expansionism telling Trump that he is
endangering peace with his "isolationism", or
(B) the claim that Trump is "isolationist" at all.
But these bogus warnings about a dangerous, nonexistent threat of isolationism are nothing new for Dubya. In
his farewell address to the nation , Bush said the following:
"In the face of threats from abroad, it can be tempting to seek comfort by turning inward. But we must reject isolationism
and its companion, protectionism. Retreating behind our borders would only invite danger. In the 21st century, security and prosperity
at home depend on the expansion of liberty abroad. If America does not lead the cause of freedom, that cause will not be led."
As we discussed
recently , use of the pro-war buzzword "isolationism" has been re-emerging from its post-Bush hibernation as a popular one-word
debunk of any opposition to continued US military expansionism in all directions, and it is deceitful in at least three distinct
ways. Firstly, the way it is used consistently conflates isolationism with non-interventionism, which
are two wildly
different things . Secondly, none of the mainstream political figures who are consistently tarred with the "isolationist" pejorative
are isolationists by any stretch of the imagination, or even proper non-interventionists; they all support many interventionist positions
which actual non-interventionists object to. Thirdly, calling someone who opposes endless warmongering an "isolationist" makes as
much sense as calling someone who opposes rape a man-hating prude; opposing an intrinsically evil act is not the same as withdrawing
from the world.
Nobody actually believes that US foreign policy is under any threat of anything remotely resembling isolationism. The real
purpose of this buzzword is to normalize the forever war and drag the Overton window so far in the direction of ghoulish hawkishness
that the opposite of "war" is no longer "peace", but "isolationism". By pulling this neat little trick, the propagandists of the
political/media class have successfully made endless war seem like a perfectly normal thing to be happening and any small attempt
to scale it back look weird and freakish, when the truth is the exact opposite. War is weird, freakish and horrific, and peace is
of course normal. This is the only healthy way to see things.
It would actually be great if George W Bush could shut the fuck up forever, ideally in a locked cell following a public war tribunal.
Failing that, at the very least people should stop looking at him as a cuddly wuddly teddy bear with whom it's fun to
share a sporting arena suite or a
piece of hard candy or to
hang award medals on for his treatment of veterans. This mass murdering monster has been
growing more and more popular with
Democrats lately just because he offers mild criticisms of Trump sometimes, as have war pigs like
Bill Kristol and Max Boot and even John
Bolton for the same reason, and it needs to stop. And in the name of a million dead Iraqis, please don't start consulting this
man on matters of peace.
The Kurdish-dominated Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) announced a deal with the Syrian
government of president Bashar al-Assad to resist the ongoing Turkish invasion. Syrian forces
have already moved into Kobane and Manbij. If Turkey continues with its push southwards into
Syria, a war between the Turkish and Syrian forces seems imminent.
As per the deal signed on October 13, the SDF will dissolve its Autonomous Administration
of North and East Syria, also known as Rojava, and hand over the control of cities, such as
Kobane and Manbij to the Syrian government. Talks between the SDF and the Syrian government
were facilitated by the Russians at their Syrian base at Hmeimim in Latakia.
Turkey and its ally, the Free Syrian Army – many of whose members were directly
affiliated to Al Qaeda and other extremist groups – continue their offensive and
atrocities. The FSA has reportedly already illegally executed 13 people. The victims include
Hervin Khalaf, leader of the Future Syria Party, and her two drivers.Turkey launched
'Operation Peace Spring' on October 9. The operation has already led to the death of around
60 Kurdish and 18 Turkish fighters. It has already caused the displacement of more than
130,000 people.
How has the discussion predictably developed along partisan lines? Trump said he wants out of
Syria. That united the war mongers in the house and senate because war means massive profits
to the military industrial complex and congress works for them. Trump said something that
affects the bottom line of the rich and they reacted predictably.
@A123
You can google and watch what Assad told the Kurds in a press conference. It will contradict
part of your statement. The Kurds risked and lost. Great warriors, but weak diplomats and
strategists.
1BEIRUT, LEBANON (11:50 A.M.) – The Syrian Arab Army (SAA) has taken over the U.S.
military base in Manbij after entering the city last night.
According to a military source in the Aleppo Governorate, the Syrian Arab Army has
deployed several units to Manbij as they look to block any potential Turkish offensive to
capture the city.
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On Tuesday, the Anna News Agency reported from Manbij, as they showed the deployment of
the Syrian Army and their eventual take over of the U.S. military base there. -- AMN news
.
2 A stunning development in the key northern Syrian city of Manbij -- the Pentagon has
confirmed a planned handover to Russian military forces is underway amid a Turkish military
assault on the region. This also hours after President Trump tweeted that Assad "wants
naturally to protect the Kurds" and that the problem should be left to local powers.
Late Monday the main US base in Manbij was filmed empty of US forces, and American convoys
were also spotted hastily pulling out of the city as Syrian national forces entered,
following Sunday's historic deal between the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) and
the Assad government. Newsweek reports the developments follows:
I think Russia has allowed Turkey to attack Syria to satisfy Turke's main objective of
rooting out the Kurd on the condition of returning the territory to Syria . It has given Kurd
the bleak choice of oblivion or self preservation . America suffers from PTSD . The flashback
of Saigon on the roof top reappeared again . It ran. Good a sensible job by Trump.
@WJ The
machinations people are making on this topic are truly stunning when it's clear Trump is
doing the right thing. Today are reports that US positions and bases in N. Syria have been
turn keyed over the Assad and Russian forces. Trump IS Protecting the Kurds, just not with
American blood, as he promised.
The one thing Turkey has always wanted is a broken Syria so it can gobble up the remnants.
Past US (and many current) leaders and Democrats were complicit in this by funneling cash and
weapons to Syrian opposition, which directly led to the rise of Isis and deaths of thousands
– can you say evil?
I have hope that Trumps current actions will bring an end to thus war for good –
Turkey was OK to beat up on some kurds but war with Russia is something else.
@OscarWildeLoveChild
imho Jewish power keeps Trump on a perpetual short leash (Schiff is this month's designee to
'walk the dog') until Iran is wrecked.
[edit: renfro commented on Giraldi's earlier thread reminding readers that Israel has a
major interest in the Kurds, their territory, which is oil rich. Remember the proposals to
divide Iraq into three ]
Warren -- BDS is one thing, but her agenda to tax >$50million -- that's the part people
hear & cheer: Hooray! Soak the rich!
The next thing she says is, "Use the money to pay for universal child care, universal
kindergarten, increase pay for child care workers."
This gets cheers from millennials struggling to keep two people employed and kids cared
for.
But think about how drastically anti-family those proposals are.
TOTALLY turn over the care of our children to the loving embrace of the federal government
aka the Frankfurt school
The combined synthesis of social theory and psychoanalysis thus allows resituating on
new bases the Marxist optimism according to which the working class, due to its position in
the relations of production, is disposed to adopt a point of view scientifically based on
reality as well as promote legitimate forms of action.
Knowledge of the forms of the becoming-adult of humanity conceived by Freud, in the form
of a theory of passage through different stages that must result in an assumed genital
sexuality, leads to the recognition of a working class that is believed to be less
encumbered by typically bourgeois prejudices and perversities.
@NoseytheDuke
The goal was to topple Assad. Remember Obama? Assad must go? Assad and the Assad regime are
still there. Where is Saddam Hussein? Where is Muammar Gaddafi? After seven years of war in
Syria the victors are Syria, Iran and Russia. The losers are the U.S., Israel, Saudi Arabia
and Turkey. The real losers of course are the dead and the maimed. The widows and orphans.
And the millions who have been displaced and have become refugees. All are victims of
Imperial aggression. And the real winners of course are the war profiteers who have grown
fatter and fatter since 9/11.
It should be observed that the Syrian incursion by the American military, which was
initiated by President Barack Obama and his band of lady hawks during the so-called "Arab
Spring" of 2011, was illegal from the gitgo. Syria did not threaten the United States, quite
the contrary. Damascus had supported U.S. intelligence operations after 9/11 and it was
Washington that soured the relationship beginning with the Syria Accountability Act of 2003,
which later was followed by the Syrian War Crimes Accountability Act of 2015, both of which
were, at least to a certain extent, driven by the interests of Israel.
When American soldiers first arrived in Syria the U.S. War Powers act was ignored, making
the incursion illegal. Nor was there any mandate authorizing military intervention emanating
from any supra-national agency like the United Nations. The excuse for the intervention was
plausibly enough to destroy ISIS, but the reality was much more complex, with U.S. forces in
addition seeking to limit Iranian and Russian presence in Syria while also bringing about
regime change. The objectives were from the start unattainable as Iran and Russia were
supporting the Syrian Army in doing most of the hard fighting against ISIS while the regime of
President Bashar al-Assad was not threatened by a so-called democratic alternative which only
existed in the minds of Samantha Powers and Susan Rice.
Unwilling to see large numbers of Americans coming home in caskets, the United States
inevitably began to search for proxies to carry out the fighting on the ground and wound up
willy-nilly arming, training and otherwise supporting terrorists, to include the al-Qaeda
affiliate al-Nusra. The Kurdish Syrian Democratic Forces eventually became the principal tool
of U.S. military, but it must be observed that the Kurds in all likelihood had no illusions
about the staying power of their American patrons. They were fighting Syrian forces as well as
ISIS because they were seeking to carve out their own homeland of Kurdistan from the ruins of
the Syrian state. Their expansion into northern Syria, aided by the U.S., was at the expense of
the local population, which was overwhelmingly not Kurdish. Their occupation of that area was
not reported honestly in the U.S. media, but other sources suggest that their behavior was
often brutal.
So the lament about abandoning one's Kurdish allies has a kernel of truth, but the Senator
Lindsey Graham response, to include sanctioning Turkey, should be considered to be little more
than a dangerous misstep that would lead to acquiring a new and more powerful enemy. And, of
course, the argument in favor of leaving the Kurds to their fate found its most ridiculous
expression from the mouth of Donald Trump himself, who, up until recently had praised the Kurds
as friends who had "fought and died for us." Trump is now observing
that "they [the Kurds] didn't help us in the Second World War, they didn't help us with
Normandy." As President Trump did not serve his country in Vietnam due to alleged bone spurs
and his father Fred likewise did not serve in the military, the comment is particularly ironic.
Trump's surname was changed from the original German Drumpf and if there were any Drumpfs
present at Normandy they were undoubtedly on the German side.
Finally, there is one other important issue that should be observed. Donald Trump's actual
record on ending useless wars is not consistent with his actions. He has sent more soldiers to
no good purpose in support of America's longest war in Afghanistan, has special ops forces in
numerous countries in Asia and Africa, has threatened regime change in Venezuela, continues to
support Saudi Arabia and Israel's bloody attacks on their neighbors and has exited to from
treaties and agreements with Russia and Iran that made armed conflict less likely. And he has
five thousand American soldiers sitting as hostages in Iraq, a country that the United States
basically destroyed as a cohesive political entity and which is now experiencing a wave of
rioting that has reportedly killed hundreds. Trump is also assassinating more foreigners using
drones based mostly on profile targeting than all of his predecessors. These are not the
actions of a president who seriously wants to end wars even if one does not consider the
economic warfare that is currently taking place through the use of sanctions that is reportedly
killing tens of thousands.
So should one take Donald Trump seriously when he says he wants to end the pointless wars?
Perhaps not, but even giving him the benefit of the doubt, he should be judged by his actions,
not by his words and, apart from the withdrawal of a handful of soldiers from the actual front
lines in Syria, nothing has changed. It is quite possible that nothing will change.
Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest,
a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a
more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is
councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its
email is[email protected]
The Turkish Army, which is one of the most powerful in NATO, will do whatever is
necessary to crush them. Trump should have realized that before he started talking.
IDK, Phil. I am not sure that he didn't. My sense is that he has been pandering to the
neocons in the hope of a compromise that would allow him to deliver enough of his campaign
promises to permit his re-election. I think hiring Bolton was just such a move –
thinking that keeping his enemies closer would permit him more control.
Recently, he has expressed frustration with his staff and I speculate that he has come to
realize that pandering to the jews is going to be a one-way street. He has given them a score
of concessions, including Jerusalem and the Golan Heights. He hasn't received anything in
return, except for the onslaught of palace coups, one after the other, orchestrated by the
very same zionist forces in both parties.
My hypothesis is that the man, narcissistic as he is, has reached the end of his tether.
Faced with the potential to not get re-elected, he has mounted a counteroffensive against
them. He, rightly, believes that the people who got him elected are the only ones who can get
him re-elected. So, his recent tweets are both an attempt to recapture us to his side, while
at the same time slapping the zionists across their faces with a show of power, as he is
won't to do in business negotiations where he feels that he has been betrayed.
I could be completely wrong as I try to pry into his mind.
So should one take Donald Trump seriously when he says he wants to end the pointless
wars? Perhaps not, but even giving him the benefit of the doubt, he should be judged by his
actions, not by his words and, apart from the withdrawal of a handful of soldiers from the
actual front lines in Syria, nothing has changed. It is quite possible that nothing will
change.
It serves us naught to take this pessimistic stance in the absence of a replacement
candidate. I have always contended that the best way to use Trump is to support his ego.
Let's inundate him with praise for withdrawing from the Kurdish/Turkish quagmire. Sure, he
hasn't vacated Syria yet, however, he has no choice but to vacate or be evacuated. His ego
will opt for the former.
Trump is also assassinating more foreigners using drones based mostly on profile targeting
than all of his predecessors.
These are not the actions of a president who seriously wants to end wars even if one does not
consider the economic warfare that is currently taking place through the use of sanctions
that is reportedly killing tens of thousands
-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --
Mr. Giraldi,
Could you please elaborate on the first point: the use of drones. Who and where?
Secondly, economic warfare: are you referring to Iran or Venezuela? Could you
elaborate?
@A123
NATO members will not help the New Ottoman Empire "offensive".
-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --
Wow, Israeli is really terrified. What will they do when the U.S. decouples from the Middle
East completely? It's pretty clear that, short of running to Russia and fellating Putin, Bobo
the Clown of Tel Aviv has no plan.
Tic Toc.
The fact of the matter is that President Donald Trump is a Corrupt "Crypto Jew" in spite of
the American people may think Trump is as he was chosen by the Elite to serve and protect
Israel and churn profits for Elite owned and controlled Armaments industry in promoting wars
against the Best interests of the citizens of United States of America.
If Washington withdraws its military, spooks and mercenaries the Syrian Curds will go back to
being Syrians. Syria, Iran, Russia and Turkey will negotiate the peace. The U.S., Israel,
Saudi Arabia and Turkey will have been defeated in their war against Assad. Syria, unlike
Iraq and Libya will remain standing.
Everyone loves to hate on Erdogan. I was hoping for a more nuanced view than [he] "is just
crazy enough to do that." Remember when George Galloway called him "a lion," awestruck at his
reaction to the Israeli murders of Turks on the boat to Gaza? Is it true that Turkey has made
tremendous economic gains under his administration? He has much support, as shown by the
[popular] squelching of attempted coup.
I've just never understood why he facilitated the chaos on his border, harboured the White
Helmets, probably murdered Serena Shim, etc. And now, what will he do with his jihadi proxy
army? As far as his threats to release migrants to Europe, I have no sympathy for EU
countries who've been part of the war on the ME. What goes around, comes around. Same for the
Kurds.
There have been some suggestions that the Kurds could make nice with the Damascus
government and rely on the protection of the Syrian Army to deter the Turks, an option that
they have already begun to exercise.
The Kurds have caved. Plus our radical Islamic rebels are going over, with our equipment
etc to the Ass man.
Updated Oct. 14, 2019 6:48 pm ET. WSJ
ISTANBUL -- Syrian troops entered areas that have been outside their control for years on
Monday, after a quickly forged pact between Kurdish forces and the Syrian government to
confront a Turkish military campaign reshaped alliances in Syria.
That pact transformed the Kurds, an erstwhile partner of the U.S. in the fight against
Islamic State, into a force more closely aligned with Russia and Iran, as the U.S. began
withdrawing its troops from northeastern Syria.
Until recently, thousands of U.S.-backed fighters had trained at a military base in the
town of Ain Eissa. After the Syrian military arrived on Monday morning, soldiers raised the
tricolor Syrian flag in the town center.
The US gets out of the way, and Assad, who won the Civil War, immediately settles with the
Kurds and Nustra.
So, it wasn't many troops, but we had successfully prevented Assad from absorbing
(voluntarily) two groups in the Civil War. Meaning we (US) alone was preventing settlement.
The. deep state has thwarted Trump's intentions to leave for 3 years.
"Or the Turks might be willing to escalate their own offensive to take on the inferior Syrian
Army and the Kurds together." It is a stretch without careful analysis.
Many people said the same about the world's most cowardice army, the Israeli. There is an
agreement between the parties and Erdogan will comply. The Kurds are the West-Israel proxy
terrorists. They proved their usefulness many times.
But in pursuing their aspirations for self-rule, Syria's Kurds risked overreach and
miscalculation. American officials have long made clear in meetings and public comments
that U.S. military backing never amounted to an endorsement of Kurdish political
ambitions.
In December, U.S. envoy to Syria James Jeffrey likened the partnership with the SySo he
rian Kurds to a "transactional relationship for a specific goal."
Trump got it basically right -- time to leave and we never promised Kurds a Rose
Garden.
His bumbling ruling decrees via Twitter stem from the lack of loyal staff. His decisions
are ignored or subverted when he goes through channels. So he announces it and works from
there. This is the 3rd Time Trump has announced withdrawal from Syria. Although the neocon
press and Hawkish politicians howled.
Trump also implemented the Pivot to Asia (an Obama failure) by engaging China
diplomatically through efforts at trade reform. Much more nuanced that fortifying bases.
Its never pretty, but Trump tends to stubbornly pursue a less warlike agenda.
The mideast is where everybody backstabs everybody recalling the CIA used to deliver
renditioned prisoners to Assad to be tortured along lines a bit more than 'enhanced'
interrogations (karma could be a b *** h.) The soup only gets thicker as the pot boils down.
Remember those NATO nukes kept at Incirlik?
Why had NATO (the USA particularly) sat on its hands these past 3+ years? It's not like no
one was aware there could be a serious problem with 50 (or more) tactical nukes in the hands
of the paranoid narcissist Erdogan:
@A123
"that is, the goods and services produced by the economy -- rises faster than the money
created, so there is no inflation, and rises faster than the debt created, so the country's
debt burden doesn't increase."
"The long term prospects for peace are still there. A return to the status quo ante. Russia
remains as guarantor of the peace and all other foreign fighters and their proxies exit the
nation."
Spot on.
Given cast-iron assurances re the PKK & it's Syrian cousins that Nth Syria will cease to
be a zone for organising attacks (or any kind of nefarious Kurdish behaviour) on Turkey, I
think Erdogan would likely consider a withdrawal of his forces.
i think there are few unknowns between Russia, Turkey, Syria; the plan seems to be to get
ISIS, SDF, the PYD/YPD without regard to who is supporting them. Unleash ISIS, even those in
prisons so they can move against Assad to be destroyed ? Those trapped in Idlib can either
commit suicide or wait for the executioner. I have no facts, but by observing that the
sanctions warfare is directed at those who intend to destroy ISIS, SDF, PYD/YPD and Israelis
and Iranians visiting in Syria I conclude Russia and Turkey have skunked the Pentagon (maybe
Trump is also in on it?) .
Russia and Syria have agreed to stand by while Turkey engages in some target practice at
unwanted visitors in Syria? Invade Syria even North Western Iraq.. rid the world of pesky,
trouble making, fake news head chopping face book and Twitter super stars, destroy all traces
of Kurds, remove all non Syrian others threatening the Ottoman, Syrian Turf. Don't look now,
but Iran seems to be on the Turkey list of non Syrians ?. ..After the area is cleared Assad's
problem, will be, what if Turkey (Erdogan) refuses to return to Turkey, and that return to
Turkey promise has probably been be guaranteed to Assad by Russia.
I read a Russian statement somewhere last year [early 2018], in which they unequivocal said
there would never be an autonomous Kurdish state. They [the Kurds] could stick to some of
their customs, but legally and lawfully they would fall on Damascus' rule/s.
Trump's foreign policy constitutes an egregious betrayal of his election platform which was
to "stay neutral" on Israel/Palestine, withdraw remaining troops and avoid any further
entanglements. He reneged on all pledges.
The recent announcement that he was withdrawing troops from Syria was followed the next
day by an announcement of 2,000 US troops being deployed to Saudi Arabia to protect that
country from Iran. Say what?
It was totally predictable five years ago that Turkey was in Israel's gunsights, and as
usual Israel tends to destroy others by proxy. They can sit back and savor Turkey destroying
more of Syria, while US sanctions destroy more of Turkey.
The waves of death and destruction that have hammered the Middle East for the last seventy
years are all symptoms of one problem and that is the illegitimate "state of Israel".
Most Americans seem obsessed with stupid wars. For example the vast majority of people in the
UK see the Iraq War as a catastrophic mistake and despise Tony Blair, yet in the US most
people still seem to see the Iraq War as a good thing. The mentality is far apart.
Americans seem a very insecure people, projecting military power is all they really have.
If America is not constantly embroiled in a war somewhere then most Americans feel they have
nothing to be proud of. I would go as far to say that the military is the only real source of
pride in America, it's the only thing Americans feel they undeniably excel at.
There are no "stupid wars", every slaughter of millions was long time in planning and was
based on greed and racism of the "master" races vs. "subhumans".
USA corporation, can not and will not survive without WARS.
Complete "economy" is a WAR machine, USA corporations has WEAPONIZED it ALL.
It is nice to dream, even HollyWood supports and promotes it.
Whiskey Rebellion me think was the Birthday of citizen USA and blessed it's associates
with representation by corrupt and greedy anointed by others rushing to become corrupt and
greedy.
Trump has shown himself to be completely unreliable on every important issue; I do not
see why it will be different this time -- his desire for approval from the Establishment is
apparently far stronger than any principles he may hold -- you can see this in practically
everything he does, perhaps most notably in his constant bleating about black and Hispanic
unemployment -- he simply can't be trusted.
On the other hand Trump has not started any new wars (so far). He is also resisting the elite
of Deep State (MIC) and the mdia, probably in his own weird way by making confusing
statements keeping them off balance. No body knows we are all simply speculating. Time will
tell.
@WorkingClass
Not really. The goal all along was not to "take" Syria so much as to destroy it and leave it
in fragments. Mission accomplished! Syria, or at east large swathes of it has been reduced to
rubble, its economy is gutted and its people are scattered to the winds. The US had no goals
there to begin with and has just been acting in the service of its "great friend and ally"
Israel. Your tax dollars at work.
Syria, Iraq, Libya are now less of a threat to Israel than ever before so that is a kind
of peace. Solitudenum facient, pacem appellant said Tacitus. They make desolation and call it
peace.
@Europe
natonalist I agree. Worship of the military is surely modern America's most cringeworthy
and repellent aspect. The war hero is the American equivalent of the medieval saint, and you
can't even blame the Jews for it. It's clearly a whitey thing. Get a few bullets shot at you
by some primitive and soon to be obliterated savages and you can live large on your war
stories for the rest of your comfortably pensioned days. The sad thing is that there are no
wars for the US military to fight these days except those they create themselves.
America, an exceptionally immature, warlike and stupid nation. And they worship Jesus! Who
of course will just laugh when he presses the button and sends them all into the lake of fire
without a second thought.
@Cloak And
Dagger Interesting, I've been mulling over this possibility recently and was thinking
about it earlier as a potential outcome-based upon basic game theory.
What I don't understand is, if there be an alleged discreet hidden super-hand of
power controlled by the Jewish elite, and Trump seemed to be doing their bidding (moving the
Embassy), where are all the "compromising photos" and "Blasey Ford's" for the Warren's and
Biden's of the world? Certainly some damaging (and likely private) material, or "witnesses"
from the past exist, against those who attack Trump? Certainly the Mossad and/or other hidden
forces have such information, that could protect Trump. Here's a guy with a (now) Jewish
daughter and a Jewish son-in-law, doing positive things for Israel and the Jewish elite in
the US/West, and yet, he has been subject to continual attacks, as have those around him, and
now he is facing impeachment?
I don't see Israel getting it any better if Warren is elected (certainly not by her base,
which is turning more toward a BDS worldview). It just makes me think their power is not as
great as conspiracy theorists alleged, or in the alternative (perhaps likely) their "power"
is superseded by an even greater hidden force of elites. If their power is as awesome and
infiltrating as alleged, why isn't he president for life at this point? Using the media,
politics, blackmail, international banking, this guy could usher in Israel as the capital of
the universe, but yet none of that is happening. He is betrayed at every corner and faces
removal from office, disgrace (for actually being the removed, i.e. the other side actually
"winning" against him), and probably the destruction of any chance Ivanka and Jared had of
becoming the first couple, in the future.
So perhaps as you offer, he's going for broke and just doing whatever he wants or wanted
to do in the beginning. Time will tell. Strange times indeed.
@Contraviews
, Contraviews said: "He (Trump) is also resisting the elite of Deep State (MIC) and the mdia,
probably in his own weird way by making confusing statements keeping them off balance."
No! Zionist Jews & Israel are keeping you and almost all of Amerika "off balance."
Refer to Jerusalem Post article (linked below) and you will distinguish "confusing
statements" by Trump from the reality of mandatory ZUS endless ME wars since 9/11.
Everybody should be happy Uncle Sam is getting out of Syria. Look at the disasters the US
created in Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, etc. and all the money wasted which could have been
better spent here at home.
Much of what's being said in the MSM has to do with the American narrative that Turkey and
Syria are bad guys for the unspoken reason that they have opposed the zionist enterprise.
What American national interest justified the occupation and dismemberment of Syria? Why
should we support terrorist groups like the PPK against NATO member Turkey? Why should we
ally with al-Qaeda affiliate HTS for israel's benefit?
@anon
Good point about DJT needing to use Twitter to announce his decisions since they'd otherwise
be thwarted or outright ignored going through normal channels. But, how can he actually be
against these wars when they're contrasted with his embarrassing servility toward Israel,
which in actuality is an enemy state responsible for Lavon, Liberty, and 9/11, not to mention
it's theft of our technology that's used against us by Israel's intel tech companies for
profit and communications espionage at the deepest levels of our government? The canard about
other, overriding strategic interests doesn't hold water since the $trillions wasted on these
wars could have secured our economic and military interests a hundredfold through trade and
cultural interaction. As much as I want to trust DJT and would stand with him and the
deplorables at the barricades if necessary, I cannot overcome my repugnance at his support
for Israel, knowing as he now must know that Israel did 9/11.
Our neocon policies have proven to be an existential threat to the solvency , well being,
and future of the United States.
We have squandered tens of trillions of dollars on stupid wasteful wars when we could have
been using those exact same resources to build out our infrastructure, education and
technological advantages.
Our pentagon should be producing best and first technologies ACROSS THE BOARD, not
spending all its time trying to hide from the taxpayer how many billions the neocons pilfered
last quarter.
We need to replace our policy of "perpetual war fraud" with a policy of empowering and
igniting creativity and human excellence.
It's quite ironic that the party that was in power when it was revealed that the NSA was
spying on every US citizen (and a ton of foreigners) – an obvious violation of the 4th
Amendment – now want to moan about the unconstitutionality of this phone call.
But if someone would have told him that the people denouncing and blacklisting him would
have been the *liberal Democrats* and some of their most "excitable" elements would be
accusing him of being a "Neo-Nazi White Supremacist Russian Agent" he would have thought
the entire country had gone on LSD.
Ran into a Ukie from Odessa yesterday on a beach i go to i go to Saigon n Vung Tau. He told
me all about how Putin set up the Maidan in Kyiv, in order to invade and take Crimea. He was
doing a great propaganda act, for this American, until I told him I live in Crimea. I gave
some info how the US did Kyiv, then he stormed off. The Ukie nationalist are super
brainwashed. Spacibo Unz Rev.
@Dennis
Gannon "If we ever get a dictator in the USA, I would not be surprised to see everyone in
the lying mainstream media wind up in a gulag."
If we ever get a dictator in the USA, he will owe his dictatorship to the lying mainstream
media. But that of course doesn't mean he won't turn on them. But it's more likely he'll
enjoy their continued support.
Russia is the excuse for US actions in the Ukraine as it was in the ME.
What is America without a big bad boogeyman like Russia?. Certainly not a "Superpower'
defending the world. Without enemies like Russia we would be nothing but big rich
country.
And all the Neos and Zios and politicians would have to use Viagra instead of war to
squirt out their poison.
A lot of countries like the Ukraine have gotten a lot of US taxpayer money by 'standing up
to a Russian takeover' .and are laughing all the way to their bank.
This New York Times article about @TulsiGabbard is perfect. It belongs in a museum to show
how the NYT & DNC smear anyone who expresses any dissenting views: accuse them of serving
RUSSIA & white nationalists, quote Neera Tanden & Laura McCarthy Rosenberg, etc.
What, Exactly, Is Tulsi Gabbard Up To? - The New York Times
6:56 AM - 12 Oct 2019
[ Radical, unethical Democratic National Committee folks are determined to defame and
destroy an heroic Democratic member of congress, a combat veteran and still serving member of
the armed forces, reelected with a 70% majority in 2018. ]
Astonishing the Democratic leadership calumny of a Democratic member of Congress, a woman, of
Indian and Samoan heritage, a combat veteran and serving member of the armed forces. Such is
self-styled supposed Democratic leadership, steeped in the terrible terrifying tradition of
Joseph McCarthy.
(The price of admission, so as to be
able to read the posts of others, is
for now, posting something, anything.)
What, Exactly, Is Tulsi Gabbard Up To? https://nyti.ms/33s1Aj8
NYT - Lisa Lerer - October 12
WASHINGTON -- Stephen K. Bannon, President Trump's former chief strategist, is impressed
with her political talent. Richard B. Spencer, the white nationalist leader, says he could
vote for her. Former Representative Ron Paul praises her "libertarian instincts," while
Franklin Graham, the influential evangelist, finds her "refreshing."
And far-right conspiracy theorists like Mike Cernovich see a certain MAGA sais quoi.
"She's got a good energy, a good vibe. You feel like this is just a serious person," Mr.
Cernovich said. "She seems very Trumpian." ...
(The price of admission, so as to be
able to read the posts of others, is
for now, posting something, anything.)
What, Exactly, Is Tulsi Gabbard Up To? https://nyti.ms/33s1Aj8
NYT - Lisa Lerer - October 12
WASHINGTON -- Stephen K. Bannon, President Trump's former chief strategist, is impressed
with her political talent. Richard B. Spencer, the white nationalist leader, says he could
vote for her. Former Representative Ron Paul praises her "libertarian instincts," while
Franklin Graham, the influential evangelist, finds her "refreshing."
And far-right conspiracy theorists like Mike Cernovich see a certain MAGA sais quoi.
"She's got a good energy, a good vibe. You feel like this is just a serious person," Mr.
Cernovich said. "She seems very Trumpian." ...
Among her fellow Democrats, Representative Tulsi Gabbard has struggled to make headway as a
presidential candidate, barely cracking the 2 percent mark in the polls needed to qualify for
Tuesday night's debate. She is now injecting a bit of chaos into her own party's primary
race, threatening to boycott that debate to protest what she sees as a "rigging" of the 2020
election. That's left some Democrats wondering what, exactly, she is up to in the race, while
others worry about supportive signs from online bot activity and the Russian news media. ...
On podcasts and online videos, in interviews and Twitter feeds, alt-right internet stars,
white nationalists, libertarian activists and some of the biggest boosters of Mr. Trump heap
praise on Ms. Gabbard. They like the Hawaiian congresswoman's isolationist foreign policy
views. They like her support for drug decriminalization. They like what she sees as
censorship by big technology platforms. ...
Ms. Gabbard has disavowed some of her most hateful supporters, castigating the news media
for giving "any oxygen at all" to the endorsement she won from the white nationalist leader
David Duke. But her frequent appearances on Tucker Carlson's Fox News show have buoyed her
support in right-wing circles.
Both Ms. Gabbard and her campaign refused requests for comment about her support in
right-wing circles or threat to boycott the debate. Even some political strategists who have
worked with her are at a loss to explain her approach to politics.
"She's a very talented person but I'm not sure, I just don't know what to say about the
campaign exactly," said Mark Longabaugh, a Democratic strategist who worked with Ms. Gabbard
when she was campaigning for Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont in 2016. ...
Stephen K. Bannon, President Trump's former chief strategist, is impressed with her political
talent....
-- Lisa Lerer
[ This is a vile article, contemptible for the New York Times to have printed. An heroic
member of congress, a woman, a person of color, a combat veteran, a serving member of the
armed forces, a person who serves others to seek peace, is being contemptibly slandered.
Shame, shame, shame for writing and printing such an article. ]
You and a number of the posters here are horribly naive about the Nixon Rat(bad word
omitted)s. Tulsi has been working with them. This should be automatically disqualifying.
Gabbard is a veteran, very much younger than I, she also is the most opposed to the neocon
permanent war (strong in securing the US' post WW II world order)agenda which seems to be
standard democrat stance.
"
By Dillon Ancheta | October 10, 2019 at 10:13 AM HST - Updated October 10 at 5:54 PM
HONOLULU, Hawaii (HawaiiNewsNow) - Claiming a "rigged" primary process, presidential
candidate Tulsi Gabbard says she's seriously considering boycotting the next Democratic
presidential debate.
Twelve contenders, including Gabbard, have qualified for the Oct. 15 debate in Ohio.
But in a video posted on social media Thursday, Gabbard said she's not sure she'll take
the debate stage because she believes the Democratic National Committee and corporate media
rigged the 2016 primary election against Bernie Sanders and are trying to do it again with
the 2020 primary.
She said the election is being rigged against early voting states.
"There are so many of you who I've met in Iowa and New Hampshire who have expressed to me
how frustrated you are that the DNC and corporate media are essentially trying to usurp your
role as voters in choosing who our Democratic nominee will be," Gabbard said, in the
video.
"In short, the DNC and corporate media are trying to hijack the entire election process,"
she added."
This of course is sheer nonsense, and so hurtful to Dems that she has drawn the admiration
of right wing crazies for her efforts to help trump.
Nonsense in 2016 just like this hurt Dems; ruined the Supreme Court; and damaged the
country. And she is trying to do it again in the midst of a primary in which she never, ever
had a ghost of a chance. And that was because of her total inexperience and a number of
highly questionable actions in the last decade.
At this point, she has managed to remove herself from higher office for the rest of her
life. And deservedly so.
In Hawaii you cannot run for two public offices at once, so this is her plan to run for
the House. Trash the DNC and media for defeating her, despite the fact she never had any
chance to even be a serious player in the primary.
Combine that with her gay conversion stance of a decade ago and her meddling withe asaad
and Modi, and I am starting to question her sanity.
If she loses the House primary, I would fully expect her to be the Rep candidate.
American interventionalist is not an aberration; it is dictated by the design to maintain and expand the USA led global
neoliberal empire. It is impossible to cure without the destruction of this empire. But the process of destruction already
started with US-China trade war.
Notable quotes:
"... Fontaine's article misses the biggest argument against frequent military interventions: the U.S. has no right to bomb and invade other countries at will. The assumption that the U.S. has the right to use force in other countries whenever it decides to is wrong in principle, and it is the source of countless policy failures and tremendous human suffering. If we respected the "rules-based international order" that we claim to support, our government would use force sparingly and only when there were no other alternatives. That is a "rigid formula" that we should insist on upholding. ..."
Rubble aftermath of a Saudi airstrike on a Yemeni neighborhood in 2015.
Almigdad Mojalli/Voice of America Richard Fontaine
claims that there is now
a consensus for military restraint, and he believes the consensus to be wrong:
Faced with such a sweeping political consensus, one might conclude that Washington should simply get on with it and embrace
restraint. The problem is that such a strategy overlooks the interests and values that have prompted U.S. action in the first
place and that may for good reasons give rise to it in the future. The consensus also neglects the fact that, despite the well-known
failures of recent large-scale interventions, there is also a record of more successful ones -- including the effort underway
today in Syria.
To assume that nonintervention will become a central tenet of future U.S. foreign policy will, if anything, induce Americans
to think less seriously about the country's military operations abroad and thus generate not only less successful intervention
but possibly even more of it. Instead of settling into wishful thinking, policymakers should accept that the use of military force
will remain an essential tool of U.S. strategy. That, in turn, requires applying the right lessons from recent decades.
Fontaine makes two mistakes early on his article that mar the rest of his argument. The first is to assert that a strategy of
restraint "overlooks the interests and values that have prompted U.S. action" in the past. That is simply not true. Advocates of
restraint don't overlook these interests and values. We deny that the U.S. has interests in many of the places interventionists claim
to find them, and we insist that waging unnecessary wars against states and people that have done nothing to us is contrary to American
values. Proponents of restraint aren't overlooking anything. We contest and reject many of the assumptions that interventionists
take for granted. Constant warfare in multiple countries is not only harmful to U.S. security and interests, but it has been steadily
corroding our constitutional system and giving virtually unchecked power to the executive. The forever war has horribly distorted
our foreign policy, and it has been deforming our system of government as well.
The other mistake is to suggest that nonintervention will cause Americans "to think less seriously about the country's military
operations abroad." The word seriously is doing all of the work in that statement, and it gets to the heart of the disagreement that
advocates of restraint have with interventionists. Non-interventionists do think very seriously about U.S. military operations. Sometimes
it seems as if we are some of the only people who do think seriously about them, because we consider their costs not only for the
U.S. but also for the countries and peoples affected by them. Advocates of restraint also tend to think seriously about the illegality
of a lot of these operations, many of which have never been authorized by Congress. Others rely on an expansive interpretation of
the 2001 AUMF for their legal justification, and it has become extremely difficult to accept that a 2001 vote can be used to authorize
military action in completely different parts of the world almost twenty years later.
It is debatable whether there is a "sweeping political consensus" in favor of military restraint. There is significant political
support for extricating the U.S. from many of its current conflicts, but it is not clear that there is anything like consensus on
how the U.S. should respond to foreign conflicts and crises in the future. Fontaine conjures up this imaginary consensus to serve
as a foil for his argument, and then proceeds to point out that there really isn't a consensus after all.
He also trots out the old cliche about presidents reluctantly going to war:
Even at a rhetorical and intellectual level, then, the end of intervention is not nearly as clear-cut as today's politicians
suggest. The reality of being commander in chief complicates things further: on the campaign trail, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush,
Barack Obama, and Trump each pledged to engage in fewer foreign military adventures and redirect resources toward needs at home.
In office, each reluctantly proceeded to not only continue existing wars but also launch new offensives.
Fontaine greatly exaggerates the reluctance with which these presidents have ordered the use of force. In Bush's case, he simply
makes it up. It is true that then-Gov. Bush campaigned against "nation-building" of the kind that Clinton had done in the 1990s,
but his "humble" foreign policy rhetoric was belied by the fact that he didn't oppose a single military intervention in the past
and surrounded himself with extremely hawkish advisers who were only too eager to use force. The trope of Obama as "reluctant warrior"
has been repeated so many times that it is easy to forget that this is also wildly misleading. The "reluctant" Obama ordered the
bombing of Libya when he had no legal authority to do so, and he did so even though no vital U.S. interests were threatened. He then
oh-so-"reluctantly" launched another illegal war in 2014 in Iraq and Syria that has continued to this day. A truly reluctant president
would not start or join wars without Congressional authorization, but that is exactly what Obama did more than once. His decision
to throw U.S. support behind the Saudi coalition was yet another example of how he involved the U.S. in a foreign conflict when didn't
need to. A consistently non-interventionist president is hard to imagine, but that is only because we haven't had one for such a
long time.
Fontaine then sets up a strawman by pointing out that U.S. interventionism after the Cold War is just more of what the U.S. did
during the Cold War:
American military action is not, as many believe, a feature of post–Cold War overstretch; it has been a central element of
the United States' approach to the world for decades.
I'm not sure what argument Fontaine thinks he is refuting here. Non-interventionist critics of America's post-Cold War foreign
policy are almost always equally appalled by and opposed to U.S. military interventions during the Cold War. Some non-interventionists
have been against unnecessary and illegal wars all along, and others have come around to recognizing the futility and folly of these
interventions in recent decades. No one really disputes that intervening militarily in other countries has been "a central element
of the United States' approach to the world for decades." We know it has been a central element. We think it has been the cause of
enormous harm, and that's why we seek to put an end to it! Fontaine calls attention to the fact that the U.S. has been frequently
resorting to force for a long time as if that is an argument for letting this destructive pattern continue indefinitely.
Fontaine offers a number of "guidelines" that he wants us to use when judging future military interventions. He gets off to a
bad start with the first one:
The first guideline is to avoid overlearning the supposed lessons of past interventions.
It is impossible to read this and not think of the many hawkish admonitions that Americans have "overlearned" the lessons of the
Iraq war. No doubt it is meant to bring that to mind. The idea that Americans have ever "overlearned" lessons from our failed and
unnecessary wars is almost funny, because it seems obvious that our political leaders have barely learned anything at all. It is
true that each case is different and should be judged on its own merits, but surely we should draw on past experience to inform how
we judge these new cases. When hawks consistently underestimate how difficult and costly a war will be, it is relevant to cite the
Iraq war as an example of how disastrously wrong war supporters can be. When we hear promises from proponents that war with Iran
won't be as costly or prolonged as the Iraq war, it is probably worth recalling that proponents of invading Iraq promised that the
war would be cheap, easy, and quick, too. Many of our politicians and analysts stubbornly refuse to learn from what they euphemistically
call the "mistake" of the Iraq war. That brings us back to the earlier point about thinking seriously about military operations abroad.
As a general rule, interventionists treat going to war very cavalierly and don't think through the consequences. When things predictably
go awry, they then insist that we can't quit the war we should never have waged.
Fontaine adds, "Sticking to rigid lines based on prior errors can easily lead to new and different pitfalls." It is always possible
that in avoiding certain errors the U.S. will end up making different ones, but surely that is an argument for intervening as infrequently
as possible. If we keep missing the mark every time, perhaps we should stop shooting. This also ignores that sticking to a rigid
line against a Vietnam or Iraq war-style intervention is always the right call. There is no scenario in which waging a war like that
would be a prudent and necessary use of force. If subsequent military interventions have also caused problems or failed to resolve
everything, that is much better than being bogged down for years (or decades) in unwinnable wars that serve no American interests.
I am probably the most vocal critic of the Libyan war then and now, but Obama's error was intervening in the first place. The "failure"
to follow up the intervention with an occupation was the best of the bad available options. If Obama had committed U.S. troops to
Libya after Gaddafi was overthrown, they would probably still be fighting there in large numbers today, and we would be hearing from
the usual suspects that they can't be withdrawn for many more years.
Fontaine's second guideline sounds reasonable, but it isn't all that helpful:
Another guideline is to pick interventions that meet clear conditions and commit to those that are chosen. The United States
should generally undertake interventions only when political leaders -- namely, the president and a majority of Congress -- believe
that force is necessary to attain a clearly stated objective.
This doesn't seem like a bad guideline, but we should remember that this guideline wouldn't have prevented the Iraq war. The president
and a majority of Congress were in agreement that the U.S. should launch an invasion to achieve regime change, and they were horribly
wrong. Even when a majority of Congress is on board with the idea of launching an illegal invasion, that doesn't make it right.
Another guideline sounds sensible, but it is not as useful as it seems:
They should conclude that the benefits of a military intervention over the long run are reasonably expected to exceed the costs.
The problem here is that interventionists always conclude that the benefits of intervention will exceed the costs, and in the
debate before a war begins the cavalier proponents of "action" usually prevail because of the ingrained bias in favor of "doing something."
They often do this by grossly overestimating the benefits (of which there are usually few or none) and ignoring the costs all together.
The Iraq war is the most famous example of this, but it is true of virtually every military intervention that the U.S. has engaged
in over at least the last thirty years. This guideline raises a number of questions: how are the benefits being calculated, who benefits,
and how long is "the long run"? The fact that U.S. politicians and policymakers have usually done a horrible job of calculating the
costs and benefits of past interventions should make us question why we think that our government is a fit judge of such matters.
There are a few big omissions in Fontaine's argument that need to be addressed. First, he says nothing about international law
or the Constitution. More often than not, U.S. military interventions bend or outright break international law and the U.N. Charter.
Many of them are also carried out in clear violation of the Constitution. One of the main rules in future debates has to be that
any future military intervention needs to be authorized by Congress and consistent with the U.N. Charter's prohibition against the
unauthorized use of force except for self-defense. Very few U.S. interventions since 1989 have met this standard, but it is an extremely
important one. The U.S. wages so many wars of choice because it can, and very few of them have been legal.
Fontaine says near the end of his article:
No grand strategy can be built on the presumption that military intervention is mostly an erroneous activity of yesteryear,
rather than an enduring feature of U.S. foreign policy.
We are having this debate because we all know that military intervention is not an "activity of yesteryear." It is what our government
is doing right now. We are still very far from having a consensus that it is an erroneous one. Military intervention does not have
to be an "enduring feature" of U.S. foreign policy if we were to adopt a grand strategy that makes it a much rarer thing. Fontaine
doesn't want to adopt a strategy of restraint, but he has not made the case that the U.S. would have to keep intervening on a regular
basis if that were our government's strategy. He takes for granted that interventionism is inevitable, and dismisses the possibility
that it could ever be stopped.
Fontaine's article misses the biggest argument against frequent military interventions: the U.S. has no right to bomb and
invade other countries at will. The assumption that the U.S. has the right to use force in other countries whenever it decides to
is wrong in principle, and it is the source of countless policy failures and tremendous human suffering. If we respected the "rules-based
international order" that we claim to support, our government would use force sparingly and only when there were no other alternatives.
That is a "rigid formula" that we should insist on upholding.
"a strategy of restraint "overlooks the interests and values that have prompted U.S. action" in the past."
What a deeply stupid statement. He doesn't seem to understand that "restraint" IS one of America's "interests and values".
Leaving others alone. Minding our own business. Mature recognition of the limits of our power, knowledge, and competence.
"... George W. Bush's presidency wasn't just morally bankrupt. In a superior reality, the Hague would be sorting out whether he is guilty of war crimes. Since our international institutions have failed to punish, or even censure him, surely the only moral response from civil society should be to shun him. But here is Ellen DeGeneres hanging out with him at a Cowboys game: ..."
"... This is what we say to children who don't want to sit next to the class misfit at lunch. It is not -- or at least it should not -- be the way we talk about a man who used his immense power to illegally invade another country where we still have troops 16 years later. His feet should bleed wherever he walks and Iraqis should get to throw shoes at him until the end of his days. ..."
"... DeGeneres isn't a role model for civility. Her friendship with Bush simply embodies the grossest form of class solidarity. From a lofty enough vantage point, perhaps Bush's misdeeds really look like minor partisan differences. Perhaps Iraq seems very far away, and so do the poor of New Orleans, when the stage of your show is the closest you get to anyone without power." ..."
"... There is no reason that anyone should treat George Bush with respect. ..."
"Comedian Ellen DeGeneres loves to tell everyone to be kind. It's a loose word, kindness; on her show, DeGeneres customarily
uses it to mean a generic sort of niceness. Don't bully. Befriend people! It's a charming thought, though it has its limits
as a moral ethic. There are people in the world, after all, whom it is better not to befriend. Consider, for example, the person
of George W. Bush. Tens of thousands of people are dead because his administration lied to the American public about the presence
of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and then, based on that lie, launched a war that's now in its 16th year. After Hurricane
Katrina struck and hundreds of people drowned in New Orleans, Bush twiddled his thumbs for days. Rather than fire the officials
responsible for the government's life-threateningly lackluster response to the crisis, he praised them, before flying over
the scene in Air Force One. He opposed basic human rights for LGBT people, and reproductive rights for women, and did more
to empower the American Christian right than any president since Reagan.
George W. Bush's presidency wasn't just morally bankrupt. In a superior reality, the Hague would be sorting out whether
he is guilty of war crimes. Since our international institutions have failed to punish, or even censure him, surely the only
moral response from civil society should be to shun him. But here is Ellen DeGeneres hanging out with him at a Cowboys game:
And here is Ellen DeGeneres explaining why it's good and normal to share laughs, small talk, and nachos with a man who has
many deaths on his conscience:
Here's the money quote from her apologia:
"We're all different. And I think that we've forgotten that that's okay that we're all different," she told her studio
audience. "When I say be kind to one another, I don't mean be kind to the people who think the same way you do. I mean be
kind to everyone."
This is what we say to children who don't want to sit next to the class misfit at lunch. It is not -- or at least it
should not -- be the way we talk about a man who used his immense power to illegally invade another country where we still
have troops 16 years later. His feet should bleed wherever he walks and Iraqis should get to throw shoes at him until the end
of his days.
Nevertheless, many celebrities and politicians have hailed DeGeneres for her radical civility:
There's almost no point to rebutting anything that Chris Cillizza writes. Whatever he says is inevitably dumb and wrong,
and then I get angry while I think about how much money he gets to be dumb and wrong on a professional basis. But on this occasion,
I'll make an exception. The notion that DeGeneres's friendship with Bush is antithetical to Trumpism fundamentally misconstrues
the force that makes Trump possible. Trump isn't a simple playground bully, he's the president. Americans grant our commanders-in-chief
extraordinary deference once they leave office. They become celebrities, members of an apolitical royal class. This tendency
to separate former presidents from the actions of their office, as if they were merely actors in a stage play, or retired athletes
from a rival team, contributes to the atmosphere of impunity that enabled Trump. If Trump's critics want to make sure that
his cruelties are sins the public and political class alike never tolerate again, our reflexive reverence for the presidency
has to die.
DeGeneres isn't a role model for civility. Her friendship with Bush simply embodies the grossest form of class solidarity.
From a lofty enough vantage point, perhaps Bush's misdeeds really look like minor partisan differences. Perhaps Iraq seems
very far away, and so do the poor of New Orleans, when the stage of your show is the closest you get to anyone without power."
...I am all in favor of Tulsi Gabbard's anti-war stance, but this comment shows me she is too childish to hold any power.
Tulsi Gabbard
Verified account @TulsiGabbard
22h22 hours ago
.@TheEllenShow msg of being kind to ALL is so needed right now. Enough with the divisiveness. We can't let politics tear
us apart. There are things we will disagree on strongly, and things we agree on -- let's treat each other with respect, aloha,
& work together for the people.
There is no reason that anyone should treat George Bush with respect.
"... "Sorry, until George W. Bush is brought to justice for the crimes of the Iraq War, (including American-lead torture, Iraqi deaths & displacement, and the deep scars -- emotional & otherwise -- inflicted on our military that served his folly), we can't even begin to talk about kindness," the actor of Incredible Hulk fame tweeted. ..."
"... While some online were appreciative of the anti-Bush sentiment, many wondered aloud why similar treatment was rarely afforded to Bush's successor, Barack Obama, who is largely given a pass despite pursuing – in some cases escalating – many of the same policies for which Bush is condemned today. ..."
"... From a massive escalation of the Afghan war in 2009, ramping up drone bombings on Pakistan, establishing a secret presidential "kill list" that included American citizens, leading a NATO operation that left Libya in ruin, or arming violent Islamist militants in Syria – Obama still has much to answer for, but is rarely asked to do so. Despite bragging that he'd already bombed seven countries by 2015, liberal celebrities like Ruffalo have had few harsh words for the Nobel Peace Prize winner. ..."
"... *Nobel Peace Drones™ ..."
"... "Mark Ruffalo (correctly) calling out George Bush for being a war criminal, responsible for the displacement and death of millions," ..."
Actor Mark Ruffalo was shredded for double standards after he posted a "callout" tweet
assailing George Bush for the sins of the Iraq War, with many netizens noting his aversion to
slamming Barack Obama's military adventures. Weighing into a controversy kicked off by TV
personality Ellen Degeneres, who came under fire for schmoozing it up with former President
George W. Bush at a football game last weekend, Ruffalo insisted no quarter or kindness should
be offered to perpetrators of heinous war crimes until they face consequences, including
Bush.
"Sorry, until George W. Bush is brought to justice for the crimes of the Iraq War,
(including American-lead torture, Iraqi deaths & displacement, and the deep scars --
emotional & otherwise -- inflicted on our military that served his folly), we can't even
begin to talk about kindness," the actor of Incredible Hulk fame tweeted.
Sorry, until George W. Bush is brought to justice for the crimes of the Iraq War,
(including American-lead torture, Iraqi deaths & displacement, and the deep scars --
emotional & otherwise -- inflicted on our military that served his folly), we can't even
begin to talk about kindness. https://t.co/dpMwfck6su
While some online were appreciative of the anti-Bush sentiment, many wondered aloud why
similar treatment was rarely afforded to Bush's successor, Barack Obama, who is largely given a
pass despite pursuing – in some cases escalating – many of the same policies for
which Bush is condemned today.
Claiming Bush is some monster while worshipping Obama even though they did the same things
abroad🤔
From a massive escalation of the Afghan war in 2009, ramping up drone bombings on Pakistan,
establishing a secret presidential "kill list" that included American citizens, leading
a NATO operation that left Libya in ruin, or arming violent Islamist militants in Syria –
Obama still has much to answer for, but is rarely asked to do so. Despite bragging that he'd
already bombed seven countries by 2015, liberal celebrities like Ruffalo have had few harsh
words for the Nobel Peace Prize winner.
"Woke Twitter, [including] Mark Ruffalo, are selective about call outs," one user
observed, noting the several occasions former first lady Michelle Obama posed affectionately
with Bush without facing a similar wave of outrage from figures like Ruffalo.
People ripping Jameela Jamil and the celebs in these screenshots but it was tumbleweed 101
when Michelle Obama was getting regular sweeties fixes from George W. Bush & going above
and beyond duty in friendly optics. Woke Twitter, incl Mark Ruffalo, are selective about call
outs. pic.twitter.com/snNYZEbAWM
It's funny how Mark Ruffalo can criticize Ellen, who was an actual person affected by
Bush's ignorance, but not a peep about Michelle Obama who admits to having a special
FRIENDSHIP with GW. https://t.co/9UM1BP8GpY
Another commenter seconded Ruffalo's views on Bush, but encouraged the actor to take his
criticism further, applying the same humanitarian standard evenly, regardless of the party in
power.
"Mark Ruffalo (correctly) calling out George Bush for being a war criminal, responsible
for the displacement and death of millions," the user said.
The same is true for Obama. He started 5 wars and displaced even more people than Bush.
However, Obama is a media darling who Mark gushes over.
Mark Ruffalo (correctly) calling out George Bush for being a war criminal, responsible for
the displacement and death of millions
The same is true for Obama. He started 5 wars and displaced even more people than Bush
However, Obama is a media darling who Mark gushes over
100% on Bush. You forgot to add Obama & Clinton though. No reason to root for justice
against one war criminal, while giving a free pass to others. It makes it partisan, rather
than ethical.
Some interesting estimates of the numbers of foreign fighters that participated in the Donbass War
from 2014-2019 from a report [PDF]
by the Soufan Center. (h/t
Kholmogorov)
Kiev-controlled Ukraine served as a destination for would-be murderers seeking impunity for
years. However, inviting foreign scum will help it about as much as it helped ISIS. Maybe
even less: some foreign and domestic ISIS bandits had ideology beyond raping and looting,
Ukrainian bandits in Donbass do not. "True believer" Ukies are in Canada, the US, or far away
from the front in Ukraine itself and studiously avoid getting into real fighting, where they
can be maimed or killed.
In contrast, many volunteers on the side of Donbass freedom fighters do have honest
beliefs and are not cowards avoiding combat. Not all, though: some just look for an
adventure, on the battlefield and in bed.
@Korenchkin If
you go by quintessence of Nazi ideology "my tribe is better than your tribe", every nation
has its Nazis, including Russia.
To its credit, tribal nationalists never got more than ~7% electoral support in
Russia.
After Ukrainian experience showed that any country can be quickly ruined by primeval
tribal nationalism, their support in Russia dropped to below 2%. But it still isn't zero.
Then again, ~1% of any population are schizophrenics, 2-3% are gays/lesbians, etc., so single
digit representation of any kind of deviation is not threatening country's survival.
@Mr. Hack I
asked the questions first, but I'll be generous and explain this to you on the fingers.
1. I used the term "Banderists" in the context of Ukraine's volunteer battalions –
that is, where foreigners have the most realistic chance of getting accepted.
2. Polls show Ukrainians to generally be 50/50 on Bandera, but obviously, that number will be
much higher amongst the rather self-selected sample that are volunteer battalion members. At
least 80%, if not 90%.
3. Poles obviously couldn't care less for Bandera. Polish *nationalists* – even less
so.
4. Nationalists are the likeliest foreigners to participate in the Donbass.
5. Do you now see why this would be a pertinent point to mention in the specific context of
why 10x fewer Poles fight for the Ukraine relative to Georgians, despite having 10x the
population?
I'm not sure if 14 fighters is a big enough sample size to justify lumping Canada into the
dreaded "Russophobe" category. But the 10 pro-Ukrainians to 4 pro-Russians ratio closely
mirrors that of self-declared ethnic Ukrainians (1,359,655) to Russians (622,445) in Canada.
Though many, possibly even a majority of those "Russians" are actually Jews. The Ukrainian
lobby has been disturbingly powerful in Canada for a long time (multiculturalism was their
bright idea), while the Russian lobby is seemingly invisible.
There are signs and symbols of Ukrainian nationalism everywhere (banks, festivals, flags,
bumper stickers etc), while similar Russian symbols are basically non-existent. The Uke to
Russkie ratio may be only 10-4, but it feels more like 10-1, or even 100-1.
I expected more Russians from the Baltics. Apparently, they and Serbs were early arrivals in
Girkin's group. Perhaps the ethnic Russians were counted as Russian?
Quite a few White Russians emigrated to France. The Whites were well supported by ethnic
Russians in the Donbass during the Civil War.
Many Irish Nationalist commentators supported Russia (enemy's enemy) but the table shows
Ireland Pro Ukraine (anti-imperialist a stronger driver?). The Russian settlers in the
Donbass are such an obvious parallel to the Orangemen.
1. Chechens would be the obvious answer. I recall reading there were 2x as many Chechens
fighting for Ukrainians than for Russians.
2. Svidomy Ukrainians in Russia.
3. And, as mentioned, Neo-Nazis and White Nationalists (~60%-70% on Ukraine's side, at
least initially). The other brands of Russian nationalists were overwhelmingly
pro-Russian.
@AnonFromTN
More foreign "scum" on Donbas side than Ukrainian side. As one would expect. It's not all bad
however, Donbas should be kept apart from Ukraine.
"True believer" Ukies are in Canada, the US, or far away from the front in Ukraine
itself and studiously avoid getting into real fighting, where they can be maimed or
killed.
Ukrainian-American Paslawsky fought and died in the war.
A graduate of the U.S. Military Academy and the only American known to have fought
alongside Ukrainian forces against pro-Russian separatists has been killed in eastern
Ukraine.
Mark Gregory Paslawsky, 55, died while fighting with the volunteer Donbas Battalion.
Paslawsky, who fought under the nom de guerre "Franko," was killed on August 19 during
fighting in the town of Ilovaysk, near the Ukrainian city of Donetsk, according to a Facebook
post by Ukrainian Interior Ministry adviser Anton Herashchenko.
Paslawsky was born in 1959 in New York and grew up in a tight-knit Ukrainian-American
family in New Jersey. He moved to Ukraine around two decades ago and informed his family
earlier this year that he planned to volunteer for the Ukrainian Army, according to his
brother, Nestor Paslawsky.
::::::::::::::
The American fighting for Donbas, "Cowb0y", meanwhile was some sort of petty criminal in
the USA. Like Motorola in Russia, of course.
@Philip Owen
Well the Serbs played a major role in the defence of the territory that is today the Donbas
(not particularly well known among modern Russians). So Serbian nationalists have an extra
cause in regards to the Donbas
Slavo-Serbia or Slaveno-Serbia, was a territory of Imperial Russia between 1753-64. It was
located by the right bank of the Donets River between the Bakhmutka River
(Бахмут) and Luhan
(Лугань) rivers. This area today constitutes the
territories of present-day Luhansk Oblast and Donetsk Oblast of Ukraine. The
administrative centre of Slavo-Serbia was Bakhmut (Bahmut).
In contrast, many volunteers on the side of Donbass freedom fighters do have honest
beliefs and are not cowards avoiding combat. Not all, though: some just look for an
adventure
Not mutually exclusive. If you feel that you're leading a meaningless life and you are
looking for adventure, something radically different from a cubicle job or whatever, might as
well do something like join a war where you get to defend innocent people.
Considering ex ISIS fighters are often left to go free and claim benefits it was interesting
to see the fate of the fella who went to the Donbass and didn't even fight.
@anonymous
coward So was South Africa but didn't stop there being close ties between loyalists and
the apartheid government, a few Ulstermen were in the the government and there was the shared
settler Calvinist outlook. The IRA had quite close links to Croats, don't know if loyalists
had the same with Serbs. MP Ian Paisley junior is somewhat of a Russophile.
@SveVid This is
all true, but all those people are completely and utterly assimilated into Ukrainians /
Russians and have been for much longer than living memory. Most people in Serbia (except
history nerds etc) have no idea about this history. A much more plausible explanation for
Serbs going to fight in the Donbass would make some reference to Russian (and also Greek btw)
volunteer units fighting with the Serbs in the 1990s and contacts established during that
time.
@Anatoly Karlin
Mazepa is way up there and he joined the early 17th century Swedish invasion of Russia that
ended with the defeat at Poltava. That effectively ended Sweden as a great power. Seems like
Ukrainians have a thing for worshipping losers allied with anyone west of them, so there is
some hope for Porky's eventual rehabilitation.
Carl Bildt's ancestors were there in high stockings among the vanquished at Poltava
– the Bildts never forgave the humiliation, those Swedes can be sneaky. That explains
the persistent anti-Russian attitudes among the Nordics. Swedes also tend to be
simple-minded, nobody swallows the current globo-homo propaganda as eagerly or looks for
Russian submarines hiding behind every whale.
By and large Austria and Croatia are the only surprises – here, the history of the last
century is a bit complicated. "Altösterreicher" is a popular euphemism for "Galician
Jew" i.e. the current Kiew regime. The Croats are more probably channeling their recent
hatred for the Serbs. [Not really] funny what the separation of East and West Rome is still
doing to a people.
"'You can assume that these terrorists are fighting for Israel. If they aren't part of the
regular Israeli army, they're fighting for Israel. Israel has common goals with Turkey, the
United States, France, Britain, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and other countries,' Assad was quoted by
Ynet" – https://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4946010,00.html
it's quite amazing that nothing similar happened only two decades later in WWII
Oh it did, we just changed the target race to the Japanese, as like Dan states, the German
race had been sufficiently castigated in the previous war, never to recover.
Our Supreme Allied Commander was said to have been of Jewish German descent
(((Eisenhauer))).
And yes, we know with which blood line he sided with.
Just one item about the Statue of Liberty. Its association with Emma Lazarus' later ode to
immigration has eclipsed the original meaning of the great monument. French sculptor
Bartholdi named his creation "Goddess Liberty enlightening the world." He conceived the idea
for the statue on July Fourth 1865 to commemorate the suppression of the slaveholder
insurrection two months earlier; Lazarus' poem was not added until1903. Bartholdi proposed to
give the statue to the people of America as an enduring monument to their successful struggle
to preserve the world's sole experiment in republican self-government.
Americans of 1865 understood it was their responsibility to maintain the free institutions
of their republic as an example to the world, not to function as an asylum for its poor and
downtrodden. It was the world's peoples' task to fight free government in their own
homelands, not to relocate to ours. While Europe's despots cheered the collapse of America's
first republic in 1861, there was an immense outpouring of support among the common folk for
the Union and the hope for democracy in their own nations that it inspired. Mindful of the
1848 republican revolutions that convulsed the Old Word, British and European rulers dared
not endorse the Confederate oligarchy, lest they trigger a new round of class warfare in
their own restive kingdoms.
Mass immigration of non-English speaking people was allowed for the first time in the
corrupt laissez-faire Gilded Age that followed the Civil War because the victorious northern
capitalists needed vast supplies of cheap labor to do the hard manual and industrial work
that Americans did not wish to do, having fought a costly war to abolish the most grotesque
form of exploitation of labor, and which four million ex-slaves could no longer be compelled
to do without wages.
It seems that Karl Muck wasn't the only musician arrested and interned as an emery alien
during WW I. Another conductor, Ernst Kunwald of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra was also
arrested.
In fact so many other musicians were arrested that Karl Muck was able to conduct a full
symphony orchestra when he made his last performance at the Interment camp at Fort Oglethorpe
, Georgia
It is highly likely that those musicians were denounced by their artistic rivals in order
to gain advancement
Curious that so far no one has mentioned just how magnificent a conductor actually Muck was.
His version of Parsifal, available on CD from I think Naxos is a supreme revelation of the
difference between a good conductor like, say, Karajan, and a sublimely great one like Muc...
It seems that Burrage initially approached this project with only a superficial
understanding of her subject matter. The subtitle of her work is Classical Music and
Xenophobia in World War I America . The dust jacket blurb tips her hand even more (or, more
likely, that of her publishers):
One of the cherished narratives of American history is that of the Statue of Liberty
welcoming immigrants to it shores. Accounts of the exclusion and exploitation of Chinese
immigrants in the late nineteenth century and Japanese internment during World War II tell a
darker story of American immigration. Less well known, however, is the treatment of
German-Americans and German nationals in the United States during World War I. Initially
accepted and even welcomed into American society, at the outbreak of the war this group would
face rampant intolerance and anti-German hysteria.
From such vain moral posturing, one can conclude that this book will amount to yet another
blunt instrument with which the Left can pummel supporters of President Trump for wishing to
build a wall on the Mexican border and limit non-white immigration. If we can shame people for
past xenophobia, according to this strategy, perhaps we can conquer xenophobia today and allow
the huddled masses of future Democrats to keep streaming into America. (Stephen Jay Gould
attempted a similar kind of history-shaming – only with psychometrics – in his
thoroughly debunkedThe Mismeasure of Man. )
Burrage hits a snag, however, when she reveals Muck's true character. He was the most
celebrated conductor in America at the time. Under his leadership, the BSO became the nation's
leading orchestra, which aided greatly in keeping Boston at the forefront of American high
society and culture. Affable, charismatic, and cultured, Muck was extremely popular in Boston,
and, shortly after arriving at the behest of financier and BSO founder Henry Lee Higginson in
1906, became a de facto member of Boston's aristocracy.
This aristocracy was so famous, it had a name: the Boston Brahmins . Boston was also home
to a very large German population and was ground zero for Germanophilia in New England. German
businesses, German newspapers, German food, and German culture were highly visible in Beantown
in the early twentieth century. Of course, everybody loved German classical music, which Muck
was all too happy to provide.
Higginson was Muck's biggest booster, despite not being German himself. They were close
friends who had much in common, culturally and ideologically. Both were highly aristocratic and
conservative. Higginson had spent many years in Germany and Austria in his youth studying
piano, and was fluent in German. In a peculiar coincidence, both men had similar scars on their
right cheeks. Muck received his from a fencing duel in his youth, and Higginson from a
Confederate saber during the Civil War.
But who was Karl Muck? He was a highly educated man of world-class talent who was proud of
his German roots, possessed nationalistic sympathies for his nation of birth, and held the
realistic opinions on race which were common in his day. This was, after all, the heyday of
writers such as Madison Grant, Lothrop Stoddard, and Henry Adams. Race realism, as well as
cultural chauvinism and a healthy support for eugenics, were de rigueur in educated
circles back then. And this included a relatively mild form of anti-Semitism among the
still-strong WASP elites:
[Muck's] racial views also affected his actions and judgment. When composer Ernest Bloch
presented his Three Jewish Poems for inclusion on the Boston Symphony program, Muck
was reluctant to debut the work if Bloch did not change the title. Bloch supposedly
responded, "Dr. M[uck] you speak exactly like my Jewish friends, who advised me to change the
title for obvious reasons." Bloch defended the title of his piece, to which Muck replied, "If
there were more Jews like you, there would be less anti-Semitism."
Higginson was worse in this regard – or better, depending on your perspective. He
supported immigration restriction in order to keep undesirables out of America and was a race
patriot almost as much as he was an American patriot. He was a leading member of the Immigrant
Restriction League, and was well ensconced in the national power circles of the day, being
cousins with fellow immigration hawk Senator Henry Cabot Lodge . Higginson used his
contacts in government to bust musician's unions. He also wrangled with Jewish attorney and
future Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis , who sought to curtail
Higginson's various business interests in the name of trust-busting. And this, according to
Burrage, informed Higginson's negative opinions of Jews.
Not surprisingly, Burrage considers Higginson's racial views "flawed," and then describes
Higginson and the Immigrant Restriction League like so:
The league also used pseudo-scientific dogma to divide European white men into
biological categories, classifying eastern Europeans into the most inferior type to justify
their arguments. Its view of nationalism was built on an "ideology of kinship to enthrone
their own tribe and oppress others." It justified discrimination, arguing that America
could "improve its race" by selecting immigrants based on "appropriate national origins." The
league was influenced by eugenicist Madison Grant, who wrote The Passing of the
Great Race (1916), which promoted a theory of "Nordic" racial supremacy and advocated the
separation or removal of all "worthless" and "unfit" types. It was inspired by scientist
Robert DeCourcy Ward, who publicized his view that "science decrees restrictions on the new
immigration for the conservation of the 'American race."' Higginson's father-in-law, Harvard
professor Louis Agassiz, was a prolific writer and teacher on the topic of
scientific racism, believing that races were distinct and unequal and could be
classified based on climatic zones. Boston's upper classes feared that foreigners would
replace their own native stock, and they worried about "biological defeat." Immigration
restriction was a "phase of national defense" against "the strange invaders who seemed so
grave a threat to their class, their region, their country, and their race."
After stepping back from this and having a cigarette, I believe most of us on the Dissident
Right will conclude that we were all born a century and a half too late.
Getting over that, there is so much to unpack here, one hardly knows where to begin. Yes,
there's the stunned respect we all must have for this Higginson fellow, who was related to both
Henry Cabot Lodge and Louis Agassiz (whom Gould heartily denounced in Mismeasure
), and who was able to speak in defense of white, ethnocentric interests so candidly. The
Boston Brahmins had every reason to worry about biological defeat; we're entering the jaws of
that defeat today. Also, this passage should be met with some sadness regarding the hidebound
chauvinism whites used to have toward other whites. This attitude will have to be discarded
entirely for whites to have enough solidarity to thrive in the next century.
Most apropos to The Karl Muck Scandal , however, is how Burrage attempts to paint
Karl Muck as the victim of xenophobia. Of course, he was. He was a perfectly innocent
man when federal authorities arrested and incarcerated him in March 1918. But Muck and
Higginson were Dissident Rightists back when the not-so-Dissident Right ruled the roost in
America. So Burrage is in effect going to bat for someone on the Right in order to strike a
blow for the Left. How's that for irony?
The story undergoes a few more twists before completely unraveling. If there is a villain in
this book, it is New York socialite Mrs. William (Lucie) Jay, who really didn't like Germans.
Jay, whose deceased husband was descended from early American statesman John Jay, tirelessly
lobbied for Muck's dismissal from the BSO all throughout the war. Muck hired too many German
musicians, or he played too much German music, according to her. The woman organized committees
to ban all German music. She tried to prevent the BSO from playing in New York. She spread
false rumors about Muck in order to discredit him. She hurled insults at him as often as
possible. She called for boycotts. She accused him of supporting the German military effort.
She also (ahem) muck -raked his life, searching for sexual impropriety. As anti-German
feeling in America grew more and more intense, Jay's attacks on Muck grew more and more
strident.
Here she is at her hysterical best:
Rather a thousand times that the orchestral traditions fade from our lives than one hour
be added to the war's duration by clinging to this last tentacle of the German octopus!
Then there was the "Star-Spangled Banner" non-scandal which got the attention of the entire
country. In October 1917, the BSO had received numerous requests to play the "Star-Spangled
Banner" before a concert in Providence, Rhode Island. Since it was late and the programs had
already been printed, Higginson decided to ignore the requests. The song hadn't yet become the
national anthem (which wouldn't happen until 1931) and didn't quite fit in with the pieces the
BSO was slated to play that evening, anyway. Of course, Higginson didn't bother to tell Muck
about this, and allowed the oblivious maestro to conduct a concert free of star-spangled
banners.
In an astonishingly brazen instance of "fake news," John Rathom, the editor of the
Providence Journal, then accused Muck of deliberately refusing to play the patriotic
anthem because of his German sympathies. Not only did this story later appear in newspapers all
across the country, but Rathom kept the momentum going with even more accusations:
The zealous newspaperman spread reports among his readership that Muck was pro-German and
a friend of Kaiser Wilhelm. Rathom distorted the facts, claiming to uncover foreign espionage
plots that were later revealed to be fraudulent. Once such plot suggested that Muck intended
to destroy American munitions factories. On November 21, 1917, the New York Times
reported that Rathom "thrilled and enthused" seven hundred members of the Pilgrim Publicity
Association at the Boston City Club with a story of "German spies in Boston" outlining his
great campaign against them.
This damaged Muck's reputation overnight, and Lucie Jay later used it relentlessly to incite
violent hatred against him. (Burrage speculates that Jay and Rathom colluded in Muck's
character assassination, but no one knows for sure.) Thousands of influential Americans were
now onboard Lucie Jay's muck-up-Muck train. People were calling for the conductor's
assassination, internment, or deportation. Crowds as far away as Baltimore were chanting "Kill
Muck! Kill Muck!" It got so bad that the authorities had to step in to determine if Muck was
indeed a dangerous enemy alien. In all cases, they found no evidence of wrongdoing – but
not for lack of trying. Some investigators feared that Muck was putting coded messages in his
musical scores. Others theorized that he kept a disassembled radio transmitter in his Maine
summer house with which he signaled German U-boats. (The apparatus belonged to the landlord,
and was unbeknownst to Muck.)
Regardless, we should remember that this was a period when the American war machine was
churning out absolutely vicious anti-German
propaganda – and the people were beginning to believe it and take part in the
suppression of all things German. Violence against German-Americans became quite common during
this time. So these false accusations from Jay and Rathom threatened to have deadly
consequences.
A First World War-era anti-German propaganda poster A German-American after
being whipped, tarred, and feathered in August 1918
Despite her hypermodern moral posturing, Burrage does provide useful scholarship. Most
notable in The Karl Muck Scandal is her well-researched contention that Lucie Jay was
not all that she was cracked up to be. Jay may indeed have been an American patriot. She may
also have been as anti-German as advertised. But her real motivations behind ruining Karl
Muck's life were far pettier. She was on the Board of Directors of the New York Philharmonic
(NYP), and was jealous of the BSO's star conductor. Other than the brief period from 1909 to
1911, when Gustav Mahler waved their baton, the Knickerbockers really did play second fiddle to
the Celtics back then – and that bothered a lot of wealthy and powerful people in Gotham.
Taking out the NYP's top rival in the most literal sense became Lucie Jay's idée
fixe throughout the wa,r and ultimately made her the Tonya Harding of classical music.
Burrage reveals another reason for Jay's hatred for Muck, and this one's even pettier. Yeah,
it was all about money:
Jay had even deeper motives for her persistent attacks on the Boston Symphony that cut to
the heart of her own economic security. In September of 1906, her brother Hermann had passed
away. Estranged from his wife, much of his estate was bequeathed to Mrs. Jay and her brother
Charles. Mrs. Jay acquired a large share in the North German Lloyd Steamship Line and
presumably railroad stocks from the Vanderbilt interests as well. It made logical sense to
support her family's interests and further their progress within the United States, which was
threatened, as we shall see, by political forces directly related to the BSO.
And what were these political forces? None other than Henry Lee Higginson and his powerful
anti-immigration allies in government. Since the 1880s, millions of immigrants, many of whom
were Eastern European Jews, had been streaming into America from Europe on steamships, making
Mrs. William Jay and her family richer and richer by the mile. Immigration was Mrs. Jay's bagel
and cream cheese, as it were, and Higginson with all his race realism and polite anti-Semitism
was threatening to spoil the bar mitzvah. That's basically it. So, let's now appreciate another
level of irony in which Burrage is forced to cast a pro-immigration harpy like Jay as the
villain in a drama that's ostensibly pro-immigration.
Unbelievable as it sounds, there's even more irony to this story. Lucie Jay, as it turns
out, was herself German! Her maiden name was Oelrich – a fact she obscured beneath her
husband's time-honored and quite Anglo last name. It seems to me that the obsession behind
Jay's Muck-hate was a form of ethnocentrism in reverse, the kind of contempt born only from
familiarity. I can't prove this, but it seems to be the prime motivator here. America was
pulled into a war with Germany, and Jay felt especially betrayed by her own people whenever
they expressed sympathy for the enemy. And in Muck's case, this was at least half-true. Before
America's entry into the war, he had actively supported his homeland and was on excellent terms
with the German ambassador in Washington. He also never applied for American citizenship and
never denounced Germany. For a person like Lucie Jay, who wanted to erase or hide everything
about her that was German, what Karl Muck did (and did not do) must have seemed like
treason.
The story could have ended here. Worn down by years of slander, libel, hostility, and death
threats, Karl Muck and his wife Anita decided to leave for Germany. He resigned from the BSO in
March 1918 and was preparing to depart when he was hit with the bombshell news that the
Massachusetts District Attorney would not let him leave. Apparently, the DA was intrigued by
Lucie Jay's previous unproven accusations of sexual impropriety, and felt that Muck may have a
skeleton rattling around in his closet after all. And after a thorough investigation by the
Bureau of Investigation (BOI), they found it. Muck had been having an affair with a 22-year-old
mezzo-soprano named Rosamond Young.
This wasn't a mere summer fling; he was madly in love with her, so much so that he wrote her
love letters and promised to divorce his wife for her. Yes, he was a married man in his late
50s. Yes, under normal circumstances, this would be quite the scandal. But it hardly amounts to
law-breaking. Yet the BOI and powerful anti-German elements in the federal government –
especially hardline Attorney General and rabid Hun-hater A. Mitchell Palmer – were
determined to make it so. And under what contrived pretenses did they finally nab Muck?
Well, Muck (kind of) violated the Comstock Act of 1873 , which forbade sending
anything obscene or immoral by US Mail. Apparently, sappy quotes such as this qualified as
"obscene":
But can't you see, my darling, how much harder it is for me to renounce the love that grew
between us so sublimely? Must we, for the sake of foolish sentiments that are imposed on us
by others, foreswear the love that is divine and inexpressible by common language? No, a
thousand times, no! You are mine and I am your slave and so I must remain.
He also (sort of) violated the Mann White Slavery Act of 1910 , which prohibited
transporting women or girls across state lines "for the purpose of prostitution or debauchery,
or for any other immoral purpose." Muck had apparently "abducted" Young every time he traveled
with her out of state with the BSO to perform.
Such flimsy reasons to arrest a man may seem ridiculous today, but they were deadly serious
back then. Yes, the US government needed to keep a lid on the immoral behavior of its citizens
(if only it would do so today!), and yes, white slavery was quite the menace back then.
However, Karl Muck's arrest clearly amounted to abuse.
And the abuse did not end there. American authorities then blackmailed Muck into
being interned as an enemy alien at Fort Oglethorpe in Georgia in return for their keeping
quiet about his affair with Young. It was either that or going public and trying him as a
sexual deviant in a Boston court – a humiliation that would ruin him, Young, and Anita
regardless of the trial's outcome. Honorable gentleman that he was, Muck "was only too proud to
shoulder" the burden of internment, and opted for the extended vacation in Georgia. He stayed
there for a year and a half.
Then, while Muck was serving time behind barbed wire and machine guns in the sweltering
Georgia heat, the US government reneged on its promise and allowed the Boston press to
publicize his affair and his love letters to Young anyway. This caused nearly all of
what remained of Muck's fan base to abandon him. The Boston Brahmins did so as well, likely
because distancing themselves from Muck would keep the heat off their own sexual indiscretions,
of which, according to Burrage, there were many. Unfortunately, Higginson was counted among
this number – although in his case he seemed to be acting more out of wartime American
patriotism than sexual hypocrisy.
If this weren't enough, the US authorities then stole all of Muck's assets. When they
finally deported him nine months after the war, he went back to Germany flat broke.
Given the vitriolic hatred of Germans in WWI, it's quite amazing that nothing similar
happened only two decades later in WWII. Best demonstrated by the family name of the #1
General of the Allied forces in Europe.
The remnants of America's still virulent World War I germanophobia had taken its toll. By
World War II it had essentially totally eviscerated German-American culture and political
strength. A job well-done by the Anglo-American establishment!
This short documentary mentions German-American persecution during World War I, and the
massive numbers of draft dodgers. It also notes problems with the British royals German
roots, including the fact the Kaiser was a first cousin and buddy of the King of England.
Most Americans don't realize that Anglo-Saxons were Germans who immigrated to England!
"... This is a profound and sound thesis, i.e., the Power Elites could encourage universal suffrage and not feel it threatened, significantly, their long term interests or direction. The "Masses", that undifferentiated formless and shapeless blob-like gelatinous mass, could simply be "Nudged" and fudged and snockered to vote against their own interests based on generated fantasy, lies. agitprop, propaganda, and easily subverted Christianity-thoroughl made into a double agent. ..."
"... They are a kind of unlanded gentry, or a bankster oligarchy if you will. The "capitalist class" is really a pseudo-capitalist, Cultural Marxist, corruption-dependent, chosen class. ..."
"... YES – Trump is an insufferable jerk – but clearly, they are the ones being dishonest. Russiagate was a hoax – Ukrainegate is a gross exaggeration of a problem. ..."
"... This is as it's going to get before the country breaks apart. Overall, I don't regret voting for Trump, but there is not a lot of swamp draining going on. ..."
Tell me something about liberal hatred and plans I don't know.
Trump is not ridiculous. He looks good for his age. Compare him to that withered crone
actor de Niro.Or the hideous Lyndon Johnson. Or lardass big bellied cucumber nose WC Field
face Bill Clinton. whoever said a president has to be good looking?
NYC has been corrupt since it was a Dutch Colony and pirate's flea market to rival Port
Royal in Jamaica. NYC Real estate? Founding fathers Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr and
others were NYC real estate speculators 230 years ago. Construction may have been reasonably
honest in NYC at some point but that ended when immigrants from 2 countries took over the
construction business long before Trump and his parents were born. Construction and real
estate is a tough business as I know well. The Trumps waded in to the toughest town in the
country fought the good fight and beat the crooks at their own game.
I can't wait till Trump wins again to see the liberals heads totally explode. I was in a
joyous mood all November and December 2016 as I saw the angst and despair of the liberals
The liberals hate me and mine as much as they hate Trump.
I suppose the author is trying to say Trump and the liberals are both bad. Trump used too
much gold in his apartment in Trump tower. Well, I suppose if you're an IKEA person you're
not used to anything else
He'll have to find something other than Trump is a repulsive clown to convince me.
@animalogic
i agree with you .. the oligarchs are just fine.. they have N. Korea wondering what to do
next, the situation in Iraq is Kurds have generated total Chaos in Iraq. the situation in
Syria in Idib has the Terrorist hiding behind the Syrians trapped there, so it is a stand off
for now, and Erdergodan has abandoned the USA as a partner in N. Syria and will move
independently into Syria to establish the 20 mile wide buffer zone in order to separate Kurds
from Turks, Iraq just wiped out the Kurd radio and tv stations, and Sissi in Egypt has been
exposed in corruption so the masses in the streets demanding his demise, the situation in
France is yellow jackets on the rise, the situation in Hong Kong is shoot the protesters,
China has given the high sign and is preparing for war, Israel can't find an honest leader,
Russia and Iran have teamed to avoid the USA dollar Hegemony..and Iran is setting higher and
better than ever and Briton is about to leave the UK and the EU and the USA is infighting to
impeach its President.
but what I see coming is not another American revolution instead I see a worldwide
revolution developing the masses against the corrupt nation state system and all its bankers,
corporatist and politicians. The elites have been using the Nation state system, and
privately owned media, to organize their crimes and to further their corrupt profits and to
deny everyone, everywhere their human rights. and that denial is about to come home to rest.
Americans are far behind the rest of the world in understanding but soon, I believe, they too
will catch up..
I believe we are about to see humanity take on the powers that be. everywhere all at once.
The war cry is going to be no more corruption, no more nation states, no more top down
governance.. and the result is going to be chaos for the bankers, the corporations and the
people that depend on the rule of law and bureaucracies for their protection.. Cause I don't
think there is going to be any protection for them.
@Laurent
Guyénot LOL. Donald Obama Trump belongs to the swamp. Only the zombie voting class
can't see that. Anyone with an ounce of common sense knows that the voting class consists of
100% deluded zombies who believe they personally can influence the creatures who own and rule
them.
Doing what is needed to avoid fighting/dying in yet another "bankster's" war is hardly
cowardly, in fact it is the only moral and brave thing to do. Wars for the sake of empires
are not only immoral, they are illegal.
I don't know how old you are but that realization only took place in the population
because of the Vietnam war ..not before it.
The military allowed for pacifist who objected to killing anyone as medics or supply
jobs.
This guy made clear he ran not because he objected to war on a moral basis but because he was
afraid of getting his little self hurt.
There IS a difference.
@French
Pronografer You ain't kidding! Does anyone remember the Don(ald) was hobnobing with the
Clintons? He was writing checks to their reelection campaigns and they had been guests at his
last wedding. The zombies are getting scarier
Many insightful comments to think about, but the most practical one was to be ready when the
"SHTF." (I love that initialism. The precursor to GTFO). Graham Greene wrote that every man's
life has a turning point; but that most men do not recognize it at the time. Societies, I
think, are the same. The challenge is to recognize the SHTF/GTFO/RuralTown point in a timely
fashion.
@Ash
Williams Q: "Do you seriously believe that the people coming out of 'higher education'
today with basket weaving degrees can compete with the Chinese that major in STEM?"
A: "You mean the IP spies they send to the USA? I think that's being addressed."
Regardless of how STEM-educated the Chinese really are, and regardless of whether they
stole or invented their high tech, their high tech manufacturing capabilities appear to have
already outpaced those of the USA. They quickly build giant automated factories making very
sophisticated and high quality gear at low cost, and seem to have few problems finding
employees to operate them. They are quite agile and advanced. I doubt that they have
hindrances like unions, drug-addiction, high labor cost, and stifling regulations on the same
scale that the USA does. Probably about 20% of USA working-age citizens are basically
ineducable.
@RoatanBill
". Do you also attend some religious institution to pray to some space man? "
Hey Bill, l enjoy your comments but you ought to show a little decency towards certain
aspects of this so- called "life" and the faith and INSPIRATIONAL aspects that give some of
us the courage and energy to FIGHT on here on the front lines.. for what is OURS. What WE
built.
To pot shot from the side-lines in Roatan, is kinda dirty pool, eh?
This is a profound and sound thesis, i.e., the Power Elites could encourage universal suffrage
and not feel it threatened, significantly, their long term interests or direction. The
"Masses", that undifferentiated formless and shapeless blob-like gelatinous mass, could
simply be "Nudged" and fudged and snockered to vote against their own interests based on
generated fantasy, lies. agitprop, propaganda, and easily subverted Christianity-thoroughl
made into a double agent.
Hmmm. We are approaching an existence resembling that of The Matrix-which was non-fiction
fiction.
Let me offer you democratarians some succor. The Republic is in good hands, by the
populace, so shall ye know the country:
@SafeNow
When the Dems take over they will do the opposite of Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot who forced
people into the countryside. The current elites hate the rural life and those that own small
farms. Absolutely hate them. The Dems will install heavy carbon, meat and ammunition taxes
among others forcing what is left of meth infested rural white America into the cesspools
that are our cities. Really I don't see any way out of this mess we've got ourselves in. You
think people are going to stand up and fight knowing the heavy counter force that will come
their way swiftly and savagely? The time to roll this lunacy back was in the 70s and 80s.
I'm
a YM 1955. Lived through it all my man. By the grace of God the Vietnam war ended the year I
graduated high school and I did not have to face the decision of submitting to a governments
edict that I must "go and do my patriotic chore" or saying f*ck it and disrupting my life up
to that point and knowing it could never, ever be the same.
You keyboard commando's talk shit, because it is cheap. How many of you have ever received
a letter from uncle sugar which started out with the words "Greeting"? By the way, after
5o,000 KIA's and many more WIA's, what was actually achieved by the Vietnam war? My
chonies(google it) are now made in Vietnam. Please tell me why this could not have been hashed
out in a trade deal, without all the death and destruction.
@Stonehands
Congratulations – you're the first person I'm aware of that figured out what my screen
name signifies.
To me, religion and gov't are the two worst inventions of mankind with religion being the
precursor that led to gov't. Once you can convince people of some god, it's not a far stretch
to convince them they absolutely need a leader. Both institutions are anti freedom and
detrimental to the worlds people.
Throne and alter were twins–two vultures from the same egg.
To attack the king was treason; to dispute the priest, blasphemy.
The sword and cross were allies.
Together they attacked the rights of men; they defended each other.
The king owned the bodies of men, the priests the souls.
One lived on taxes collected by force, the other on alms collected by fear.
Both robbers, both beggars.
The king made laws, the priest made creeds.
With bowed backs the people carried the burdens of one, with open-mouthed wonder received the
dogmas of the other.
The king said rags and hovels for you, robes and palaces for me.
The priest said God made you ignorant and immoral; He made me holy and wise; you are the
sheep, I am the shepherd; your fleeces belong to me.
You must not reason, you must not contradict, you must believe.
Robert G. Ingersoll
My only gripe would be referring to the Western power class as "capitalist" (a common, minor
complaint here in the comments section of this article).
Granted, there is a thin veneer of capitalism coating the ugly visage of the globalist power
class, but scratch the surface and you discover something else altogether.
Western elites do not live by the rules & strictures of the free market. They are a kind of unlanded gentry, or a bankster oligarchy if you will.
The "capitalist class" is really a pseudo-capitalist, Cultural Marxist, corruption-dependent,
chosen class.
The homeless & the powerless know capitalism.
The powerful & rich here in the West know only that their financial missteps must be
& will be socialized, & insured by the dwindling wealth of the angry but impotent
masses.
@renfro Now
students, let us go over the history of American warfare.
Revolution;
organized by the wealthiest people in the colonies who borrowed 13 billion in French money
to pay for it all. This included our first gold deposits for our treasury. As per usual, most
of the money stayed in France to pay for armaments soldiers and ships to get it all to
America.
After the war, Hamilton and the rest of the founders decided they weren't going to tax
themselves to pay for the war, build the Capitol and support the new government.
So Hamilton sec treasury decided to tax the frontier hillbillies redneck deplorables who'd
done most of the fighting on their only transportable cash crop whiskey. The deplorables
rebelled. Washington led a bigger army against veterans of the revolutionary war than he ever
did against the British. The leaders of the whiskey rebellion were hanged. By the way, we
never did pay France back
Civil War; 750,000 White men in the prime of life killed so as to leash on the scale of the Black Plague. Side effect
100 years of poverty for the south
Spanish American War;
ostensibly to free Cubans from Spain so they could have a wonderful democracy. Lots of
American men killed and crippled. Real purpose, to grab Manila Harbor and the Philippines for
a forward base to harass east Asia. Side effect, burdened with Puerto Rico and Rican
immigrants.
WW1;
conned into it by Britain that needed our help to destroy its major economic competition
Germany and Jews who wanted to invade Palestine using the British army. Lots of American men
killed and crippled
WW2.;
more of the same. Side effects communists swallowed up China east and Central Europe and
fomented revolution and death all over the world. Jews became supreme rulers of the west due
to their martyrdom during the war.
Korea;
A lot of American men killed and crippled for no good reason. Side effect, best guarded
border in the world. Unlike the borders of America which are essentially unguarded
Vietnam;
Caused by Cold War egomania of Kennedy and Johnson. A lot of American men Killed and
crippled for no good reason. We lost Side effect all S Vietnamese classified as refugees for
admission to America Set a very very very very bad precedent.
Late 1990s Balkan War;
America fought with the bad guys Muslim Albanians and Bosnians against the good guys
Christian Culture Serbs and Croats.
1990 to eternity war;
Killing and bombing Middle East so Israel won't have to fight its own wars. Lots of
American soldiers lots of civilians killed and crippled for no good reason. Side effect
Zionist jews in Pentagon steal billions of dollars and vast amounts of armaments. Loot
presumably sent to Israel.
Oldie but goodie
Q. What's the battle song of the Israeli army?
A. Onward Christian Soldiers
Off topic, that Batman movie with Danny de Vito and Christopher Walken's on TV.
@Ash
Williams Interesting observations about China and Russia. They seems to prefer a
multi-polar world based on co–operation and being "left alone". In my view they would
probably also co-operate with the Anglo-Zionists if they were not such warmongers intent on
global hegemony. I think Trump wants to cooperate with Russia but the MIC globalists will not
let him.
@Anon Sorry
to be a spoil sport and a doom monger. I really wish I could say that there were good guys. I
always used to think of Israel (and the US and UK) as the "good guys" but then I woke up.
There are no good guys. Nations operate out of self-interest. Empires struggle for supremacy.
They have all done bad things. Might is right.
Where does this leave us? We must seek out like minded Christians and like minded people
who will resist the coming evil. We are all asked to repent and to preach about the coming
judgement. If the Apocalypse is anything to go by then "overcoming the world" actually means
resisting until death. I am sorry. Bad times ahead. Keep the faith try and be kind don't back
down from standing up for the truth.
Perhaps the monetary answer to the banksters' usury has been tried before. And because it was
so successful the banksters declared war on this simple yet principled system of monetary
discipline and demonized its leader–unlike any other person before and since
(specifically so this system would not catch on and put the banksters out of usurious
money-lending practices).
What if most of everything we were told–especially about history–was an
outright lie, fabrication, "enhancement", distortion or embellishment? What if you could
investigate for yourselves and confirm this fable was organized? If so, then it must be by
way of reason to have been intentional! We are not talking about pieces here or there, but
wholesale chunks inverted and presented by corrupt "officials" as sacrosanct history based on
"research". No, ladies and gentlemen, these are no more than propaganda talking points made
to keep you in your place: devoid of the truth, distracted from an en-devour thereof, or
coerced into silence or taken out if all else failed.
The awakening is here and now in our lifetimes; what remains is our effort to commit .
time for a reprogramming course indeed .
Hitler, more than an other politician since then, cared more about his people than
imaginable. For example, he used non-inflationary government created and issued Labor
Treasury Certificates to fund Germany from the poorest country in Europe to the richest in
five years. This made the bankers (Judea) declare on Germany. This simple approach to money
(money is not an intrinsic value rather it is a "measure" of value much like a measuring cup
that measures commodities like sugar, flour, grain, etc.) could have caught on in the rest of
Europe and throughout the world putting the end to the banksters and their usury.
"Germany issued debt-free and interest-free money from 1935 on, which accounts for
Germany's startling rise from the depression to a world power in five years. The German
government financed its entire operations from 1935 to 1945 without gold, and without debt.
It took the entire Capitalist and Communist world to destroy the German revolution, and
bring Europe back under the heel of the Bankers."
If you have ever dared or not to watch a video, please make an concerted effort to watch
this one (just about six minutes long but one that needs views and redistribution like none
other) and one that may hold the most retained value from its consumption:
The American attitude has changed dramatically the public majority has lost its innocence
and is not 'trusting' as it was once. Vietnam was the eye opener for the public but not until
it dragged on and on till no one could justify it. People didn't want to believe the
government perfidy.
With good reason we have learned war is politics and the still fooled or patriot believer
young people get sent to war.
A lot of people talking about war have great 'hindsight'.
@RoatanBill
Even the average atheist draws the line whenever someone says that we DO NOT have any degree
of freedom and that moral responsibility is not a reality.
As a die-hard unbeliever, you may
reject the position that moral laws descend from a higher plane unperceived by our senses; as
a tax- paying citizen, however, you still need to live by sublunary standards of civility.
And this can be done only if free will and moral realism are the law of the land.
In the normal course of events both you and l are one in promoting some kind of " operative
morality."
As a guardian of morality, whether you feel this necessary truth is objectively real (
Christianity) or subjectively true (as l presume it is for you)- we could not go on living
and believe that being alive is all right , unless we enact these inferences or postulations.
@Who Cares
Well, my friend, CA is way ahead of you. High gas prices, translating into high
transportation costs. Outrageous vehicle license fees. Everything is more expensive here, and
going up everyday. Insane building codes and exorbitant fees. Background checks every time
you buy a box of ammo. Homeless everywhere, some have been arrested up to 50 times and still
on the street. I've seen bums sleeping on the sidewalk roll over and piss right in front of
everyone. Don't expect any help from the cops, they're too busy chasing car thieves,
stabbings, murders and other mayhem. And if you're stupid enough to take matters into your
own hands?
You'll end up in jail. Meth, opioids, you name it. Oh, and on windy days, they
sometimes cut the power. This is out here in the country, the cities are way worse. The
communists have turned a once great state into a turd world shit hole. I'm not overly fond of
Trump, but the Bolsheviks scare the piss out of me. And they're just getting started. Smile!
It only gets worse. Try the Soylent Green New Meal at McDonald's! Babies. It's what's for
dinner! America the fucking beautiful, my ass.
@Johnny Walker
Read An informative book on Vietnam is, Charlie Company, What Vietnam Did to US, by Peter
Goldman and Tony Fuller, based on interviews of 65 Vietnam veterans.
@Laurent
Guyénot No doubt Trump is fundamentally a non-obedient character which is what
determines the "information" attitude towards him.
No doubt Trump tried to wake up the part of America that the élite lives on the
shoulder of, in the early stage of his political rise: the élite noticed it and found
it, naturally, outrageous. The part of America that is ridden herd on by the élite,
however, didn't notice the wake-up signs.
That's natural too no Trump nor anyone else can revert the natural hiearchy, and order of
things between people, because that's determined by the quality of their minds.
The comments against Trump by people who are on his same team just confirm the above, with
their primary (or secondary) school way of looking at things in here-and-now and
smash-them-to-win ways.
Trump's achievements are severely limited by his team's characteristics, so to speak.
@Cyrano
Great comment But around 99% of Western "nationalists", brought up on a constant brainwashing
diet of socialism-o-phobia, Soviet-o-phobia, Russophobia, and mindless adoration of "Western
capitalism" as patriotism literally since their toddler days, will shy away from recognizing
the truth of this.
@Robert
DolanAnn Coulter has soured on him, but says she feels compelled to defend him
because the
Jmedia lies about him all day long.
Exactly – I find myself in the same boat. It is not just the Dems and the Jew media,
it is also the entrenched security state – the CIA, the FBI leadership, and the
permanent bureaucracy, that are all trying to take Trump down on false premises.
YES – Trump is an insufferable jerk – but clearly, they are the ones being
dishonest. Russiagate was a hoax – Ukrainegate is a gross exaggeration of a
problem.
The "virtue signaling" of his opposition is without question BS! Truly his opposition are
phonies! The truth is they are all ripping off America – using the government to enrich
themselves.
Trump is doing America a favor by exposing Bidden as a crook. (Good god – when Is
Obama going to be a three-figure millionaire?)
The real evil is Bannon, Clapper, and Comey using the security state to attack and nullify
the 2016 election. They are making fools of democracy itself.
Anything that can be construed as actually or potentially presenting a "threat" or a
"challenge" to the untrammeled world domination of the globo-imperialist capitalist
Anglo-Zionist/Western ruling class must be demonized, execrated and slandered – up to
& including their own native population's yearnings for a normal existence and sensible,
nativist ethno-nationalism.
This is as it's going to get before the country breaks apart. Overall, I don't regret voting
for Trump, but there is not a lot of swamp draining going on. Too bad we can't repeal
birthright citizenship and kick more illegals out of the country. Team R wants to give more
greencards out.
"... Biden's criminal extortion wasn't a secret. He boasted of this racket at a public occasion. He famously admitted that: ..."
"... The Ukrainians put in place someone who was solid at the time, so solid that he terminated the investigation of Burisma oil company. This company was the vessel to transfer bribes to VP Biden, via his son Hunter Biden. John Solomon of The Hill wrote: ..."
"... The Ukraine became a Clintonite colony, and Joe Biden their viceroy in the Ukraine. Biden's involvement in the coup d'état was his biggest crime, but nobody speaks of that, noticed Joe Lauria . ..."
"... Joe Biden had been treated royally in Kiev. He was asked to chair government meetings and proudly sat on the Presidential seat. The Ukrainians are not famous for their subtlety. Nice people, but rather simple ones, even by East European measure. ..."
"... People in Kiev say he had built the case against Russia on the strength of a single server allegedly used for hacking the DNC. The server is located in the Ukraine, not in Russia. President Trump asked for its whereabouts in his conversation with the Ukrainian President Mr Zelensky. ..."
"... The Dems claimed Trump threatened to withdraw funds from the Ukraine if they won't cooperate with the US enquiry. This claim had been debunked after the full transcript of two Presidents' chat had been published ..."
"... How could they find fault in Trump allegedly threatening to cut aid to Ukraine if they think Biden was perfectly all right for doing exactly that? But these guys aren't playing cricket. ..."
"... The forthcoming Presidential race is becoming a global affair, it seems. In so many countries the US influence had been delivered by agents of Clintonite clan, and all of them are tempted to do what the Clintonites ask, that is to help them to undermine President Trump. In the Ukraine, the struggle of Clintonites and Trumpers is far from over. President Zelensky promised President Trump to help him; but the oligarchs of the Ukraine are in Clintonite camp. ..."
"... All but one: Igor (Benny) Kolomoysky, a maverick Jewish oligarch and a friend of the President, is an enemy of Clintonites. He also stands against IMF, International Monetary Fund, the powerful bankers' body that issued many loans to the Ukraine. ..."
"... People in Kiev say that about 1.7 billion dollars of the latest loan had been pocketed by the American supporters of Poroshenko, meaning Joe Biden and his ilk. Now Mr Kolomoysky suggests the new Ukrainian president may default on IMF loans. ..."
"... The Ukrainians like to back winners; once they made a mistake supporting Mrs Clinton, as they were sure she would win. Perhaps they will make this mistake again. It would depend on the actual Dem contender. Joe Biden had cooked his goose by taking too many bribes in the Ukraine, but another contender may have a better chance, the Ukrainians think. Mrs Warren, perhaps? ..."
"... "Maverick" Kolomoysky is a Zionist, Jewish supremacist, unhinged Putin-hater- in the mold of Khodorkovsky . A couple of Rothschild stooges installed to loot Ukraine and Russia respectively. ..."
"... You are 100% bang on with this article, Mr. Shamir. If anyone should be impeached, it's Joe Biden and his criminal enterprise, otherwise known as his family. Joe Biden should be pre-emptively impeached before he has even bigger chance to do even more damage to his country and the world. ..."
"... Notice how Eliz Warren is skyrocketing. Because she's talking about government corruption and the middle class. Most people .that have a brain at all will unite against corruption ..no matter which party they support .there will be tunnel vision knuckle draggers who wont .but most people will. No one likes being cheated or betrayed. ..."
"... The forthcoming Presidential race is becoming a global affair, it seems. In so many countries the US influence had been delivered by agents of Clintonite clan, and all of them are tempted to do what the Clintonites ask, that is to help them to undermine President Trump. In the Ukraine, the struggle of Clintonites and Trumpers is far from over. President Zelensky promised President Trump to help him; but the oligarchs of the Ukraine are in Clintonite camp. ..."
"... Adam Schiff received campaign contributions from a Ukrainian donor/host at a fundraiser. All solid citizens, especially the host, an arms dealer. ..."
"... Nancy Pelosi also received funding for her campaign in the Ukraine and other Democrats may have as well. ..."
The Borderlands of the Ukraine have been a decisive battlefield for centuries. Here
Stockholm, Berlin and Moscow vied for dominance. Karl XII had lost here to Peter the Great;
Stalin defeated Hitler; now the Clintonites are likely to suffer in the Ukraine their ultimate
defeat. The Democrats had made their biggest political mistake of the century in attacking
Trump for the Biden affair -- that is, if the Americans retain any common sense.
Vice-President Biden extorted millions of dollars in personal bribes from the vulnerable
Ukrainian client state. When this sordid affair came under investigation, he blackmailed
Ukrainians, using his position and American taxpayer money to force the sovereign state to fire
its Attorney General for investigating the bribes.
Instead of covering their face in shame and dismissing Biden as a potential party candidate
in the 2020 race, the Dems led by the superannuated Mrs Pelosi decided to impeach the President
for uncovering this rogue. In the well-remembered flick Dirty Harry the lawyers tried to
save a criminal by attacking the policeman who didn't observe the niceties of a Miranda warning . This was
the model for the Dems in their impeachment attempt.
Biden's criminal extortion wasn't a secret. He boasted of this racket at a public occasion.
He famously admitted
that:
I said, I'm telling you [the Ukrainian leaders], you're not getting the billion dollars. I
said, you're not getting the billion. I'm going to be leaving here in, I think it was about
six hours. I looked at them and said: I'm leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not
fired, you're not getting the money. Well, son of a bitch. (Laughter.) He got fired. And they
put in place someone who was solid at the time.
The Ukrainians put in place someone who was solid at the time, so solid that he terminated
the investigation of Burisma oil company. This company was the vessel to transfer bribes to VP
Biden, via his son Hunter Biden. John Solomon of The Hill wrote:
"U.S. banking records show Hunter Biden's American-based firm, Rosemont Seneca Partners
LLC, received regular transfers into one of its accounts -- usually more than $166,000 a
month -- from Burisma from spring 2014 through fall 2015, during a period when Vice President
Biden was the main U.S. official dealing with Ukraine and its tense relations with
Russia."
The fired prosecutor Mr Viktor Shokin
said that Biden fils had been under investigation. After he was dismissed due to
Biden père interference, the money continued to pour out of poor Ukrainian pockets
to well-stuffed Biden coffers. My Kiev acquaintances had a memory of a good-for-nothing young
man, keen on coke and broads, who by himself would never get such a salary.
You would ask, why Biden admitted to the crime? He considered himself untouchable like Mrs
Clinton and other people of her circle. Mischievous President Trump decided to prosecute Biden
for bribery and extortion, as if he were an ordinary mortal. This was a direct threat to the
Clintonites (let us use this nickname for the power variously described as Democrats, Liberals,
Internationals, financiers, Masters of Discourse or Deep State). This challenge caused them to
abandon caution and to start a furious pre-emptive campaign against cocky Trump.
Their accusation is outright ridiculous: they claim Trump's intention to bring Corrupt Joe
to justice was criminal per se , as Biden was a likely contender for the Dem nomination.
As it happens, the US Constitution didn't find it fit to provide likely contenders with full
immunity for past and future crime prosecutions. It's just the Clintonites were used to be
above the law. Indeed, for three years President Trump avoided to touch them. Crimes of Mrs
Clinton were well known, from the simple affair of the email server to the Libya murders.
It was expected victorious Trump would unleash the law against the defeated dowager for Mrs.
Clinton's role in the Obama administration's decision to allow the Russian nuclear agency
to buy a uranium mining company . Conservatives have long pointed to donations to the
Clinton family foundation by people associated with the company, Uranium One, as proof of
corruption, reported the New
York Times . The Clintonites saved the old lady's skin by starting the Russiagate
hoax. In 2016 election debate Trump told Clinton that, if he was in charge of the nation's
laws, "you'd be in jail". But a year later he was in charge, and she wasn't in jail, not even
charged. The ruse of Russiagate worked wonders: the President accused of collusion with
Russia did not dare to charge his adversary with this very offence.
Now the Clintonites decided to repeat their feat and began impeachment procedure hoping it
will keep Trump busy and away from uncovering the Ukrainian Hell's Kitchen.
What actually had happened in the Ukraine? In 2014, Clintonites had managed the regime
change in this former Soviet republic. They removed the legitimate president by using the full
spectre of illegal operations. The Ukraine became a Clintonite colony, and Joe Biden their
viceroy in the Ukraine. Biden's involvement in the coup d'état was his biggest crime, but
nobody speaks of that, noticed
Joe Lauria . They had turned Ukraine against Russia and instigated the civil war in the
East of the poor country, despite strong efforts of president Putin to keep Russia out of
Ukrainian turmoil. But they also gave a thought to personal profiteering, like they did in
Russia in 1990.
Joe Biden had been treated royally in Kiev. He was asked to chair government meetings and
proudly sat on the Presidential seat. The Ukrainians are not famous for their subtlety. Nice
people, but rather simple ones, even by East European measure. They became involved in 2016
election campaign on the Clintonite side. There is no doubt VP Biden was the man who directed
this "foreign involvement in the US elections". The obliging Ukrainians delivered to him the
dirt on Paul Manafort, and Manafort went to jail.
The Ukraine is the second home for CrowdStrike , the cyber-security company that was
instrumental in accusing Russia of meddling. Its founder and head, a Russian Jew and American
citizen Dmitry Alperovich is a pathological Russia hater on the model of Masha Gessen and Max
Boot. People in Kiev say he had built the case against Russia on the strength of a single
server allegedly used for hacking the DNC. The server is located in the Ukraine, not in Russia.
President Trump asked for its whereabouts in his conversation with the Ukrainian President Mr
Zelensky.
The subject of the server makes many people in the Clintonite camp extremely nervous. They
already
marked it with "conspiracy" marker, meaning you may not touch it. In another "conspiracy
debunking" item they
created a straw man, saying "the notion that there is some missing "server," and that the
server might exist somewhere -- like in Ukraine -- has no basis in reality. The DNC's network
consisted of many servers and computers". However, the server Trump asked about is not the DNC
server, but the server allegedly used to hack DNC server. It had left some Russian-language
traces, and it was presented as a proof of Russian involvement. But Alperovich's hackers in the
Ukraine also use Russian as their working language, and this allowed the Russia-hating Jew an
opportunity to create the whole chain of "proofs" of Russian hackers' activity with fancy
names. Recovery of the server would put paid to the whole myth of Russian hacking, and would
make the Clintonite case untenable.
Alperovich, obsessed with his hatred, could cook the case of Russian meddling, but it had to
be ordered and utilized by somebody up the feeding chain, most probably Joe Biden. And now Joe
Biden, the real criminal, who took bribes and blackmailed the friendly state officials, who
orchestrated foreign involvement in the US elections, went on to become the leading contender
for Dem party.
The Dems claimed Trump threatened to withdraw funds from the Ukraine if they won't cooperate
with the US enquiry. This claim had been debunked after the full transcript of two Presidents'
chat had been published. But even if it were sterling truth, it would be business as usual for
the US. You probably remember the threats of cutting aid that were issued by the US
representative in the UN in order to force sovereign states to vote for Israel. The execrable
Nicky Haley
said , 'The US will be taking names', and Donald Trump
added his own threats to cut aid.
How could they find fault in Trump allegedly threatening to cut aid to Ukraine if they think
Biden was perfectly all right for doing exactly that? But these guys aren't playing
cricket.
The forthcoming Presidential race is becoming a global affair, it seems. In so many
countries the US influence had been delivered by agents of Clintonite clan, and all of them are
tempted to do what the Clintonites ask, that is to help them to undermine President Trump. In
the Ukraine, the struggle of Clintonites and Trumpers is far from over. President Zelensky
promised President Trump to help him; but the oligarchs of the Ukraine are in Clintonite
camp.
All but one: Igor (Benny) Kolomoysky, a maverick Jewish oligarch and a friend of the
President, is an enemy of Clintonites. He also stands against IMF, International Monetary Fund,
the powerful bankers' body that issued many loans to the Ukraine. Just this year, Kiev has to
pay six billion dollars to the IMF to remain solvent, and IMF refused to refinance it. The
loans were mainly stolen by the gang of the former President, Mr Poroshenko. People in Kiev say
that about 1.7 billion dollars of the latest loan had been pocketed by the American supporters
of Poroshenko, meaning Joe Biden and his ilk. Now Mr Kolomoysky suggests the new Ukrainian
president may default on IMF loans.
Kolomoysky is also the only oligarch who is not in bed with the liberals. The balance of
power in the Ukraine is not in favour of Trumpers. The Ukrainians like to back winners; once
they made a mistake supporting Mrs Clinton, as they were sure she would win. Perhaps they will
make this mistake again. It would depend on the actual Dem contender. Joe Biden had cooked his
goose by taking too many bribes in the Ukraine, but another contender may have a better chance,
the Ukrainians think. Mrs Warren, perhaps?
They even fiddle with the idea of Mrs Hillary Clinton running again and winning this time.
The Ukrainian oligarchs, and first of all Mr Victor Pinchuk, a Jewish billionaire from Dnepro
city, No. 1 among the rich Ukrainians, would do anything for her. He contributed many millions
to her fund; he finances the Atlantic Council, the Clintonite think-tank, fighting against
Russia and Euro-sceptics. He is 'the wealthy businessman' Trump referred to in his talk with Mr
Zelensky. Judging by Trump's interest in the Ukrainian server, the President is aware that the
old lady is still able to do some mischief, and his promise to take her to jail is still
unfulfilled.
It is possible in the presidential race 2020, the Dems will use drafting technique, as the
long-distance runners (or bikers, or cross-country skiers) do. The first leading contender (in
our case, Biden) would get the flak, get exhausted, and in the last moment he would withdraw
from the race yielding the nomination to his well-rested comrade, be it Warren or Clinton or
whoever. Bearing that in mind, Trumpers could keep some of the ammo they have on Biden (and
there is a lot to find in the Ukraine) until (or rather if) he gets the nomination.
If this depiction of events is remotely true (I haven't personally researched it), one might
conclude that the cunning, ruthlessness, brazenness, greed and malice of the Clintonite
Democrats is off the charts -- of Mafia or Stalinist caliber.
One might also conclude that, with their command of the Deep State (especially the CIA and
FBI) and mainstream media, they will come out the winner in this game.
The key mode of operation: aggressively, and very loudly, accuse your opponents of
whatever crimes you are committing. Flip reality upside down.
The mainstream media have thoroughly obstructed all lines of investigation into facts
which contradict the Clintonite narrative. And Silicon Valley is working furiously to shut
down any discussion in alternative media on the Internet which addresses these issues.
Are we moving towards the consolidation of a Soviet-style regime in the United States?
Great summary. There is also that one billion dollars the Biden clan got from China. More
from my blog:
Jun 7, 2016 – The $5 Billion Coup
I thought the claim that the USA spent $5 billion to organize a coup to take control of
Ukraine was a wild estimate. I recently found this 2013 video where the semi-covert coup
manager from Hillary's State Department, rabid neocon Victoria Nuland, spouts nonsense and
states that $5 billion was spent! I love the Chevron sponsorship symbol in the
background.
For those unfamiliar with the massive Uranium one Clinton bribery scandal, here is a hot
story that disappeared from our news, from my blog:
Dec 16, 2018 – Rogue FBI
As a follow-up to my December 2nd blog post, our major media failed to report that last
week:
"The Justice Department and FBI have missed a Wednesday deadline to provide information
about the government's mysterious raid on a former FBI contractor-turned-whistleblower's home
last month. Sixteen FBI agents on Nov. 19 raided the home of Dennis Nathan Cain, who
reportedly gave the Justice Department's Inspector General (IG) documents related to the
Uranium One controversy and potential wrongdoing by former Secretary of State Hillary
Clinton.
The documents in question allegedly showed that federal officials failed to investigate
possible criminal activity related to Clinton, the Clinton Foundation and Rosatom, a Russian
nuclear company. Its subsidiary purchased Canadian mining company Uranium One in 2013.
Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, whose panel has oversight of
the Justice Department, penned a letter to FBI Director Christopher Wray and Justice
Department IG General Michael Horowitz, requesting information on the justification for the
raid. Grassley gave Wray and Horowitz until Dec. 12 to respond to his request. That deadline
has come and gone, and neither the FBI nor DOJ has produced any documents or response."
Why would a coke head like Hunter Biden, with a string of failed ventures with shady
characters and living in the US have been sought out for a position on the board of a Ukraine
gas company?
Even "if" Biden did not secure that job for is son and his son was 'sought out' by the
Ukraine gov or the company owners because they thought that contact would help them
Then Biden is still guilty of putting his son's advancement above obvious 'conflicts of
interest' in letting him assume the job.
Don't know about others but when I was growing up in teen years I was constantly schooled
by my father to 'not put myself in ' company or situations' that could lead to my being
associated with anything questionable that might happen.
I would think that should have been how Biden viewed his son taking the Ukraine company
position..
But then again Biden is both stupid and without any ethics. And so much for his free
speech support LOL
The Biden Campaign Is Demanding That TV Execs Stop Booking Guiliani
During this time, Hunter Biden was busy making a living in his father's wake.
He began working at MBNA bank, one of Delaware's largest employer, in 1996. He left to become
a lobbyist in 2001, though he continued receiving consulting fees from the bank. For years,
beginning in the late '90s, Joe Biden had been a top Democratic supporter of a controversial
bankruptcy bill that aided issuers of credit card debt, like MBNA, by making it harder for
borrowers to seek bankruptcy protections. The consulting fees to Hunter continued until 2005,
when the bankruptcy bill finally passed with Joe's support.
At his new firm, Oldaker, Biden & Belair, Hunter also lobbied for the music-sharing
service Napster while the Judiciary Committee, on which Joe sat, took on digital music piracy
and represented public universities seeking congressional earmarks. The Bidens have said that
Hunter avoided lobbying his father. In 2008, The Washington Post reported that, as a senator,
Obama had sought more than $3.4 million in earmarks for Hunter's clients before Joe became
his running mate and that another lobbyist at Hunter's firm had successfully lobbied Joe for
an earmark for the University of Delaware
Biden and his wife, Jill, have set about providing for themselves, earning more than $15
million in the two years following the end of his vice presidency in early 2017"'
Do me a favor did Biden say to Obama ????? .." Obama had sought more than $3.4 million in
earmarks for Hunter's clients before Joe became his running mate and that another lobbyist at
Hunter's firm had successfully lobbied Joe for an earmark for the University of Delaware"
So some Jewish oligarchs are for the Clintons (Biden Dems etc) and other Jewish oligarchs are
for Donald the Orange (Repugs etc) It seems uncannily just like the situation in the US with
good ole Sheldon and Haim. A cynic might even suggest that it was a type of a pincer movement
or a case of good cop/bad cop. Either way I suspect than none of the aforementioned
characters give a rodents patootie about Joe Six-pack and the American people.
Igor (Benny) Kolomoysky, a maverick Jewish oligarch and a friend of the President, is an
enemy of Clintonites. He also stands against IMF, International Monetary Fund, the powerful
bankers' body that issued many loans to the Ukraine.
Really? Sure he is agains bankers. Who are you fooling Shamir? Come on, get real. This is
intra-Jewish affair. Kolomoysky is as bad for Ukraine as the Clintonites.
"In the well-remembered flick Dirty Harry the lawyers tried to save a criminal by attacking
the policeman who didn't observe the niceties of a Miranda warning. This was the model for
the Dems in their impeachment attempt."
I want to be careful here because many people don't grasp the value of what the justice is
really all about. At it core the Constitution is by design intended to limit government
intrusion. The Miranda expectation is not a dodge. Its primary if fencing the abridgement of
a citizens personal space on a whim. In reality Miranda is probably not strong enough. It is
not a trick to cover up criminal behavior.
And the democrats call for impeachment is not in any way related to Miranda, not as simile
or metaphor.
" The ruse of Russiagate worked wonders: the President accused of collusion with Russia
did not dare to charge his adversary with this very offence."
If this depiction of events is remotely true (I haven't personally researched it), one
might conclude that the cunning, ruthlessness, brazenness, greed and malice of the
Clintonite Democrats is off the charts -- of Mafia or Stalinist caliber.
One might also conclude that, with their command of the Deep State (especially the CIA
and FBI) and mainstream media, they will come out the winner in this game.
"I now think that Trump WILL be impeached in the House."
-- Richard Spencer, Sept. 27, 2019
More from Richard Spencer on the Ukraine impeachment matter:
[Hide MORE]
"[Trump] still has 90% approval among Republicans. These Senators, though, they'll go with
the wind. They certainly could do it [vote to remove Trump from office], but something
dramatic would have to change."
"Trump will be impeached but will be let off by the Senate, and he will likely benefit
from this process because we're going to be talking about this [impeachment drama] and kind
of defending him, not criticizing him. So I think Trump ultimately will benefit."
"I'm rather shocked. This whole Ukraine thing is so weak . The Mueller and
Russia hysteria has apparently gone out the window, or it's kind of background to this. We've
now moved on to this -- phone call."
"I've seen this transcript I can only look at and laugh. It's basically Trump being Trump.
He is praising this comedian that won a miraculous victory "
"In 2014, Clintonites had managed the regime change in this former Soviet republic. Ukraine
became a Clintonite colony, and Joe Biden their viceroy in Ukraine.
They instigated the civil war"
-- Let them rot in hell for the destroyed lives of the innocent civilians.
In a morally healthy society, these criminals would suffer anathema and ostracism. In a
morally unhealthy society well.
Kolomoysky is the beneficial owner of the company, Burisma Holdings, that Hunter Biden
supposedly worked for. All the MSM is pretending that the previous owner, Mykola Zlochevsky,
is the one who hired Biden – an obvious lie. The Wikipedia supports this Zionist lie:
It is important to realize that this company has acquired licenses to exploit Ukraine's
largest gas field through dishonest means. The bribes paid to father Biden are much greater
than what the son received. In any case, these bribes are a tiny fraction of the value of
these gas fields.
This gas company is in a position to greatly profit from any deterioration in
Russian-Ukrainian relations.
An extension and exacerbation of the civil war in the east of that country will lead to a
shortage of gas. Shortage of gas leads to higher prices for consumers. War-profiteering at
the expense of the poorest country in Europe.
@Sean
McBride Sean, I agree with what you say – mostly. The fact that we are reading Mr
Shamir's excellent appreciation here shows that not all Westerners are mugs, though.
The bigger question is: how much does it really matter what crimes and tricks are played
in Washington? I am reminded of J.G. Ballard's superb short story "Manhole 69", about an
experiment to see if men could be treated and trained to do without sleep. They succeed, but
are found one morning in a state of catatonic withdrawal. To them, the whole world has shrunk
and collapsed down to a tiny bubble surrounding each person's body, so that – with no
external source of stimuli – their minds shut down.
Similarly, the more fascinated the Swamp creatures get with their own navels, the less
their intrigues matter to anyone outside their little personal bubble. By and by, they may
look up to notice that the world has gone on without them.
Because they are all ultimately funded via both direct and indirect theft [taxes], and
counterfeiting [central bank monopolies], all governments are essentially, at their very
cores, 100% corrupt criminal scams which cannot be "reformed","improved", nor "limited" in
scope, simply because of their innate criminal nature." onebornfree
"Taking the State wherever found, striking into its history at any point, one sees no
way to differentiate the activities of its founders, administrators and beneficiaries from
those of a professional-criminal class." Albert J. Nock
"The kind of man who wants the government to adopt and enforce his ideas is always the
kind of man whose ideas are idiotic" H.L.Mencken
"Government is a disease masquerading as its own cure" Robert LeFevere
"Why should any self-respecting citizen endorse an institution grounded on thievery?
For that is what one does when one votes. If it be argued that we must let bygones be
bygones, see what can be done toward cleaning up the institution of the State so that it
might be useful in the maintenance of orderly existence, the answer is that it cannot be
done; you cannot clean up a brothel and yet leave the business intact. We have been voting
for one "good government" after another, and what have we got?" Frank Chodorov, Out of
Step (1962)
"Joe Biden , the Hawk " by Branko Marcetic in the Jacobin Magazine , " If you're looking for
a president with a track record of foreign intervention , expanding the surveillance state
and steadfastly backing Israel despite its war crimes Joe Biden is your guy ."
@EliteCommInc.
Shamir isn't saying that the Miranda ruling itself is a ruse. Clearly, the article states
that Clintonites are using misdirection as a ruse. Russiagate is also a ruse, and is
unrelated to Miranda.
The mention of Miranda is in reference to a fictional screenplay. What else you got over
there?
@NoseytheDuke
True (and funny). George Eliason has written a couple of pieces concerning the recent history
of the Ukraine connection with the US deepstate and its campaigns such as Russiagate and the
current impeachment push:
[Crowdstrike's] founder and head, a Russian Jew and American citizen Dmitry Alperovich
is a pathological Russia hater on the model of Masha Gessen and Max Boot.
Try as I might, I was hard pressed to confirm the ethnic origin of Dmitry Alperovich. But
Israel Shamir was kind enough to put that mystery to rest. Thanks Israel!
"Make no mistake about it: UKRAINEgate is very real, but not the false narrative pushed by
the media. Trump tricked the Democrats into blowing wide open their own Ukraine scandal under
Obama. Just how big is that? It will expose BIDENgate. Which will expose the real RUSSIAgate
conspiracy. Which will then expose Clinton's EMAILgate and SERVERgate
scandals. Which will in turn expose Deep State and their International Banking Cartel
sponsors. Even the Illuminati hidden hand may be revealed as never before along with the
forever veiled Black Nobility."
-- Intelligence Analyst & Former U.S. Army Officer
I'm not a "Q" follower or one who believes Trump is some kind of 5D chess player, but for
the life of me I could not see how UKRAINEgate would not come back to bite the Democrats in
the ass. I guess we'll just have to wait and see if the above statements are true. http://stateofthenation2012.com/?p=128744#more-128744
The Ukraine is a corrupt zionist controlled government just like the zionist corrupt ZUS
government so it is no surprise that the zionist backed Bidens would be feeding at the trough
just as they feed off the American taxpayers, corruption is as corruption does and that is
how zionists control governments.
Why would a coke snorting loser like Hunter Biden be given millions from a Ukrainian company
when he doesn't even speak the language? Same reason the Clintons used to get $500k for
"speeches". Give us a millions to our fraudulent charity and we will give you millions of tax
payer money.
@APilgrim" .There are two possible ways for people to relate to each other: either voluntarily or
coercively. The State is pure institutionalized coercion. As such, it's not just unnecessary,
but antithetical, to a civilized society. And that's increasingly true as technology
advances. It was never moral, but at least it was possible in oxcart days for bureaucrats to
order things around. Today the idea is ridiculous .":
Are we moving towards the consolidation of a Soviet-style regime in the United
States?
No it's already an upgraded Owellian regime that relies on 24/7 brainwashing. The Soviet
regime could repress people through violence or the threat of it. They could never convince
people that there really are 52 sexes or the need to bring in tens of millions of illegals
and replace the population with foreigners.
Bidengate is killing the blind Dems. Will he be in the Oct 15 debate or forced out before
that? For once, it may be worth watching as the other Dems will profit when he is out. Like
vultures they will seek his campaign donors and voters. The lying mainstream media can't make
this pig look pretty. Biden was already going to lose based on his failing mental abilities.
Now, he is really toast. The phony impeachment claims are killing the Dems also. It seems
they are suicidal this election and want to make SURE Trump wins in a landslide.
An 'independent' Ukraine is nothing more than a preponderantly Jewish directed outpost for
the Anglo-Zionist Empire. It is always going to be raped, and then charged for the service of
the rape, by those who run the Anglo-Zionist Empire.
@Whitewolf
Correct. The WASP-created and currently WASP+Jews administered Anglosphere, the Anglo-Zionist
Empire (which controls Western Europe and all of Latin America it wants to control), is today
much worse off in many ways than the USSR ever was.
Am I the only one who finds it strange Obama was never mentioned by Mr. Israel?
What no one is talking about here is the much bigger crime against humanity that the
Obama administration committed by engineering the catastrophic Ukraine Civil War. Not only
did Biden's warmongering tear apart that country, that continuing war served to re-start
the Cold War with Russia. How calamitous for the world community of nations is that
intentional outcome designed by the Obama-Biden-Clinton-Nuland war-making team?!
Which means that the recent UKRAINEgate is really about stifling Trump's initiative to
get to the bottom of BIDENgate because that will inevitably lead to the root cause of the
real UKRAINEgate, not the current fake one. It ought to be apparent how the Left is
co-opting real scandals with fake scandals by even using the same memes and MSM
emotionally-charged language. Deep State knows that the ensuing confusion is simply far too
great for the average American voter to comprehend as the true story is so obfuscated by
the CIA-controlled Mockingbird Media.
Clintonites? A clintonite would be a follower and not an equal partner in crimes. And
Clintons maybe everything else but powerful they are not. Let's call it the Cabalites. For
they are members of a cabal (not to be confused with Jews though certainly there are Jews in
it along with a ton of non Jews) and equal participants in crimes such as Biden corruption.
Biden was/is Obama errand boy and as such got paid his share of the thirty pieces of silver.
It's a cabal, deep and secretive with octopus like reach that has the government cornered
with Democrats and their counterparts, the Republicans!
This remains to be seen. I'm not optimistic considering the massive propaganda
loudspeakers being brought out to steer the narrative. The Clintons and Biden, among others,
have been irredeemably corrupt their entire lives yet have had a sense of impunity
throughout, a well grounded sense since nothing has ever touched them. The rottenness of all
of it makes one's head swim. All of them have also been fond of committing war crimes
overseas, killing and displacing millions of people everywhere, which is even worse than
their financial flimflam. American democracy, what a joke, way different in reality than the
garbage they taught us in school.
Only slow people, aka the willing slaves called the voting class, believe a difference exists
between democrats and republicans. The rich know better.
The US staged a Nazi coup in Ukraine and wanted to station the navy in the Crimea. Before
that, the US had the dying Soviet Union hand over Crimea to Ukraine for free, out of love of
Russia.
Clearly both Republicans and Democrats see the law as a tool to enrich themselves and harm
their "enemies."
@Alfred
Shamir, and now you, mention bribes to Joe Biden. Is there documentation in one of your links
about those bribes? (Shamir cited nothing.) I don't doubt it, but can't share empty
allegations. (D0es Shamir think this is common knowledge? Or does he just never back up his
claims.)
This is such a hoax conspiracy that I question why they allow this op-ed to be printed.
Without bank and tax records to prove it , why would you make these fictitious claims? You' d
be better off tracking Trumps financials and building on those facts. Good luck with that.
@Bastien
McCormick Was the de-nuclear treaty enforced by both US and Russia over Ukraine a US plot
as well?
Face it, a jew currently runs Ukraine, the national socialists are bidding their times in
every parts of the world, waiting for a chance to save this post-1945 world.
"Shamir isn't saying that the Miranda ruling itself is a ruse. Clearly, the article states
that Clintonites are using misdirection as a ruse. Russiagate is also a ruse, and is
unrelated to Miranda."
There is nothing in this matter that can be remotely associated with Miranda. By
referencing Miranda as like the collusion accusations the author is making the comparison
between the two. Such as lawyer uses Miranda to draw attention away from the case.
That is a false comparison, even if the person is actually guilty of the accusation.
Miranda says, the state cannot proceed to abuse a citizens ignorance of the process to
prosecute, The citizen is entitled to know how to protect himself/herself from state
authority – period. It is a legal standard.
There is no legal standard for the collusion accusation. It is not linked even remotely to
the Constitutional protections of citizens. Your response is circular self reinforcing and
flawed logic coming and going. The liberals are not claiming a legal standard -- they are
merely slinging mud. Because even if the president were in fact colluding, it would not
provide a legal basis that the liberals and democrats lost the election as result.
Furthermore, even if they colluded by sharing information that alone is not a crime.
Unlike collusion, Miranda is a legal standard that upon violation moots a case because of
the governments abuse of power --
nothing at all like manufacturing a lie to cover incompetence, face saving or illegal
activity (including conspiring with foreign powers to start violent revolutions among
sovereign nations, i.e. Syria, the Ukraine, Libya, etc.) in office, or ineffective campaign
choices.
The collusion argument does reflect the kind of circular rhetoric in defending this
authors false comparison.
For the lovers of the IQ : the collective , national , IQ of white blond ukraruinas , polacks
, and other ex-soviets specimens is much much lower than mexicans . Puro pendejos .
Did anyone actually believe that Biden is not corrupt? Or that Ukraine is not corrupt? Or
that Porky and his appointees are not corrupt? If these people exist, they must be either
remarkably naïve or simply retarded.
@anon It's
untrue that Lutsenko, appointed by his buddy Porky, has no legal experience. Yes, he has no
legal education. But he spent some time in jail, which counts as legal experience.
Clintonites (let us use this nickname for the power variously described as Democrats,
Liberals, Internationals, financiers, Masters of Discourse or Deep State).
All but one: Igor (Benny) Kolomoysky, a maverick Jewish oligarch and a friend of the
President, is an enemy of Clintonites.
a "maverick" eh?
Kind of like John McCain, huh?
As Truth3 mentioned,
"Kolomoisky is one of Rothschild's front men."
Yep.
However, the server Trump asked about is not the DNC server, but the server allegedly
used to hack DNC server. It had left some Russian-language traces, and it was presented as
a proof of Russian involvement. But Alperovich's hackers in the Ukraine also use Russian as
their working language
What's with all this misdirection?
Assange has all but said the DNC data was given to him by Seth Rich, [RIP]
There was no 'Russian (or Ukrainian) hacking. Rich was pissed that 'corrupt Hillary' had
shut out Bernie in the primaries. He had a motive.
What, pray tell- would be the motive of the corrupt, Obama State Dept. installed-
Ukrainians, (working for the Clintonites) to expose Hillary's corruption? (and their
own)?
Eh?
"Maverick" Kolomoysky is a Zionist, Jewish supremacist, unhinged Putin-hater- in the mold
of Khodorkovsky . A couple of Rothschild stooges installed to loot Ukraine and Russia
respectively.
The "maverick' is conducting himself in perfect, parallel alignment with the "Democrats,
Liberals, Internationals, financiers, Masters of Discourse or Deep State", (i.e. the
Clintonites) that hate Putin's guts, and would like to see him dead.
In fact, there are deep ties between Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, and the
'Maverick'.
The Maverick owns the television station where Zelensky performed his comedy routine.
I'd say in all probability that Zelensky is the Maverick's boy. Which would go a long way
toward understanding why Putin is staying at arms length from the comedian.
All of this rot and corruption and its effects on ZUS politics is why I looked forward to
getting some insights from Mr. Shamir.
@Sean
McBride Spencer might say some things that are valid and even things that pro-Whites
agree with but he's still controlled opposition just like David Duke.
Its common knowledge that most politicians are crooked lying thieving bastards but the
brazenness of Biden is truly astounding. His boasting about the Ukraine affair should cost
him 10 years in prison if there was truly justice in America. But just like Hildabeast
Clinton they know no matter what they say or do they are a protected class in this God
forsaken country.
congrats issy, marvelous work.. while i read your column, i was also watching the clive owen
film "the international". i couldn't tell which one's more thrilling; possibly yours, because
your story is real!
all these show, that the fight between "patriots and globalists" (as pres. trump put it in
his UN speech: "the future belongs to patriots, not to globalists!") is flaring up.
globalist agendas like climate change and the EU are on the retreat, nevertheless
globalists seem not to leave the arena without bitter fighting.
patriots may be the last hope for earth to survive in the form known to us, but they are
more vital for america herself. why? -- because the "democraps and rebloodicans" with their
globalist agendas were growing to be disgusting in the eyes of many ordinary american people
before trump. remember, trump is a guy from the outside of the "political establishment",
don't get fooled by that he imitates the "rebloodican"!
for many american people, and for reasons above, the american federal government had
morphed into an alien body, regardless of the voters' political will, pushing its own alien
globalist agenda and endless wars.
4-5 years ago, there was the talk of secession.. american states should leave the union en
masse to cancel a useless federal govt. and summon a new continental convention. a new
constitution will be proclaimed which allows the states to fire any president or congress,
who don't heed to states' (people's) calls to come to senses, by a majority vote. i don't
know how widespread that discussion was.. i know, it exists. and if trump is unsuccessful
somehow or gets imprisoned, that danger still looms.
it may seem unimportant, what happens to america; but remember, she is the flagship of the
western civilization. for all people on earth, what happens to the u.s.a. will this or that
way affect what happens to them. regards..
@Smith
Yes.
I would love to see BO hoisted on this petard along with Biden.
Why should Biden be the only one to take the fall for BO, the Clintons, Nuland, etc.?
Actually, that logic doesn't seem quite kosher to me -- doesn't the actual truth/reality
count for something?
Its quite logical the 'appearance ' of a conflict of interest can lead to questioning
motives that's why judges 'recluse' themselves in cases where they have ties to anyone or
anything involved in the case.
Since you cant peer into the mind of someone who has the 'appearance 'of conflicting interest
the best approach is to remove said person from any involvement in the search for the
truth.
@Sean
McBride One issue that stuns me is that snarky comments of Chelsea Clinton to the
President, publicly made and without one ounce of fear. He tweeted something about the
Biden/Ukraine impeachment hoax was part of the biggest political scam, and this repellent
little beast shot back:
Yes, you are.
Readers here know, and certain members of the media know (Ammanpour, Anderson Cooper who
have actually traveled without fixers and entourages)
that if the daughter of a past PM or President smarted off to Erdogan, Xi or Rouhani on a
social media account,
she would likely disappear, be tortured or her children would be snatched for a few weeks,
to get her "mind right".
Chelsea Clinton is a repulsive slob who has no achievements other than inviting an actual
human sex trafficker to her marriage to a fat, sullen Jew that is unemployed.
Trump needs to go full thug. He needs to go completely bananas bat shit and have Biden's
son indicted TODAY.
From his first day, I was certain that it was a catastrophic error not to indict Hillary
Clinton and her accomplices. She never let up, and it appears she may just win yet.
@Johnny Walker
Read "Am I the only one who finds it strange Obama was never mentioned by Mr. Israel?"
No! Not the only one.
But in the case of Shamir I chalk it up to his focusing on the Biden details -- not on the
big Barry picture. Surely the buck for this whole thing comes to rest like a stinking turd on
Barack Obama's desk. It all occurred on his watch, overseen by his State Dept.
Or perhaps not on his desk.
Obama must owe major Jewish chits in Chicago. Rahm Emanuel, anyone?
I am kind of flailing here, but when I think Chicago and Dem party and Obama I think Rahm
Emanuel and Penny Pritzker, and when I think Rahm Emanuel I think dual citizen and dad was a
Zionist terrorist. What does all of that have to do with the Ukraine? I don't know!!
Plenty of Jewish oligarchs there . .
Biden is corrupted. Clinton is corrupted. But Trump is corrupted too for the following
reasons (among others):
1. Timing: He has not investigated Biden nor Clinton for almost 3 years. Now that Biden
seems likely Democrat nominee, he suddenly becomes so keen to investigate, while still
ignoring (or not pushing for) investigation of Clinton (who is not running).
2. Corruption: Trump appears corrupted too when he tries to use US aids as leverage to get
Ukraine to start the ball rolling on something that can benefit his re-election. This is
almost no difference than what Biden did.
3. Vengeance: Instead of letting the machinery of Justice and State departments work at
their own pace, Trump looks vengeful when he and his personal lawyer Giuliani are intimately
involved.
The end results is that Trump supporters becomes more convinced of Biden/Clinton/Democrats
wrong doing, and the Democrat supporters becomes more convinced of Trump's corruption and
guilt. So, the country hardens the divide and more people lose confidence of politicians.
Here's Scott Ritter , Iraq weapons inspector who objected to calling off the Iraq
inspections. .
My Letter From Joe Biden
Author's note: The 2003 invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq by a U.S.-led coalition
will go down in history as one of the greatest geopolitical disasters in modern history.
Then-Sen. Joe Biden was in a unique position to prevent this war from happening. That he
chose not to speaks volumes about the man who now seeks to become the next president of the
United States. My personal experiences with Biden from 1998 to 2002 provide a window into the
character of the man that Americans should familiarize themselves with before considering
whether to give him their support.
Scott Ritter
[MORE]
"I envy your position. I sincerely do. I envy the ability to have such clarity on this
issue."
Listening to those words, coming as they were from Sen. Joe Biden, one of the most vociferous
defenders of the policies of Bill Clinton's administration, I knew I was in for a grilling.
It was Sept. 15, 1998. I was seated, alone, at a table reserved for witnesses, giving
testimony to a joint session of the Senate foreign relations and armed services committees
about the reasons behind my resignation as a chief weapons inspector with the United Nations
Special Commission (UNSCOM), charged with overseeing the disarmament of Iraq's weapons of
mass destruction (WMD) programs. Arrayed before me were some of the most powerful people in
the United States, if not the world. The combined membership of these two committees totaled
36 senators, a little over a third of the entire membership of that esteemed body. More than
20 were present at the hearing and, over the course of the next hour and a half, I was
questioned in detail by 17 of them, none of whom seemed to object to my presence more than
Biden.
"Let me ask you a question," Biden continued. "Do you think you should be the one to be
able to decide when to pull the trigger?"
By Aug. 28, I had received a call from the staff of the Senate Armed Services Committee,
requesting my presence on Sept. 3 before a joint session of that committee and the Committee
on Foreign Relations.
Biden, however, had taken umbrage over the fact that the hearing had been allowed to go
forward without the presence of either the secretary of state or secretary of defense to
offer balance, especially when, as he couched the issue, I was trying to push the United
States to war with Iraq. "Isn't that what this is about?" he demanded. And despite my answers
to the contrary, Biden proceeded to lecture me on the limitations of my position as an
inspector. "I respectfully suggest that [the secretaries of state and defense] have
responsibilities slightly above your pay grade that's why they get paid the big bucks. That's
why they get the limos and you don't." The issue, Biden said, was more complex than simply a
question of "Old Scottie Boy didn't get in." It was a decision "above my pay grade," and the
jobs of those charged with making that decision were "a hell of a lot more complicated than
yours." It was about as insulting an experience one could imagine, and it took all my
willpower to sit there and take it unflinchingly
Sen. Chuck Hagel, a Nebraska Republican, who said, "We realize, Major Ritter, as far as we
know, that you did not have a limousine; you did not make the big bucks we understand that,
like sergeants and junior officers and people who carry the rifles and actually do the
fighting and do the inspecting, that you may have a perspective that the big-bucks people
don't."
But rather than allow the inspections to run their course, the Clinton administration
instead used the work of UNSCOM to deliberately provoke a confrontation, seeking to inspect a
sensitive facility belonging to the Baath Party based upon old intelligence information that
had long since expired. The goal was to get the Iraqis to deny inspectors access to the site.
When Iraq instead agreed to allow inspectors inside the facility, the Clinton administration
immediately ordered all UNSCOM inspectors out of Iraq, before initiating a 72-hour bombing
campaign, Operation Desert Fox,
Biden, later declined to talk to me directly, instead dispatching a senior member of the
minority staff of the Foreign Relations Committee to meet with me. This meeting was a
singular disappointment. The staffer began by calling me a traitor for speaking out about
Iraq and took umbrage when I backed up my claims with documents. "You are not supposed to
have these materials," he said. "They are classified, and you are a traitor for publicizing
the information they contain."
After reminding the staffer that he was walking a very
dangerous line in calling a former officer of Marines a traitor, I pointed out that the
information I cited was from my time as an inspector, and was not classified in any way.
The staffer agreed that the article was fact-based, even if he disagreed with its
conclusion. "But this isn't about facts. This is about politics, and Senator Biden will not
go against the policies of the Clinton administration, even if those policies are
failing."
Biden convened his hearing, which sought the testimony of witnesses hand-picked to sustain
the desired conclusion that Iraq was a threat worthy of war. He then went on to vote in
support of the use of military force against Iraq -- a sharp contrast to the position he took
in 1991.
You are 100% bang on with this article, Mr. Shamir. If anyone should be impeached, it's Joe
Biden and his criminal enterprise, otherwise known as his family. Joe Biden should be
pre-emptively impeached before he has even bigger chance to do even more damage to his
country and the world.
I also agree that all of this is a deep state operation against Trump. Why the deep state
doesn't like Trump? Because they are afraid that he is going to blow their cover about the
supposedly "liberal" US. It's all phony, but that's all they got, fake liberalism to keep the
proles quiet in order not to demand real social improvements in their "democracy", instead of
senseless voting in fixed elections.
The "catastrophic error" was allowing the Mueller/Russia farce to drag on and on, with the
media and hack political/pundit class shitting on him daily, questioning the legitimacy of
his election and robbing him of nearly all presidential authority -- he showed himself to be
an easy mark, which is one reason they haven't let up -- he should have given Mueller six
months and not a day more, then very publicly fired the lot of them -- but he didn't have the
balls and this is the result -- instead he kisses Jew ass and bleats on and on about low
black and Hispanic unemployment -- then he acts surprised when they still hate his guts and
show him zero respect -- what's the point of being President and having the power of the
presidency if you're not going to use it?
@d dan This
a zionist tactic, divide and conquer, it is not good enough for the zionists that they
control the ZUS government, the zionists like to see their puppets tear each other apart, is
a continual zionist recreation.
The mockingbird mainstream whore media is unrelenting in its coordinated effort to coverup
the crimes of creepy Joe Biden and his son Hunter, whilst hoisting the blame for said crimes
on President Trump who had the audacity to request that the crimes of Joe and Hunter be
investigated.
September 20, 2019 Video of Joe Biden admitting that he bribed the Ukrainian President
with $1 billion dollars to fire lead prosecutor investigating his corrupt son
@eah I see
Trump's tactical error differently. He needed to take a shot at the big money with a series
of antitrust cases against big tech, big banks and investment banks, big media.
It would have been very popular, and he would have been hitting the correct targets.
Trump
is a stupid cuck, a miserable pussy. That's why he can't get anything done. He TALKS big ..but then he rolls over every time. The biggest loss is on immigration/demographics. He isn't going to do anything about
it.
He responds to jewing by bending over more .and the jews respond by reaming his ass even
HARDER.
If he'd just stand up to them and tell them to fuck off, the whole world would be better
for it.
@Robert
Dolan Yea, Trump is not very good, but the cackling hyena would have been atrocious. It's
too bad we are reduced to choosing between shit and even bigger shit, but is it quite clear
which shit was bigger in 2016. It looks like it's going to be just as clear in 2020, as Dems
did everything to remove even half-decent candidates.
Best damn thing said about the Trump and Biden corruption fight..
Its everybody pilgrims everybody.
Just read thru to see ALL the US politicos and Elites involved in the huge money pit
corruption that is Ukraine. There are dozens of them. Protecting the Ukraine from Russia is
the guise for getting stinking rich for those using their office or connections to congress
or the StateDept.
ITS THE CORRUPTION THAT HAS BECOME NORMALIZED IN THE US BABY CAKES!
Don't waste your time with partisan bullshit defending Trump or Biden.
Notice how Eliz Warren is skyrocketing.
Because she's talking about government corruption and the middle class.
Most people .that have a brain at all will unite against corruption ..no matter which party
they support .there will be tunnel vision knuckle draggers who wont .but most people
will.
No one likes being cheated or betrayed.
There was little chance that the Trump Administration could prosecute Clinton Inc. without a
widespread hue and cry of political vengeance being leveled: Likewise with the Bidens.
As I've commented in UR a few times before, Trump should hand out Presidential Pardons to
the scurvy lot of them; they'll never be prosecuted for their misdeeds, so why not tar them
with pardons that spell out those misdeeds in gleeful detail.
This isn't partisan oppo war. Kurt Volker, the virgin they threw into the volcano when Biden
got burned? I knew him back when he disappeared into CIA. Think he quit, and just happened to
show up in all these sensitive jobs?
McCain's ventriloquist, then senior ratfuck officer
assigned to Dmytro Firtash? This is just more of the same shit, CIA picks up their
presidential Ken dolls and shakes them around like they're talking to each other.
Biden's
role as poster boy for corruption is all-you-can-steal, but don't imagine he has agency or
discretion or anything.
The forthcoming Presidential race is becoming a global affair, it seems. In so many
countries the US influence had been delivered by agents of Clintonite clan, and all of them
are tempted to do what the Clintonites ask, that is to help them to undermine President
Trump. In the Ukraine, the struggle of Clintonites and Trumpers is far from over. President
Zelensky promised President Trump to help him; but the oligarchs of the Ukraine are in
Clintonite camp.
The Clintonite clan can be better described as the Western Global(ist) Deep State. Whether
it's the global white genocide project or the global CO2 control initiative, it's glaringly
obvious that a lot of "our" political representatives are getting their marching orders from
a half-hidden group of wannabe masters of the universe.
The scary part is that a lot of those politicians are unflinchingly pushing unpopular and
ultimately political-career-ending policies. That's how much their loyalty lies on the side
of these enemies of humanity.
@renfro I
would only insert the note that all this mess started by Carter moving into Somalia.
I was really puzzled by that. Only years after I did realize that it was long term plan for
destabilization of Muslim power
@Realist I
guess you don't have the proper reverence for "Bite-Me". Every other story ever written about
that slimeball mentions that he lost a wife and child in an auto accident right after he won
his first election to the US Senate. He's been trafficing off of it for nearly fifty years
now. Sometimes he says the accident was caused by a drunk driver (not true). The family of
the other driver has been trying to get him to stop making that claim, but I guess it brings
more sympathy.
If you love Jews for Israel Vote for Joe.
Did you know that our constitution is based on Jewish values?
I didn't know that but Joe says it is.
Strange there's not a single Jew among the signers of the Del of Indep. or the Constitution.
Biden: 'Jewish heritage is American heritage'
excerpts
"The truth is that Jewish heritage, Jewish culture, Jewish values are such an essential
part of who we are that it's fair to say that Jewish heritage is American heritage," he said.
"The Jewish people have contributed greatly to America. No group has had such an outsized
influence per capita as all of you standing before you, and all of those who went before me
and all of those who went before you."
"So many notions that are embraced by this nation that particularly emanate from over 5,000
years of Jewish history, tradition and culture: independence, individualism, fairness,
decency, justice, charity.
Jews have also been key to the evolution of American jurisprudence, he continued,
namedropping Brandeis, Fortas, Frankfurter, Cardozo, Ginsberg, Breyer, Kagan. "You literally
can't. You can't talk about the recognition of rights in the Constitution without looking at
these incredible jurists that we've had."
"Jewish heritage has shaped who we are – all of us, us, me – as much or more
than any other factor in the last 223 years. And that's a fact," he said.
"We talk about it in terms of the incredible accomplishments and contributions" of Jews in
America, Biden added, but it's deeper "because the values, the values are so deep and so
engrained in American culture, in our Constitution."
"So I think you, as usual, underestimate the impact of Jewish heritage. I really mean
that. I think you vastly underestimate the impact you've had on the development of this
nation. We owe you, we owe generations who came before you," he said."
I don't think Nancy would impeach if she could not get a conviction. Why would Republican
Senators say no to Trumps head on a platter? He's not one of them. The House will impeach and
the Senate will convict.
Then what? Then the Clinton/Bush/Obama crime family and their paymasters will remain safe
and in charge of the Federal Government. Safe from Orange Man and the Deplorables I mean.
Russia, China and Iran are another matter.
Unless U.S. Atty Barr has something really good up his sleeve. Does anybody here think
Barr will actually do anything? Other than not inditing Comey?
Today America is governed by an Organized Criminal Enterprise. a take over that began with
then Vice President Bush after his bungled assasination of Ronald Regan. However, it wasn't a
complete failure as it resulted in Bush (a Rockefeller asset) actually running the WH, and
subsequently winning the presidency.
Bill Clinton (a possible Rockefeller offspring, who for
all his Democratic party trappings is a CIA (Bush) creation who was treated by G. Bush like
a favored nephew, and both benefitted greatly in partnership international narcotics
trafficking.
After Bill it was George's son's turn, after that came Rockefeller's next choice
Obama. Trump interrupted the Rockefeller reign, but he has problems too steming from his
accepting Russian mafia money in the late 80s early 90's, to save his real estate empire.
They, the Russian/Ukrainians, needed a brand name through which to launder money into the
states, looted from mother Russia, and Trump filled that need to a T. So today we're
witnessing a fight between the Russian mafia crooks including a reluctant but fatally comprimised Trump, and the Rockefeller's communist crooks, all for control of America, her
banks and military, and ultimately the world.
@Justvisiting
I understand the approach; it would be very popular with Joe 6-Pack. Big Media has been
exposed: watch Giuliani and George Stepinshitalopolous. The Naked Deceit of the MSM has been
laid bare. I think that in future, many will look back and see that a simple win as you
suggest was not doable;the lack of executive control of the Alphabet agencies and Civil
Bureaucracy is near non-existent at this point. 2020 will break the will of the Democrat
Party. Two years of controlling the House and Senate could actually allow for this type of
activity because the way was cleared to do so in the first term.
What the Dems did was go spastic for 3 years screaming Russia to hide Ukraine. I'm sure
there is more dirt in Ukraine and China and .Notice Trump has 2 personal lawyers that he has
briefed to handle items he could normally count on a Cabinet Secretary to do? Why? These are
not, I suggest, normal times. The C_A, Brennan, Clapper and others are in full court press.
But now it's the 4th period and they are out of gas (sorry, bad sports metaphor).
Trump could get impeached. The Senate would look at it. Rule it is spurious and throw it out.
Then McConnell could say: 'What about this CFR video, Biden, Ukraine what about that?" Trump
gets elected in 2020 with a landslide after gaining significant sympathy and support. The
MORE INSANE the MOCKINGBIRD CIA media behaves, the more people are leaving the Democrat Party
and the more Independents see Trump as the only game in town.
Who is their to vote for: Biden, Warren, Booker, Bernie? The Left has no one except Gabbard
and they don't trust her. Kamala Harris has lost all heart. Killary Clinton or Big Mike
Obama? The voters would reject both. They have nothing.
@Sean
McBride I have a colleague, who I believe to be a psychopath, who always backs the person
he thinks will win in our organization's power struggles.
He has been very successful, and
leads a happy and celebrated life. I would urge all of you to consider his example, think
first of your families, and desist from backing a losing cause.
America is mostly lost. We
can keep it alive in our homes, but our political culture is, and will remain, an alien
culture, that renounces the vision of our founders.
@Rurik
Rurik,
good or bad, Mr Kolomoysky is the only one Ukr oligarch who is against IMF and against
Clintonites. Good or bad, he is not considered as anti-Putin, or anti-Russian in the Ukraine.
If he is connected to the nefarious entity called Rothschild, this omnipotent Rothschild did
not help him when the other bankers took over his bank.
The world is not that simple, Rurik. You see a Jew and you presume he is a Zionist, Jewish
supremacist, unhinged Putin-hater and Rothschild stooge. With this presumption, you do not
have to read at all.
@Cato A
question to consider: has America been a Masonic project from the start? Has it been a
Masonic project all along? Has there always been a radical disconnect between America's overt
agenda and a hidden agenda?
Which is precisely why Trumpenstein must be destroyed, and why Brexit must not be
allowed to happen or, if it does, why the people of the United Kingdom must be mercilessly
punished. It is also why the Gilets Jaunes are being brutally repressed by the French
police, and disappeared by the corporate media
The author nailed it
True believers in the Globalist faith as a matter of dogma believe, "Anyone who does not
meekly submit to unelected elites must be mentally ill." That people wish to have freedom is
beyond their ability to comprehend.
Thus the 1st Mosque of the Globalist Faith leads only to failure. Free Christian citizens
will not go to Globalist Mosques to revere graven images of the Most Holy Soros. In fact,
Christianity has sanctions for such idolatry.
Now that the fake stream, corporate media no longer controls the narrative -- The far left
cannot win the next election. Will the beast of the underworld, The IslamoSoros, try to steal
the election? Probably. But, such spawn of Satan can be defeated by men of goodwill.
Candidates for POTUS who are fundraising off "impeachment" are undermining credibility of
inquiry in eyes of American people, further dividing our already fractured country. Please
stop. We need responsible, patriotic leaders who put the interests of our country before
their own.
On day one of my presidency, I will call a summit between the United States, China, and
Russia to work to end the new Cold War, stop the arms race, and reduce tensions and increase
cooperation going forward.
A recent interview given by a former high-ranking official in Israeli military
intelligence has claimed that Jeffrey Epstein's sexual blackmail enterprise was an Israel
intelligence operation run for the purpose of entrapping powerful individuals and politicians
in the United States and abroad.
Since the apparent death by suicide of Jeffrey Epstein in a Manhattan prison, much has come
to light about his depraved activities and methods used to sexually abuse underage girls and
entrap the rich and powerful for the purposes of blackmail. Epstein's ties to intelligence,
described in-depth in a recent MintPress investigative
series , have continued to receive minimal mainstream media coverage, which has essentially
moved on from the Epstein scandal despite the fact that his many co-conspirators remain on the
loose.
For those who have examined Epstein's ties to intelligence, there are clear links to both
U.S. intelligence and Israeli intelligence, leaving it somewhat open to debate as to which
country's intelligence apparatus was closest to Epstein and most involved in his
blackmail/sex-trafficking activities. A recent interview given by a former high-ranking
official in Israeli military intelligence has claimed that Epstein's sexual blackmail
enterprise was an Israel intelligence operation run for the purpose of entrapping powerful
individuals and politicians in the United States and abroad.
In an
interview with Zev Shalev, former CBS News executive producer and award-winning
investigative journalist for Narativ , the former senior executive for Israel's
Directorate of Military Intelligence, Ari Ben-Menashe, claimed not only to have met Jeffrey
Epstein and his alleged madam, Ghislaine Maxwell, back in the 1980s, but that both Epstein and
Maxwell were already working with Israeli intelligence during that time period.
"They found a niche"
In an
interview last week with the independent outlet Narativ , Ben-Menashe, who himself
was involved in Iran-Contra arms deals, told his interviewer Zev Shalev that he had been
introduced to Jeffrey Epstein by Robert Maxwell in the mid-1980s while Maxwell's and
Ben-Menashe's involvement with Iran-Contra was ongoing. Ben-Menashe did not specify the year he
met Epstein.
Ben-Menashe told Shalev that "he [Maxwell] wanted us to accept him [Epstein] as part of our
group . I'm not denying that we were at the time a group that it was Nick Davies [Foreign
Editor of the Maxwell-Owned Daily Mirror ], it was Maxwell, it was myself and our team
from Israel, we were doing what we were doing." Past reporting by Seymour Hersh and others
revealed
that Maxwell, Davies and Ben-Menashe were involved in the transfer and sale of military
equipment and weapons from Israel to Iran on behalf of Israeli intelligence during this time
period.
He then added that Maxwell had stated during the introduction that "your Israeli bosses have
already approved" of Epstein. Shalev later noted that Maxwell "had an extensive network in
Israel at the time, which included the then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, according to
Ben-Menashe."
Ben-Menashe went on to say that he had "met him [Epstein] a few times in Maxwell's office,
that was it." He also said he was not aware of Epstein being involved in arms deals for anyone
else he knew at the time, but that Maxwell wanted to involve Epstein in the arms transfer in
which he, Davies and Ben-Menashe were engaged on Israel's behalf.
However, as MintPress reported in Part
IV of the investigative series " Inside the Jeffrey Epstein
Scandal: Too Big to Fail ," Epstein was involved with several arms dealers during this
period of time, some of whom were directly involved in Iran-Contra arms deals between Israel
and Iran. For instance, after leaving Bear Stearns in 1981, Epstein began
working in the realms of shadow finance as a self-described "financial bounty hunter,"
where he would both hunt down and hide money for powerful people. One of these powerful
individuals was Adnan Khashoggi, a Saudi arms dealer with close ties to both Israeli and U.S.
intelligence and one of the main brokers of Iran-Contra arms deals between Israel and Iran.
Epstein would later forge a business relationship with a CIA front company involved in another
aspect of Iran-Contra, the airline Southern Air Transport, on behalf of Leslie Wexner's
company, The Limited.
http://www.unz.com/pgiraldi/how-israel-controls-its-narrative/
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It is interesting to note how the Israel
Lobby is able to manage and contain the commentary of groups in America that might normally be critical of
Israeli policies vis-à-vis the United States.
A recent article
by Professor Andrew Bacevich entitled "President Trump, Please End the American Era in
the Middle East" is a good example of how self-censorship by authors works. The piece appeared as one of
Bacevich's regular weekly contributions to
The American Conservative
website under the rubric
"Realism and Restraint."
The article particularly focused on the
foreign policy pronouncements of Bret Stephens, the resident neocon who writes for
The New York Times
.
Stephens, per Bacevich, has been urging constant war in the Middle East and
worrying lest
"we may be witnessing the beginning of the end of the American era in the Middle East."
Bacevich, unlike Stephens, is a genuine foreign policy expert, a realist, an Army veteran, and always quite
sensible. He correctly described how "in the Middle East, the military power of the United States has played
a large part in exacerbating problems rather than contributing to their solution."
The overall message is sound, but in
this case, it is interesting to note what Bacevich left out rather than what he included. It is easy to
understand the "realism" part when he writes and it is sometimes also possible to perceive the "restraint."
He cited Iran seven times as well as Saudi Arabia, but, strangely enough, he never mentioned Israel at all,
which a number of commenters on the piece noted. It rather suggests that there is a line that Bacevich is
reluctant to cross. The omission is particularly odd as Israel is absolutely central to and might even be
described as driving American policy in the Middle East and Bret Stephens, whom Bacevich excoriates, is a
notable Israel-firster who once worked as the editor of the
Jerusalem Post.
Almost everything
Stephens writes is basically a promotion of Israel and its interests coupled with a call for the United
States to do what it must to attack and destroy the Jewish state's principal perceived enemy Iran.
The reticence is perhaps understandable
as Bacevich is president of a newly organized group called the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft,
which
I have written about previously
, that will have its official launch in November. It claims to promote
"ideas that move U.S. foreign policy away from endless war and toward vigorous diplomacy in the pursuit of
international peace" and further takes some pride in being non-partisan though bipartisan might be a better
description. To be sure, Quincy's two major donors are the highly controversial George Soros on the
globalist left and the equally notorious Koch Foundation on the libertarian-lite right, which leads one to
wonder who is ordering the restraint when it comes to Israel. Or is it both of them as neither organization,
though very active in foreign policy, has indicated any desire to seriously criticize the many crimes of the
Jewish state. I appear to have accurately predicted in my earlier article on Quincy that " there will
inevitably be major issues that Quincy will be afraid to confront, including the significant role played by
Israel and its friends in driving America's interventionist foreign policy."
Indeed, anyone who wants to be a player
in Washington DC has to avoid the Israel hot wire. That it should be so is a tribute to the power of the
Jewish lobby coupled with the bulk support and Bible-belt votes of its brain-dead Christian Zionist spear
carriers. Congress, once described by Pat Buchanan as "Israeli-occupied territory," likewise knows whom not
to offend lest one be unemployed in the next electoral cycle. That is why criminalizing criticism of Israel
or support of a non-violent boycott of the country are regularly introduced in Congress and find themselves
with more than one hundred sponsors and co-sponsors. Nearly two dozen such pro-Israel bills are currently at
certain points in the legislative process,
including one
that will enable aggrieved Israelis to sue the Palestinian Authority (PA) in sympathetic
U.S. courts for damages, a move that will potentially bankrupt the PA.
And the colleges and universities have
not been immune from pressure to conform to the pro-Israel narrative. The White House acting through the
Department of Education is functioning as thought police on behalf of the Jewish state. It is currently
planning on withholding
some federal funding of the University of North Carolina and Duke because their
joint Middle Eastern studies program does not meet alleged government standards. The standards involved
relate to the fact that the program has had speakers and course content that can be construed as critical of
Israel and friendly to Muslims. The message clearly being sent to the schools by the Trump Administration is
that if you criticize the Jewish state you will be punished.
The drive to eliminate any pushback
against Israeli actions at colleges has been spearheaded by leading Zionist Kenneth L. Marcus, who was
appointed the Education Department's Assistant Secretary of Civil Rights. Marcus, who has worked as a paid
pro-Israel activist, has been urging the government to define the BDS movement as anti-Semitic and has used
his office to designate any Palestinian advocacy as a violation of Jewish students' civil rights.
The federal action to enforce
educational conformity on Israel is not exactly new as universities have long since been self-censoring,
just like Bacevich, normally in response to complaints by Jewish groups. To cite only one example, in 2013,
at nominally Catholic Fordham University in New York City,
a student group sought
to form a Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) club. Their paperwork advised
that their goal was to "build support in the Fordham community among people of all ethnic and religious
backgrounds for the promotion of justice, human rights, liberation and self-determination for the indigenous
Palestinian people." The applicants also revealed that they would support the Boycott, Divestment and
Sanctions (BDS) movement. Three years later, Fordham's Dean of Education denied the application because of
the support for BDS. The students took Fordham to court and in August of this year, three years later, a New
York judge finally struck down the decision as "
arbitrary
and capricious
."
So it took six years and a lawsuit to
enable a group of students to form a club that was admittedly political in nature but non-violent and
welcoming of everyone. So much for freedom of speech and association at America's colleges and universities
when they run up against the Israel wall.
What is less observed is how Israel's
message is promoted at the state and local levels. At the state level, anti-BDS legislation is now the rule
in 26 states, with some requiring government employees to sign a pledge not to boycott Israel. And the same
thing is happening among Boards of Education. Fourteen states now require holocaust education, where
students are compelled to read fiction like Eli Wiesel's "Night" while also consuming the established and
standard, largely fabricated, account of what the so-called holocaust was all about. In Virginia, for
example,
a shadowy
group
called the Institute for Curriculum Services (ICS), which is actually a "partisan group with
backing by state and local Israel advocacy organizations,"
is seeking to
change the information conveyed by the history and social studies textbooks used in K-12
classrooms across the state. ICS recommended changes include: "1. Emphasizing Arab culpability for crisis
initiation leading to military action and failure of peace efforts -- and never Israeli culpability, even when
it is undisputed historic fact. 2. Replacing the commonly used words of "settlers" with "communities,"
"occupation" with "control of," "wall" with "security fence," and "militant" with "terrorist." 3.
Referencing Israeli claims such as "Israel annexed East Jerusalem" and the Golan Heights as accepted facts
without referencing lack of official recognition by the United Nations and most member nation states."
The ICS is only one example of the
persistent Israel Lobby brainwashing of the American public on behalf of the Jewish state to completely
alter the narrative about what is going on in the Middle East. Taken all together, the self-censorship of
groups and individuals that wish to remain viable by ignoring the Israel problem, the criminalization of
non-violent movements like BDS, and the pressure on universities and schools to conform with positive
narratives about Israel means that any genuine understanding of that nation's war crimes and crimes against
humanity will, unfortunately, remain on the margins.
Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is
Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation
(Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East.
Website is
https://councilforthenationalinterest.org,
address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA
20134 and its email is
[email protected].
The day Jeffrey Epstein turned up dead in a New York jail cell, I decided I needed to write
something about Eyes Wide Shut (1999), Stanley Kubrick's last and weakest movie.
Epstein has quickly faded from the headlines, so let me remind
you briefly of who he was. Epstein was an American Jew who enjoyed immense wealth from
unknown sources, hob-knobbed with the global elite, including Bill Clinton and Prince Andrew,
and was a pervert with a taste for underage girls, meaning that he was a serial rapist. He is
also accused of sharing these women with his wealthy and powerful friends, which would have
implicated them in marital infidelity and statutory rape, making them subject to blackmail.
In 2006, the FBI began investigating Epstein, tracking down over 100 women. In 2007, he was
indicted by the federal government on multiple counts of sex trafficking and conspiracy to
traffic minors for sex. If convicted, he and his co-conspirators could have spent the rest of
their lives in prison. But US Attorney Alex Acosta was told to go easy on Epstein, because "he
belonged to intelligence." Epstein received a sweetheart deal. He pled guilty to two state
prostitution charges and spent 13 months at a Florida county jail with generous work release.
Epstein's co-conspirators were not prosecuted at all. The records were sealed, and would have
remained so, were it not for the efforts of reporter Julie Brown , whose stories
led to the unsealing of Epstein's records, followed by his arrest and death in custody.
The most plausible explanation for Epstein's mysterious life and death is that he was a pimp
who implicated rich and powerful men and then blackmailed them, financially and politically. If
he enjoyed the patronage of "intelligence," it was most likely Israeli. When he was first
arrested, he called in favors from his patrons (and probably from his victims as well), to
avoid federal prosecution, which could have embarrassed many powerful people. When Epstein was
re-arrested, there was no way he could escape prosecution, so he was murdered to protect the
secrets of any (or all) of his patrons and victims.
... ... ...
The higher one climbs in the social hierarchy, the closer one approaches the inner party,
the greater the degeneracy and the more ferocious the assault on marital fidelity.
... ... ...
So why would the power-elites of a society engage in group perversion? The richer a person
is, the more opportunities there are for self-indulgence. After a while, though, such people
get jaded and hunger for exotic pleasures, including ones that violate the rules of morality
and the laws of society. It takes a highly developed sense of honor not to abuse the freedom
granted by great wealth. Even when such an aristocratic ethos was cultivated, there were many
spectacular failures. Moreover, today's oligarchy has dispensed with the pretenses of honor
entirely.
...Beyond routine degeneracy, elites also use sexual perversion as a tool of control. Just
as street gangs require prospective members to sully themselves with crimes to join, elites
have similar rituals, the more morally repulsive the better.
The prospects are eager to incriminate themselves because joining the gang will bring them
power. But self-incrimination also gives the gang power over its members, who must obey lest
they be exposed and humiliated. And of course worse sanctions are waiting in the wings, as
Jeffrey Epstein reminds us.
... ... ...
But for all its faults, Eyes Wide Shut has two important messages to which today's
Dissident Rightists are particularly receptive. It dramatizes important truths about man-woman
relationships and displays how sexual perversion is a tool of elite control. If you already
know the score on these matters, however, you might not want to suffer through two hours and
forty minutes of Cruise and Kidman.
In his phone call with Zelensky, President Trump mentioned two subjects in particular which
are Kryptonite to the Democrats: Crowdstrike and "the server," meaning the DNC server which
was never forensically examined by the FBI. Pulling on these two threads may be even more
interesting than the stuff about the big-bucks shakedowns of foreign governments by Joe Biden
& Son, Inc. Just for starters: what the fcuk is the DNC server doing in Ukraine?
As I reported on the previous thread, Sanders endorsed the impeachment proceedings in a
tweet I linked to and cited. Gabbard is apparently the only D-Party candidate that said this
decision is a mistake.
This article about her stance is actually balanced. Citing her recent interview by
FOXNews :
"'I have been consistent in saying that I believe that impeachment in this juncture would
be terribly divisive for our country at a time when we are already extremely divided,'
Gabbard explained. 'Hyper-partisanship is one of the things that's driving our country
apart.'
"'I think it's important to defeat Donald Trump. That's why I'm running for president, but
I think it's the American people who need to make their voices heard, making that decision,'
she said.
"Regardless of how you feel about Gabbard, you have to give her credit on this front.
America is extremely divided today and politicians in Washington play into that. The
impeachment saga is a prime example of their role in this division ." [My Emphasis]
When one digs deeper into the forces Gabbard's attacking, she's the most patriotic one of
the entire bunch, including the Rs. I haven't looked at her election websites recently, but
from what I see of her campaign appearances, her and Sanders seem to be sharing each other's
policy proposals, although they both choose to place more emphasis on some than others. For
Gabbard, its the wonton waste and corruption of the Empire that keeps good things from being
done for all citizens at home, whereas Sanders basically inverts the two.
Pelosi on Tuesday started this rock rolling down the hill.
She has made impeachment, which did not even come up in the last Democratic debate, the
issue of 2020. She has foreclosed bipartisan compromise on gun control, the cost of
prescription drugs and infrastructure. She has just put her own and her party's fate and future
on the line.
With Pelosi's assent that she is now open to impeachment, she turned what was becoming a
cold case into a blazing issue. If the Democrats march up impeachment hill, fail and fall back,
or if they vote impeachment only to see the Senate exonerate the president, that will be the
climactic moment of Pelosi's career. She is betting the future of the House, and her party's
hopes of capturing the presidency, on the belief she and her colleagues can persuade the
country to support the indictment of a president for high crimes.
One wonders: Do Democrats blinded by hatred of Trump ever wonder how that 40% of the nation
that sees him as the repository of their hopes will react if, rather than beat him at the
ballot box, they remove him in this way?
The first casualty of Pelosi's cause is almost certain to be the front-runner for the party
nomination. Joe Biden has already, this past week, fallen behind Sen. Elizabeth Warren in Iowa,
New Hampshire and California. The Quinnipiac poll has her taking the lead nationally for the
nomination, with Biden dropping into second place for the first time since he announced his
candidacy.
By making Ukraine the focus of the impeachment drive in the House, Pelosi has also assured
that the questionable conduct of Biden and son Hunter Biden will be front and center for the
next four months before Iowa votes.
What did Joe do? By his own admission, indeed his boast, as vice president he ordered
then-Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko to either fire the prosecutor who was investigating
the company that hired Hunter Biden for $50,000 a month or forgo a $1 billion U.S. loan
guarantee that Kiev needed to stay current on its debts.
Biden insists the Ukrainian prosecutor was corrupt, that Hunter had done no wrong, that he
himself was unaware of his son's business ties.
All these assertions have been contradicted or challenged.
There is another question raised by Biden's ultimatum to Kiev to fire the corrupt prosecutor
or forgo the loan guarantee. Why was the U.S. guaranteeing loans to a Kiev regime that had to
be threatened by the U.S. with bankruptcy to get it to rid itself of a prosecutor whom all of
Europe supposedly knew to be corrupt?
Whatever the truth of the charges, the problem here is that any investigation of potential
corruption of Hunter Biden, and of the role of his father, the former vice president, in
facilitating it, will be front and center in presidential politics between now and New
Hampshire.
This is bad news for the Biden campaign. And the principal beneficiary of Pelosi's decision
that put Joe and Hunter Biden at the center of an impeachment inquiry is, again, Warren.
Warren already appears to have emerged victorious in her battle with Bernie Sanders to
become the progressives' first choice in 2020. And consider how, as she is rising, her
remaining opposition is fast fading.
Sen. Kamala Harris has said she is moving her campaign to Iowa for a do-or-die stand in the
first battleground state. Sen. Cory Booker has called on donors to raise $1.7 million in 10
days, or he will have to pack it in. As Biden, Sanders, Harris and Booker fade, and "Mayor
Pete" Buttigieg hovers at 5 or 6% in national and state polls, Warren steadily emerges as the
probable nominee.
One measure of how deeply Biden is in trouble, whether he is beginning to be seen as too
risky, given the allegations against him and his son, will be the new endorsements his
candidacy receives after this week of charges and countercharges.
If there is a significant falling off, it could be fatal.
Patrick J. Buchanan is the author of "Nixon's White House Wars: The Battles That Made and
Broke a President and Divided America Forever."
In his phone call with Zelensky, President Trump mentioned two subjects in particular which
are Kryptonite to the Democrats: Crowdstrike and "the server," meaning the DNC server which
was never forensically examined by the FBI. Pulling on these two threads may be even more
interesting than the stuff about the big-bucks shakedowns of foreign governments by Joe Biden
& Son, Inc. Just for starters: what the fcuk is the DNC server doing in Ukraine?
I now think that someone on the Trump team did this leak. It only helps him. The dirt on
Biden was public, but ignored by the corporate media. Now they are forced to report it to
attack Trump, and it makes Dems look corrupt. Big media spins this, but not true leftists
like Jimmy Dore and others with millions of followers.
I'm writing from Athens, Greece, where the Greek language media, along with most other
European non-English language media, have tracked the Hunter Biden story since 2014 –
the unashamed and unabashed nepotism, corruption and conflict of interest of his appointment
to Burisma, and the subsequent trail of arrests in Ukraine for drugs, prostitution, drunk
driving. Burisma itself is not a pretty story, and by being headquartered in Cyprus it of
course evades Ukrainian taxes.
All this is an old story here.
It is satisfying, given the outrages that have been forced on the Ukrainian people, to have
at least one tiny part of this horrible mess brought to light. For us it is immaterial who
does this good thing.
The fact that the Ukrainian prosecutor intended to prosecute despite Washington's
domination speaks to his honesty. Only the compradore "elites" of Europe would pretend
anything different – for Washington's sake.
Meanwhile one can only marvel at the Democrat party: surely they realise they are only
shooting themselves in the foot. Worse, what if it leads to the unveiling of other Obama era
crimes?
Biden insists the Ukrainian prosecutor was corrupt, that Hunter had done no wrong, that he
himself was unaware of his son's business ties.
All these assertions have been contradicted or challenged".
This is par the "American" course. This attitude of ordering other nations interface with
many unrelated areas . America vouch for their honesty integrity and love for rule of law,
desire for woman's lib , peace, democracy and open business as the reasons for them to
liberate Iraq ,sanction Iran, topple Basher ,kill foreign leaders ,impose IMF on Libya or
Pakistan and displace tribals from Amazon or Ganges ,or dismantle welfare stems in Venezuela
or India.
Biden just made this personal.
Whats wrong with this?
Just as Biden knows that he was aware of the business and the corruption so was America
that Taliban did nit attack USA and Saddam did not carry out 911 or conduct any WMD or CW
tests .
Biden was bombastic. So was America in 2003.
Chicken coming home to roost . But the home has been usurped also by latinos blacks
immigrants and by the climate change.
Good one. She's gotta be next to get defrocked, a phony progressive Wall Street war hawk.
Only not so soon that a limp Biden zombie could rise again.
TULSI Gabbard = A Thinly Veiled Threat to Israel
This speech was about Saudi Arabia, but the Israel Lobby has to get a cold chill at the
thought of a US military that ONLY DEFENDS AMERICA. "Our military exists to defend America -- not the radical Islamist dictatorship of Saudi
Arabia"
@yetagain
We all enjoy Trump, and I hope the enjoyment lasts another few years, because there is a lot
of roach-infested curtains and termite-infested walls to be torn down by the bumbling
mastodont.
(And, bugger me sideways, La Pelosi looks like something out of a Disney "Ghosts of the
Carribean" amusement park ride, what's going on?)
@anonymous
Dems are in a bind on this one. I think the DNC orchestrated the leak to take out Biden who
is clearly losing it. But Biden's strength was his "so called" pro-labor appeal, and there's
no one to take up that mantle. "So Called" because Biden sold out labor on the TPP with China
in exchange for $1.5 Billion to Hunter.
The replacement is the problem. Warren ain't it. Watch the Fake News Media and see who
they start promoting. Yes Warren can win the primary, but free medical to illegals means
she's toast.
@JamesD
Justice Kennedy – who decreed the change in legal marriage – was another
Republican choice for whom young Mr. Kavanaugh clerked before helping President Cheney with
the Patriot Act to earn his first robe on the Swampville Circuit. Chief Justice Roberts was
the one who nailed down Big Sickness for the pharmaceutical and insurance industries.
Like the "federal" elections held every November in even-numbered years and the 5-4
decrees of the Court, the nail-biting confirmation hearings are another part of the show that
keeps people gulled into accepting that so many things in life are to be run by people in
Washington. Mr. Buchanan for years has been proclaiming each The Most Important Ever.
I'm still inclined to the notion that the Constitution was intended, at least by some of
its authors and supporters, to create a limited national government. But even by the time of
Marbury, those entrusted with the powers have arrogated the authority to redefine them. In my
lifetime, the Court exists to deal with hot potato social issues in lieu of the invertebrate
Congress, to forebear (along with the invertebrate Congress) the warmongering and other
"foreign policy" waged under auspices of the President, and to dignify the Establishment's
shepherding and fleecing of the people.
Why should a robed, unelected politician be redefining marriage? Entrusted to enforce the
Constitutional limitations on the others? Sure, questions like these are posed from time to
time in a dissenting Justice's opinion, but that ends the discussion other than in the
context of replacing old Justice X with middle-aged Justice Y. Those of us outside the
Beltway are told to tune in and root Red. And there are pom pom shakers and color
commentators just like Mr. Buchanan for Team Blue.
@anon
No democrat votes will be cast for months, yet Pat and other pundits are already saying that
Pocahontas Warren will be their nominee. Tulsi raised the question of Warren's lack of
qualifications to be Commander-in-Chief (the most important job of any president). The media
and the DNC are trying to bury Tulsi, just as the RNC tried to do the same with Trump –
and we know how that turned out. The DNC failed this time to cheat her out of her rightful
place in the upcoming debate, which must make phoneys like Warren scared to death. Don't
count Tulsi out. Americans are sick unto death of constant war.
Academic freedom is a relatively simple principle. It refers to the "liberty to teach,
pursue, and discuss knowledge without restriction or interference, as by school or public
officials."
This principle seems to be under attack in America. The American administration has openly
interfered with the liberty to freely teach, pursue and discuss knowledge.
The New
York Times writes : "in a rare instance of federal intervention in college course content,
the department asserted that the universities' Middle East program violated the standards of a
federal program that awards funding to international studies and foreign language
programs."
According to the NYT the focus on 'anti Israeli bias' "appears to reflect the views of an
agency leadership that includes a civil rights chief, Kenneth L. Marcus, who has made a career
of pro-Israel advocacy and has waged a years long campaign to delegitimize and defund Middle
East studies programs that he has criticized as rife with anti-Israel bias."
One may wonder why America is willing to sacrifice its liberal ethos on the pro Israel
altar? Miriam Elman provides a possible answer. Elman is an associate professor at Syracuse
University and executive director of the Academic Engagement Network, which opposes BDS. Elman
told the NYT that this "should be a wake-up call what they're (the Federal government
presumably) saying is, 'If you want to be biased and show an unbalanced view of the Middle
East, you can do that, but you're not going to get federal and taxpayer money."
In Elman's view academic freedom has stayed intact, it is just the dollars that will
be withheld unless a university adheres to pro Israel politics.
Those who follow the history of Zionism, Israeli politics and Jewish nationalism find
this latest development unsurprising. Zionism, once dedicated to the concept of a "promised
land," morphed decades ago into an aspiration toward a 'promised planet.' Zionism is a global
project operating in most, if not all, Western states. Jewish pressure groups, Zionist think
tanks and Pro Israel lobbies work intensively to suppress elementary freedoms and reshape the
public, political and cultural discourse all to achieve Zionism's ambitious goal. After all,
Jewish power, as I define it, is the power to suppress criticism of Jewish power.
ORDER
IT NOW
This authoritarian symptom is not at all new. It is apparently a wandering phenomenon. It
has popped out in different forms at different times. What happened in the USSR provides a
perfect illustration of this symptom. In the early days of Soviet Russia, anti-Semitism was met
with the death penalty as stated by Joseph Stalin in
answer to an inquiry made by the Jewish News Agency: "In the U.S.S.R. anti-semitism is
punishable with the utmost severity of the law as a phenomenon deeply hostile to the Soviet
system. Under U.S.S.R. law active anti-semites are liable to the death penalty."
Germany saw the formation of Jewish anti defamation leagues attempted to suppress the rise
in anti Jewish sentiments.* There's no need to elaborate on the dramatic failure of these
efforts in Germany. And despite Stalin's early pro-Jewish stance, the Soviet leader turned
against the so- called " rootless cosmopolitan s." This
campaign led to the 1950s Doctors' plot , in which a group of doctors
(mostly Jewish) were subjected to a show trial for supposedly having plotted to
assassinate the Soviet leader.
In Britain and other Western nations we have seen fierce pro Israel campaigns waged to
suppress criticism of Israel and Jewish politics. Different lobbies have been utilizing
different means amongst them the adoption of the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism by
governments and institutions. In Britain, France, Germany and other European countries,
intellectuals, artists, politicians, party members and ordinary citizens are constantly
harassed by a few powerful Jewish pressure groups. In dark Orwellian Britain 2019, critics of
Israel have yet to face the death sentence, but they are subjected to severe reprisals ranging
from personal intimidation to police actions and criminal prosecution. People have lost their
jobs for supporting Palestine, others have been expelled from Corbyn's compromised Labour Party
for making truthful statements. Some have even been jailed for satirical content. And as you
might guess, none of this has made Israel, its supporters or its stooges popular. Quite the
opposite.
I learned from the NYT that the administration "ordered" the universities' consortium to
submit a revised schedule of events it planned to support, a full list of the courses it offers
and the professors working in its Middle East studies program. I wonder who in the
administration possesses the scholarly credentials to assess the academic level of university
courses or professors? Professor Trump himself, or maybe Kushner & Ivanka or Kushner's
coffee boy Avi Berkovitch , or
maybe recently retired 'peace maker'
Jason Greenblat t?
It takes years to build academic institutions, departments, libraries and research
facilities. Apparently, it takes one determined lobby to ruin the future of American
scholarship.
*In his book Final Solution David Cesarani brings the story of the Centralverein deutscher
Staatsbürger jüdischen Glaubens (Central Association of German Citizens of Jewish
Faith) that operated in Germany since the late 19th century "suing rabble rousers for
defamation, funding candidates pledging to contest antisemitism " You can read about the
association and its activity here
' 'Those who follow the history of Zionism, Israeli politics and Jewish nationalism find
this latest development unsurprising. Zionism, once dedicated to the concept of a "promised
land," morphed decades ago into an aspiration toward a 'promised planet.' '
It is quite clear that this legislation is in breach of the U.S. Constitution and that it
sets a new standard for legislation designed to prevent any type of negative speech against
Israel.
You are flat out wrong Gilad.
There is a difference between criticism of Israel and racist talk. There has been a lot of
racist behavior towards Jews going on college campuses. Students have been thrown off student
boards just because they went to Israel on a birthright trip. University of California has a
Israel Apartheid week, where Jewish students face physical abusive. Three is a curriculum
course on called "How to eliminate Israel".
You have not followed American Universities closely and are taking one incident out of
context see below what happened at a pro Gaza conference at UNC, when a Palestinian rapper
got really racist.
Just fill in Jews for Black, Muslim, gays, etc. There is a big difference you refuse to
acknowledge because a lot of your followers are racist. Isn't that what we are talking about?
American Universities have trustees that donate tons of money. Here in NY. NYU lost a lot of
trustee money from Alumni because of harassment by the SJP of Jewish students. In California
Jewish students are routinely harass and bullied. Racism is racism, not about Jews.
Columbia University had Edward Sayed and now Rashid Kaledi. Both who were outspoken critics
of Israel, and continue uninterrupted. L
This is what the rapper sang:
"Let's try it together. I need your help. I cannot be "anti-Semitic" alone," Nafar said
before singing, "don't think of Rihanna when you sing this, don't think of Beyonce –
think of Mel Gibson. I'm in love with a Jew/Oh/I fell in love with a Jew/Oh/Her skin is
white and my skin is brown, she was going up, up and I was going down."
@Sean The Palestinians are losers, who do not want their own state but rather they want
the Jews gone. That is their entire raison d'être, not national sovereignty.
It is you who need to come out of the trees.
Every left winger wants to make the Pals out to be the natives who got kicked out. Not true,
there were always Jews in Palestine, which belonged to no one and was a province of the
Ottomans.
It is a stupid story. 70% of Israelis come from Arab countries not Europe. The Pals are not
the Native Americans, with a distinct culture and identity who were replaced by colonizers.
It is a bogus story.
Their leaders are Jihadist who want to murder Jews, if they wanted a state the whole thing
would have been over like 50 years ago. Look at those corrupt leaders, keeping the entire
population prisoners of their greed and lust for destruction. They care little for national
sovereignty if it involves sharing land with the Jews.
The Jews figured it out a long time ago, it is just a matter of weaning the global
community from the propaganda and showing people what a scam the Palestinian cause is. The
arabs have abandoned them a long time ago, because their cause was not sincere.
Do no blame the Jews for all the death and destruction in the ME. Muslims have their own
porblems.
Prior to 9/11 the consensus of experts on the Middle East, Islam, Comparative Religion, etc.
was that MI6 Zionist Bernard Lewis was an ignorant, extremist lunatic. When Lewis feuded with
Edward Said, the whole academy sided with Said, who was elected president of MLA in a
landslide.
The 9/11 neocon-Zionist coup terrorized the academy and made Lewis a mainstream guru,
advisor to Bush Jr. and bestselling author. Since then the insane Zionist party line, which
has always dominated in both liberal and conservative media as well as politics, has been
forced on the academy, whose experts are smart enough and knowledgable enough to know how
insane it is but what can they do?
Atzmon tips his hand when mentioning the so called "Doctors plot" by citing Zionist dominated
Wikipedia on the subject.
Wikipedia is certainly not a reasonable, unbiased source for anything of special interest to
Jews.
@MarkU Yes, "Sean's" comment is illustrative of an emerging tendency among sophistic,
pilpul-pushing Jews (and some shabbosgoyim) in comment strings.
One key feature that we see here is the traditional Jew resort to claims of inevitability
for whatever goal the Jew is pursuing. The Jew is on the "right side of history." And those
in opposition are sure to be on the losing side. Note also the employment of Trump-like
winner/loser dichotomy. The Jew looks at what "sells" to any particular slice of goyim.
"Sean" figures that Trump-style language and phraseology will have some appeal here and so he
uses these terms in his comment.
Of course, the Jew has been thrown out of every place he has every infested. He first
alienated the Greeks of the Hellenistic Eastern Mediterranean, then the Western Europeans,
then the Eastern Europeans, and ultimately in the 20th century, the Muslim world. So over the
longer historical term, the Jews doesn't really look like much of a winner. The things he
does to "win" get him expelled or exterminated. But he is counting on the short historical
memory of the goyim to render that reality moot.
The Jew's first inclination is to make a moralistic appeal. His sense of his own morality
is a dominant characteristic of the Jew psyche. But here, "Sean" appeals explicitly to Jewish
power–"the strongest power." The Jew understands that the destructive obsessions of the
Jew left (really, pseudo-left) and Jew Neocons have exhausted and alienated American goyim.
So now he is trying to jump off that train and onto the MAGA or nationalist train. This is
absolutely typical of how the Jew thinks and operates. He doesn't really believe in anything
except what happens to be "good for the Jews" at the moment and in the foreseeable future.
The Jew observes that MAGA Goyim who think this way are inclined to accept power realities,
so the Jew wants to appeal to that by asserting the overwhelming power of the Jew in the US,
which, he informs us for our edification, is the most powerful country in the world. The
message is that whether you like the Jew or not, his position is unassailable, so you might
as well give in to it.
Another characteristic feature of the contemporary faux-conservative scheming Jew is the
inclination to co-opt anti-immigration sentiment. Notice how he links the British Labor
Party, one of the Jew's current bogeymen, with immigration, which he assumes is an emotive
topic for MAGA goyim, in an attempt to make his enemy everyone else's enemy. Again,
this is typical Jew behavior.
The Jews would go berserk if Israel came to an end. Sorry but its not worth it, and we
have responsibilities to our own that come first.
"Sean" concludes with a final warning that Jew power must be accommodated and projects an
air of resignation. He also strangely appends two quotes from former Italian PM Giulio
Andreotti:
"We learn from the Gospel that when they asked Jesus what truth was, he did not reply.
"Power wears out those who don't have it"
Now who would know or take the time to come up with these pessimistic, even nihilistic
comments from an old, Italian politician? It could be an utterly dejected and morally
defeated Catholic–in theory. But it's much more likely that this is all a Jew's notion
of how to promote the idea of the power of Jewry and the powerlessness of those who oppose
Jewry's global scheming. The Jew says to himself, "Well if the goyim are focused on the
scheming of the Jews, then I will co-opt that focus to impress on the goy the idea that
resistance is futile–that Jew schemes are destined to succeed no matter what the goy
does."
TUR is clearly a place where a good deal of experimentation goes on–including Jew
experimentation in how to anti-Jewish sentiments–judo-like–for use on behalf of
the Jew.
This sort of conniving–double and triple games–is at the very heart of how the
Jew sees and behaves towards the goyim.
@Oscar Peterson Woha there bucaroo!
Sean does not represent classic Hasbara thought or ideas. Not. He is not a classic Jew a
phobic in his thoughts, and often strays from the message, so much so that we Hasbara Jews
scratch out heads.
Zionist Jews do not think the Palestinians got treated badly. They believe that the entire
story is a Jihad against the Jews in an attempt to wipe them out as a religion. Nothing to do
with land and or peace. That is the beginning middle and end of the story, and we care little
about the Palestinians and their cause, talk to the Jihadist and stop them from trying to
eradicate us.
The rest of your story is pure speculation and bullshit and Jews have little time to ponder
such far out thoughts as they are facing constant threats of annihilation from Islam.
You may disagree with my points, but lets at least stay on track.
Thoughts like this:
Yes the Palestinian got badly treated and are had their rights violated, I consider
myself under any obligation to be on their side, I am on the side of the traditional people
of the West in their own countries. For helping other peoples I need to see some benefit to
my people, who cannot afford altruism. The Palestinians bring nothing to the table and are
helpless. As someone pointed out to Giraldi the other day on RT one of the main reasons the
Palestinians are helpless is because the other Muslims of the Middle East have lost
interest in them. Now they are left with Iran.
"Sean" is clearly using standard Jew techniques of sophistic argumentation: Inevitability,
selling Israel with different pitches to different goy audiences, attempting to sell pro-Jew
intellectual schlock as a "package deal" with memes assumed to be favorably received by the
targeted goyim.
These are absolutely indicators of the Jew rhetorical style.
Now, whether Sean is ultimately a classically conniving, dishonest Jew or an
unconventionally conniving, dishonest Jew or a shabbosgoy who has learned at the knee of the
conniving, dishonest Jew or a hapless goy whom the conniving, dishonest Jew has succeeded via
his propagandistic efforts in demoralizing to the point of a Stockholm-Syndrome-style
recitation is not a fully resolved issue. But clearly, we can see that the Jew or his
influence has been at work here one way or another.
Beyond that, you have said nothing except that you don't like the post, which is not a
concern for me in any case.
Sanders is spend force in any case. His endorsement does not matter much. But for Warren this
is a blunder. Tulsi is the only one out of this troika who proved to be capable politician.
As I reported on the previous thread, Sanders endorsed the impeachment proceedings in a
tweet I linked to and cited. Gabbard is apparently the only D-Party candidate that said this
decision is a mistake.
This article about her stance is actually balanced. Citing her recent interview by
FOXNews :
"'I have been consistent in saying that I believe that impeachment in this juncture would
be terribly divisive for our country at a time when we are already extremely divided,'
Gabbard explained. 'Hyper-partisanship is one of the things that's driving our country
apart.'
"'I think it's important to defeat Donald Trump. That's why I'm running for president, but
I think it's the American people who need to make their voices heard, making that decision,'
she said.
"Regardless of how you feel about Gabbard, you have to give her credit on this front.
America is extremely divided today and politicians in Washington play into that. The
impeachment saga is a prime example of their role in this division ." [My Emphasis]
When one digs deeper into the forces Gabbard's attacking, she's the most patriotic one of
the entire bunch, including the Rs. I haven't looked at her election websites recently, but
from what I see of her campaign appearances, her and Sanders seem to be sharing each other's
policy proposals, although they both choose to place more emphasis on some than others. For
Gabbard, its the wonton waste and corruption of the Empire that keeps good things from being
done for all citizens at home, whereas Sanders basically inverts the two.
"... The conservative movement's unwholesome obsession with Israel is not an entirely organic obsession to be sure. There is a whole lot of dark kosher oligarch money lurking behind the neoconservative cause, Christian Zionism, and the Reagan/Zioboomer battalion ..."
"... there is something awfully peculiar, almost disturbing about the old guard's infatuation with Israel. I mean, why are American boomers so concerned about the Jewish state and its survival? How exactly does a tiny apartheidesque ethnostate half-way around the world affect their everyday lives? Are they simply mind-slaves to a mainstream media dominated by powerful Jews and powerful Jewish interest groups? Is this all really about scripture as Christian radio likes to contend? Or is there something else afoot here? Well, in short, there is. ..."
"... White Westerners, white Americans in particular, are a thoroughly vassalized, deracinated people. We aren't allowed to celebrate our own race's host of historic accomplishments anymore. That would be racist. We aren't allowed to put our own people first either, as all other peoples do. That would likewise be racist. White Western peoples aren't even allowed to have nations of our own any longer, nations which exist to advance our interests, and which are populated by and overseen by people like us, who share our interests and our attitudes. That also would be, you guessed it, racist. Our very existence is increasingly little more than an unfortunate, racist obstacle to a brighter, more diverse future, in the eyes of the Cultural Marxist sociopaths who rule the Western World. Needless to say, most white Americans would rather be dead than racist, and so we are naturally, quite literally dying as a result. ..."
"... The white American psyche has been tamed, broken as it were. Ziocucking is a symptom of that psychic injury. ..."
"... White Americans can not, they must not, stake claim to an identity or a future of their own, so they have essentially committed themselves to another people's identity and future instead of their own. ..."
"... Actually, Donald Trump's electoral victory is at least partially attributable to a very similar psychological phenomenon. White Americans, who have largely lost the self-confidence to stand behind their traditions and convictions, still had the gumption to vote for a man who possesses in oodles and cringy oodles, the self-same self-confidence they lack. White Americans are thus engaged in an almost unstated, indirect, vicarious defiance of Cultural Marxism via Trump/Trumpism, a tangible, albeit somewhat incoherent, symbol of open revolt against Western elites. The repressed group will of whites is longing for an authentic medium of civilizational expression, but can only find two-bit demagoguery and Israel worship. The weather is not fair in the white, Western mind. ..."
"... After all, the birthrates of Jews in Israel are at well above replacement level . Israelis are optimistic about the future. As whites in the West fall on their proverbial sword to atone for their racist past, Jews in Israel are thriving. ..."
"... that unwholesome obsession will not dissipate until whites reclaim their own history, rediscover their roots, learn to take their own side, and demand a place in the planet's future (yes, I said demand , ..."
"... Until whites have a story and a spirit of their own, they will only, and can only, live through the identities and triumphs of other races. And perhaps most critically, they will continue to be a ghost people on the march to extinction. ..."
The conservative movement's unwholesome obsession with Israel is not an entirely organic
obsession to be sure. There is a whole lot of dark kosher oligarch money lurking behind the
neoconservative cause, Christian Zionism, and the Reagan/Zioboomer battalion. Nevertheless,
whether organic or not, the boomer generation's excessive regard for Israel is today authentic
and undeniable. A strong fealty to Israel is deeply entrenched amongst boomer-generation
conservatives. Indeed, when it comes to defending Israel and its conduct, many of these types
are like samurais on meth. They don't seem to care at all if their entire state or city should
devolve into a semi-anarchic New Somalia, but god forbid some Somali congresswoman should
lambaste the sacred Jewish state. That simply can't be countenanced here in the land of the
free!
Mind you, this article is not meant to constitute a polemic against Israel, or Jewish
ethnopolitics for that matter. The BDS movement is just as wrongheaded as Ziocuckoldry, in my
humble opinion. Although there is much wrong with Israel, there is plenty right with it as
well. Despite what the modern left may believe, there is nothing inherently illegitimate about
a state like Israel, one rooted in history, in genes, in religion, and in race. States built
around a shared ethnicity or a shared religion (or, as in Israel's case, an ample helping of
both) are generally more stable and successful than diverse societies erected upon propositions
most people and peoples don't really accept, or leftist values that have ideological quicksand
for their foundations.
With that said, there is something awfully peculiar, almost disturbing about the old guard's infatuation with Israel. I
mean, why are American boomers so concerned about the Jewish state and its survival? How exactly does a tiny apartheidesque ethnostate half-way around the world
affect their everyday lives? Are they simply mind-slaves to a mainstream media dominated by
powerful Jews and powerful Jewish interest groups? Is this all really about scripture as
Christian radio likes to contend? Or is there something else afoot here? Well, in short, there
is.
White Westerners, white Americans in particular, are a thoroughly vassalized, deracinated
people. We aren't allowed to celebrate our own race's host of historic accomplishments anymore.
That would be racist. We aren't allowed to put our own people first either, as all other
peoples do. That would likewise be racist. White Western peoples aren't even allowed to have
nations of our own any longer, nations which exist to advance our interests, and which are
populated by and overseen by people like us, who share our interests and our attitudes. That
also would be, you guessed it, racist. Our very existence is increasingly little more than an
unfortunate, racist obstacle to a brighter, more diverse future, in the eyes of the Cultural
Marxist sociopaths who rule the Western World. Needless to say, most white Americans would
rather be dead than racist, and so we are naturally, quite literally dying as a result.
The white American psyche has been tamed, broken as it were. Ziocucking is a symptom of that
psychic injury. Because white boomers possess no group/tribal identity any longer, or
collective will, or sense of race pride, or civilizational prospects, because they have been enserfed by a viciously anti-white Cultural Marxist overclass, they have opted to live
vicariously through another race. White Americans can not, they must not, stake claim to an
identity or a future of their own, so they have essentially committed themselves to another
people's identity and future instead of their own. Indeed, just as the cuckold doesn't
merely permit another man to penetrate his wife, but actually takes a kind of perverse pleasure
in the pleasure of that other man, in large measure by fetishizing his dominance and sexual
prowess, the Ziocuck likewise doesn't merely allow his civilization to be debased, he takes an
equally perverse pleasure in the triumphs of other peoples and nations, and by so doing
imagines, mistakenly of course, that America itself is still as free and proud a nation as
those foreign nations he fetishizes.
Actually, Donald Trump's electoral victory is at least partially attributable to a very
similar psychological phenomenon. White Americans, who have largely lost the self-confidence to
stand behind their traditions and convictions, still had the gumption to vote for a man who
possesses in oodles and cringy oodles, the self-same self-confidence they lack. White Americans
are thus engaged in an almost unstated, indirect, vicarious defiance of Cultural Marxism via
Trump/Trumpism, a tangible, albeit somewhat incoherent, symbol of open revolt against Western
elites. The repressed group will of whites is longing for an authentic medium of civilizational
expression, but can only find two-bit demagoguery and Israel worship. The weather is not fair
in the white, Western mind.
Through this sordid, vicarious identitarianism, threats to Jewish lives become threats to
their own white lives. Jewish interests become tantamount to their own interests. It is a sad
sight to behold anyhow, a people with no sense of dignity or shame, too cowed by political
correctness to stand up for their own group interests, too brainwashed to love themselves, too
reprogrammed to be themselves, idolizing alien peoples. Nevertheless, the need for belonging in
place, time, and history, and for collective purpose, doesn't just go away because Western
elites say being white signifies nothing but "hate". As white civilization aborts and hedonizes
itself into extinction, as whites practice suicidal altruism and absolute racial denialism,
atomized white individuals seek out other histories, other stories, other peoples to attach
themselves to and project themselves onto.
White Americans have thus foolishly come to see their own destiny as inseparable from the
destiny of a people whose destiny they don't really share.
After all, the birthrates of Jews in Israel are at well above replacement level .
Israelis are optimistic
about the future. As whites in the West fall on their proverbial sword to atone for their
racist past, Jews in Israel are thriving.
As whites in America suffer from various epidemics of despair , their fellow white
Americans seem more interested in the imaginary plight of Israelis who can't stop winning
military skirmishes, embarrassing their Arab enemies, and unlawfully acquiring land and
resources in the Levant. The actual, visceral plight of their own people seems almost an
afterthought to most white Americans. The whole affair is frankly bizarre and shameful.
This peculiar psychological phenomenon of vicarious identitarianism is at least partially
responsible for the Zioboomer's undying devotion to Israel. Furthermore, that unwholesome
obsession will not dissipate until whites reclaim their own history, rediscover their roots,
learn to take their own side, and demand a place in the planet's future (yes, I said
demand , since the white race's many enemies have no intention of saving a place for
them or willingly handing them a say in that future). Until whites have a story and a spirit of
their own, they will only, and can only, live through the identities and triumphs of other
races. And perhaps most critically, they will continue to be a ghost people on the march to
extinction.
A related phenomenon is Russia-cucking. White American conservatives who have seen through
Jewish bullshit often seem to conclude that the racial predicament in America is hopeless, so
they switch to Russia-cucking. Being pro-Russia is obviously more sensible than being
pro-Israel, but it's nationalism by proxy all the same.
"... Tulsi is the only Democrat who has her head screwed tight on her shoulders. As for the rest of that clown show---God help us!! ..."
"... Russia Gate 2.0 ..."
"... The Ukrainian gas HoldCo gave Hunter Biden a no-show job that paid $600K a year. They could have hired dozen of Yale Law grads for less. ..."
"... Kind of sad we Americans after two years of Russia gate will be dragged through a new political ploy. Our intelligence community and the DOJ need come clean and quick. ..."
"... The transcript of Trump's call to the Ukrainian president is out. There is absolutely no mention of anything close to a quid pro quo. ..."
"... "Repeat after me: the President should not demand foreign powers investigate his political rivals." How about Senate Democrats, Hillary Clinton, the DNC? Do you have a problem with them soliciting, even paying cash, to foreigners to investigate Trump? How about spying? Do you have a problem with one party using U.S. intelligence to spy on another party's nominee? ..."
"... This time - played into showing an utter electoral weakness by demanding an impeachment with no grounds for such a year before an election they, according to their screams on every corner, are "poised to win". Uncool, bros and sises, uncooool... ..."
"... The only mildly critical observation as to how exactly Trump played the said fiddle is that it would have been a tad better had he taken his time and waited for some days. ..."
"... The Democrats have hitched their train to the impeachment star not with impeachment per se as the goal. ..."
"... Just dragging us through this execrable process will achieve what they want nicely, i.e., disrupting possible Trump progress on his policy initiatives ( such as they are ), and weakening his electoral chances amongst the incorrigibly indecisive segment of American voters at the margin. Fighting corruption with corruption has now become the norm in Washington, D.C. ..."
I agree with Tulsi Gabbard - an impeachment at this time serves no point. It also discounts
the value of voting Democrat. This act may hand the White House to Trump for another 4
years. One can only hope that a Tusi G can arise and become our next president. The rest of
the team are basically knee jerk politicians waiting for the lobbies to instruct.
If Democrats weren't fanatically determined to prevent her from arising at all costs, she
could become the president already in a year. She can realiably beat any Republican aside
from Rand Paul, who isn't much more loved within his party than she within hers. One can
only wonder why the Democratic establishment hates her so much. Not a member of the Cult?
Better losing on and on and on than allowing an anti-war candidate to get the nomination?
Collective political manifestation of Freudian death wish?
"I hope with all of my soul, and with respect for those like Ellsberg, Manning, and
Snowden, that this whistleblower proves worthy to stand next to them. And God help him and
our country if not."
So, Democrats have done just what he wanted them to do - started a miserable (and a doomed,
given that the Senate is in Republican hands) circus instead of actually campaigning with
their voters, while also riling his ones. But thanks, team D, for showing what your
candidates' chances to get elected really are. Has been no secret to me that those chances
are illusory, but thanks for making the thing official anyways. Starting a stillborn
attempt to depose a president, against whom you, in your fantasy world, are "poised to win"
in a year, is the best testimony of how toast you are in the said fantasy world's real
counterpart. Attacongressboys and attacongressgirls. Take some metaphorical cookies from
the metaphorical jar.
The only sad thing is that you're sullying the notion of whistleblower with a clown,
who, most probably, doesn't even exist. The whole thing is actually your petty revenge
against Snowden, who has just released his new book, ain't it? Low.
"Remember, he knows what was said and the Dems demanding impeachment do not."
Exactly and the Dems are setting themselves up for another public disaster thus handing
Trump his reelection. Anyway Biden is history and he should withdraw immediately. Fighting
this losing battle will only invoke the well deserved wrath of justice.
Looks to me that Trump is turning the tables on the democrats and they are in for a
world of hurt when the investigations and indictments start rolling now.
Kind of sad we Americans after two years of Russia gate will be dragged through a new
political ploy. Our intelligence community and the DOJ need come clean and quick.
The transcript of Trump's call to the Ukrainian president is out. There is absolutely no
mention of anything close to a quid pro quo. Trump asks the president to take calls from
Bill Barr and Giuliani to talk about corruption broadly. Biden's son is also included in
what they'll talk about. It is all very high-level, general, surface talk. If Dems want to
try and impeach on this, it is a long shot at best.
https://fm.cnbc.com/applica...
"Repeat after me: the President should not demand foreign powers investigate his political
rivals."
How about Senate Democrats, Hillary Clinton, the DNC? Do you have a problem with them soliciting, even paying cash, to foreigners to
investigate Trump? How about spying? Do you have a problem with one party using U.S. intelligence to spy on
another party's nominee?
I'll repeat after you once you clarify your position on those things. But if you're not
consistent, why should I?
The transcript released has Trump asking for an investigation of Biden and Biden's son
explicitly. Then it emphasizes how "very good" to the Ukraine the U.S. has been and how the
relationship "has not always been reciprocal".
At the time of the call the president was holding back hundreds of millions of dollars
in Ukranian aid. How dumb do you have to be to not interpret this as a gangsta time of quid-pro-quo
attempt?
The whole whistle blower report should be released.
The Demos have no real choice but to start an impeachment query as their voters will
interpret not doing this as clear cowardice and moral spinelessness. They know the
impeachment won't succeed.
So, looks like "some" folks have been played like a fiddle all over again. This time -
played into showing an utter electoral weakness by demanding an impeachment with no grounds
for such a year before an election they, according to their screams on every corner, are
"poised to win". Uncool, bros and sises, uncooool...
The only mildly critical observation as to how exactly Trump played the said fiddle is
that it would have been a tad better had he taken his time and waited for some days.
Nothing practical - the situation served its purpose fairly and squarely - but it would be
such a cute circus, and wailings would be so much louder if everything fell apart just a
little bit later. But maybe he just doesn't like the circus. De gustibus non est
disputandum , though.
Whoa, there cowboys and indigenous peoples! The Democrats have hitched their train to the
impeachment star not with impeachment per se as the goal.
Just dragging us through this
execrable process will achieve what they want nicely, i.e., disrupting possible Trump
progress on his policy initiatives ( such as they are ), and weakening his electoral
chances amongst the incorrigibly indecisive segment of American voters at the margin.
Fighting corruption with corruption has now become the norm in Washington, D.C.
It's sort of the long game, with a hint of the "Hail Mary" pass thrown in for good
measure. They know what they're up to. But, as the author says, it just might backfire.
They may overplay their hand. Or make one of the two classic blunders.
Vizzini: "Ha-ha, you fool! You fell victim to one of the classic blunders, the most
famous of which is 'Never get involved in a land war in Asia,' but only slightly less well
known is this: 'Never go in against a Sicilian, when death is on the line!'"
A presentation and reading by Hamilton Gregory, author of "McNamara's Folly: The Use of
Low-IQ Troops in the Vietnam." Because so many college students were avoiding military service
during the Vietnam War, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara lowered mental standards to induct
354,000 low-IQ men. they were known as McNamara's "Moron Corps." Their death toll in combat was
appalling. Gregory indicates at the end of his talk that the situation didn't really change.
The same practice is taking place nowadays.
England patriot says:
September
24, 2019 at 5:27 pm GMT 100 Words A lot of people mistake low IQ brutishness for genuine
bravery and strength, which is why blacks are considered by many whites to be the toughest race
and probably why they are favoured by the military.
A big weakness of the US and UK militaries is the assumption that street thugs make the most
effective and capable troops, in reality such people are often the most useless and cowardly in
an actual war zone. Read More Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter Display All
Comments
The story is definitely true. Not only were there low moron troops but even the so called
West Point graduates with no experience in war were complete idiots. It was a two fold fiasco
because these graduates couldn't read coordinates on maps and the morons couldn't find them
and thus they often bombed our own troops.
There were a lot "friendly fire" deaths that were never reported. The carnage of Vietnam
was a disgrace from poor military strategies to morons and incompetents running them. We were
not prepared for the "Jungle Type Gorilla War" our leaders got us into and the results are
told forever on the Vietnam Memorial in Washington. What did they die for? Another
"Communist" are taking over Domino Policy when the true Communist Jews were running the stuff
in the USA and destroying us.
Two destroyers were recently collided into by slow-moving merchant ships. Someone said that
this is like a Chevy Corvette being struck by a bulldozer on the Bonneville Salt Flats while
a team of trained experts had the job of keeping the Corvette from being hit.
@A123
Any civilization that sends their Best and Brightest to the front lines is taking huge risks.
Cannon fodder troops generally come (and should come) from the lower tiers of society. This
promotes a nation's long-term health and vitality.
There is no starvation–only fasting–during Ramadan. Fasting occurs each day
from sunrise to sundown. On the other hand, Israel's high fertility rates among Orthodox and
Sephardic Jews has dysgenics written all over it. This explains why Israel's average IQ
average remains below 100. Highly religious and less-intelligent Jews are producing a
disproportionate number of the births inside Israel.
It's a lesson the US could've learned back in World War II. The US deployed black troops in
France, and instead of proving that the blacks were just as capable fighters as the whites,
the blacks engaged in typical black behavior of rape and thievery. It got so bad in areas
like Cherbourg that the local population preferred the Germans over their supposed
'liberators'.
The same thing happened earlier in the war when the Allies deployed Moroccan mercenaries
in Italy.
After the battle of Monte Cassino, these savages could rape Italian women with impunity, they
wouldn't be stopped by the French, the British or indeed the Americans, and as a result more
than 30.000 Italian women became victims of these vicious assaults.
But I bet it was all in good faith of course, after all the US was making Europe safe for
stali I mean, 'democracy'
Politicians did not want the war to become an issue among the affluent. It was the old adage
about wars: "Rich men start them; poor men fight them." There were plenty of chicken hawks
around.
The article and comments, so far, are interesting.
A military is a tool of the ruling class/caste/layer/whatever. What is moronic, or not, is
for them to decide. The only principle: is the tool good for the job?
There are several very good reasons to have "low-level IQ" troops in the military, a
modern war/combat in particular.
In an infantry company of, say, 160 men, a smart O.C. would love to have 10-20 of those
types. Plenty of jobs/assignments for them and definitely attributing to combat efficiency of
the unit.
Even better in logistics, especially in higher units/rear areas. Comparison:
warehouse/storage facilities employees in civvy street.
BTW, those guys, if/when properly treated (LEADERSHIP) can be utterly loyal and
dependable. For "experts" around, there are plenty of miserable, mind-numbing jobs/tasks in
the military, plus quite dangerous, which those guys shall do when others won't. If .treated
properly
And, one more element, especially in contemporary wars: certain moral attitude, "relaxed"
approach to human life and limb etc. Ability to commit acs of war other, more, say, smart,
"sensitive" troops, are reluctant to do.
Israel. IDF as the state tool to keep Palestinians under control.
Occupation forces of The Empire in Afghanistan and Iraq.
And one more thing: for suppressing possible internal unrest in a Western country ..For
that job you really don't want very intelligent/sensitive people.
Etc.
Big topic but, of course, not for this thread, for obvious reasons. Program.
Sorry for the interruption, guys. Feel free to resume the "bashing".
Infantry in Vietnam was known to be awful. Everyone in the military knew to avoid it. It was
openly used as a threat for non-compliance to troops elsewhere.
There were certainly exceptions. Some Marines, people wanting or needing to get their
ticket punched, etc. But before anything, Vietnam Infantry was getting the dregs. Not that I
doubt McNamera leaned into it as an opportunity.
Why in the world did they want or need all these troops? Westmorland kept asking for more
and more. After 500,000, per the pentagon papers, the JCS mood Westmorland that given US
presence in Europe, Japan, Korea, etc., there were no more extra troops.
Too bad that the US military has made a cottage industry out of revisionist accounts
regarding how it could have been "won". Showing a remarkable lack of insight into what it
means to win.
@A123
Interesting to see how a conniving Jew takes a piece about Vietnam and uses it to further his
objective of trying (quite unsuccessfully, one infers) to generate sympathy for the
Judenreich. He then doubles down with a further tangent leading somehow to Ramadan (!) It's
almost comical how transparent Jew scheming has become. It makes one wonder if the Hasbara
brigades have had to go low-IQ at this point?
Both in terms of IQ and class background, infantry in Vietnam were generally
representative of the general population. As one author assessed, "If they [soldiers in
combat units] were not the social and intellectual cream of American youth, neither were they
its dregs or castoffs."
nI saw the author of the book give at talk. I believe it was at a Tennessee Unversity. What
he described he saw as an enlisted man if I remember correctly. He was sent to OCS later and
sounded a very decent man. The conditions were awful for these guys. They were treated as
expendable by peers and officers alike.
I wonder how the IDF works this issue out. The Israelis are masters of the universe at
everything don't you know. They are utter geniuses.
All this brouhaha over Russiagate and to think that in the end it
was Ukraine that did it
Anyhow:
I am pretty sure this is a trap (for the Dems), who are initiating impeachment without even
knowing what's on the damn transcript.
It will be nice to see some questions on how exactly Hunter Biden was given a position at
Ukraine's natural gas monopoly with a monthly salary of $50,000 (in a country where the average
wage is two orders of magnitude lower) while daddy campaigned against Ukrainian corruption.
Perhaps there'll even be some good opportunities for knowledge about the Maidan false flag
to seep into the US, discourse though I'll believe it when I see it.
I do not know where the Dems are going with this. To actually get Trump out of office would
require a 2/3 majority of the senate to vote for conviction do the Dems really think there's
any set of circumstances under which they get those votes? Impeachment itself is nothing more
than "bringing charges." Bill Clinton was impeached; he still finished his term.
4D chess: the Dem establishment wants to knock off Biden and they think any extended
investigation into this Ukraine stuff may bring him down. But it could backfire: Biden still
ends up the nominee but Trump uses any dirt unearthed to portray him as a corrupt
wheeler-dealer, thereby weakening Biden's campaign.
a monthly salary of $50,000 (in a country where the average wage is two orders of
magnitude lower)
FWIW, the New York Times report suggests Hunter Biden's monthly salary for this cushy
position fluctuated, and that $50,000 was the maximum he ever received for his
services in any given month.
I wonder, if they had salary information, why not publish the full total? e.g., it could
have been [to make up a plausible number] $1,500,000 over his five years in that role (ca.
May 2014 to April 2019), ranging from $10,000 to $50,000 a month.
What would a Ukrainian look like who makes a salary as high as – one –
order of magnitude lower than Hunter Biden made for his Ukraine consulting work?
Someone made an English wiki page on Ukraine salaries:
According to that page, the salary avg. in Kiev was at 11,400 hryvnia/month in mid 2017,
while most other oblasts were at 6-7,000 hryvnia/month.
The exchange rate to USD
(nominal) in the period Sept. 2015 to Sept. 2019 has fluctuated between 21 and 29 hryvnia to
1 USD, which yields, covering the exchange rate range:
– avg. Kiev salary: something between $400 and $540/month [USD]
– avg. non-Kiev salary: something between $210 and $335/month [USD]
But the PPP-to-nominal spread for Ukraine suggests a more accurate view, when viewing the
figures in USD as above, would mean multiplying each by about 3x or even 3.33x.
So it looks like a lower-rung Kiev professional making ~1.5x to 1.75x the Kiev avg.
monthly salary, when that salary-figure is pushed up by PPP, is able to make, in one year,
what Hunter Biden may have made in a typical (not peak) month.
The ratcheting up of retaliatory actions between the US and Iran will lead to a war that
will be devastating to the people of both countries. As president I will re-enter the Iran
Nuclear Agreement and end the sanctions against Iran to move us back from the precipice of
war.
Reckless Retaliation Has Us One Spark Away From War
Most of the surprising material presented here is hardly hidden or kept under
lock-and-key. Nearly all the books are easily available at Amazon or even freely readable
on the Internet, many of the authors have received critical and scholarly acclaim, and in
some cases their works have sold in the millions. Yet this important material has been
almost entirely ignored or dismissed by the popular media that shapes the common beliefs of
our society. So we must necessarily begin to wonder what other massive falsehoods may have
been similarly promoted by that media, perhaps involving incidents of the recent past or
even the present day. And those latter events do have enormous practical significance.
Being the Guardian, of course, their prescription is that people should make a more
sincere effort to support the Reporters of Truth, such as the Guardian. In their retrograde
Left vs Right world, it's still up to the 'goodthinkers' to preserve our liberties from the
Boris Johnsons and Donald Trumps of the world. Never in a million years would they entertain
the possibility that Johnsons and Trumps come about because the Establishment–most
certainly including its MSM lackeys–is corrupt to its core.
As the Washington Post has it, "Democracy Dies in Darkness" -- neglecting to add, "We
supply the Darkness."
"... Aaron Maté warned, "They're doubling down on failure: a failure to transform after losing 2016; & a failure to bring Trump down w/ the failed Russiagate conspiracy theory." ..."
We've long commented that Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hawaii) is certainly the most interesting and
'outside-the-establishment-box' candidate on the Democrat side running for president
--
a
"Ron
Paul of the Left"
of sorts given her outspoken criticism of US regime change wars and standing
against foreign policy adventurism as her central message.
She even once met in 2016 with then President-elect Trump to discuss Syria policy and
non-interventionism at a private meeting at Trump Tower just ahead of his being sworn into office,
after which she said both agreed to resist "the drumbeats of war [on Syria] that neocons have been
beating to drag us into an escalation...".
And now
she's resisting calls for Trump to be impeached,
saying it
would be
"terribly divisive"
. She
told "Fox &
Friends"
on Tuesday that she'll remain consistent to her message that the road to 2020 can only
be found in a clear victory and mandate, saying it's for
"the American people... making
that decision" of who is in the White House,
not impeachment
.
"I believe that impeachment at this juncture would be terribly divisive for the
country at a time when we are already extremely divided. The hyperpartisanship is one of the
main things driving our country apart,"
Gabbard
told
host Brian Kilmeade.
Once again showing herself outside of the establishment and its blindly loyal partisan
narrative, and perhaps more in-tune with the American public, she's further setting herself apart
from her main Democratic rivals and the presidential nominee front-runners on this one.
"I think it's important to beat Donald Trump, that's why I'm running for president," she said.
"But I think it's the American people who need to make their voices heard making that
decision."
Top contender Elizabeth Warren, for example, tweeted
early Tuesday
, "The House must
impeach. It must start today."
A number of commentators pointed out this would likely end in failure as the Democrats double
down on impeachment even after Trump agreed to release the full, unredacted transcript of the
Ukraine call in question.
One progressive journalist and political commentator, Aaron Maté warned, "They're doubling down
on failure: a failure to transform after losing 2016; & a failure to bring Trump down w/ the failed
Russiagate conspiracy theory."
As we noted earlier, Democrats are now scrambling as it seems President Trump's
decision
to release the transcript has spoiled their narrative.
Like the failed Mueller investigation, should this blow up in Democrats' faces
it will
practically guarantee the reelection of Donald Trump
.
And likely for this very reason, Pelosi herself had for months resisted calls to start the
impeachment process, and
yet here we are
, with Pelosi leading the charge.
When the other candidates prove reliably progressive, I'll consider them. So far, Sanders
is the only one to reach that threshold. You may call that "purism"; I call it not supporting
candidates who don't support me.
I contributed to Tulsi Gabbard's campaign (and supported her as a potential VP candidate)
despite having reservations about her, specifically because I wanted her to be on the debate
stage to promote her anti-imperialist foreign policy views. She lost a lot of ground with me
on her vote on the anti-BDS referendum.
Not a Gabbard 'fan', despite donating to her. She was never a serious candidate; her
usefulness was in bringing a genuine anti-war platform into the debate. Now that the
'democratic' Party has cut her out, she doesn't have much point. She's still a drone loving
Zionist, and her continued supporting of literal fascist (or the next closest thing) Modi is
just gross.
Purity suggests politics is about morality. It isn't. It's about who's going to get you
stuff. Only Bernie talks in those terms. And he isn't pure but barely acceptable.
Purity is posturing for those who think politics is about public performance and self
expression. Upper middle class liberals can afford to approach things this way, but most
people are too busy trying to keep their horse out of the ditch. They need stuff.
Your work concentrates on Jewish guilt. There is another side of it that should be
considered: Jewish strategy has, at least since the end of the Napoleonic Wars, been good for
the Jewish financial oligarchy.
The current position of Jewish financial oligarchy worldwide is highly precarious. The
only Jewish state is small and surrounded on all sides by either sea or states that range
from hostile to at best neutral. States with nuclear weapons are among its fairly close
adversaries. Stability of the area depends on the United States, a Christian power (even yet)
that is severely weakened by two decades of war [1]. Jewish populations in the Middle East
are gone, and Christian populations in the area have been severely diminished in number.
Further, the population expansion that has been required to retain control of the Israeli
government by equaling the Arab birth rate has resulted in a very large highly religious
Jewish population that apparently is supported by welfare and believes so strongly in the
power of God that it relies on divine intervention for physical security and won't join the
IDF.
The only society that tolerates Judaism, Christianity, has been severely weakened
worldwide. It is being replaced by societies that in some cases do not tolerate Judaism and
in other cases treat Judaism as one of a number of competitors for foreign market dominant
minority.
During many years of writing about or describing the terrible damage that the "special
relationship" with Israel has done to the United States the question occasionally comes up
"Given the enormous power of the Zionist lobby, what can we do to bring about change?"
It is a simple question, though one that begs for multiple answers, but it also requires
some thinking about how the Establishment, better known as the Deep State, operates in America.
The American Deep State, which has as one of its dearest principles eternal nurturing of
Israel's interests, is actually a bundle of individual enterprises that together operate to
sustain policies that are mutually beneficial. Its epicenters include financial services and
faux news media in New York and the political hub in Washington, but it also is served by
Hollywood's entertainment plus propaganda machine.
And the three parts of the Deep State are essentially interchangeable, with generals and
intelligence figures ignorant of finance winding up in the KKR Global investment firm as has
General David Petraeus and Michael Morell in Beacon Global Strategies, while leading
representatives from Wall Street do a turn in government, particularly at the Treasury
Department. Television news and entertainment also feature celebrities from across the
Establishment while Hollywood draws on all of the above and works hard to make sure the
contrived narrative about American democracy and its wonderful "allies" is promoted at every
opportunity.
Which brings us to the Israel Lobby which is an integral part of the Deep State and in some
ways one of its most powerful elements as it has a foot in all the other components plus depth
that enables it to interfere in American government at the federal, state and local levels. It
is indisputably the driving force behind U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East and even beyond
as it enforces standards on alleged anti-Semitism and engages in Lawfare and other shady
practices to protect the Jewish state. It differs somewhat from other parts of the
Establishment in that it pretends to have no such power at all, a fiction that it preserves by
pretending that its actions are all in defense of U.S. national security against evil nations
like Iran. From the Lobby's expressed point of view, Israeli and American interests just happen
to coincide.
By some estimates, there are 600 Jewish organizations active in the United States that have
at least as part of their raison d'etre the defense of Israel and Israeli interests.
They are supplemented by Christian Zionist groups like Christians United for Israel (CUFI) that
claims seven million supporters. The leading predominantly Jewish organizations like the
American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and the Foundation for Defense of Democracies
(FDD) are largely funded by Jewish oligarchs and exist to promote Israeli interests, to include
pressuring the United States into attacking Iran.
The Israel Lobby groups are awash in money, with AIPAC alone having an annual budget of more
than $100 million and 200 employees, who are able to blanket Capitol Hill and actually write
legislation for lazy congressmen. The salary and benefits of its Executive Director Howard Kohr
exceed $1 million. Against that, no organization critical of the Israeli relationship has
resources sufficient to do anything beyond surviving at a basic level and trying to get the
message out.
So what to do? First of all, there is Congress. Pat Buchanan once referred to Congress as
"enemy occupied territory." He was referring to the Israel Lobby's ability not only to control
the discussion on the Middle East but also to focus its efforts to defeat any congressman who
dared criticize the Jewish state. Politicians like Paul Findley, Chuck Percy, William
Fulbright, Pete McCloskey, James Traficant and Cynthia McKinney, who were brave enough to stand
up against Israel, found themselves out of a job after confronting well-funded and media
supported opponents at reelection time, sending the message that it was career ending to do
so.
That would suggest that it must be regarded as a given that congressmen and women will be
terrified of saying the wrong thing about Israel, but the reality is not quite so simple. I
have had numerous contacts with congressmen through the years, first by way of government
Congressional Delegations (CODELS) when I was overseas with CIA, and more recently in
Washington at various conferences and meetings. A quite surprising percentage of legislators
were privately quite willing to express their dislike of Israel and its policies, though none
of them were brave enough to go public with such sentiments. Some of them even expressed their
desire to see the Israel Lobby effectively destroyed because of its corruption of America's
institutions, surely an admirable viewpoint.
That means that there is an audience in Congress even if it is essentially passive. American
citizens who wish to become involved but are disdainful of getting active in political
campaigns or in even dealing with congressmen should recall Plato's warning that "Those who are
too smart to engage in politics are punished by being governed by those who are dumber." A good
friend of mine from California who has worked the congressional circuit on Palestinian issues,
most recently in backing the
Congresswoman Betty McCollum bill opposing Israel's military detention of children,
believes that it is necessary to be persistent to get through. She calls her congressman and
tries to set up an appointment to discuss the Middle East, saying that she is available
whenever there is an opening in the schedule and is even willing to fly to Washington if that
works best. When she is predictably put off, she persists, calling again and again until she
gets an appointment. The appointment itself is usually with a staffer, but when she gets to the
office she pushes again for another meeting, this time with the congressman. She repeats the
process as necessary.
One might argue that one woman meeting with one congressman has virtually no impact, which
may on the surface be true, but it reflects a failure to understand how congress works. If that
same congressman gets twenty-five calls on one issue, it is highlighted by the staff and the
congressional office begins to pay attention. If there are a hundred calls it is treated
seriously. Surely in every congressional district in the U.S. there are one hundred activists
willing to bug congress on the issue of the Israel relationship and the wars and devastation
that it has brought. If everyone angry about Israel were to call his or her congressmen there
would be a panic on Capitol Hill to be sure, but major unrest over the lopsided and dangerous
relationship is exactly what is needed.One particular subject to raise with congressmen is the
issue of Zionist foundations' apparent immunity from having to register as foreign agents under
the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) of 1938. Russian media outlets have been forced to
comply even though they are in no position to advance policies favorable to Moscow. The Israel
Lobby, which even writes legislation favorable to its most favored nation, is only exempted
because congress and the White House fear confronting Jewish power.
For activists who identify with the political parties, in a like fashion putting pressure on
delegates to next year's nominating conventions would also be desirable. While the Republican
Party's hawkish representatives would almost certainly be difficult to approach in that
fashion, the Democrats could prove to be much more susceptible. There has been considerable
criticism of Israel surfacing among the Democratic base, not just from the "Squad in Congress,"
most of which is now more sympathetic to the Palestinians than to the Israeli occupiers. An
uprising by the party faithful demanding an open discussion of the blank check support for
Israel is not inconceivable and it would really shake up the status quo .
The same basic formula works with the media. Send in one letter-to-the-editor criticizing
Israel and you will be ignored. Send in letter after letter and one piece might eventually
appear. If one hundred newspaper subscribers are sending in letters, the editorial staff will
begin to take notice. This has, in fact, been a development in the mainstream media over the
past five years. Disenchantment with Benjamin Netanyahu and the horror that he represents has
been growing, so much so that the genie is out of the bottle regarding Israeli "democracy." As
a result, it is now possible to read op-eds and editorials highly critical of Israel even in
Jewish-owned Establishment pillars like The New York Times . But much, much more of the
same is needed.
Finally, people who want to be freed from the Israeli yoke should support organizations that
are seeking to do just that and have been in the front line of the struggle. There is my own
Council for the National
Interest as well as If Americans
Knew , The Washington Report and
IRMEP just for starters, supplementing the
activity of a number of groups that focus on Palestinian rights. Sites like the Ron Paul Institute and Antiwar are also excellent sources of information.
All such organizations do benefit from the support of activists who are willing to speak up
and protest over the brutal behavior of the Israeli government, particularly as the Israel
Lobby has turned the United States into a co-conspirator for the Jewish state's war crimes. All
the groups are active in holding seminars and speaking events nationwide, information which can
be obtained from their websites.
So, the message is that the Israel Lobby is powerful but it is not invulnerable. We have to
keep pounding on congress, the political parties and the media if we are ever to be unshackled
from the Israeli monster. We have to do it and even more because the very future of our country
and what kind of nation we will be is at stake.
Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest,
a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a
more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is https://councilforthenationalinterest.org,
address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is[email protected] .
"The US served as a benevolent hegemon,
administering the occasional rap on the knuckles
to those acting in bad faith"
". Meanwhile, the system's multilateral institutions,
especially the International Monetary Fund,
helped countries in dire need of funds,
provided they followed the rules."
Behind the escalating global conflict over trade and technology is a larger breakdown of the
postwar rules-based order, which was based on a belief that any country's growth benefits
all. Now that China is threatening to compete directly with the United States, support for
the system that made that possible has disappeared.
By RAGHURAM G. RAJAN
CHICAGO – Another day, another attack on trade. Why is it that every dispute –
whether over intellectual property (IP), immigration, environmental damage, or war
reparations – now produces new threats to trade?
For much of the last century, the United States managed and protected the rules-based
trading system it created at the end of World War II. That system required a fundamental
break from the pre-war environment of mutual suspicion between competing powers. The US urged
everyone to see that growth and development for one country could benefit all countries
through increased trade and investment.
Under the new dispensation, rules were enacted to constrain selfish behavior and coercive
threats by the economically powerful. The US served as a benevolent hegemon, administering
the occasional rap on the knuckles to those acting in bad faith. Meanwhile, the system's
multilateral institutions, especially the International Monetary Fund, helped countries in
dire need of funds, provided they followed the rules....
"The US served as a benevolent hegemon, administering the occasional rap on the knuckles to
those acting in bad faith"
USA foreign policy since 70th was controlled by neocons who as a typical Trotskyites
(neoliberalism is actually Trotskyism for the rich) were/are hell-bent of world domination
and practice gangster capitalism in foreign policy. Bolton attitude to UN is very symptomatic
for the neocons as a whole.
Madeline "not so bright" Allbright was the first swan. As well as Clinton attempts to
bankrupt and subdue Russia and criminal (in a sense of no permission from the UN) attack on
Yugoslavia. Both backfired: Russia became permanently hostile. The fact he and his coterie
were not yet tried by something like Nuremberg tribunal is only due to the USA dominance at
this stage of history.
The truth is that the dissolution of the USSR the USA foreign policy became completely
unhinged. And inside the country the elite became cannibalistic, as there was no external
threat to its dominance in the form of the USSR.
The USA stated to behave like a typical Imperial state (New Rome, or, more correctly,
London) accepting no rules/laws that are not written by themselves (and when it is convenient
to obey them) with the only difference from the classic imperial states that the hegemony it
not based on the military presence/occupation ( like was the case with British empire)
Although this is not completely true as there are 761 US Military Bases across the planet
and only 46 Countries with no US military presence. Of them, seven countries with 13 New
Military Bases were added since 09/11/2001. In 2001 the US had a quarter million troops
posted abroad.
Still as an imperial state that is the center of neoliberal empire the USA relies more on
financial instruments and neoliberal comprador elite inside the country.
With the collapse of neoliberal ideology in 2008 the USA centered neoliberal empire
experiences first cracks. Brexit and election of Trump widened the cracks in a sense of
further legitimizing the ruling neoliberal elite (big middle finger for Hillary was addressed
to the elite as whole)
If oil price exceed $100 per barrel there will yet another crack or even repetition of the
2008 Great Recession on a new level (although we may argue that the Great Recession never
ended and just entered in Summers terms "permanent stagnation" phase)
Although currently with unhinged Trump at the helm the USA empire still going strong in
forcing vassals and competitors to reconsider their desire to challenge the USA. Trump
currently is trying to neutralize the treat from China by rejecting classic neoliberal
globalization mechanism as well as signed treaties like WTO. He might be successful in the
short run.
In the long run the future does not look too bright as crimes committed by the USA during
triumphal period of neoliberalism hangs like albatross around the USA neck.
EU now definitely wants to play its own game as Macron recently stated and which Merkel
tacitly supports. If EU allies with Russia it will became No.1 force in the world with the
USA No. 2. With severe consequences for the USA.
If Russia allied with China the USA No.1 position will hinge of keeping EU vassals in
check and NATO in place. Without them it will became No.2 with fatal consequences for the
dollar as world reserve currency and sudden change of the USA financial position due to the
level of external debt and required devaluation of the dollar.
Looks like 75 year after WWII the world started to self-organize a countervailing force
trying to tame the USA with some interest expressed by such players as EU, Russia, China,
India, Iran, Turkey, Pakistan and even Saudi Arabia. As well as ( in the past; and possibly
in the future as neoliberal counterrevolutions in both countries probably will end badly) by
Brazil and Argentina.
Only Canada, Australia and probably UK can be counted as the reliable parts of the USA
empire. That's not much.
"If Russia allied with China the USA No.1 position "........
Think Italy moving into the Axis in 1937? Or the Soviet German Non Aggression Pact.
Nuclear weapons removes the incentive for large "rearmaments" or not?
Would the Britain to France 1938 relationship describe the US to EU? Thinking in 1939
(1914?) terms Europe is less stitched together than in 1936.
Most of the surprising material presented here is hardly hidden or kept under
lock-and-key. Nearly all the books are easily available at Amazon or even freely readable
on the Internet, many of the authors have received critical and scholarly acclaim, and in
some cases their works have sold in the millions. Yet this important material has been
almost entirely ignored or dismissed by the popular media that shapes the common beliefs of
our society. So we must necessarily begin to wonder what other massive falsehoods may have
been similarly promoted by that media, perhaps involving incidents of the recent past or
even the present day. And those latter events do have enormous practical significance.
Being the Guardian, of course, their prescription is that people should make a more
sincere effort to support the Reporters of Truth, such as the Guardian. In their retrograde
Left vs Right world, it's still up to the 'goodthinkers' to preserve our liberties from the
Boris Johnsons and Donald Trumps of the world. Never in a million years would they entertain
the possibility that Johnsons and Trumps come about because the Establishment–most
certainly including its MSM lackeys–is corrupt to its core.
As the Washington Post has it, "Democracy Dies in Darkness" -- neglecting to add, "We
supply the Darkness."
Sigal Mandelker ,
the Zionist Under Secretary of the Treasury in charge of enforcing sanctions and boycotts,
was one of the high-ranking Department of Justice officials who signed off on the
nonprosecution agreement with Jeffrey Epstein in 2008.
Was she the one who told Acosta to back off on Epstein, as he belonged to intelligence and
was above Acosta's pay grade?
She did make him look stupid – all he had was a handful of talking points. Occasionally
he did try to talk over her to hammer home his points, but often he sat quietly and let her
finish. When your interviewer lets you speak, he's interested in what you have to say, or if
opposed to you, in letting you hang yourself.
When he talks over you, he's simply trying to do all the talking while offering the
pretense of an interview.
Given their age old fame for perfidy, corruption, cunning, mendacity and hatred of the
nations, along with their proclivity for high technology, my money would be on the Amish or
the Russian Old Believers as prime suspects and beneficiaries of the attacks.
Once again, the contest appears to be coming down to a choice between a "centrist"
establishmentarian corporatist with institutional backing (Joe Biden) and a left-leaning
populist progressive (Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders) preferred by Democrats, of whom 3 out
of 4 voters self-identify as progressives.
In 2016, the Democratic National Committee smooshed their thumbs all over the scale,
brazenly cheating the insurgent progressive Sanders so they could install their preferred
choice, the right-leaning Hillary Clinton. They won the battle but lost the war. Fewer than 80%
of Democrats who supported Bernie in the primaries voted for Hillary in the general election.
Disgruntled progressive voters -- especially those who sat at home on Election Day -- cost her
the race.
... If anything, Biden is even less appealing to the progressive base than Hillary
was
Warren sounded good when she said "let's break up the banks" but of course she sold out her
economic common sense to the Dem's corporate masters and had to embrace hard-core lefty
identity politics as a poor substitute.
wake up mr rall the democratic party is not monolithic and is in real likelihood of
disintegrating over the next few years into 2 parties: the hillary clinton democrats (in
reality part of the uniparty repubocrats) nad the progressive democrats who are obviously
unable to swallow any longer the fascism that IS the uniparty.
should trump be re elected i fully expect the democrats to split into 2 factions but still
use democrat in the name in whole or in part.
It has been 17 days since a four-year study of the collapse of World Trade Center Building 7
by civil engineers was made available to the media. The study concluded that fire was not the
cause of the collapse of the 47-story building. The study also concluded that "the collapse of
WTC 7 was a global failure involving the near-simultaneous failure of every column in the
building."
https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2019/09/04/the-official-story-of-the-collapse-of-wtc-building-7-lies-in-ruins/
In other words, the study concludes that the building was intentionally destroyed by
controlled demolition. Controlled demolition means that there was a plan to destroy the
building and that access to the building inhabited by a number of US security agencies was
permitted in order to wire the building for demolition. This finding is consistent with what
the owner of the World Trade Center, Silverstein, said on television, that the decision was
made "to pull" the building.
"... Margolis also says the KSA's US made air defences "failed" to protect their oil installations. This maybe so. But apart from the fact that their air defences are orientated away from Yemen there's a good chance the defences were turned OFF -- apparently this is common practice in the KSA, esp on weekends. I don't believe that Margolis's "mystery" is anywhere as deep as he suggests. The Houthis have received weapons & training from Iran/Hezbollah & have demonstrated an ability to hit KSA targets with unmanned aerial weapons. ..."
"... Until better evidence appears, I'm willing to give it to the Houthis -- if for no other reason than that they deserve to get in some good licks against that vile "Kingdom" (I'd suggest they next hit the water purification plants that serve Riyadh with all its water – apparently, the city has about 3 days of water stored. Evacuating 6 million from the Capital, the Sauds would be exposed as the corrupt, negligent, incompetent, stupid, vicious frauds we all know they are. ..."
"... These Hawks are under delusional assumption that an American led war against Iran would be a "Cakewalk" ..."
"... What they do know for sure is that the military industrial complex will increase its budget during and after such a war. Follow the money! ..."
Who Launched That Mystery Attack? Eric Margolis September 21, 2019 700 Words
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The Mideast has its own variety of crazy humor. The Saudis have been blasting and bombing
wretched Yemen, one of this world's poorest nations, since 2015.
These US-supported attacks and a naval blockade of Yemen imposed by Saudi Arabia and its
sidekick ally, the United Arab Emirates, have caused mass starvation. No one knows how many
Yemenis have died or are currently starving. Estimates run from 250,000 to one million.
The black humor? The Saudis just claimed they were victims of Iranian `aggression' this past
week after the kingdom's leading oil treatment facility at Abqaiq was hit by a flight of armed
drones or cruise missiles. The usual American militarists, now led by State Secretary Mike
Pompeo after the demented warmonger, John Bolton, was finally fired, are calling for military
retaliation against Iran even though the attack was claimed by Yemen's Shia Houthi
movement.
This drama came at roughly the same time that Israel's prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, a
close ally of US president Donald Trump, vowed to annex Palestine's entire Jordan Valley if
elected. Not a peep of protest came from the US, which recently blessed Netanyahu's annexation
of Syria's Golan Heights while scourging Russia's leader, Vladimir Putin, for annexing Crimea
– a Russian possession for over 300 years.
I studied US photos of the damaged Saudi oil installations. Its oil tanks appear to be
precisely hit at the same place. After the attack, the Saudis claimed half of their oil
production was knocked out; but a day later, they vowed production would be resumed within a
week. Parts of so-called drones were shown that appeared way beyond the technological
capabilities of Yemen or even Iran. The missiles may have been supplied by Ukraine.
The Saudis, like their patron in Washington, have a poor record for truthfulness. Remember
the Saudi denials about the murder of journalist and Saudi critic Jamal Khashoggi? More
important, we have been waiting for more false flag attacks in the Gulf designed to justify a
US attack on Iran.
The pattern of so-called drone attacks against the Saudi oil installations is just too neat
and symmetrical. The Israelis have a strong interest in promoting a US-Saudi War. The attacks
in Saudi came ironically right after the anniversary of 9/11 that plunged the US into war
against large parts of the Muslim world.
As a long-time military observer, I find it very hard to believe that drones could be guided
over such long distances and so accurately without aircraft or satellites to guide them. In
Yemen, which is just creeping into the 12th century, changing a flat tire is a major
technological achievement. To date, Iran's missile arsenal has poor reliability and major
guidance problems.
Adding to the questions, the Saudis have spent billions on US-made air defense systems. They
failed to protect the oil installations. The Saudis would have been better off buying air
defenses from the Russians, at a quarter of the US selling price.
ORDER IT NOW
Trump at least showed some wisdom by so far rejecting demands from the neocons that surround
him to launch major attacks on Iran. Blasting Iran would not serve much purpose and would
expose US forces in Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, Somalia, and Syria to Iranian guerrilla
attacks. Saudi oil installations – after what we saw last week – are
vulnerable.
Attacking Iran, even if just from the air, risks a much wider Mideast war just as the Trump
administration – which originally campaigned against 'stupid' Mideast wars – faces
next year's elections. But the administration is under intense pressure from its pro-Israel
base to go after Iran.
Bombing Iran's oil infrastructure would be relatively easy and has been intensively planned
since early 2002. But what next? So-called 'regime change' (Washington's favorite euphemism for
overthrowing disobedient foreign governments) rarely works as planned and can get the US into
horribly messy situations. The CIA overthrew Iran's democratic government in 1953 and look
where we are today.
Perhaps the attacks on Abqaiq may cause the reckless Saudi leaders to stop devastating Yemen
and throttle back on their proxy war against Iran which has gone on since 1979. But don't count
on it.
The so called "Zionist Hawks" in Israel and Washington, who want to start a war between
the USA and Iran.
These Hawks are under delusional assumption that an American led war against Iran would be
a "Cakewalk", and that Iranians have no means to defend themselves, will capitulate –
these are of course delusional assumptions – only found in disturbed minds of a bunch
of Go-Getter Zionist Think-Tanks in Washington, DC who are eager to serve their own tribal
interests at the US expense.
The US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, and Iraq in 2003, both are still ongoing –
have long proven how delusional are these ridiculous assumptions – Iran will be at
least 10 times harder nut to crack than Iraq was under Saddam Hussein – at least not
without serious consequences to the security of Israel, Saudi Arabia, the Gulf states and the
US itself, along with serious ramification to the post WWII international order under the
USA; established since 1945.
By now, president Trump knows too well that he is being poorly served by these so called
"Zionist Hawks" – who have instigated the US unilateral withdrawal from the Iranian
Nuclear Agreement – but thanks to Trump's own instinct, and his close relationship with
Emmanuel Macron; Shinzo Abe; and of course Vladimir Putin – so far, Trump has resisted
the temptation of going to all out war against Iranians.
President Trump should ban these" Go-Getter Zionist Hawks" from the White House; they are
"Disloyal Jews" – who are eager to serve their own tribal interests at the US
expense.
Trump at least showed some wisdom by so far rejecting demands from the neocons that
surround him to launch major attacks on Iran.
He doesn't want to get involved in another Iraq (or worse) which makes excellent sense for
the US and himself on many levels.
However, if the US Deep State (with the Israelis) could set up 9/11 without President Bush
in the loop, then they could also arrange a False Flag attack on these oil installations,
without Trump's knowledge.
The CIA looks very much like an independent international criminal enterprise, and they're
used to working with their Israeli and Saudi friends.
This is a seriously flawed analysis of Yemen's and Iran's actual capabilities. We've already
seen Iran's precision strike capability in Iran and Syria and we've seen Yemen's homemade
drones and missiles do similar to this at slightly lesser differences. The parts shown by SA
are matches to Yemeni made missiles and drones such as Iran has been sharing around with
their allies. The reason they avoided the US defences was that they came from a direction
these do not cover, being pointed as they are at Iran. I'd say this was a Houthis attack and
as they say, more will be coming if the aggression from SA against Yemen does not stop. One
thing this attack has done is cool the heels of US, Saudi and Zionist warmongers. The damage
done here by relatively small attack and cheap means gives some inkling of what things might
look like after an attack on Iran. This was doubtless supported by Iran and as such a
masterstroke. We enter a new paradigm.
Saudi Arabian oil pipelines have always been vulnerable to attack. They are not well guarded
at all. This is well known by Security Experts worldwide but not well known, it would seem,
by hack 'journalists'.
Saudi Arabia is attacking Yemen as part of a long term plan to reroute it's oil pipelines
to the other side of it's country, the Red Sea side, so that it is no longer vulnerable at
the Strait of Hormuz 'choke point'. In order to get rid of the Iranian threat to it's oil as
it leaves port in the Persian Gulf, the Saudi's must sustain huge costs and PR losses to
"stabilize" Yemen by a brutal war and then transit it's oil via the Red Sea. This is also
well known by Security Experts but not 'hack journalist'.
Trump rejected neocon demands for a war with Iran as he saw his chances for re-election
vanish in the smoke of an US-Iran war. If Trump is reelected Americans will have to worry
every day about a US-Iran war.
I love this comment by Margolis, that the KSA & US have a "poor record for truthfulness"
Priceless. Apparently Genghis Khan had a poor record for brushing his feet on the mat
before entering a town for a bit of light shopping.
Margolis also says the KSA's US made air defences "failed" to protect their oil
installations. This maybe so. But apart from the fact that their air defences are orientated
away from Yemen there's a good chance the defences were turned OFF -- apparently this is
common practice in the KSA, esp on weekends.
I don't believe that Margolis's "mystery" is anywhere as deep as he suggests. The Houthis
have received weapons & training from Iran/Hezbollah & have demonstrated an ability
to hit KSA targets with unmanned aerial weapons.
Until better evidence appears, I'm willing to give it to the Houthis -- if for no other
reason than that they deserve to get in some good licks against that vile "Kingdom" (I'd
suggest they next hit the water purification plants that serve Riyadh with all its water
– apparently, the city has about 3 days of water stored. Evacuating 6 million from the
Capital, the Sauds would be exposed as the corrupt, negligent, incompetent, stupid, vicious
frauds we all know they are.
Given their age old fame for perfidy, corruption, cunning, mendacity and hatred of the
nations, along with their proclivity for high technology, my money would be on the Amish or
the Russian Old Believers as prime suspects and beneficiaries of the attacks.
The Jeffrey Epstein case is notable for the ups and downs in media coverage it's gotten over the years. Everybody, it seems, in
New York society knew by 2000 that Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell were corrupting teenage girls, but the press wouldn't cover
it. Articles by New York in 2002 and
Vanity Fair in 2003 alluded to it gently,
while probing Epstein's finances more closely. In 2005, the Palm Beach police investigated. The county prosecutor, Democrat Barry
Krischer, wouldn't prosecute for more than prostitution, so they went to the federal prosecutor, Republican Alexander Acosta, and
got the FBI involved. Acosta's office prepared an indictment, but before it was filed, he made a deal: Epstein agreed to plead guilty
to a state law felony and receive a prison term of 18 months. In exchange, the federal interstate sex trafficking charges would not
be prosecuted by Acosta's office. Epstein was officially at the county jail for 13 months, where the county officials under Democratic
Sheriff Ric Bradshaw gave him scandalously
easy treatment , letting him spend his days outside, and letting him serve a year of probation in place of the last 5 months
of his sentence. Acosta's office complained, but it was a county jail, not a federal jail, so he was powerless.
Epstein was released, and various lawsuits were filed against him and settled out of court, presumably in exchange for silence.
The media was quiet or complimentary as Epstein worked his way back into high society. Two books were written about the affair, and
fell flat.
The FBI became interested again around 2011 (
a little known fact
) and maybe things were happening behind the scenes, but the next big event was in 2018 when the Miami Herald published a
series of investigative articles rehashing what had happened. In 2019 federal prosecutors indicted Epstein, he was put in jail, and
he mysteriously died.
Now, after much complaining in the press about how awful jails are and how many people commit suicide, things are quiet again,
at least until the Justice Department and
the State of Florida finish their
investigation a few years from now. (For details and more links, see " Investigation: Jeffrey Epstein
"at Medium.com and " Jeffrey Epstein " at Wikipedia
.)
I am shocked that nobody is asking Barr why Epstein's autopsy hasn't been made public.
Also, why is nobody asking Acosta who
told him that Epstein should be treated gently because he "belongs to intelligence" and what they meant by that. Rumor is that
Mueller told him. So, Mueller has been making the rounds, yet nobody asks him.
Also, Epstein's seized video collection shows various individuals committing serious crimes so why is nobody going through
it and charging those individuals who can be identified? Is the DOJ now of the opinion that these crimes are not important enough
to pursue? And if they should point to a blackmailing operation involving a major intelligence service, that might be worth exposing?
I feel like I am almost the only person in the world asking.
Society has been corrupted by the promotion of cost-benefit moral thinking to a point where nobody can be trusted to do their
job if they think it might be 'better overall' to act corruptly.
I keep thinking of innocent Joe DiGenova assuring us that however frustrating it has been in the past, the appointment of Bob
Barr will turn everything around. Nonsense. Barr is a fat man, and as James Watson reminds us, you never want to give a fat man
a critical job. So far he is acting like a fat man. Firing a couple minor players is window dressing at best.
Gabbard's uncompromising honesty and principles on these important foreign policy positions
give her the moral high ground.
Trump can't respond to that without betraying his entire Presidential aura.
She is correct that US citizens who sign up for the military take an oath to protect and
defend the constitution and the people of the United States. They did not take an oath to
protect foreign dictators incapable of basic defense of their most precious and valuable real
estate.
This is especially true when said dictators are the aggressors in a war of conquest against
their neighbors. After more than four years of fighting, using weapons produced by the United
States, with assistance by US military advisers, the Saudi Arabians have completely botched
their war in Yemen, committing dozens, if not hundreds, of despicable attacks on civilian
targets without anything to show for it but animosity and, now, wholly insecure
infrastructure.
That this infrastructure is vital to the global economy should be irrelevant to Trump's
calculus as to where to send US troops and war materiel. That was something Saudi Arabia's
Clown Prince, Mohammed bin Salman should have considered before starting this war back in
2015.
The Houthi rebels in Northern Yemen claimed responsibility for the attack on the Abqaiq gas
processing facility as a direct consequence of Saudi aggression. Of course, they are backed by
Iran and Iranian technology.
It's nearly a week after the event and we still don't know for sure what happened. We have
vague assurances from anonymous sources with the US and Saudi governments but no concrete
details other than what was hit and how.
More questions abound, still, than answers.
That Trump ultimately decided against going to war with Iran over this incident doesn't
negate Gabbard's attack on him. It was cogent given the moment and is principled in how US
troops should be used.
In all of this discussion about a potential war with Iran no one in the Trump administration
or anywhere else have made a credible argument as to what actual threat Iran poses to the
people of the United States.
Vague proclamations by Iranian politicians of "death to America" are, ultimately far less
threatening or interesting than the parade of US Senators and Congresscritters saying that Iran
is a "rogue regime" and it should be wiped off the face of the earth.
Are our sensibilities so fragile that we can't handle a little criticism from people we have
waged war by proxy with for over 70 years?
How is this any different than the average tweet
by Lindsay Graham (R-AIPAC)?
We have senior officials, like the Secretary of State and the erstwhile National Security
Adviser calling Iran 'evil' and we have officially lumped their army in with the same lot of
terrorists as Al-Qaeda and ISIS. We have sanctioned their government and individuals within
it.
Never forget that you reap what you sow in this life. And any animosity Iran and Iranians
bear towards the US and Americans is richly deserved. The reverse, however, is difficult to
make a case for.
Because, little factoid, Iran hasn't attacked anyone in a span of time that is longer than
the US has been a country.
Iran threatens Israel in the same way that Israel threatens it. Saudi Arabia threatens Iran
as an oil competitor and religious one.
And the idea that the President of the United States should entertain even a mere thought of
going to war with Iran over an attack on Saudi oil production should be anathema to anyone with
two brain cells to rub together and make a spark.
Because at the end of the day this is not our fight. This is a fight between enemies made
rich by oil in some cases (Saudi, Iran), political clout in high places in the US and U.K. in
others (Israel) and friends in other high places and cultural integrity (Iran).
This is a cultural and religious conflict we barely understand and cannot change the
dynamics of by blundering in with weapons of mass destruction. It is precisely because we take
sides in this conflict that this conflict never ends.
And it is a conflict that dovetails with prevailing 'wisdom' in the West about how to
maintain control over the planet that dates back more than 150 years. And that is why we do
what we do. But it is time for that worldview to end.
It's time bury Mackinder's ideas alongside his corpse.
To Trump's credit he seems to have realized that this incident was another like the events
which led up to the US Global Hawk drone getting shot down in June. It was designed to get him
to over-commit to a policy which would engulf the world in a war that only a very few powerful
and highly placed want.
Even the tweet that Gabbard called him out on was carefully worded to cool things down and
hint that he wasn't prepared to respond militarily to this incident. As Gabbard climbs in the
polls and is treated worse than Bernie Sanders in 2016 and Ron Paul by the Republicans in 2008
and 2012, she will hold Trump to account on foreign policy with an ever-growing clout and moral
clarity which bodes well for the future of US involvement overseas.
And, like Nigel Farage in the U.K. offering the Tories a non-aggression pact to get a real
Brexit over the finish line, Gabbard should put country before career and applaud Trump when he
doesn't act like Saudi Arabia's "Bitch." That will win her even more votes and more respect
among the silent majority who are not in the throes of Trump Derangement Syndrome on both the
Left and the Right.
Along with this, the likely end of Netanyahu's political career should mark a sea change in
US policy. While AIPAC's pull is still very strong in the US, Israel's commitment to an
aggressive foreign policy with an uncommitted President should falter under a new government
without its Agitator-in-Chief.
And without that animus propelling events along eventually cooler heads will prevail, and
the present dynamic will change.
Trump made an enormous mistake pulling out of the JCPOA. That genie cannot be put back in
the bottle. The question now is does he have the sense and the humility to realize his board
position has materially weakened to the point where the probability of a rout is rising?
2020 for him has to be about making good on his promises to end the Empire building and
improving relations with Russia. With Putin openly trolling him and the Saudis recently over
weapon sales the odds of the latter happening are low.
But he can still make good on the former. Trump has lost so much of his goodwill with the
people he's 'negotiating with' that there is little to no wiggle room left. He has no leverage
and he's got no goodwill.
I saw this coming the day he bombed the Al-Shairat airbase in April 2017. I said then that
it was one of the biggest geopolitical mistakes ever. It set the stage for all the others
because it showed us just how out of his depth Trump was on foreign affairs. It set him back
with both Putin and Chinese Premier Xi and it also showed how easily he could be manipulated by
his staff and their rotten information.
It's a deep hole he's dug for himself. But there are still people who want to help him climb
out of it. Gabbard's 'bitch slap' is an example of the kind of tough love he needs to right his
Presidency's ship.
His base needs to do that a little more often and then maybe, just maybe, we'd get
somewhere
It was neoliberalism that ensured the redistribution of wealth up -- this was an explicit
goal.
Jewish bankers of course played their role but stress should be on bankers, not of Jewish.
Financial oligarchy should be regulated as special type of organized crime.
At the same time the rise of question of particularion and role of Jews in financial sector
is a dangerous sign . Jews are convenient scapegoats and were used as one in 1030th in Germany.
We should not forget that. As Eric Fromm said: "When Fascism came into power, most people were
unprepared, both theoretically and practically. They were unable to believe that man could
exhibit such propensities for evil, such lust for power, such disregard for the rights of the
weak, or such yearning for submission. Only a few had been aware of the rumbling of the volcano
preceding the outbreak." ( Escape from Freedom )
Also: "Fascism begins the moment a ruling class, fearing the people may use their political
democracy to gain economic democracy, begins to destroy political democracy in order to retain
its power of exploitation and special privilege." ~Thomas Clement Douglas
If you're a member of the working class, 1/3 of your pay has been stolen from you.
You would think this would be front page news every day until the problem is fixed. Not only
is that a huge amount of money for a huge portion of the country, but you would expect our left
leaning media to be all over this. There is no better evidence that capitalism, at least in its
current state, is failing. If the left actually cared about the working class, if the wave of
cultural Marxism that has spread through academia and the media was actually about the plight
of workers oppressed by a distant and uncaring elite, no fact would be repeated more often than
this.
And yet, aside from a handful of articles – such as one from the New York Times in
2011, and another from The Atlantic in 2015 – the issue hardly gets mentioned by the
media. And even when it is mentioned, it is often editorialized in a way that distorts the
problem and hides its root cause, if not outright lied about by a media with an agenda that has
little to do with helping actual workers.
The evidence for the theft of 1/3 of the working class' pay comes primarily from a left wing
think tank called the Economic Policy Institute, and comes from a comparison of productivity
growth in the economy vs the average hourly pay of non-management workers. Their graph shows
that worker pay increased steadily at basically the same rate at productivity from the 1948
until 1972. In 1972, productivity was up 92.2% from where it was in 1948 while the average
worker's hourly compensation was up 91.3%. From 1972-3, productivity rose to 97.0% higher than
its 1948 value while pay fell to only 91.0% higher than it was in 1948. Productivity and pay
both fell from 1973-4, but productivity rose again from 1974-5 while pay declined for another
year, widening the gap between productivity and pay growth to over 10% for the first time since
1948, a gap which would never close again.
Pay then rose more slowly than productivity for the rest of the 70s, fell during the 80s and
early 90s, grew slowly again during the dotcom boom of the late 90s when productivity grew far
more rapidly, and stagnated again for most of the 00s. Then from 2008-09, pay rose sharply by
almost 8% of its 1948 value. In other words, during the housing market collapse, when wealthy
investment bankers were losing a lot of money (and before they got it back during the bailout),
workers' hourly compensation jumped up faster than productivity for the first time in decades
– though not by nearly enough to close the gap, as productivity had risen by more than
100% more than pay by 2008. After the bailout, pay stagnated again, though according to many
sources pay is increasing under Trump at a faster rate than it did for most of the past few
decades.
However, for some reason, both the Economic Policy Institute's current graph and the New
York Times graph put a line through 1979 to divide the era of regular pay growth and pay
stagnation, despite the gap having grown to about 15% by then. It would seem that 1972-3, when
pay growth stagnated and then fell for the first time in decades, would be a better place to
put the line – and indeed, that is where The Atlantic's graph (and some older versions of
EPI's graph) put it. Is there a reason for this obfuscation?
There is, of course, some disagreement over EPI's findings. Right wing sources like the
Heritage Foundation claim that worker pay is actually rising at about the same rate as
productivity. Their main disagreement with EPI's findings is due to the fact that EPI doesn't
include management workers and self-employed professionals in their estimate of worker pay.
When those groups are included, pay did in fact increase at almost the same rate as
productivity – however, as the Heritage Foundation notes, only the top 20% of earners saw
their earnings rise at a faster rate than productivity since the 70s, while the middle 60% saw
far lower growth in their pay, so their findings are of little comfort to a majority of
American workers, particularly the shrinking middle class.
One final analysis, this one from BLS data published by Pew Research and Statista, both of
whom look only at wages and not productivity, actually suggests the situation may be even worse
than EPI's data suggests – where EPI shows wages grew by about 25% of their 1948 value
from 1972-2018, Pew shows worker pay peaking in 1973, falling from the mid 70s through the mid
90s, and rising slowly from the mid 90s until now with a significant jump during the 2008
recession. According to Statista, 2019 was the first year wages rose above their 1973 value
– by about $0.05 cents an hour in 2019 dollars.
Basically everyone's data suggests the same thing. After seeing solid wage growth prior to
the early 1970s, non-management worker pay stagnated from the mid 70s until the mid 90s, and
rose more slowly than productivity from the mid 90s until now with the exception of one
significant jump up during the housing market crash. The economic stagnation experienced by a
solid majority of Americans, particularly the middle class, is the driving force behind a
variety of economic, social, and political problems. It's among the reason why many Americans
eat too much cheap overprocessed food, why young people are burdened with debt to pay for
degrees to qualify for more complicated and demanding jobs that don't pay enough to pay off
their student loans, and why more women are working outside the home and choosing not to marry
as they can't find husbands capable of supporting them. It's the driving cause of both the
left's growing agitation for more socialist programs to make up for their lack of fair pay and
the new right's longing for a bygone era when the American economy was great because workers
actually got paid what their productivity was worth. Finding the cause of this problem and
solving it would relieve much of the growing polarization and political dissatisfaction that's
growing among people who are too young to remember an era when workers got real raises every
year.
The left blames this problem on a variety of factors that have little relationship to the
actual wage data, such as declining union membership and minimum wage laws that don't keep up
with inflation. Union membership has been declining since the early 1950s, so workers continued
to get raises for the first two decades of declining union membership. And while minimum wage
laws haven't kept up with inflation since about the same time worker pay began to stagnate,
that's likely a symptom of the same problem rather than the cause. Nor can this be blamed on
lower taxes on the rich, since this data looks at pre-tax income and 1/3 of your pay is being
stolen before a single dollar of taxes is taken out.
The establishment right mostly tries to dismiss the existence of the gap, despite a variety
of sources pointing to its existence and the Heritage Foundation's admission that middle class
has indeed seen their pay stagnate even as their productivity rose. It might be tempting for
some on the right to blame the problem on immigration, and changes in immigration policy in the
1960s did allow for an increase in the number of immigrants entering the country, but growth in
immigration was slow until the late 80s and early 90s. By that time pay had already been
stagnant for a while, so immigration doesn't seem to be the driving force keeping wages down,
even if it may be a small factor. This doesn't negate the many other reasons many Americans
want more control over immigration, such as preventing criminals from entering our country and
protecting our cultural values by making sure immigrants share those values before letting them
in, but we must look elsewhere to explain why worker pay is stagnant.
Other theories include the rise of automation, increased female participation in the
workforce, and corporate greed. Blaming automation implies that automation was not happening
from the 1940s through the early 1970s, or was at least not significant enough to affect worker
pay until then, and that it has happened much faster since the 70s. There's no objective way to
measure automation to test that theory, but as automation is one of the driving factors behind
increased worker productivity, it seems like automation should be increasing the availability
of goods and services to each worker. Shouldn't automation result in an economy where most
people can get more stuff for less work, rather than the same amount of stuff for more work?
There's no good explanation for why automation would result in stagnating worker pay,
especially as jobs become more high tech and require a more educated middle class that should
be able to demand higher wages relative to poorly educated and low skill workers. Instead, it
is precisely that highly educated middle class who have taken the biggest hit to their wages.
As for women in the workforce, much like the stagnant minimum wage, this appears to be more a
symptom of a greater problem than the cause – the rise of second wave feminism in the 70s
occurred as pay was stagnating, and was likely driven at least in part by women needing to work
outside the home more to make up for their husbands' stagnant pay. And considering the
significant increases in productivity and automation, workers ought to be able to provide for
their families without needing their wives to work as there should be more resources available
per worker today than there were a few decades ago when fewer women worked outside the home. As
for corporate greed, corporations were just as greedy from the 1940s until the early 70s as
they are today, and simply blaming greed does nothing to explain how the elite are able to
siphon more money out of the economy today than they did decades ago. A better explanation is
needed.
There was a major change in the way our economy is run that occurred in the early 1970s,
just before worker pay stopped growing. That change occurred in 1971, just before pay stagnated
from 1972-3. From 1944-1971, an international monetary agreement called Bretton Woods tied
the value of the dollar (and many other currencies around the globe) to the value of gold,
limiting the Federal Reserve and banking industry's ability to manipulate the money supply.
During the Bretton Woods years, changes in the money supply and value of the dollar were
primarily driven by market forces rather than by the decisions of bankers and economic elites.
The Bretton Woods years overlap so perfectly with the period when worker pay kept up with
productivity growth that the glaring lack of any mention of it by any of the think tanks and
media outlets – left, right, or center – that have written about the gap between
pay and productivity says a lot about the dishonesty of our media and academics.
Is Federal Reserve policy really capable of causing such a major economic shift? It
certainly seems to be. Consider a recent study from economist Brian Barnier of FedDashboard.com
that found that over 90% of stock market price fluctuation since 2008 has been due to Fed
policy. If the Fed can cause that much of a shift in the market, it's likely that the Fed can
cause a lot of other changes too. That same study found that from the end of WWII until the
early 70s, GDP growth caused most of the change in the stock market – as it would
normally be expected to. Then, in the mid 70s, the growth of debt based spending –
enabled by the end of Bretton Woods which gave the bankers much greater ability to expand the
money supply through loans – became the biggest factor in the stock market's movement,
causing a solid majority of stock market movement over the next few decades, first through the
expansion of consumer debt and credit cards, then by business loans and mortgages. Fiscal
policy, primarily set by the Fed, has been the driving cause of stock market movement since
shortly after the end of Bretton Woods, rather than market forces which were the driving cause
of market changes under Bretton Woods. And the worst drop in worker pay came during the 1980s
when Paul Volcker, who said that helping end Bretton Woods while he worked in Nixon's Treasury
department was the most important decision of his career, was chairman of the Federal
Reserve.
It's clear that Bretton Woods and the era when supply and demand ruled the market coincided
with the steady rise of worker pay, while the era of Federal Reserve policy dominating the
market has coincided with stagnant worker pay and wealth redistribution to the rich. Whether
this is due to inflation, as workers who aren't as economically savvy as management and owners
won't always realize that a raise that's equal to or less than inflation is not actually a
raise at all, or due to the direct creation of wealth within the banking industry and by
members of the investor class through fractional reserve banking and other tools enabled by the
Fed, or a combination of those and other factors is not entirely clear, but it is certainly
clear that there is a strong correlation between central bank meddling in the economy and
stagnating worker pay. This justifies far more investigation, and we may not have all the
answers to how the rich are gaming the system and screwing the working class without a full
audit of the Federal Reserve. But there are two more questions we can ask now without waiting
for that audit that may help shed light on who's responsible for the problem: who has been in
charge of Federal Reserve policy for the past few decades, and where is the money going?
Remember that it was Paul Volcker who was both instrumental in ending Bretton Woods,
enabling the rise of the Fed's dominance of the economy and redistribution of wealth, and who
oversaw the largest decrease in worker pay in the past half century. There's one other thing
you need to know about Paul Volcker, something that will help answer the question of who
controls Fed policy and where the money is going. Paul Volcker shares something in common with
four other recent Federal Reserve chairs during the period of wage stagnation and with an
extremely disproportionate number of billionaires – Volcker was hereditarily (though not
religiously) Jewish. Arthur Burns, who became chairman of the Federal reserve in 1970, the year
before Volcker convinced Nixon to end Bretton Woods, was the first Jewish Federal Reserve
chairman since World War 2 and ran the Fed through most of the 70s. Volcker took over the Fed
in 1979 and was followed by three more Jews in a row: Alan Greenspan, Ben Bernanke, and Janet
Yellen. While it may be tempting to blame ties to corporate or banking interests instead, only
Volcker and Greenspan had any history of working in corporate banking prior to working at the
Fed; Burns, Bernanke, and Yellen had mostly academic and government advisory experience before
their appointments to Federal Reserve chair. Last year, Trump appointed the first non-Jewish
Fed chair since the 1970s, and that year was one of the best years for wage growth since the
1970s.
Just how wealthy have the Jews become while controlling our central bank, the most powerful
financial regulatory agency in the country? Most estimates of Jewish wealth (including Jewish
sources) find that over 1/3 of American billionaires are Jewish in a country that is less than
2% Jewish, meaning you're roughly 20 times as likely to be a billionaire if you're Jewish than
if you're not. That overrepresentation is even greater at the top, where 5 of the 10 richest
Americans are Jewish according to the Times of Israel. Coincidentally, Jews are overrepresented
among the billionaire class by about the same amount as the portion of the working class' pay
that's missing from their checks. And according to one estimate, Jews were 23% of the
billionaire class in 1987; that year, workers were losing about 20% of what they should have
been getting paid based on their productivity according to EPI, about the same percent as
Jewish overrepresentation among the billionaire class. As the rich have gotten richer while the
working class have gotten robbed, the rich have also gotten more Jewish.
Of course, not all Jews benefit from the Fed's theft of the working class. Rather, it's more
likely that there is a Jewish financial cartel in much the same way there are Mexican drug
cartels, an Italian mafia, Islamic sex slave grooming gangs and terror networks, and many other
gangs whose identity is based partly on ethnic and religious affiliation. Volcker, as someone
who both was and was not Jewish, was the perfect patsy – he was ethnically Jewish enough
to be part of the tribe, but any backlash against him for his role in ending Bretton Woods and
reducing worker pay could be deflected away from the Jewish financial cartel because he was a
practicing Christian. Not all Jews have to be a part of this financial cartel for the people
responsible for stealing 1/3 of the American working class' pay to be Jewish, and those that
aren't should be just as upset about the actions of those that are as anyone else. While the
idea of a Jewish financial cartel may come off as conspiratorial to some, two of the biggest
news stories of the past year – Jeffrey Epstein and NXIVM – have been about Jewish
billionaires (the Bronfmans in the case of NXIVM) running pedophilic sex slave trading networks
which they used to blackmail and manipulate the rich, famous, and powerful. It's not much of a
stretch to assume that part of the reason why they needed those criminal networks was to help
cover up an even bigger ongoing crime.
But it is possible, if unlikely, that there is no Jewish financial cartel. In that case,
however, the resulting assumption seems much worse for the Jewish people – that five
different Jewish Federal Reserve chairs simply happened to accidentally oversee the stagnation
of the American working class' pay as Jewish investment bankers capitalized on their fiscal
policies after more than two decades of solid worker pay growth under non-Jewish Fed chairs. If
that's the case, a five for five record of screwing over the working class is more than enough
evidence that Jews should never be allowed near the halls of financial power in the United
States ever again. But, as many lower and middle class Jews are hurt just as much by the
financial theft that's been going on for decades, it would be far better to investigate the
possible existence of the Jewish financial cartel and focus our attention on the people
directly responsible for robbing a majority of Americans first, rather than directing our ire
at all Jews.
Regardless of whether or not this Jewish financial cartel exists, a few things should be
clear. First, the Federal Reserve needs a full audit and investigation to determine how corrupt
the institution has become and whether they are directly enriching particular members of the
billionaire class or just accidentally creating the kind of economy where rich and often Jewish
investment bankers profit while the rest of us stagnate. Second, we need to seriously consider
changing our monetary system, whether that means returning to a gold standard, a pseudo-gold
standard such as Bretton Woods, or some other form of stable currency that limits the
inflationary and wealth redistribution power of the banking industry. Third, Jewish control of
our financial (not to mention political) institutions must be dismantled in much the same way
our Jewish media and academics talk about dismantling white privilege, regardless of whether
the problem turns out to be a specific criminal cartel comprised mostly of wealthy and powerful
Jews or whether the problem turns out to be that the nature of the Jewish people is to manage
the economy for the good of investment bankers and upper management, rather than for the good
of the workers who produce and distribute the things we all rely on to survive and thrive.
Americans deserve an economy that works for us as much as we work for it.
There is a systematic tax theft ongoing, all under the auspices of Woke Capitalism. But
don't worry about this, let's distract you about non-existing identity controversies on
gender, trannies, homosexuals, race, religion etc. And people fall for it.
The FED is a jewish banking cartel. It is not federal. Greenspan admitted on Charlie Rose
that, "There is no government agency that has power over The Federal Reserve."
Ron Paul spent his entire career trying to end the FED and wrote a great book with that
title.
The FED causes a misallocation of resources, creates bubbles, funds wars for Israel.
I suspect that the government and financial sector have played a huge role in the decline
of the white middle class and our falling birthrates.
I read "The Creature From Jekyl Island" many years ago and the story of the origin of the
FED is quite fascinating.
It's what started happening when Nixon took the US completely off the Gold standard, which
facilitated the subsequent rise of the FIRE economy in place of real productive economic
activity.
While individual productivity continued to rise, the fruits of that productivity got
sidetracked into excessive growth of the FIRE economy.
p.s. Now that I've read the full article, I see I'm just giving a quick summary; the
article just proves my point in much greater detail.
Basically everyone's data suggests the same thing. After seeing solid wage growth prior
to the early 1970s, non-management worker pay stagnated from the mid 70s until the mid 90s,
and rose more slowly than productivity from the mid 90s until now.
In the early 1970's I remember the first Asian manufactured products starting to appear
along with digitalization and the basic internet. The article could have highlighted the
fact, since digitalization and the internet had a big part in making Asian outsourcing
technically (and economically) viable.
As the article points out, elites and their top managers did well, and from this POV, they
would do well, since they were the ones capturing the extra profitability (Western sales
prices less Asian manufacturing costs). It was their workers who lost out as local
manufacturing was shut down. Agreed that mass immigration also put a downward pressure on
wages.
IMO Neoliberalism (economic liberalism) was the academic fraud that opened the
political door to outsourcing – and it was Neoliberalism that allied with the extreme
social liberalism of open frontiers (anti-racist), LGBT, Black/White guilt narratives etc..
Also agree that Jews were heavily involved in the "progressive" push for both types of
liberalism and enabled the mass indebtedness (through the FED) that sustains it. If the
government can't cover its social spending (or the cost of its wars), it gets into debt, and
if a person has a minimum wage job then they're also heading into debt.
Productivity and pay both fell from 1973-4, but productivity rose again from 1974-5
while pay declined for another year, widening the gap between productivity and pay
growth to over 10% for the first time since 1948, a gap which would never close
again .
The reason it happened right then and there:
The oil "embargo" of 1973, totally politically arranged but giving all the big industrial
firms an excuse to freeze wages, stop hiring, and eventually ship jobs overseas.
As long as the "national bank" is a privately run corporation it cannot be fixed. It works
for its members not for its nation. Keep in mind the steel and auto factories were owned by
the same folks who run the Fed.
The entire nation started the slo-mo drop to our current status as incipient Third World
member in 1973. This isn't really surprising: A fellow might have put a down payment on a
house in 1955 with massive monthly mortgage payments like $140 and paid it off in funny money
in the 1970s. Think of it as the "bonus" that many of the Greatest Generation got.
Bur after them, the lines all go negative. And not all of them were in a position to take
advantage of the near-hyperinflation of the post-Vietnam period. It is certain, though, that
even adjusting for inflation, house payments in the Fifties were cheaper than renting a flop
is now. The Reagan "boom" was a goldmine for suburban yuppies, everyone else got the
shaft.
Volcker was hereditarily (though not religiously) Jewish
Does the author have any source for this claim at all?
Paul Volcker (b.1927)'s grandparents were all German(-born) Protestants; he was raised in
a Lutheran church in the US, and as best I can tell remains a Lutheran today.
This allegation that Volcker is Jewish seems baseless, frivolous, and
self-discrediting.
The largest reasons for wage suppression relative to worker value (productivity is a measure
of it) has to do with the steady takeover by Jews of Corporate Boards and Management since
the late 1960's.
Eastern Banks (largely Jewish owned or led) exerted their influence in Corporate America
by forcing their nominees onto Corporate Boards of the firms they lent to, or bought shares
(or were granted) of.
Management became far more Jewish as the years progressed. In fact, without Jews in
Management positions far in excess of representative ratios, Banks would simply not lend to
'White' corporations and the Greenmail and other tactics of the 1970's and 1980's were
largely attempts by Jews to hijack Companies outright.
When CEO pay went from 10x worker pay to 100x or more, there was a reason for that Jewish
GREED. Boards authorized extravagant CEO and other top Management position pay increases
beyond all reason, why? Jews were selected at a 10x to 50x higher proportion for those slots.
Hey, what's best for the tribe, right?
Off shoring was largely a Jewish phenomenon. Financial Globalism, it's Umbrella, is as
well. Offshoring and Globalism suppresses American wages more than in any other country by
far.
Lastly Wall Street sucks the wealth from American workers in countless ways. I have known
Capital Giant VP's that spent their entire career raiding pension funds, or breaking up
companies and throwing workers out by the millions to reap a few pennies on the dollar by
selling off the main assets and looting the hidden ones. Who, do you think, dominated that
practice? Jews.
In my lay understanding about the decline of wages since the 1970s, it is necessary to look
at the whole picture – not pick and choose individual factors which, on their own, are
not necessarily the answer. Obviously, the FRB has the power to affect most of those factors
(setting interest rates, quantitative easing, controlling the money supply, etc.). Obviously
the predominantly Jewish financial institutions as the FRB, Treasury and banks have the power
to affect those factors. Obviously, and ultimately, the US Government and Congress also have
the power to affect those factors.
Putting all together, the political system enables and promotes policies in favour of the
corporate elite to the detriment of the wage-slaving working class. It has been so since
aeons and it will never change until the wage-slaves assume the reigns of political power and
enact policies for their benefit. Looking at the reasons for the diminishing purchasing power
of wages is like missing the forest for the trees.
After all, one does not need to look at macroeconomic data, flow charts and whatnots to
understand that a class based society is necessarily ruled by the ruling class for its own
benefit, not for the benefit of the ruled underclass of wage slaves. Therefore, the
plutocracy in power today is doing what the previous ruling aristocracy did before, and
before that what the Patricians of Rome and the Citizens of Greece did: using political power
for selfish ends.
Yes, there was a "golden era" of raising working class incomes from the end of WWII to the
1970s – the reconstruction boom in Europe and concomitant booming imports from the US.
But that wage bonanza was predominantly due to the Cold War itself, namely to show off that
Capitalism was capable of offering a decent wage to workers in order to tame the then popular
appeal of Communism identified with the victorious USSR. Not to mention the shortage of the
workforce following the carnage.
By the 1970s, the war was a fading memory, the counterculture movement was in full swing,
the politicians treated the people and countries as their fiefdoms, the neoliberal doctrines
taking root in academia and government. No need to pretend anymore that governments cared for
the people. The mask came off and brutal Capitalism revealed its true nature: voracious greed
for the plutocracy and large sinecural bribes for the political stooges.
@anon I take back my AGREE – meant to DISAGREE (I thought there was a
way to do that within a certain period, Ron?)
I agree with most of the article with a couple of exceptions. Immigration has been a BIG
factor in the stagnation in real pay. Secondly, instead of "Jewish financial control" being
dismantled how about just "financial control" period. Are you for sound money or not, Mr.
Tripp?
[T]here was no such thing as a progressive movement, that is, no organized campaign
uniting all the manifold efforts at political, social, and economic reform. On the contrary,
there were numerous progressive movements operating in different areas simultaneously . [T]he
progressive movement, in its political manifestations, was essentially a revolt of the middle
classes [i]
The Progressive Era is the title traditionally applied to the period from roughly 1900
through 1920 in U.S. history. It is particularly significant because it marks the first time
that our shared, fundamental values -- which collectively we call the American Political
Culture (APC) -- were called into question and, consequently, transformed. Although those two
decades are described by the single term, Progressive Era, there was actually much less
consistency to the period than its now well recognized title implies.
Progressive
Origins: the Populist Movement of the 1890s
For most of the first century of our nation's existence -- until the later decades of the
nineteenth century -- politics was fairly elitist in nature. That is to say, while much has
been written about our democratic heritage in general and about periods such as the "era of
Jacksonian democracy" in particular, in fact the role of ordinary citizens in running the
country was pretty limited. Over time, however, that situation became less and less acceptable
to the ordinary people who were doing the hard work that was moving the country forward but who
didn't have much of a say in deciding how the fruits of those labors got divided up and
distributed among different interests in society. The slowly spreading movement by which
ordinary people began demanding more of a voice in how the political economy was run is what we
call populism . Populism, in simple terms, is a democratic revolt against the ruling
powers of the well-to-do, well-positioned elites.
Common mythology has it that the populist revolts of the 1890s were, by and large, sagebrush
revolutions launched by small, independent farmers. The story holds that farmers in the
upper-midwest regions of the country were being gouged by the newly developed power of the
railroad trust. The monopoly-like power of the big railroads allowed them, according to this
line of analysis, to charge exorbitant rates for farmers to ship their crops to big-city
markets. While there certainly is an element of truth to this rendering of history, there also
is more to the story than that simple approach conveys.
The populist revolts of that period may have had as much to do with land speculation and the
price of real estate as with the relative rates for crops and shipping. The entrepreneurial
spirit for which Americans became so well known apparently was in full swing by the last decade
of the nineteenth century, including among small farmer-landowners in the rural Midwest.
Despite history's tendency (and our political culture's desire) to paint them as small,
independent farmers in the Jeffersonian tradition -- hacking out a new way of life for
themselves and their families in the bounteous but untamed wilderness of the American frontier
-- land speculation was not uncommon among the agricultural set. When, in the throes of the
worldwide economic depression of the 1890s, the bottom fell out of the (international)
agricultural real estate market, thousands of "small farmers" were left holding deeds to
homesteads that were suddenly worth considerably less than they had paid for them. And when the
private market failed, panicked landholders began turning to government to help them save their
real estate holdings.
As those cries for relief mounted, America grew up. Although the myth of the yeoman farmer
would never fade away completely -- indeed, it remains a critical component even in today's
political culture -- subsequently the ideal would be tempered by the new economic reality of
agriculture-as-ever-bigger-business. More important for our purposes, the politics of
the era underwent a fundamental change.
Those seeking to reform the system gravitated from an insurgent (populist/third-party)
political approach to a more traditional pursuit of politics by means of lobbying and pressure
tactics exercised within the existing, two-party system of Republicans and Democrats. The
Populist movement reached its apex with the presidential candidacy in 1896 of William Jennings
Bryan. Thereafter, the Progressives took up the reformist cause.
In a sense, the political unrest that characterized the populist decade was absorbed by a
growing rumble in the nation's cities. Where the landowner-farmers who drove the populist
movement had been narrowly rural in their upset, however, the newer, urban brand of
reform-minded agitator was more broadly national in outlook and more professional/intellectual
in background. In short, Progressivism would be a more complex, but also a more moderate,
tendency than was Populism.
In place of angry farmers and small-town leaders would form a coalition of clergy,
academics, lawyers and small professionals; all united against the growing power of both the
new barons of the industrializing, increasingly concentrated economy and the recently forming
labor unions that supplied a growing share of the manpower for the modern engines of American
growth. At the heart of the Progressives' concerns was the fear that the increasingly
concentrated power of the trusts and the unions would be able to drive prices ever upward.
Progressivism: A Conservative Approach in Liberal Clothing?
Seeking a
Restoration of Values
The Populists had been backward-looking insofar as they saw many of the problems facing
America as arising from the impersonal nature of the modern world, with its emphasis on science
and specialization; from economic concentration and social collectivization; and to a certain
extent from immigration.
Progressives shared some of those concerns, but with different interpretations of the
symptoms characterizing the changing American political economy. In particular, Progressives
didn't so much fear the future as they longed for a kind of idealized past that few of them (as
city-dwellers) had actually experienced. For them, the moral/spiritual purity springing from
the rugged individualism of the small, independent farmer was a loss that needed to be
restored.
Unlike their predecessors, however, Progressives were not unmindful of the benefits of the
newly industrializing economy. Thus, they didn't seek to retard progress entirely (as had at
least some of the populist strains). Instead, the Progressives sought to insure that the
increasing concentration in both economic and political life would not stifle the incentives
for individual attainment; that the economic trusts and political parties would not
interfere with the traditional, American value of individual opportunity via the
acquisition of private property . In that sense, rather than appear as what we would
today call a "liberal" movement, Progressivism can be seen as inherently conservative in
nature, in that it sought a restoration of an imagined, righteous past.
Since the concentrated economic power of the trusts (rail, coal, steel, meat-packing, etc.)
was seen by the Progressives as the major impediment to the realization of a more broadly
virtuous society -- they were aided immeasurably in their quest to preach the Progressive
gospel to the masses by the investigative journalists (as we would call them today) known
alternately as "yellow journalists" Yellow
Journalism or "muckrakers" -- the solution they proposed was to increase the power of
governments (federal, state, and/or local, as need be) so as to put them on a more equal
footing with large corporations.
The underlying goal, then, was to help those whom they saw as the victims of
industrialization -- but to do so in all cases without resorting to the kinds of "radical" or
"socialistic" solutions that were at that time finding considerable sympathy among certain
groups, particularly among the working classes.
The Place of Labor in the Progressive
Universe
In the roughly sixty-year period stretching between the Civil War and the First World War,
approximately thirty million immigrants were absorbed into the United States. The male
breadwinners for an overwhelming number of those newly arrived families became the backbone of
the emerging, organized labor movement in this country.
In their old countries, many of them had become personally familiar with systems of
government and schemes for workplace organization that were far more progressive/socialistic
than were the political and economic institutions that they encountered in their new, American
home. As a result, labor unions in the rapidly industrializing American political economy
became seedbeds for revolution. Proposals for asserting the role of common laborers in the
workplace came to be heard with increasing frequency and growing intensity. Their opposition to
the emerging class of corporate titans might seem to have positioned workers to be the natural
allies of the Progressives, who also sought to curtail (albeit for their own reasons, recall)
the seemingly unbridled power of the business elites.
In fact, however, the largely middle-class reformers who rallied under the Progressive
banner had little sympathy for organized labor -- and, in some respects, actually saw their
concentrated, potential strength as a threat to the restoration of individualistic virtue for
which they longed.
The labor unions, being far weaker than the big businesses and
the [political party] machines, held an ambiguous place in Progressive thinking. The
Progressive sympathized with the problems of labor but was troubled about the lengths to which
union power might go if labor-unionism became the sole counterpoise to the power of business.
The danger of combinations of capital and labor that would squeeze the consuming public and the
small businessman was never entirely out of sight . And wherever labor was genuinely powerful
in politics Progressivism took on a somewhat anti-labor tinge.[ii]
Even without the sometimes overt opposition of the Progressive leadership organized labor
faced problems as it sought to become a central force in the evolving, American political
economy. Although they may have shared concerns about their corporate superiors, workers in
early-twentieth-century United States nevertheless were divided by ethnic, religious, and
racial considerations -- differences that their managers were only too willing to exploit if
they allowed them to maintain control in the workplace by pitting one group of workers against
another.
The labor movement was divided, as well, along professional lines: into a more conservative
class of skilled artisans -- under the banner of the American Federation of Labor (AFL) -- and
a much larger but less prestigious group of by and large common laborers -- under the banner of
the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). It would be some years before those two groups
would overcome their disagreements and merge into the AFL-CIO.
In the end, then, the American political economic system failed to deliver the kind of
welfare state that was becoming more and more common in Europe. The United States became
"exceptional" among modern, industrialized democracies for that failure. Facing the often
staunch opposition of the business community (led by the National Association of
Manufacturers); led during its period of greatest potential for reform by a President (Woodrow
Wilson) who exhibited no sympathy for the kind of collectivization that might have resulted in
significant increases in social welfare for its most at-risk groups; and with a working class
plagued by internal divisions; the U.S. failed to implement what is perhaps the bottom-line
characteristic of a true "welfare state": that male workers (i.e., "breadwinners") should be
broadly and automatically protected by social insurance as a matter of course, rather than in
only scattershot fashion (as became the case here). In the end, only mothers and their children
(the so-called "deserving poor") were targeted for public assistance. For the rest of the
working class, the rugged individualism that constituted the core of the American political
culture would have to sustain them through economic hard-times.
The obvious question that arises is, given the agitation for change among the working
classes at the time, why did the U.S. not see the formation of a true labor party? In addition
to the cultural explanation provided in the preceding paragraph, we must consider also the
relative prosperity enjoyed by the typical American worker. If not wealthy, the average worker
at least was making steady material progress as the economy which he helped drive grew
dramatically during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As the economic
historian Warner Sombart has so cleverly put it, "All socialistic utopias come to nothing on
roast beef and apple pie." [iii] With their personal,
financial situations improving regularly, in other words, there was not always an obvious
rationale for workers to get riled up.
But cultural and economic explanations of American "exceptionalism" provide an incomplete
accounting of the situation. It was neither natural nor inevitable, in fact, that workers would
adopt a less threatening posture toward the development of corporate capitalism. Rather, the
ability of workers to band together under a common banner of worker solidarity was
short-circuited -- often deliberately, although not always so -- by the tactics of the
Progressive reformers with whom they vied for control of political economic developments of
that era.
In addition to dealing with the fallout from the corporate trusts that had come to dominate
key sectors of the economy, the Progressives also were determined to weed out the political
corruption that was the lubricant for the political party
"machines that dominated so many major cities in the increasingly urbanized nation. In
seeking to loosen the stranglehold that the party organizations had on politics in
turn-of-the-century, urban American, reformers succeeded in throwing the "baby" of political
organization for the masses out with the "bathwater" of corrupt, one-party politics.
By instituting such reform measures as nonpartisan elections, the secret ballot, and civil
service examinations as a prerequisite for holding government jobs, reformers were able to deny
the machines the tools they needed to sustain their positions of privilege. At the same time,
however, those reforms tended to work against the ability of the working classes to present a
united, political front against the growing alliance between big business and big government.
Political parties were the best hope of the lower classes for securing for themselves a decent
share of the growing "pie" that the American economy was producing. Lacking that institutional
mechanism for realizing their shared interests under a common, partisan banner, the lower
classes were more easily bought off by material rewards or diverted by racial, ethnic, or
religious concerns -- and the first era of significant reform in the American political culture
was more easily steered in a centrist direction that was deemed acceptably safe by the barons
of the new, corporate-capitalist order.
Progressivism: A Precursor of the New Deal?
The Progressive era ended clearly and decisively with the U.S.'s entry into the First World
War. The new internationalism required by that initiative cost Woodrow Wilson dearly, as the
economic sacrifices required by the war effort ushered in a series of Republican presidents
(Harding, Coolidge, Hoover) following the war. With its figurehead in political retirement and
with the postwar prosperity of the "Roaring '20s" distracting Americans' attentions from
pre-war concerns, the reform spirit dwindled and then died.
Although it is possible to cast a retrospectively critical eye on America's first period of
political-cultural reform, we must be careful to acknowledge as well the important changes in
the system that were realized as a result of the Progressive era.
Not only the extent of government intervention, but the manner in which policy was
formulated and executed changed beyond recognition. The main features were the appearance of
regulatory agencies entrusted with wide discretionary powers and a consequent diminution of the
role of both legislatures and courts in the conduct of economic policy.[iv]
Government, in other words, began to take the shape that would come to characterize it in
later decades: a public authority alternately allied with and antagonistic to corporate
capital. Maintained was the traditional, American allegiance to markets -- i.e., to
private authority -- for organizing the political economy. The driving spirit had been
to restore markets, to counter-act the organizational power of the new, corporate giants
that came to dominate the economy. What was different as a result of the Progressive era was
that government would exercise the police power deemed necessary to check the abuses of
the new class of economic plutocrats.
Essentially lost in the political shuffle, however, was the collective fate of millions of
lower- and working-class Americans. Although it was their plight at the hands of an apparently
uncaring, corporate-capitalist order that seemed to have spurred much of the activity during
the Progressive era, in fact the economic fortunes of the poor, the elderly, the working
classes, and racial minorities wound up taking a back seat to the broader, institution-driven
agenda of Progressive reformers. It would fall to the next significant era of
political-cultural change, the New Deal, to address those needs in any significant way.
In an even broader sense, however, what was perhaps the Progressive era's most fundamental
goal proved to be unattainable: for it sought nothing less than the removal of politics
from the decision-making processes that had come to characterize the modern political economy.
What Progressivism succeeded in doing, instead, was substituting one form of politics
(bureaucratic) for another (partisan -- i.e., "machine"). As subsequent eras would demonstrate,
that change made the American political system even more open to influence by special interests
-- an ironic outcome for America's first, major reform era.
"... American war-making will persist so long as the United States continues to seek military dominance across the globe. ..."
"... A government that imagines that it has both the right and responsibility to police the entire planet will find an excuse to mire itself in one or more conflicts on a regular basis, and if there isn't one available to join it will start some ..."
"... U.S. military dominance should have at least guaranteed that we remained at peace once our major adversary had collapsed at the end of the Cold War, but the dissolution of the USSR encouraged the U.S. to become much more aggressive and much more eager to use force whenever and wherever it wanted. Wertheim provides an answer for why this is: ..."
"... Why have interventions proliferated as challengers have shrunk? The basic cause is America's infatuation with military force. Its political class imagines that force will advance any aim, limiting debate to what that aim should be. ..."
"... Using force appeals to many American leaders and policymakers because they imagine that frequent military action cows and intimidates adversaries, but in practice it creates more enemies and wastes American lives and resources on fruitless conflicts. ..."
"... The constant warfare of the last two decades in particular has corroded our political system and inured the public to the idea that it is normal that American soldiers and Marines are always fighting and dying in some foreign country in pursuit of nebulous goals, but nothing could be more abnormal and wrong than this. ..."
"... Our establishment would rather give up their skin. They don't call it hegemony, they call it the post ww2 order, leadership, resisting isolationism or some other such nonsense. ..."
"... any country that attempts to gain enough power to assert its own sovereignty is considered a threat that must be crushed and we roll out all of the tools at our disposal to do it. ..."
"... Al Qaeda's attack on us was due to us using them as a tool to stop Russia's push into Afghanistan. ..."
"... Good luck with that. We are ruled by people who are functionally indistinguishable from sociopaths, and sociopaths learn only from reward and punishment. ..."
"... I do not see a politically feasible way to end our global empire without destabilizing that same globe that has come to rely on our military power. ..."
"... Empires have a sort of inertia, and few in history voluntarily give up dominion. ..."
"... What is unsustainable is the current rate of government spending. The current rate of military spending is driving up our debt and making it impossible to reinvest in desperately needed infrastructure. ..."
"... We have been coasting on the infrastructure investments of the 50's and 60's but if we don't start cutting military spending and redirecting that money elsewhere we are going to be bankrupt. ..."
"... I agree that it is almost impossible to conceive of any scenario whereby this "ideology" of so-called world order and/ hegemony would change in the US and in its puppets. ..."
"... The deck is so totally stacked in favor of this ideology, the totally controlled MSM, the MIC, the corrupt and controlled congress, and the presidential admin structure itself, would never allow this mantra to be challenged. ..."
"... It is all about greed and power-the psychopaths pursuing and defending this 'ideology' would never ever go quietly. The money and power is too corrupting. ..."
"... I'm not sure that most of the citizens in those European countries we occupy actually support our permanent military presence in their countries. ..."
"... The new paradigm is that private militarism dominates government, turning it to its preferred priorities of moneymaking warmaking. ..."
Stephen Wertheim explains
what is required to bring an end to unnecessary and open-ended U.S. wars overseas:
American war-making will persist so long as the United States continues to seek military dominance across the globe.
Dominance, assumed to ensure peace, in fact guarantees war. To get serious about stopping endless war, American leaders must do
what they most resist: end America's commitment to armed supremacy and embrace a world of pluralism and peace.
Any government that presumes to be the world's hegemon will be fighting somewhere almost all of the time, because its political
leaders will see everything around the world as their business and it will see every manageable threat as a challenge to their "leadership."
A government that imagines that it has both the right and responsibility to police the entire planet will find an excuse to mire
itself in one or more conflicts on a regular basis, and if there isn't one available to join it will start some.
U.S. military dominance should have at least guaranteed that we remained at peace once our major adversary had collapsed at
the end of the Cold War, but the dissolution of the USSR encouraged the U.S. to become much more aggressive and much more eager to
use force whenever and wherever it wanted. Wertheim provides an answer for why this is:
Why have interventions proliferated as challengers have shrunk? The basic cause is America's infatuation with military
force. Its political class imagines that force will advance any aim, limiting debate to what that aim should be.
Using force appeals to many American leaders and policymakers because they imagine that frequent military action cows and
intimidates adversaries, but in practice it creates more enemies and wastes American lives and resources on fruitless conflicts.
Our government's frenetic interventionism and meddling for the last thirty years hasn't made our country the slightest bit more secure,
but it has sown chaos and instability across at least two continents. Wertheim continues:
Continued gains by the Taliban, 18 years after the United States initially toppled it, suggest a different principle: The profligate
deployment of force creates new and unnecessary objectives more than it realizes existing and worthy ones.
The constant warfare of the last two decades in particular has corroded our political system and inured the public to the
idea that it is normal that American soldiers and Marines are always fighting and dying in some foreign country in pursuit of nebulous
goals, but nothing could be more abnormal and wrong than this. Constant warfare achieves nothing except to provide an excuse
for more of the same. The longer that a war drags on, one would think that it should become easier to bring it to an end, but we
have seen that it becomes harder for both political and military leaders to give up on an unwinnable conflict when it has become
an almost permanent part of our foreign policy. For many policymakers and pundits, what matters is that the U.S. not be perceived
as losing, and so our military keeps fighting without an end in sight for the sake of this "not losing."
Wertheim adds:
Despite Mr. Trump's rhetoric about ending endless wars, the president insists that "our military dominance must be unquestioned"
-- even though no one believes he has a strategy to use power or a theory to bring peace. Armed domination has become an end in
itself.
Seeking to maintain this dominance is ultimately unsustainable, and as it becomes more expensive and less popular it will also
become increasingly dangerous as we find ourselves confronted with even more capable adversaries. For the last thirty years, the
U.S. has been fortunate to be secure and prosperous enough that it could indulge in decades of fruitless militarism, but that luck
won't hold forever. It is far better if the U.S. give up on hegemony and the militarism that goes with it on our terms.
Our establishment would rather give up their skin. They don't call it hegemony, they call it the post ww2 order, leadership,
resisting isolationism or some other such nonsense.
Truth be told, as your article states, any country that attempts to gain enough power to assert its own sovereignty is
considered a threat that must be crushed and we roll out all of the tools at our disposal to do it.
It makes us less safe. Isolationism did not cause 9/11. In the 90's when we were being attacked by Al Qaeda we were too distracted
dancing on Russia's bones to pay any attention to them. While Al Qaeda was attacking our troops and blowing up our buildings we
were bombing Serbia, expanding NATO and reelecting Yeltsin and sticking it to Iran.
It goes beyond that. Al Qaeda's attack on us was due to us using them as a tool to stop Russia's push into Afghanistan.
We later abandoned them when the job was done: a pack hound we trained, pushed to fight, then left in the forest abandoned and
starved. Then we wonder why it came back growling.
Isolationism may not be the most effective solution to things, but I'll admit a LOT of pain, on ourselves and others, would've
never happened if we took that policy.
Good luck with that. We are ruled by people who are functionally indistinguishable from sociopaths, and sociopaths learn only
from reward and punishment.
So far, they only have been rewarded for their crimes.
While I think the economic basis of the Soviet Union was faulty, and it had lost the popular support it might have had in early
days, the USSR's military aggression, particularly in Afghanistan, was a major precipitating factor in its downfall. It would
have eventually crumbled, I believe, anyway, but had they taken a less aggressive stance I think they would have lasted several
decades longer.
Is it really in our hands to actually disengage though? Is this politically feasible?
How does this work? The US gets up one day and says "We're pulling all of our troops out of Saudi and SK. No more funding for
Israel! No bolstering the pencil-thin government of Afghanistan. All naval bases abroad will be shut down. Longstanding alliances
and interests be damned!"
I sympathize very strongly with the notion that we must use military force wisely and with restraint, and perhaps even that
the post-WW2 expansion abroad was a mistake, but I do not see a politically feasible way to end our global empire without
destabilizing that same globe that has come to rely on our military power.
This is the world we live in, whether we like it or not, and barring some military or economic disaster that forces a strategic
realignment or retreat (like WW2 did for the old European powers) I don't know how you practically pull back. Empires have
a sort of inertia, and few in history voluntarily give up dominion.
What is unsustainable is the current rate of government spending. The current rate of military spending is driving up our
debt and making it impossible to reinvest in desperately needed infrastructure.
We have been coasting on the infrastructure investments of the 50's and 60's but if we don't start cutting military spending
and redirecting that money elsewhere we are going to be bankrupt.
Sure. That doesn't mean American withdrawal would create less instability in toto. Maybe it would. Who knows? We mortals can only
take counterfactuals so far.
I agree that it is almost impossible to conceive of any scenario whereby this "ideology" of so-called world order and/
hegemony would change in the US and in its puppets.
The deck is so totally stacked in favor of this ideology, the totally controlled MSM, the MIC, the corrupt and controlled
congress, and the presidential admin structure itself, would never allow this mantra to be challenged.
It is all about greed and power-the psychopaths pursuing and defending this 'ideology' would never ever go quietly. The
money and power is too corrupting.
Maybe, just maybe, however, as we are at $22 trillion in debt and counting (just saw a total tab for F-35 of $1.5 trillion)
that the money will run out, and zero interest rate financing is not all that awesome, this unsustainable mindlessness will be
curtailed or even better, changed.
It's not really hegemony. Old-fashioned empires took over territory in order to gain resources and labor. We haven't done that
since 1920. Especially since 1990 we've been making war purely to destroy and obliterate. When our war is done there's nothing
left to dominate or own.
Domestically we've been using politics and media and controlled culture to do the same thing. Create "terrorists" and "extremists"
on "two" "sides", set them loose, enjoy the resulting chaos. Chaos is the declared goal, and it's been working beautifully for
70 years.
China is expanding empire in Africa and Asia the old-fashioned way, improving farms and factories in order to have exclusive
purchase of their output.
Could not have said it better. "On our terms" would mean that Europe is forced to take matters of military security in it's own
hands, I hope. But chanches are slim, history shows empires must fall hard and break a leg or so first before anything changes.
Iran, Saudi-arabia, the greater ME, China, the trade wars and the world economy are coming together for a perfect storm it seems.
The problem with US hegemony is Israel. Look around the world. Neither Japan nor South Korea nor Vietnam nor Philippines nor India
nor Indonesia nor Australia (the same can be said for South and Central America, Mexico, Canada and Europe) require a significant
US presence.
None of them are asking for a greater presence in their country (except Poland) while being perfectly happy with
our alliance, joint defense, trade, intelligence and technology sharing.
It is only Israel and Saudi Arabia which are constantly pushing the US into middle eastern wars and quagmires that we have
no national interest. Trump sees the plain truth that the US is in jeopardy of losing its manufacturing and its technological
lead to China. If we (US) dont start to rebuild our infrastructure, our defense, our cities, our communities, our manufacturing,
our educational system then our nation is going to follow California into a 3rd world totalitarian state dominated by democratic
voting immigrants whose only affiliation to our country and our constitutional republic is a welfare check, free govt programs
and incestuous govt contracts which funnel govt dollars into the re-election PACs of democratic / liberal elected officials.
The new paradigm is that private militarism dominates government, turning it to its preferred priorities of moneymaking warmaking.
Defeat is now when war's income streams end. The only wars that are lost, are those that end, defeating the winning of war profits.
War, as a financial success story, has become an end in itself, and an empire that looks for more to wage means some mighty big
wages with more profit opportunities. Victory is to be avoided - red ink being spilled through peace detestable - and blood spilled
profitably to be encouraged.
There was a moment in Viet Nam when I questioned whether everything I had been taught
about "America" was one big fabricated lie – a huge pretend. It was April 1969, and I had
just experienced witnessing the aftermath of a series of bombings of supposed military targets.
They were in fact inhabited, undefended villages where virtually everyone in those villages
perished from low flying bombings, that included napalming. The majority of dead –
murdered – were young burned children. On several occasions I observed those bodies up
close, sickened by the sight, now burdened by the criminal nature of the US war. The policy of
accumulating massive numbers of body counts was an inkling of the Grand Lie. Reading the
entrance sign to my squadron in-country headquarters, "Welcome to Indian Country," was a first
clue.
My duty station was the "home" of the fighter-bombers and pilots who followed orders to
destroy those "enemy targets", i.e., villages. I was the USAF night security commander
following orders to protect those soldiers and planes from mortar and sapper attacks.
A few days later I was reading an article in Stars and Stripes , an official,
independent newspaper for soldiers, reporting on a recent Supreme Court decision (
Street v . New York , 1969) that upheld the right of desecrating our "sacred"
symbol – the US flag. During a period of increased burnings of the US American flag in
protests of the US wars against African-Americans at home, and Asians abroad, an
African-American veteran recipient of a Bronze Star, Sidney Street , publicly burned his
personal flag on a New York City street corner for which he was arrested and convicted.
Depressed, I pondered how it is that one could be arrested for burning a piece of cloth
– even a national symbol – that represented an official policy of criminally
burning innocent human beings, including large numbers of young children, while the
pilot-perpetrators were commended, and whom, in my duties I was protecting? Initially suicidal,
I had difficulty wrapping my head around this dystopian nightmare. I was in psychic shock from
extreme cognitive dissonance.
Our behavior against the Vietnamese, a nation of peasants with one-sixth the population of
the USA, one-thirtieth its size, certainly must rank as one of the worst of a number of
barbarisms in the 20 th Century. The US left 26 million bomb craters, sprayed
21 million gallons of DNA-altering chemical warfare on the landscape and people,
murdered some 6 million Southeast Asians, destroyed by bombing over 13,000 of Viet Nam's
21,000 villages, 950 churches and pagodas, 350 clearly marked hospitals, 3,000 high schools and
universities, 15,000 bridges, etc.
Why all this overwhelming firepower and destruction? Incredulously, to prevent the
Vietnamese from enjoying their self-determination, absurdly touted as necessary to stop
"communism." Does there in fact exist a kind of psychopathy in our cultural DNA? Though I
hadn't fired a bullet myself, or dropped a bomb, I had been a compliant participant in a
mindless murder machine. Viet Nam was not an aberration, but consistent with a long history of
arrogant interventions revealing something very dark about who we are. Was I part of a savage
culture of unthinking sadists, I wondered?
Learning Real People's Versus Fake, Kool Aid US History
I have spent countless hours studying a more comprehensive people's version of world and US
history. Study of US history of course is part of the Eurocentric globalization/colonization
over the past 500 years. The 20 percent Eurocentric "developed-world" is a product of
self-proclaimed "superiors" violently and deceitfully stealing resources and labor from the
other 80 percent, all cloaked in the conceited rhetoric of spreading "civilization." This
patriarchal policy is totally unsustainable from a social, political, ecological,
psychological, and moral perspective.
It is instructive to learn that the "Founding Fathers" chose, not democracy, but
oligarchy/plutocracy "to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority." Jefferson's
"empire of liberty" was a vision to expand private property for large landowners. Our
Constitution is more a document to preserve freedom of "property" and commercial transactions,
than it is to preserve human liberty, of which free speech is the most fundamental. Historian
Staughton Lynd summarized it thus: inherited land replaced inherited government. Recently the
highest court of the land ruled the legal fiction that property (money) is a person with free
speech rights, as preposterous as the earlier legal fiction that a person (slave) is
property.
A fear-laden gun culture originating in violent settler-colonialism and white
nationalism-supremacy serve as a basis for the founding ideology and military strategy of the
United States. Slave patrols and Indian fighters were our first "special operations,"
establishing the essential White character of our militarized culture. As the systematic
dispossession project continued, the US government signed over 400 treaties with Indigenous
nations, violating every one of them, establishing deceit and outright lying as part of
our cultural DNA.
The politics of violence based on classism and racism has been incessant throughout our
history. Examining the US criminal injustice system housing a quarter of all the world's
prisoners reveals brutal truth when comparing extreme disparities in punishments by race, and
class. Justice?
I studied the history of the city of my birth – Geneva, New York, which in the 1700s
was Kanadesaga, capitol of the Seneca nation. On September 8, 1779, Major General John Sullivan
and his forty-five hundred soldiers eradicated these "merciless Indian Savages" in the largest
Revolutionary War battle of 1779 – a terrorist, scorched-earth campaign massacring
civilians while destroying all forty of the well-established Seneca towns, including
Kanadesaga. By 1788, the European settlers renamed it Geneva, as if nothing had happened, a
deserved reward for superiors.
All those arrowheads I enjoyed collecting as a child possessed a profound dark secret about
the nature and character of my ancestors. However, I would only discover their secret after
deep reflections from my Viet Nam awakening.
Official US military interventionism began with the US Marine invasion of the Dominican
Republic in 1798 during the undeclared naval war with France. However, hundreds of settler
paramilitary units had been killing Indians since the 1620s. But imperialism has been
explicit policy since the late 1890s to assure domestic prosperity. In 1907,
Woodrow Wilson while president of Princeton University (six years before being elected US
president) lectured:
"Since trade ignores national boundaries and the manufacturer insists on having the world
as a market, the flag of his nation must follow him, and the doors of the nations which are
closed against him must be battered down. .Colonies must be obtained or planted, in order
that no useful corner of the world may be overlooked or left unused."
President McKinley, and various Senators continued to advocate "a foreign market for our
surplus products." US meddling, both "soft," and hard, has never stopped.
Traveling to a number of nations in Latin America, Asia, and the Middle East have exposed me
to details of hundreds of US overt interventions, and thousands of covert
destabilization actions. These policies have caused the murders of millions, 20 to 30
million alone since WWII during the so-called "Cold War". Only five of these nearly 600
military interventions have been declared wars as required by the Constitution, clearly
indicating our sacred document is not taken seriously. This also tells us the system has no
interest in being accountable to its own Constitution, or international law. Speaking with
peasants in these victim-countries invariably reveals the horrendous cruelty of US interveners
and their surrogates. Does the US possess any intentions to be law-abiding? Does the US possess
any feelings for others, or only selfish imperial ambitions? And does anyone care?
Violence against even White citizens has matched violence we have carried out in foreign
policy. The Alien and Sedition Acts of 1917-18 were enacted to suppress anti-war dissent
against US entrance into World War I. Thousands of US Americans were deported and
imprisoned following World War I for "radical" anti-war expressions, including labor leaders
and socialists. Some were tortured in US prisons. Ironically, free speech dissent is most
critical when a government decides to go to war. The original Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798
stifled free speech of US citizens, including elected officials, who objected to the undeclared
war against France. Free speech? Huh?
While the US was locking up and deporting citizens for opposing World War I, the FBI was
ignoring extremely violent KKK supremacist groups whose six million members –
nearly 25 percent of the white male population at the time – were lynching with impunity
an average of six African-Americans a month. Equal protection?
The first known use of air power against civilians was committed by US Marines in Haiti in
1919. But, the second known use of US air power against civilians occurred in Tulsa, Oklahoma,
May 31-June 1, 1921, when hundreds of economically successful Black residents living in a
36-square block community were murdered, including from low flying white-piloted planes
dropping incendiaries, destroying nearly 1,300 buildings. How many US Americans know about this
abomination?
Walter White, a longtime leader in the National Association for Advancement of Colored
People (NAACP), concluded that southerners fear of Negro progress offends the
intangible feeling of racial superiority, explaining the intensity of White savagery. The sense
of established White superiority (or anyone possessing those feelings) often leads to an
insecure character from lack of practicing accountability with others in a world of varied,
challenging relationships. Those feelings easily morph into paranoia of others, and delusions
of self grandeur – one of the most difficult psychological orders to treat, as the
persistent pathology of racism (and classism) so attests.
The third known use of US bombing civilians occurred at Blair Mountain, West Virginia,
August-September 1921. As many as 15,000 striking coal miners attempting to unionize were
attacked by 2,000 armed sheriff's deputies, coal company paramilitaries, US troops, and US Army
Martin MB-1 bombers, killing as many as 100 miners, with many more wounded. Before the battles
had ended, more than a million ammunition rounds had been fired. Nearly 1,000 miners were
ironically indicted for murder of the nearly 30 deaths among the miner's attackers. Over 700
union organizers have been murdered in our history. Is this known by many?
We continue to be obsessed with personal and government guns (police and military) as a
guarantor of our security. Those who question easy access to guns, even assault weapons, or the
ridiculously wasteful military spending, are thought of as nearly traitorous. US citizens
personally own nearly 400 million firearms, or 40 percent of all private guns in the world. On
average, three US citizens are killed every day by police, disproportionately
African-Americans. So far in 2019, the US has experienced more than one mass shooting (4 or
more shot) every day. Our gun death rate is ten times above that of other high income
countries. Using violence as a default position historically ends in disaster, as it has been
proven over and over that violence spirals out of control into more violence, while distracting
from serious discourse. Why the incredible record of violence? Insecurity?
Under its doctrine of Full Spectrum Dominance, the US government routinely dispatches
military ships to every sea space, military planes to every airspace, hundreds of satellites
into outer space, while ordering Special Forces units to operate clandestinely in nearly
three-fourths of the world's countries. Additionally, of the 1.4 million US soldiers in the
world, nearly 200,000 are positioned in as many as 150 countries, most stationed at 800 major
military bases in 80 nations. The US also possesses a large percentage of the world's weapons
of mass destruction, and recently has dispensed with any genuine effort at containing the
spread of nuclear weapons. The annual military budget, including hidden costs, amounts to an
exorbitant $1.25 trillion a year, more money than the next seven countries combined spend on
their militaries. If you want to be guaranteed health care and a modest house, join the Army.
Otherwise these human rights are "unaffordable." If you want gun control, start at the top.
How to explain the extent and breadth of our violent militarism and global imperialism?
Paranoia? It seems that our sense of superiority justifies hurtful dispossession from others to
acquire and preserve undeserved privilege.
After exiting the military in 1970, my opinions about the US war against the Vietnamese were
affirmed with the 1971 release of the Pentagon Papers revealing the more than 20 years of
criminal intentions, and deceit, to thwart Vietnamese aspirations for self-determination.
Earlier in 1971, January 31-February 2, Vietnam Veterans Against the War conducted the "Winter
Soldier Investigation: An Inquiry into American War Crimes" when nearly 120 veterans testified
about the war crimes and atrocities they committed or witnessed in Viet Nam. I was aghast when
learning about Nixon's intended Huston plan to criminally interrupt antiwar activities, the
FBI's sixteen-year COINTELPRO of more than 2,000 illegal actions against innocent US citizens,
the CIA's Operation CHAOS keeping tabs on 300,000 citizens opposed to the Viet Nam war, and the
National Security Agency's Operation SHAMROCK watch lists of those communicating with people
overseas. Respect for the law? Huh? Further research revealed that as early as 1934 President
Roosevelt instituted a long-standing joint FBI-military program to conduct domestic
intelligence with broad investigative scope. The "American" Kool Aid indeed has sedated us.
Today our freedoms are further curtailed, for example, as the National Security Agency (NSA)
spies on every US American, the Authorization of Military Force Act (AUFA) allows
warrantless electronic surveillance of anyone suspected of aiding terrorism, and the National
Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) enables indefinite detention of US citizens, even arrest by
the military. Where is the Constitution when we need it? Or was it ever really there for
us?
One of the most revealing chapters in our history is the incredible sympathy the US
possessed for authoritarian Nazi Germany. Even though the Soviet military was most critical in
defeating the Nazis in World War II, deep fear of the Bolsheviks (the emergence of an
alternative social-economic system to capitalism) motivated US America's wealthy class, with
complicity of the US government, to support the rise of Nazi Germany from the mid-1930s
into the war years themselves. The US capitalists supported the Nazi capitalists to defeat the
"threat" of socialism. Elite power brokers included leaders of Wall Street and wealthy "barons"
such as the Rockefellers and Andrew Mellon, and businesses such as Ford Motor, IBM (tabulating
daily location of Jews in the Holocaust), General Motors, General Electric, Standard Oil,
Texaco, ITT, International Harvester, Chase Manhattan Bank, the House of Morgan banking
dynasty, DuPont, United Aircraft, etc., who enjoyed huge profits from the war. And following
the war, the US's "Operation Gladio" systematically defeated popular anti -Nazi groups
throughout Europe, while "Operation Paperclip" secretly brought Nazi scientists and other
professionals to the US. Our affinity for fascism has been established.
Psychologically, it is important to note that our national identity has consistently
been markedly defined by demonizing others – "merciless savages", "uppity ni**ers",
"anarchists", "radicals", "communists", "Russians", "alien filth", "narco-traffickers",
"terrorists", "shithole countries", "vermin", etc., echoing psychologist Carl Jung's principle
of "shadow projection." Jung described a cowardly trick we play on ourselves: avoid looking in
the mirror so as not to take responsibility for seeing our own demons. We "see" the evil in
others, perpetuating a nation addicted to war against them, obscenely profiting as we
self-righteously deny our own severe pathologies. If we had looked in the mirror we would have
learned what Pogo told us, "We have met the enemy and he is us."
Eco-psychologist Chellis Glendinning suggests that modern humans suffer from deep insecurity
that emerged from collective traumas hundreds of generations ago. A serious disconnect from
intimacy with the earth occurred when our ancient ancestors began controlling nature through
agriculture and animal domestication. Evolutionary philosopher Gregory Bateson concludes that
addictive behavior is consistent with the Western approach to life that pits mind against body,
while behaving as if the natural world is a commodity. We seek various distractions to numb our
pain from this feeling of aloofness. Technology, not Nature, has become our God.
Recognizing the Lie
Could it be that virtually everything I was taught by my parents, community, school, church,
and political leaders in terms of factual history, morality, ethics, and rational thinking
about "America" was the opposite of what had been represented? How could that be?
Yes, I have been conditioned by an incredibly comfortable fairy tale, a massive cultural
system denying or distorting historic realities, founded on shameful genocides. I had been
betrayed. We are told we are the greatest, even as we (s)elect imperial Presidents and
Congresspeople in an orgy of fantastic fiction about "democracy." The US Senate is a
millionaire's club, with many members of the US House also in that class. Indian author
Arundhati Roy describes "democracy" and "pro-democracy" as the "Free World's whores", hollow
words satisfying a whole range of tastes, available to be used and abused at will where facts
don't matter.
US America loves its myth of being committed to justice for all, but in fact it is a society
ruled and funded by a wealthy elite. This is not a government of, by and for the people!
It is a ruthless oligarchy sanctioned by a majority of the people believing their vote
counts. Money has always mattered, severely rigging the game in many ways toward an
upper class (obscenely bribing candidates, corporate personhood power, gerrymandering,
proprietary election software, hacking capacity to effect results, Jim Crow laws, voter
suppression, etc.). The oligarchy approves "acceptable" candidates, while contrived rhetoric,
propaganda, and our education system keep us faithful to our political system comprised of one
party with two right wings, the winner ruling by tyranny of its majority. But the bottom line
is that (s)elected representatives obey their large donors who thrive on war-making against
vulnerable others.
Nonetheless, these facts do not preclude existence of individual conscientious politicians.
However, the political economic system itself is fixed, it is not broken, a dilemma every
honest politician must face. This delicious Kool Aid has in fact concealed a delusional
madness, a Kafkaesque, Orwellian nightmare. Our political leaders have consistently and
collectively acted outside the Constitution, while selectively applying laws that
preserve the cabal in power. It has always been this way, though the social revolution of the
1960s threatened to overturn the oligopoly. This revolution was unfortunately unsuccessful but
the fearful system's repressive reaction is now in its fifth decade. In the end, we are in fact
a nation of men, not laws.
So, in effect, our mythological story made me functionally stupid, a "good kid" who became
complicit in mindless, mass murder. And I am suggesting that it has created a society comprised
of millions of functionally stupid people. This is different from intelligence. This is not
idiocy. This is serious non -thinking of intellectually capable people who, in effect,
have suspended their autonomous critical thinking, basking in an intoxicated spell of our sense
of national invincibility. It has enhanced the Friedman era of neoliberal privatization,
worshipping greed, while millions are without health care and homeless. This is mass
psychopathy, a dangerous cultural mental illness.
German Lutheran theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer , while a prisoner in one of Hitler's jails,
wrote about the role of stupidity in the German people that substantially contributed to the
rise of Nazism and worship of savior Hitler. He argued that it is very separate from
intellectual capacity but occurs when a cult-like belief system dangerously suspends critical
thinking, bringing collective relief to an emotionally anxious population. It is a form of
voluntary servitude more dangerous than malice, an entrenched belief system that makes genuine
dialogue and education almost impossible. (Bonhoeffer was hung in April 1945).
As US Americans we possess no visceral memory of the two unspeakable genocides
our ancestors shamefully committed, forcefully dispossessing Indigenous Africans of their
labor, and genuine Americans of their land, murdering millions with impunity. Even though we
are superficially taught about slavery and conquering the Indigenous, their egregious suffering
has been outsourced outside our feeling fields for 25 generations . Thus, was
established our cultural "DNA" of achieving expansion benefitting a few (mostly White males and
those who think like them) through any means while escaping any accountability
whatsoever. Now nearly 600 overt, and thousands of covert interventions later, US Americans
still know little or nothing about our unspeakable imperialism. Why not? Isn't it critically
important that we seriously grapple with our diabolical history?
In 2019, the President, US military, CIA, and other "regime change" entities like the
National Endowment for Democracy (NED), and their funders in Congress, continue to intervene
almost everywhere, destabilizing with crippling sanctions, sadistically causing suffering,
causing chaos, creating kill lists, murdering, bombing, etc. Does any of this criminal insanity
even happen? Has it ever? Does it matter to most people? I believe there is a deep shame
that burdens us. It is understandable to avoid looking at shame, but the cost is perpetual war
for perpetual peace until we are all dead. The era of privilege is over, as we enter the
terrifying era of consequences, bringing fear, insecurity and anxiety to many heretofore
privileged folks. Denial becomes a lethal seduction.
Our amnesia has precluded emotional intelligence, a depth of character, so necessary
for mature development, with little understanding of historical context. We are effectively
emotionally retarded, blocking the universal embedded human feeling of empathy, and the
collective solidarity that emerges therefrom. Thus, "America" is very insecure having been
conveniently wrapped in a fake, pretend narrative, convincing us of our "exceptional" nature,
ignoring both our systemic pattern of domestic violence, and global imperialism. The corporate
media, and corporate-owned social media platforms, serve as stenographers for our oligarchic
policies and values. They create an agenda-driven narrative that inoculates our minds with
constant group think untruths of neo-liberal capitalism.
We now live in a post-truth world, where narcissistic life is experienced as virtual, not
real. Do we feel the pain of the Afghani, Yemeni, the Syrian, Iraqi, Iranian, Libyan, Somali,
the Russian, the Venezuelan, Nicaraguan, Honduran, Guatemalan, Mexican, Palestinian in Gaza, or
our neighbor down the street whose cancer left her homeless due to foreclosure? How much do we
care? Answering these questions can tell us a lot about our own survival, including yours and
mine.
Serious discussion and debate of a broad range and depth of ideas is virtually
nonexistent. Mention of "socialism" is considered traitorous to the religion of neoliberal
corporatism. In reality, we promote individualism over community, competition over cooperation,
and acquisitiveness over inquisitiveness. These capitalist characteristics condition human
development in a way that is diametrically opposed to our inherent, genetic nature as a social
species requiring for survival cooperation in all our relations.
The economy and political system is now virtually dependent upon what Eisenhower proclaimed
as the military/security industrial complex, and that complex thrives on creation of endless
"enemies" which produce obscene war profits for a very few. Community and family units have
disintegrated, and citizenship is less engaged as life is increasingly defined in terms of
commodities. Everything and everybody is for sale to the highest bidder. This leads to anomie,
violence and madness. And yet, we continue to enjoy shopping as the government conducts its
daily bombing. How can this be? How can we pay taxes and go about our business as usual when so
many people in the world are being impoverished or eliminated by US policies facilitating the
wealthy getting richer?
The Deep Divide – 1959 – 2019
Having graduated from a rural upstate New York high school in 1959 at the height of
post-WWII Cold War euphoria, in the midst of the short historic blip of aspiring consumerism,
the "American" Kool Aid I and my 28 fellow graduates drank at that time was delicious. I was
raised in a lower middle class home by conservative, religious parents, not dissimilar to the
upbringings of many of my classmates. Life seemed great, and simple. However, my Viet Nam
experience rudely exposed the poisonous nature of this delicious drink and its true
ingredients.
Discovering information about my former classmates finds several still living in the same
area we grew up, possessing similar views to that which we believed in 1959 – religiously
and politically conservative, but now supporters of MAGA, Trump and Israel. One classmate who
had been a basketball cheerleader, still married to her high school sweetheart after 60 years,
read my Facebook postings from Nicaragua, then declared me "a fool" admonishing me to "stay
there." This same cheerleader chanted for each starter before games, such as "Brian, Brian,
he's our man, if he can't do it, nobody can."
Being raised in and conditioned by US America instills a desire to preserve a fantasy of
post-WWII euphoria for many, at least until President Reagan. But experiential reality
painfully destroys make-believe. I argue that the USA has never been great, but suspect many of
my 1959 classmates would vehemently disagree.
Trump Exposes the Pretend Society
The phenomenon of the Presidency of Donald John Trump disturbingly "offers" our culture, and
the world, an overdue undisguised photo of our real culture and its politics. Some say
Trump brings out the worst in people – hatred, self-centeredness, cruelty, insensitivity,
crassness, racism, insulting language, poisonous divisiveness, adolescent delinquency, etc. But
is it possible that his language and demeanor are validating expressions of historically
suppressed feelings and values which have never been sufficiently addressed or openly
acknowledged in our Eurocentric, capitalist, money-oriented, nature-defying, often
mean-spirited culture? These censored feelings once unleashed, no matter how adolescent they
seem, are capable of manifesting in a vicious authoritarian and neo-fascist state, as they did
in Germany nearly 100 years ago. It seems we are at that point again.
The "developed" world, now led by the United States of America, has historically been built
on egregious exploitation and violence hidden under fanciful rhetoric. Inevitably, the chickens
will come home to roost. As Eurocentrics we have been lying to ourselves and the world with our
highly touted economic system and "democracy," fooling ourselves by myths and lies we have long
believed about our "superiority" built on the suffering of others. As stated above, we have
(s)elected leaders who are to varying degrees corrupted by money who use politically "correct"
language and a finessed demeanor to gain approval. In fact, they have consistently been
imperial and oligarchic, selfishly stealing to assure an insatiably consumptive lifestyle for
under 5 percent of the world's population (but only benefitting a minority of its own people),
while gobbling up anywhere from 25 to 50 percent of the globe's resources (depending on the
resource and era examined). We ad nauseum excuse our interventions using "national
security" or "humanitarian justice." We have followed in the footsteps of our imperial teachers
in the United Kingdom. Fair? Sustainable? Ever thought about the structural unfairness and
gross arrogance that has enabled 500 years of colonization? Trump's Presidency reveals a lot
about us that we have not wanted to recognize. Scary? Our historical chronic complicity in this
horror story cannot be ignored.
Trump serves as an avatar, or caricature, of a collective, creepy, violent, disgusting,
mean-spirited, immature culture, at least as experienced by large numbers of people both in the
US and the world. Trump's appeal can largely be attributed to the fact that he has taken the
clothes off of Pretend . His childish nature of lying, tweeting and exaggerating,
ironically reveals an ugly "truth" about our modern selves that has been drowned under
incredible "public relations" – education, the media, Hollywood, sports, the State
Department, etc. His extreme personal narcissism matches well our extreme collective
exceptionalism. Is it clearer now just how big the LIE has been, protected by our comfortable
500-year myths? Welcome to dystopia, Kafka, and Orwell.
Conclusion
The 400-year history of Western dualistic Cartesian thinking (named after French philosopher
Rene Descartes' view of reductionist mind-body dualism) divorcing human beings from study of
observable nature, has produced a terribly flawed epistemology. The opposite basis for
knowledge is holism, a framework that enables comprehension of multiple interconnections and
historical context. Dispensing with any serious concern for consequences, the insatiably
consumer-driven materialistic Western Way of Life has ironically and blissfully been destroying
life itself by its addiction to burning finite fossil fuels. The harsh truth is that a
capitalist system is on a direct collision course with sustainable societies that require
conserving healthy interconnected relationships with each other and the earth's eco-system. We
have become accustomed to wishful thinking that resources are infinite, and that they belong to
us. This theft can only happen, of course, by force or its threat, and deceit, while living in
the toxic illusion we are better than others. Does this suggest a kind of arrogant
collective stupidity?
Nature bats last, something our cortex apparently chose to fatally ignore. We now face the
greatest existential crisis as Nature bats last humbling modern humans into extinction, or near
so. We somehow forgot the most critical truth of all – that we all part of the One. If we
can now recognize our various levels of "stupidity", we have an adrenaline opportunity to leap
out of our heretofore seductive comfortable fantasy, choosing instead to access our buried
human characteristic of interconnection with everything and everybody, i.e., mutual respect and
accountability. This leap now must be of a revolutionary nature, rocketing us out of our
historic arrogant pleasureableness. Our survival foundation: embracing the evolutionary feeling
of empathy. Saving ourselves is pretty damn important, and that means saving life for all.
Let's do it! We are not worth more; they are not worth less.
*
Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your
email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.
Brian Willson, Viet Nam veteran and trained lawyer, has been a lifelong critic of US
domestic and foreign policy. His essays and biography are found at his website:
brianwillson.com. His recent book, "Don't Thank Me for My Service: My Viet Nam Awakening to the
Long History of US Lies" is published by Clarity Press (2018). His psycho-historical memoir,
"Blood on the Tracks: The Life and Times of S. Brian Willson" was published by PM Press (2011).
A documentary, "Paying the Price for Peace: The Story of S. Brian Willson" was produced in 2016
by Bo Boudart Productions.
While early Zionism was a desperate attempt to divorce the Jews from the ghetto and
their tribal obsession and make them "people like all other people,"
Zionist wanting to make Jews 'like all other people' by giving them a Jew ruled only
state to get away from non Jews is as contradictory as 'Israel is Jewish and
Democratic.'
You're never going to find logical thinking in Jews.
I'm afraid you've lost me with this one. Let's start with this:
' While early Zionism was a desperate attempt to divorce the Jews from the ghetto and
their tribal obsession and make them "people like all other people," the present adherence
to Jewishness and kinship induces a return to Judeo-centric chauvinism '
I'm afraid I don't see the distinction. As I mentioned a while back, I see Zionism as the
Jewish response to the racial nationalism that dominated thinking in Europe in the second
half of the nineteenth century. There were Frenchmen, and they had France. There were
Germans, and they had Germany. There were Greeks, and they had Greece. There were Jews, and
they should have a Jewish state.
In all of these, the nation, its land, and the ethnic entity that was its people were
perceived as indivisible -- and in point of fact, many previously amiably accepted ethnic
minorities found themselves persecuted in consequence. The Poles under Prussian rule are an
example: perfectly welcome in Frederick the Great's Prussia, but repeatedly targeted in
Wilhelmine Germany.
It had become nonsense to speak of a 'German' who wasn't German by birth, a Turk who
wasn't Turkish, etc, etc. So how would Zionism -- the Jewish equivalent of all this -- be
distinct from 'Judeo-centric chauvinism'? And indeed, in the new dispensation, Jews were
forced to choose between assimilation and Zionism; they could be 'Hungarians (or whatever) of
the Mosaic faith' or they could be Zionists -- the traditional Jewish identity had become
obsolete.
What form could 'Judeo-centric chauvinism' have taken but Zionism? Aren't the two one and
the same?
Thanks Gilad for your courageous work. I think we should always remember the ordinary Jews,
the grocers, the tailors, and all the others who have lived ordinary lives and suffered due
to the activities of their elites. We should remember the radical Jews and the artists like
Cohen, Dylan and Lou Reid to mention just a few. I could make a case that the English
elites have caused just as much trouble as elite Jews. In fact, it was the meeting of English
and Jewish elites that created the British empire.
@Iron
Lion Zion "The dichotomy of Israeli vs Jew is rhetoric from the Israeli radical-left."
well, perhaps the survey cited was invalid -- the one concerning how Jews/Israelis
self-identified.
ASAIK the original Zionist idea, or the most powerful version of it in the 20th century,
was Jabotinsky's Revisionist Zionism, which was a secular movement.
If no one in Israel any longer gives even lip service to this concept, then that is indeed
a big change. And, we have read at this site and elsewhere of the takeover of the Israeli
state by the orthodox. Pushback on this explains the stance of Avigdor Liberman and his party
members. Many of which are Russian jews who do not want to support their orthodox countrymen
and -women, who are becoming demographically overrepresented but will not serve in the armed
forces, etc.These issues were written about at this site recently. I think under the title
"the End of Israel."
Certainly that contributoin suggests that what it means to be a Jew/Israeli is changing
and that it is the Israeli "left" that is trying to maintain some kind of image of a secular
Jew who is an Israeli citizen, but is going against the contemporary flow in this effort.
@Colin
Wright The Greeks, French, Germans (etc.) that you cite were people who lived within
national borders, spoke Greek, French, German etc., were educated in these countries and
voted and fought for them (including jews) – but had many different backgrounds and a
variety of religions, though of course predominately Christian. In Europe a country define
themselves by their culture, not by 'race'. i.e. their history, language, philosophy, arts
etc.
'Race' is a jewish divide-and-rule political tool to make up for the fact that:
Judaism is simply a belief (or, rather lifestyle) system – literally a set of life
style proscriptions they call 'laws' and not technically a religion since it contains no
universal, philosophic or transcendental content.
The problem for jews is what is now called judaism, which was born after Christ and
born out of opposition to Christi anity. It is in fact not a religion but a
political movement, anti-faith and anti-religion and anti-love of humankind.
Driven by oppositionalism, they were great proselytisers. People of many different
backgrounds converted to judaism, from Ethiopians to Turkic tribes. Thus there is no "jewish
nation". There is no jewish culture either as is evidenced by jews' meagre contribution to
the arts, philosophy. There wasn't even a jewish language until hebrew was revived /
re-invented all too recently and for political reasons.
Yiddish is a true language of jews if there is one – but it is merely a dialect, not a
standalone.
The Germans destroyed themselves by falling into the jewish anti-Christian, 'racialist'
trap. To aid the Germans in WW2 you had to agree to be an unter-menschen and recognise
Germans as your uber-menschen ..how self-defeating is that?
And why should anyone be surprised that the exact same mentality rules in Israel today, since
it is the delusional heart of judaism? A fake "Racial" Supremacy is the raison
d'être of "judaism".
All of this adds up to a tragic, self-defeating and ultimately stupid (un-intelligent)
position.
Peoples tend to want their own nation state presumably because it it the most
satisfying, protective and benevolent context for individuals to mediate their lives in the
world. Unfortunately German Jews lived in a state while being of a different nation to the
majority, and had their rights suddenly taken away. In the Jewish state of Israel Jews are
having their need for imprescriptible rights met. Palestinians want their own state and those
rights that go with it.
"... Committee members Sen. Tom Udall (D-N.M.) and Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Vir.) explicitly announced their opposition to war with Iran. And prominent war powers critic Sen. Jeff Markley (D-Ore.) quipped that, "[b]ack when Presidents used to follow the Constitution, they sought consent for military action from Congress, not foreign governments that murder reporters," referring to the assassination of Saudi-American journalist Jamal Khashoggi. ..."
"... "Diplomacy by Twitter has not worked so far and it surely is not working with Iran. The president needs to stop threatening military strikes via social media," said Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Mary.) in response to a question from the National Interest . "The attack on Saudi Arabia is troubling whether it was perpetrated by Houthi rebels or Iran. The U.S. should regain its leadership by working with our allies to isolate Iran for its belligerent actions in the region." ..."
"... "The U.S. should not be looking for any opportunity to start a dangerous and costly war with Iran. Congress has not authorized war against Iran and we've made it crystal clear that Saudi Arabia needs to withdraw from Yemen," he continued. ..."
"... Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) has long been a critic of Saudi Arabia's war in Yemen, proposing a successful bill to cut off U.S. support for the Saudi-led war effort. (He did not have enough votes to override the veto.) After the attacks, he wrote a long Twitter thread explaining how "the Saudis sowed the seeds of this mess" in Yemen. ..."
"... "It's simply amazing how the Saudis call all our shots these days. We don't have a mutual defense alliance with KSA, for good reason. We shouldn't pretend we do," Murphy added. "And frankly, no matter where this latest drone strike was launched from, there is no short or long term upside to the U.S. military getting more deeply involved in the growing regional contest between the Saudis and Iranians." ..."
"... "Having our country act as Saudi Arabia's bitch is not 'America First,'" said Democratic presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard, invoking a popular Trump slogan. Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ken.), who had invoked Trump's antiwar message in a public feud with Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) over the weekend, took to CNN to warn against striking Iran. ..."
"... "This is a regional conflict, that there's no reason the superpower of the United States needs to be getting into bombing mainland Iran. It would be a needless escalation of this," he told journalist Jake Tapper. "Those who loved the Iraq War, the Cheneys, the Boltons, the Kristols, they all are clamoring and champing at the bit for another war in Iran. But it's not a walk in the park." ..."
"... "In order to have clean ships by the first of January next year, all the world's shipping fleet from about now until the end of the year are busy emptying their tanks of heavy sulphur fuel oil and filling their tanks with low sulphur fuel oil, which is the new standard," Latham explained, claiming that the attack could have taken up to 20 percent of the world's desulphurization capacity out of commission. ..."
"... "This little accident was designed to be maximally disruptive to the world's oil market. It could not have happened at a worse time." "But what is really interesting is in Amsterdam this morning, I saw that for fuel oil -- the sulphurous stuff -- the price went down," Latham continued, speculating that international powers might delay the new environmental regulations by months and inadvertently drive down the price of oil in the long run. ..."
"... On Sunday, Trump tapped into emergency U.S. oil reserves, in order to stabilize prices. It's not clear, however, that the United States has enough oil to cope with wider attacks on energy infrastructure. "If the Iranians did this, they have shown they have pretty immense capabilities clearly," Parsi told the National Interest . "In the case of a full-scale war, imagine what this will do for the global economy. It's not that difficult to imagine what that will do to Trump's re-election prospects. I think that is something Trump understands." ..."
Retired Lt. Col. Daniel L. Davis pointed out that the puncture marks do not actually show
the origin of the attack. "Missiles can fly from almost anywhere. They have the ability to
maneuver! And certainly drones can, too," the Defense Priorities senior fellow told the
National Interest . "There hasn't been the time to do an actual analysis on the
ground, so let's wait and see."
Mark Latham, managing partner at the London-based analysis firm Commodities Intelligence,
told the National Interest that the puncture marks pointed to a cruise missile with no
explosive warhead. Removing the payload would allow the missile to carry more fuel and launch
from farther away from its target.
... ... ...
"Mr. X is a sophisticated fellow. He's sourced some Iranian cruise missiles.
He's removed the explosive payload. He's replaced the explosive payload with fuel," he said.
"So this isn't your twenty dollar Amazon drone. This is a sophisticated military operation."
"The culprit behind the Abqaiq attack is most definitely the Islamic Republic, either
directly or through one of its proxies," argued Varsha Koduvayur, a senior research analyst at
the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies.
"The attack fits the pattern of Iran signaling to the Gulf states that if it can't get its
oil out, it will cause their oil exports to become collateral damage," Koduvayur told the National Interest . "It's because of how strong our coercive financial tools are that
Iran is resorting to attacks like this: it's lashing out."
Violating an Obama-era agreement to regulate Iran's nuclear research program, the Trump
administration imposed massive sanctions on Iran's oil industry beginning in May 2018. The goal
of this "maximum pressure" campaign was to force Iran to accept a "better" deal. Since then,
Iranian forces have captured a British oil tanker and allegedly sabotaged tankers from other
countries.
There were some signals that Trump was planning to use the ongoing United Nations General
Assembly in New York to open a new
diplomatic channel with Iran, especially after the
firing of hawkish National Security Advisor John Bolton. But the weekend attack sent Trump
into reverse.
"Remember when Iran shot down a drone, saying knowingly that it was in their 'airspace'
when, in fact, it was nowhere close. They stuck strongly to that story knowing that it was a
very big lie," he said in a Monday morning Twitter post, referring to a June incident
when Iranian and American forces almost went to war. "Now they say that they had nothing to do
with the attack on Saudi Arabia. We'll see?"
He also hinted at a violent U.S. response.
"There is reason to believe that we know the culprit, are locked and loaded depending on
verification, but are waiting to hear from the Kingdom as to who they believe was the cause of
this attack, and under what terms we would proceed!" Trump wrote on Sunday.
"Saudi Arabia is not a formal treaty ally of ours, so there are no international agreements
that obligate us to come to their defense," John Glaser, director of foreign-policy studies at
the CATO Institute, stated. "This does not amount to a clear and present danger to the United
States, so no self-defense justification is relevant. He would therefore need authorization
from Congress."
Members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee had mixed reactions to the attack.
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) proposed putting "on the table an attack on Iranian oil
refineries" in order to "break the regime's back." His press office did not respond to a
follow-up question from the National Interest asking whether the president would have
the authority to do so.
Amy Grappone, spokeswoman for Sen. Todd Young (R-Ind.), told the National Interest
that the Senator "will support an appropriate and proportionate response" after "studying the
latest intelligence pertaining to Iran's malign activities, including these recent attacks in
Saudi Arabia."
Sen. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.), the ranking Democrat on the committee, condemned the attack with
a backhanded insult towards Saudi Arabia. "Despite some ongoing policy differences with the
kingdom, no nation should be subjected to these kinds of attacks on it soil and against its
people," he wrote on Twitter, declining to name Iran as the culprit.
Committee members Sen. Tom Udall (D-N.M.) and Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Vir.) explicitly announced
their opposition to war with Iran. And prominent war powers critic Sen.
Jeff Markley (D-Ore.) quipped that, "[b]ack when Presidents used to follow the Constitution,
they sought consent for military action from Congress, not foreign governments that murder
reporters," referring to the assassination of Saudi-American journalist Jamal Khashoggi.
"Diplomacy by Twitter has not worked so far and it surely is not working with Iran. The
president needs to stop threatening military strikes via social media," said Sen. Ben Cardin
(D-Mary.) in response to a question from the National Interest . "The attack on Saudi
Arabia is troubling whether it was perpetrated by Houthi rebels or Iran. The U.S. should regain
its leadership by working with our allies to isolate Iran for its belligerent actions in the
region."
"The U.S. should not be looking for any opportunity to start a dangerous and costly war with
Iran. Congress has not authorized war against Iran and we've made it crystal clear that Saudi
Arabia needs to withdraw from Yemen," he continued.
Asked how he would vote on a declaration of war, the senator told the National
Interest : "Let's hope it does not come to that. Congress has not authorized war against
Iran. The majority voted to engage them diplomatically to slow their nuclear ambitions. The
international community is ready to work with the U.S. again to ease economic pressure on Iran
in exchange for their restraint. We are at a dangerous precipice."
In a statement emailed to the National Interest and posted to Twitter, Sen. Tim
Kaine (D-Va.) was even more direct: "The US should never go to war to protect Saudi oil."
Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) has long been a critic of Saudi Arabia's war in Yemen, proposing
a successful bill
to cut off U.S. support for the Saudi-led war effort. (He did not have enough votes to override
the veto.) After the attacks, he wrote a long Twitter thread
explaining how "the Saudis sowed the seeds of this mess" in Yemen.
"It's simply amazing how the Saudis call all our shots these days. We don't have a mutual
defense alliance with KSA, for good reason. We shouldn't pretend we do," Murphy added. "And
frankly, no matter where this latest drone strike was launched from, there is no short or long
term upside to the U.S. military getting more deeply involved in the growing regional contest
between the Saudis and Iranians."
But the reaction did not fall neatly along party lines.
"Iran is one of the most dangerous state sponsors of terrorism. This may well be the thing
that calls for military action against Iran, if that's what the intelligence supports," said
Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.) in a Monday interview with Fox News. Others pointed out that
attacking Iran would contradict Trump's own principles.
"Having our country act as Saudi Arabia's bitch is not 'America First,'" said Democratic
presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard, invoking a popular Trump slogan. Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ken.),
who had invoked Trump's antiwar message in a public feud
with Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) over the weekend, took to CNN to warn against striking Iran.
"This is a regional conflict, that there's no reason the superpower of the United States
needs to be getting into bombing mainland Iran. It would be a needless escalation of this," he
told journalist Jake Tapper. "Those who loved the Iraq War, the Cheneys, the Boltons, the
Kristols, they all are clamoring and champing at the bit for another war in Iran. But it's not
a walk in the park."
Davis agreed with Paul's assessment. "There's too many people who have lost touch with
understanding what war is all about. They think it's easy," he told the National
Interest . "Just imagine this. What we go ahead and do this, and Iran makes good on their
threats, and American warships get sunk in the Gulf?" "This is not America's fight," he
concluded. "The American armed forces are not on loan as a Saudi defense force."
"There's another claim that the impact on oil markets is sufficient to impact the vital U.S.
interest in the free flow of energy coming out of that region, but that argument quickly
descends into absurdity when we remember that the Trump administration has been trying to
zero-out Iranian oil exports, for a host of spurious reasons," Glaser told the National
Interest . "Washington is also aggressively sanctioning Venezuela, making it harder for
Caracas to bring oil to market, too. If we really cared about the supply of oil, we wouldn't be
doing this."
In any case, the attack may not have affected oil markets in such a straightforward way.
Latham says that the attack struck an oil desulphurization facility. At the moment,
desulphurized fuel is in high demand from the shipping industry, which is rushing to comply
with new international environmental regulations.
"In order to have clean ships by the first of January next year, all the world's shipping
fleet from about now until the end of the year are busy emptying their tanks of heavy sulphur
fuel oil and filling their tanks with low sulphur fuel oil, which is the new standard," Latham
explained, claiming that the attack could have taken up to 20 percent of the world's
desulphurization capacity out of commission.
"This little accident was designed to be maximally
disruptive to the world's oil market. It could not have happened at a worse time." "But what is
really interesting is in Amsterdam this morning, I saw that for fuel oil -- the sulphurous
stuff -- the price went down," Latham continued, speculating that international powers might
delay the new environmental regulations by months and inadvertently drive down the price of oil
in the long run.
On Sunday, Trump tapped into emergency U.S. oil reserves, in order to stabilize prices. It's
not clear, however, that the United States has enough oil to cope with wider attacks on energy
infrastructure. "If the Iranians did this, they have shown they have pretty immense
capabilities clearly," Parsi told the National Interest . "In the case of a full-scale
war, imagine what this will do for the global economy. It's not that difficult to imagine what
that will do to Trump's re-election prospects. I think that is something Trump
understands."
Matthew Petti is a national security reporter at the National Interest.
Saudi Arabia oil supply was attacked. There is reason to believe that we know the culprit, are locked and loaded depending
on verification, but are waiting to hear from the Kingdom as to who they believe was the cause of this attack, and under what
terms we would proceed!
in American imperialism and the power imbalance isn't about just oil? How about we elaborate on that. It's not enough to criticize
American military meddling without also calling out the geopolitical and economic meddling. These are intertwined and while I
think Tulsi is very strong and very correct on military "interventions," she can and should go further. (All Americand should,
no arguments here.) I mean, as far as this tweet goes, it's a cheap shot at a total loser who is already an easy target. Is she
tweeting this at the American companies with interests in Saudi oil?
as far as this tweet [by Tulsi] goes, it's a cheap shot at a total loser who is already an easy target. Is she tweeting
this at the American companies with interests in Saudi oil?
The "total loser" is a master politician, surviving a coup attempt , battling hostile MSM 24/7 and with an enlarging voter
base. Include rising favorability ratings, though still less than 50%. His popularity currently equals that of Obomber at a similar
point in first term.
in American imperialism and the power imbalance isn't about just oil? How about we elaborate on that. It's not enough to
criticize American military meddling without also calling out the geopolitical and economic meddling. These are intertwined
and while I think Tulsi is very strong and very correct on military "interventions," she can and should go further. (All Americand
should, no arguments here.) I mean, as far as this tweet goes, it's a cheap shot at a total loser who is already an easy target.
Is she tweeting this at the American companies with interests in Saudi oil?
I'm not trying to be contrary, but I honestly do not get what she's saying here, other than Trump is being KSA's "bitch" because
he's waiting to hear what they say before letting bombs fly at whoever the US "believes" is responsible. Personally I think that's
a big improvement over him immediately ordering an attack on Iran, or wherever.
If her statement criticized the "locked and loaded" part of his statement and she directly said we should not be bombing
anyone on behalf of Saudi Arabia, then I'd agree with her.
But instead she criticized his waiting to hear from the country that was actually bombed, before doing anything or taking unilateral
action. Calling him SKA's bitch, means he's being weak and submissive. Goading him into quicker action ... seems like an odd way
to discourage war and the macho-man thinking that drives it.
I guess I really don't understand at all why people like this rhetoric from her. I personally have a confused, but basically
negative, gut reaction to her comment.
@CS in AZ@CS in AZ
I ran across her statements on youtube. And I don't see how you can interpret what she said as "goading" him.
I'm not trying to be contrary, but I honestly do not get what she's saying here, other than Trump is being KSA's "bitch"
because he's waiting to hear what they say before letting bombs fly at whoever the US "believes" is responsible. Personally
I think that's a big improvement over him immediately ordering an attack on Iran, or wherever.
If her statement criticized the "locked and loaded" part of his statement and she directly said we should not be bombing
anyone on behalf of Saudi Arabia, then I'd agree with her.
But instead she criticized his waiting to hear from the country that was actually bombed, before doing anything or taking
unilateral action. Calling him SKA's bitch, means he's being weak and submissive. Goading him into quicker action ... seems
like an odd way to discourage war and the macho-man thinking that drives it.
I guess I really don't understand at all why people like this rhetoric from her. I personally have a confused, but basically
negative, gut reaction to her comment.
was a country at peace and was suddenly attacked, I could sort of understand your objection to Gabbard criticizing Trump for
waiting to hear from the Saudi princes about what to do next.
But that's not the situation. Saudi Arabia has been targeting school buses, hospitals, weddings, and has starved 85,000 children
to death in Yemen, and we have HELPED! Starving a child to death is torture.
The fact that the civilized world hasn't rained retribution down on the Saudi government for supporting Al Qaeda, for supporting
ISIS and its atrocities, and for using the people of Yemen for target practice just to benefit our defense contractors, is an
abomination. We are not just being USED by the Saudi government. We are being ABUSED, as a nation, as a people, as a culture that's
supposed to have values. We are being transformed into the sucking scum of the earth. For money. For a few contractors.
I'm not trying to be contrary, but I honestly do not get what she's saying here, other than Trump is being KSA's "bitch"
because he's waiting to hear what they say before letting bombs fly at whoever the US "believes" is responsible. Personally
I think that's a big improvement over him immediately ordering an attack on Iran, or wherever.
If her statement criticized the "locked and loaded" part of his statement and she directly said we should not be bombing
anyone on behalf of Saudi Arabia, then I'd agree with her.
But instead she criticized his waiting to hear from the country that was actually bombed, before doing anything or taking
unilateral action. Calling him SKA's bitch, means he's being weak and submissive. Goading him into quicker action ... seems
like an odd way to discourage war and the macho-man thinking that drives it.
I guess I really don't understand at all why people like this rhetoric from her. I personally have a confused, but basically
negative, gut reaction to her comment.
Trump is his own worst enemy. His thoughtless tweets reveal him to be some seriously damaged goods.
Not since the late days of dementia ridden Reagan has a more dangerous finger been on "The Button".
@earthling1@earthling1
Trump's policies are by and larger terrible, neoliberal, disguised as populism. But before considering that Trump is an idiot,
rather than one prone to bad choices in policy, please consider his current POLIICAL status. See my comment above to Monsieur
le Frog.
Trump is his own worst enemy. His thoughtless tweets reveal him to be some seriously damaged goods.
Not since the late days of dementia ridden Reagan has a more dangerous finger been on "The Button".
have not unreasonably read his tweet as saying what it clearly seems to be saying, that the US will wait to see who the Saudis
decide carried out the bombing, and the US will wait for their instructions on how the US should proceed -- deferring to the Saudis
on two counts.
Does seem rather clear, and odd, for a US president to state a foreign power should dictate our actions on their behalf.
I didn't read it at all as a complaint that the US has to wait and cool its heels for the Saudis in order to rush into military
action.
Of course she went on twitter to respond to DT's tweet. Twitter, the short-form of communication, where brief tweets are always
vulnerable to misunderstanding.
This used to be called diplomacy. That's what we (the peace-not-war minded) people) wanted from our government. I still
do, and I'm forced to say I think I actually agree with trump on this one. His tweet was unusually diplomatic and relatively calm.
I was glad he said something reasonable, for perhaps the first time ever.
WE (the US) are not the world dictatorship that should feel free to bomb anyone anywhere anytime, and screw the rest of the
world. Cooperation among governments is not being anyone's bitch. That's the pro war, pro US empire kind of thinking.
America first... see, that's not really what I believe in. So I see now, that must be why I felt so disturbed by her comment.
I just disagree with her basic premise.
have not unreasonably read his tweet as saying what it clearly seems to be saying, that the US will wait to see who the
Saudis decide carried out the bombing, and the US will wait for their instructions on how the US should proceed -- deferring
to the Saudis on two counts.
Does seem rather clear, and odd, for a US president to state a foreign power should dictate our actions on their behalf.
I didn't read it at all as a complaint that the US has to wait and cool its heels for the Saudis in order to rush into military
action.
Of course she went on twitter to respond to DT's tweet. Twitter, the short-form of communication, where brief tweets are
always vulnerable to misunderstanding.
@CS in AZ@CS in AZ
is when two countries engage in discussions to possibly reach a mutual agreement. That seems like an incredibly expansive and
pro-Trump reading of his bizarre tweet.
Twump's tweet, in the clear language of the brief text, was about the US president waiting to hear marching orders from Crown
Prince Mohammed "Ben" Salman as to what the US should do.
Tulsi's tweet and use of the word "bitch" was actually referencing a previous tweet she had made months ago criticizing the
way the US seems to be subservient to the Saudis.
This used to be called diplomacy. That's what we (the peace-not-war minded) people) wanted from our government. I
still do, and I'm forced to say I think I actually agree with trump on this one. His tweet was unusually diplomatic and relatively
calm. I was glad he said something reasonable, for perhaps the first time ever.
WE (the US) are not the world dictatorship that should feel free to bomb anyone anywhere anytime, and screw the rest of
the world. Cooperation among governments is not being anyone's bitch. That's the pro war, pro US empire kind of thinking.
America first... see, that's not really what I believe in. So I see now, that must be why I felt so disturbed by her comment.
I just disagree with her basic premise.
Gabbard Campaign Video Slams Trump For Making US "The Prostitute Of Saudi Arabia"
by Tyler Durden
Wed, 04/17/2019
Democratic presidential candidate for 2020 Rep. Tulsi Gabbard lashed out at Trump on Wednesday after the president vetoed
the Yemen War Powers Resolution this week, which sought to end US support for the Sauid-led war in Yemen.
The Hawaiian congresswomen and outspoken US foreign policy critic asserted the president is turning the nation "into the
prostitute of Saudi Arabia" and further stated he vetoed the bill "to please his Saudi masters" in a minute-and-a-half campaign
video.
"Unlike Donald Trump I will not turn our great country into the prostitute of Saudi Arabia."
#5.1#5.1 is when two countries
engage in discussions to possibly reach a mutual agreement. That seems like an incredibly expansive and pro-Trump reading of
his bizarre tweet.
Twump's tweet, in the clear language of the brief text, was about the US president waiting to hear marching orders from
Crown Prince Mohammed "Ben" Salman as to what the US should do.
Tulsi's tweet and use of the word "bitch" was actually referencing a previous tweet she had made months ago criticizing
the way the US seems to be subservient to the Saudis.
@Linda Wood
which provides the context for Tulsi's latest tweet. In this manner, Tulsi continues to emphasize a theme: no matter the circumstance
(i.e., excuses), Saudi is a barbarous country, executing its detractors with swords rather than nice "surgical" drone strikes
like Obomba and DJT have used.
Gabbard Campaign Video Slams Trump For Making US "The Prostitute Of Saudi Arabia"
by Tyler Durden
Wed, 04/17/2019
Democratic presidential candidate for 2020 Rep. Tulsi Gabbard lashed out at Trump on Wednesday after the president vetoed
the Yemen War Powers Resolution this week, which sought to end US support for the Sauid-led war in Yemen.
The Hawaiian congresswomen and outspoken US foreign policy critic asserted the president is turning the nation "into
the prostitute of Saudi Arabia" and further stated he vetoed the bill "to please his Saudi masters" in a minute-and-a-half
campaign video.
"Unlike Donald Trump I will not turn our great country into the prostitute of Saudi Arabia."
very
convoluted version , Iranian drones were launched from an Iranian affiliated militia base in Iraq in retaliation for Saudi
funded Israeli drone strikes originating from a US/Kurdish base in Syria that struck Iranian/Iraqi bases, weapons depots, and
a convoy in August.
Middle East Eye, a Qatari financed outlet, reported yesterday that the attack was launched from Iraq by Iran aligned forces
in revenge for Israeli attacks in Syria. The author, David Hearst, is known for slandered reporting. The report is based on
a single anonymous Iraqi intelligence source. Qatar, which is struggling with Saudi Arabia and the UAE over its support for
the Muslim Brotherhood, would like to see a larger conflict involving its rivals east and west of the Persian Gulf. The report
should therefore be disregarded.
but with all the various reports it does seem clear that who launched them (drone or planes) look hard to ascertain for certain.
but trump was far more careful than pompeo and lindsey graham who want to bomb bomb bomb iran on speculation, because iran
is evil.
ah, i've been trying to figure out ho to compile a post on possibilities v. blame, and it's getting further and further away
from me. but both KSA and trump (or his generals) may really understand what's at stake. what's bibi saying?
very
convoluted version , Iranian drones were launched from an Iranian affiliated militia base in Iraq in retaliation for Saudi
funded Israeli drone strikes originating from a US/Kurdish base in Syria that struck Iranian/Iraqi bases, weapons depots, and
a convoy in August.
it's clear that Gulf oil installations are vulnerable from a new generation of drones that these players are assembling or
otherwise acquiring themselves. Several years ago, the Iranians were able to hack a Predator drone and bring it down intact, suitable
for reverse engineering. In past war games, the entire US fleet in the Persian Gulf was destroyed in a matter of minutes by swarms
of Iranian missiles. The Yemen war is likely to be over and the possibility of an attack on Iran seems more unlikely now as well.
Middle East Eye, a Qatari financed outlet, reported yesterday that the attack was launched from Iraq by Iran aligned
forces in revenge for Israeli attacks in Syria. The author, David Hearst, is known for slandered reporting. The report is
based on a single anonymous Iraqi intelligence source. Qatar, which is struggling with Saudi Arabia and the UAE over its
support for the Muslim Brotherhood, would like to see a larger conflict involving its rivals east and west of the Persian
Gulf. The report should therefore be disregarded.
but with all the various reports it does seem clear that who launched them (drone or planes) look hard to ascertain for
certain. but trump was far more careful than pompeo and lindsey graham who want to bomb bomb bomb iran on speculation,
because iran is evil.
ah, i've been trying to figure out ho to compile a post on possibilities v. blame, and it's getting further and further
away from me. but both KSA and trump (or his generals) may really understand what's at stake. what's bibi saying?
against such a swarm attack like this (and so accurately targeted), nor does the US, according to b and a few others. iran
probably does have russian missile defense, but clearly: riyadh needs to make peace with the houthis at any cost. there must be
next to nothing left standing there after what, four years?
it's clear that Gulf oil installations are vulnerable from a new generation of drones that these players are assembling
or otherwise acquiring themselves. Several years ago, the Iranians were able to hack a Predator drone and bring it down intact,
suitable for reverse engineering. In past war games, the entire US fleet in the Persian Gulf was destroyed in a matter of minutes
by swarms of Iranian missiles. The Yemen war is likely to be over and the possibility of an attack on Iran seems more unlikely
now as well.
against such a swarm attack like this (and so accurately targeted), nor does the US, according to b and a few others. iran
probably does have russian missile defense, but clearly: riyadh needs to make peace with the houthis at any cost. there must
be next to nothing left standing there after what, four years?
@dystopian
She, as many predicted, is pushing Trump further and further into a non-confrontational foreign policy. There is not one of the
Klown Kontenders with enough guts to call out Trump as forcefully as this--including Bernie.
This is a new tweet from Tulsi this afternoon with a short vid...
The attack marks a turning point in asymmetrical warfare: no longer can a country bomb its neighbor without fearing a significant
attack in return. An that attack won't be tossing a few rockets in the general direction of a targey; instead they'll be precision
strikes taking out key infrastructure.
The concept of an air force has changed and the big powers won't have a monopoly going forward. Mutually assured destruction
lite.
While the Trump Administration seems to be cozying up to America's Jewish voters, here is an
article that outlines what American Jews really think of Donald Trump and his leadership:
Thanks Gilad for your courageous work. I think we should always remember the ordinary Jews,
the grocers, the tailors, and all the others who have lived ordinary lives and suffered due
to the activities of their elites. We should remember the radical Jews and the artists like
Cohen, Dylan and Lou Reid to mention just a few. I could make a case that the English elites
have caused just as much trouble as elite Jews. In fact, it was the meeting of English and
Jewish elites that created the British empire.
"Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hawaii) slammed President Donald Trump for turning the nation into
"Saudi Arabia's bitch" after he assured the kingdom that the U.S. is "locked and loaded" as
it waits to hear who may be behind an attack on its oil supply.
"Trump awaits instructions from his Saudi masters," the Democratic presidential candidate
tweeted Sunday. "Having our country act as Saudi Arabia's bitch is not 'America First.'"
Gabbard previously accused Trump of making the U.S. "Saudi Arabia's bitch" last November
for his failure to take action against Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman who, according
to the U.S. intelligence community, directed the killing of Washington Post journalist Jamal
Khashoggi."
"Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hawaii) has doubled down attacking President Donald Trump over his
response to the weekend's drone attacks on major oil sites in Saudi Arabia.
Trump assured Saudi Arabia via Twitter that the U.S. is "locked and loaded" and awaiting
its direction following the strikes, which were claimed by Yemen's Houthi rebels but which
Trump claimed were backed by Iran.
The Democratic presidential candidate -- a combat veteran and a major in the Army National
Guard ― called Trump's response "disgraceful" in a new video shared online Monday.
"Mr. President, as you know, I have never engaged in hateful rhetoric against you or your
family and I never will," said Gabbard. "But your offering our military assets to the
dictator of Saudi Arabia to use as he sees fit is a betrayal of my brothers and sisters in
uniform who are ready to give our lives for our country."
Gabbard said Trump's belief he can "pimp out our proud servicemen and women to the prince
of Saudi Arabia is disgraceful and it once again shows that you are unfit to serve as our
commander in chief."
"My fellow service members and I, we are not your prostitutes," she concluded. "You are
not our pimp."
Most of our disagreements here are not on either economic or political principles, but rather
the awarding of style points with considerable confusion regarding the (sometimes remotely)
possible, the plausible, and the actual.
"... Only President Donald Trump, predictably, had something so say in his usual personalized fashion, which was that the report was "hard to believe," that "I don't think the Israelis were spying on us. My relationship with Israel has been great Anything is possible but I don't believe it." ..."
"... So Trump is stupid, a liar and an Israeli sycophant what's the solution? ..."
Just bewildering to read the Left's continuing insistence that Israel is best understood as
'just another outpost of the American empire'. This is probably the most damaging idea in
circulation right now, as its diversionary effect is only matched by its absurdity.
The Left simply cannot 'go there' though, no matter how much factual evidence is stacked up.
(On top of the spying and theft we have 'The Lobby' documentary, the defence pact, party
funding, etc. etc.). They have to avoid the reality, one which can only be explained through
cross border tribal allegiances and religious history going back many centuries. These, of
course, lay outside the Left's purview, and any consideration of them is dogmatically
opposed. It is getting to be a kind of insanity.
Tulsi can allege that Saudi Arabia was behind the 9/11 attacks and that they pull the
strings in Washington, (and many on the Left will applaud) but she cannot point out the
rather more glaring 9/11 connections to Israel and the whole machinery of control that lies
at the centre of American empire.
As she votes against BDS, has there ever been a more ridiculous double standard ?
Only President Donald Trump, predictably, had something so say in his usual
personalized fashion, which was that the report was "hard to believe," that "I don't think
the Israelis were spying on us. My relationship with Israel has been great Anything is
possible but I don't believe it."
So Trump is stupid, a liar and an Israeli sycophant what's the solution?
It's amazing how little coverage this story got. Can you imagine if Russian devices had been
found? It would be on CNN, etc. hour after hour and they'd be interviewing Nancy Pelosi non
stop.
@Cloak And
Dagger I think you are correct there maybe many Americans in the USA.. It may take the
few Americans who have been allowed to see the big picture at the USA
"I've never seen a President -- I don't care who he is -- stand up to them. It just
boggles the mind. They always get what they want. The Israelis know what is going on all
the time. I got to the point where I wasn't writing anything down. If the American people
understood what a grip these people have on our government, they would RISE UP IN ARMS.
Our citizens certainly don't have any idea what goes on." – Admiral Thomas Moorer, head
of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, interview, 24 Aug. 1983
Admiral Moorer, "the dirty anti-semite," was one of the few people with influence to call
out Israel for their deliberate attack on the USS Liberty – https://www.erasingtheliberty.com/
The American Legion continues to wet its pants apparently believing that kissing (((ass)))
is more patriotic than standing up for America and members of the Navy.
Whats new about Israeli spying against the zio/US, hell the government is full of zionists in
every facet of the government, they run every department, including and especially the CIA ,
which would be better named the Mossad West, in fact the Mossad is so embedded in the CIA
that the only way to end this would be to as JFK said to scatter it to the winds aka abolish
the Mossad infested CIA.
the placement of technical surveillance devices by Israel was clearly intended to target
cellphone communications to and from the Trump White House. As the president frequently chats
with top aides and friends on non-secure phones, the operation sought to pick up conversations
involving Trump with the expectation that the security-averse president would say things off
the record that might be considered top secret.
The Politicoreport
, which is sourced to top intelligence and security officials, details how "miniature
surveillance devices" referred to as "Stingrays" imitate regular cell phone towers to fool
phones being used nearby into providing information on their locations and identities.
According to the article, the devices are referred to by technicians as "international mobile
subscriber identity-catchers or IMSI-catchers, they also can capture the contents of calls and
data use."
Over one year ago, government security agencies discovered the electronic footprints that
indicated the presence of the surveillance devices around Washington including near the White
House. Forensic analysis involved dismantling the devices to let them "tell you a little about
their history, where the parts and pieces come from, how old are they, who had access to them,
and that will help get you to what the origins are." One source observed afterwards that "It
was pretty clear that the Israelis were responsible."
The Israeli Embassy denied any involvement in the espionage and Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu adroitly and predictably lied regarding the report, saying "We have a directive, I
have a directive: No intelligence work in the United States, no spies. And it's vigorously
implemented, without any exception. It is a complete fabrication, a complete fabrication."
The Israelis are characteristically extremely aggressive in their intelligence gathering
operations, particularly in targeting the United States, even though Trump has done the
Netanyahu government many favors. These have included moving the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem,
withdrawing from the nuclear deal and sanctioning Iran, recognizing Israeli sovereignty over
the Golan Heights, and looking the other way as Israel expands its settlements and regularly
bombs Syria and Lebanon.
Israel's high-risk spying is legendary, but the notion that it is particularly good at it
is, like everything having to do with the Jewish state, much overrated. Mossad has been caught
in flagrante numerous times. In 2010, an undercover Mossad hit team was caught on 30
minutes of surveillance video as it wandered through a luxury Dubai hotel where it had gone
to kill a leading Hamas official. And the notion that Mossad and CIA work hand-in-hand is also
a fiction. Working level Agency officers dislike their reckless Mossad counterparts.
Newsweek magazine's "Spy Talk" once cited
a poll of CIA officers that ranked Israel "dead last" among friendly countries in actual
intelligence cooperation with Washington.
The fact is that Israel conducts espionage and influence operations against the United
States more aggressively than any other "friendly" country, including tapping White House
phones used by Bill Clinton to speak with Monica Lewinski. Israeli "experts" regularly provide
alarmist and inaccurate private
briefings for American Senators on Capitol Hill. Israel also constantly manufactures
pretexts to draw the U.S. into new conflicts in the Middle East, starting with the Lavon Affair in Alexandria Egypt
in 1954 and including the false flag attack on the U.S.S. Liberty in 1967. In short,
Israel has no reluctance to use its enormous political and media clout in the U.S. to pressure
successive administrations to conform to its own foreign and security policy views.
The persistent spying, no matter what Netanyahu claims, is a very good reason why Israel
should not receive billions of dollars in military assistance annually. Starting in 1957,
Israel's friends stole enriched uranium from a
Pennsylvania refinery to create a nuclear arsenal. More recently we
have learned how Arnon Milchan, a Hollywood producer/billionaire born in Israel, arranged
the illegal purchase of 800 krytron triggers to use in the production of nuclear weapons. The
operation also involved current Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu.
The existence of a large scale Israeli spying effort at the time of 9/11 has been
widely reported, incorporating Israeli companies in New Jersey and Florida as well as hundreds
of "art students" nationwide. Five "dancing" Israelis from one of the companies were observed
celebrating against the backdrop of the twin towers going down.
While it is often observed that everyone spies on everyone else, espionage is a high-risk
business, particularly when spying on friends. Israel, relying on Washington for billions of
dollars and also for political cover in international fora like the United Nations, does not
spy discreetly, largely because it knows that few in Washington will seek to hold it
accountable. There were, for example, no consequences for the Israelis when Israeli
Mossad intelligence officers using U.S. passports and pretending to be Americans recruited
terrorists to carry out attacks inside Iran. Israelis using U.S. passports in that fashion put
every American traveler at risk.
Israel, where government and business work hand in hand, has obtained significant advantage
by systematically stealing American
technology with both military and civilian applications. The U.S. developed technology is
then reverse engineered and used by the Israelis to support their own exports. Sometimes, when
the technology is military in nature and winds up in the hands of an adversary, the
consequences can be serious. Israel has sold advanced weapons systems to China that incorporate
technology developed by American companies.
The reality of Israeli large-scale spying in the United States is indisputable. One might
cite Jonathan Pollard, who stole more highly classified information than any spy in history.
And then there were Ben-Ami Kadish, Stuart Nozette and Larry Franklin, other spies for Israel
who have been caught and tried, but they are only the tip of the iceberg. Israel always
features prominently in the annual FBI report called "Foreign Economic Collection and
Industrial Espionage." The 2005 report states "Israel has
an active program to gather proprietary information within the United States. These collection
activities are primarily directed at obtaining information on military systems and advanced
computing applications that can be used in Israel's sizable armaments industry." It adds that
Israel recruits spies, uses electronic methods, and carries out computer intrusion to gain the
information.
A 1996 Defense Investigative Service report noted that Israel
has great success stealing technology by exploiting the numerous co-production projects that it
has with the Pentagon. It says "Placing Israeli nationals in key industries is a technique
utilized with great success." A General Accounting Office (GAO) examination of espionage
directed against American defense and security industries described how Israeli citizens
residing in the U.S. had stolen sensitive technology to manufacture artillery gun tubes,
obtained classified plans for reconnaissance systems, and passed sensitive aerospace designs to
unauthorized users.
The GAO has concluded that
Israel "conducts the most aggressive espionage operation against the United States of any U.S.
ally." In June 2006, a Pentagon administrative judge ruled against a difficult to even imagine
appeal by an Israeli denied a security clearance, saying that "The Israeli government is
actively engaged in military and industrial espionage in the United States." FBI counter
intelligence officer John Cole has also reported how many
cases of Israeli espionage are dropped under orders from the Justice Department., making the
Jewish state's spying consequence free. He provides a "conservative estimate" of 125 viable
investigations into Israeli espionage involving both American citizens and Israelis that were
stopped due to political pressure.
So, did Israel really spy on Donald Trump? Sure it did. And Netanyahu is, metaphorically
speaking, thumbing his nose at the American president and asking with a grin, "What are you
going to do about it?"
For those who have not heard of Israeli startup Carbyne911 (partly owned by Ehud Barak, run
by former Israeli officers of the unit 8200, and to which Jeffrey Epstein donated to) here is
an interview TruNews with Whitney Webb:
Carbyne911: Israeli Tech Scheme to Weaponize 911 Emergency Call System
(Interview starts at 11:16 mark)
The rarest occurrence was when Epstein would fly without any of his usual entourage and
just one other passenger. There was only one name that jumped out from the flight manifest
as a good example of when Epstein alternated from his routine. His second meeting with
Nicole Junkermann.
The link between Nicole Junkermann, the Israeli state intelligence services and the
Israeli Defence Force is not a tenuous one. The ominously named "Reporty Homeland Security"
was the first incarnation of what is now called "Carbyne911" and is referred to as simply
"Carbyne." Described as a "global leader in public safety technology," Carbyne is a call
handling platform app that allows you to, amongst other things, stream any ongoing
emergency directly to the responding emergency services. It claims, in the information
section of a promotional video on YouTube entitled "Nicole Junkermann presents Carbyne,
They promise to combine the use of personal data, location data, live video, data from
surrounding wearable tech, and even information from parked smart cars, to deliver more
information to the emergency services who should be responding. They can pinpoint your
location, even indoors, to within three feet, and they claim that they can even collect
data from dropped calls. However, they fail to mention how they'll get the permission to
use such masses of available data. Who are these angels behind this revolutionary
technology which aims to get between a victim and the emergency services?
One of the directors of Carbyne is Nicole Junkermann. The chairman of the board of
directors is Ehud Barak, the 10th Prime Minister of Israel, the 14th Chief of Staff of the
Israel Defense Forces, former Minister of Defense and former Head of Military Intelligence
for Israel.
Another of Carbyne's directors and board members is Brigadier Pinchas Buchris, the
former Deputy Commander of an elite IDF operations unit and former Commander of the IDF
8200 Cyber Intelligence Unit. Amir Elichai is the Founder and CEO of Carbyne, he is
also a former Israeli Army officer who served in various positions in the special elite
forces and the intelligence corps. Alex Dizengof is Carbyne's Co-Founder & CTO. He's
described as a Software Architect and Algorithms Developer. Dizengof had previously
developed machine learning algorithms for robots and mobile platforms, as well as cyber
security software for the Israeli Prime Minister's Office.
The GAO has concluded that Israel "conducts the most aggressive espionage operation
against the United States of any U.S. ally."
Even a statement like this from the GAO is misleading in that it implies that the next
friendly country spying on the US (the UK, presumably) to be out-edged by Israel, when in
fact the difference is probably one of order (if not of kind) in magnitude.
FBI counter intelligence officer John Cole has also reported how many cases of Israeli
espionage are dropped under orders from the Justice Department ., making the Jewish
state's spying consequence free.
Wow.
So when Paul Craig Roberts says "US Justice Department (sic)" we now have Giraldi's total
confirmation. If fact, Roberts is being too much of a gentleman about it.
Maybe call it (((Justice Department))) from now on and get it over with.
The Israelis are characteristically extremely aggressive in their intelligence gathering
operations, particularly in targeting the United States, even though Trump has done the
Netanyahu government many favors. These have included moving the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem,
withdrawing from the nuclear deal and sanctioning Iran, recognizing Israeli sovereignty
over the Golan Heights, and looking the other way as Israel expands its settlements and
regularly bombs Syria and Lebanon.
I'm sure that the Israelis don't regard these as favours...
"... I guess America does not need Saudi oil any more, cause it looks like Israel is about to be made king of the Oil Kingdoms in the middle east.? ..."
I think you are correct there maybe many Americans in the USA.. It may take the few Americans who have been
allowed to see the big picture at the USA...
Interestingly, one of the people the Ukrainians gave up in this exchange was Vladimir
Tsemakh, a native of the Donbass who was kidnapped by the Ukie SBU in Novorussia (our noble
"Europeans" did not object to such methods!) and declared the "star witness" against Russia in
the MH-17 (pseudo-)investigation. Even more pathetic is that
the Dutch apparently fully endorsed this load of crapola . Finally, and just for a good
laugh, check out how the infamous'
Bellingcat presented Tsemakh . And then, suddenly, everybody seem to "forget" that "star
witness" and now the Ukies have sent him to Russia. Amazing how fast stuff gets lost in the
collective western memory hole
Thus we see these apparently contradictory developments taking place: on on hand, the
Ukraine finally agreed to a prisoner swap with Russia (a painful one for Russia as Russia
mostly traded real criminals, including a least twobona fide Ukie
terrorist, against what are mostly civilian hostages, but Putin decided – correctly I
think – that freeing Russian nationalists from Ukie jails was more important in this
case) while on the other hand, the Ukronazi armed forces increased their shelling, even with
152mm howitzers which fire 50kg high explosive fragmentation shells, against the Donbass.
Whatever may be the case, this prisoner swap, no matter how one-sided and unfair, is a positive
development which might mark the beginning of a pragmatic and less ideological attitude in
Kiev.
Some very cautious beginnings of a little hint of optimism might be in order following that
exchange, but the big stuff seems to be scheduled for the meeting of the Normandy Group (NG),
probably in France. So far, the Russians have made it very clear that they will not meet just
for the hell of meeting, and that the only circumstance in which the Russians will agree to a
NG meeting would be if it has good chances of yielding meaningful results which, translated
from Russian diplomatic language simply means "if/when Kiev stops stonewalling and sabotaging
everything". Specifically, the Russians are demanding that Zelenskii commit in writing to the
so-called "
Steinmeier formula " and that the Ukrainian forces withdraw from the line of contact. Will
that happen? Maybe. We shall soon find out.
Here is my informal translation of these words:
The international order is being shaken in an unprecedented manner, above all with, if I
may say so, by the great upheaval that is undoubtedly taking place for
the first time in our history , in almost every field and with a
profoundly historic magnitude . The first thing we observe is a major
transformation, a geopolitical and strategic re-composition. We are undoubtedly
experiencing the end of Western hegemony over the world . We were accustomed to an
international order which, since the 18th century, rested on a Western hegemony, mostly
French in the 18th century, by the inspiration of the Enlightenment; then mostly British in
the 19th century thanks to the Industrial Revolution and, finally, mostly American in the
20th century thanks to the 2 great conflicts and the economic and political domination of
this power. Things change. And they are now deeply shaken by the mistakes of Westerners
in certain crises, by the choices that have been made by Americans for several years
which did not start with this administration, but which lead to revisiting certain
implications in conflicts in the Middle East and elsewhere, and to rethinking a deep,
diplomatic and military strategy, and sometimes elements of solidarity that we thought were
intangible for eternity, even if we had constituted together in geopolitical moments that
have changed. And then there is the emergence of new powers whose impact we have
probably underestimated for a long time. China is at the forefront, but also the Russian
strategy, which has, it must be said, been pursued more successfully in recent years
. I will come back to that. India that is emerging, these new economies that are also
becoming powers not only economic but political and that think themselves, as some have
written, as real "civilizational states" which now come not only to shake up our
international order but who also come to weigh in on the economic order and to
rethink the political order and the political imagination that goes with it, with much
dynamism and much more inspiration than we have. Look at India, Russia and China. They
have a much stronger political inspiration than Europeans today. They think about our planet
with a true logic, a true philosophy, an imagination that we've lost a little
bit.
... ... ...
6) " Look at India, Russia and China. They have a much stronger political inspiration
than Europeans today. They think about our planet with a true logic, a true philosophy, an
imagination that we've lost a little bit."
This is the "core BRICS" challenge to the Empire: China and Russia have already established
what the Chinese call a "Comprehensive Strategic Partnership of Coordination for the New Era".
If they can now extend this kind of informal but extremely profound partnership (I think of it
as "symbiotic") to India next, then the BRICS will have a formidable future (especially after
the Brazilian people give the boot to Bolsonaro and his US patrons). Should that fail and
should India chose to remain outside this unique relationship, then the SCO will become the
main game in town. And yes, Macron is spot on: China and, especially, Russia have a
fundamentally different worldview and, unlike the western one, theirs does have "much stronger
political" goals (Macron used the word "aspirations"), "a real philosophy and imagination"
which the West has lost, and not just a "little bit" but, I would argue, completely. But one
way or the other, and for the first time in 1000 years, the future of our planet will not be
decided anywhere in the West, not in Europe (old or "new"), but in Asia, primarily by the
Russian-Chinese alliance. As I explained here , the AngloZionist Empire is
probably the last one in history, definitely the last western one.
The Americans have gotten themselves in a real bind with their maximum pressure campaign on Iran. This latest attack on Saudi
Arabia's oil production looks like an escalation of the previous attacks on shipping and the spy drone. It is not evident how
the Americans can respond to this latest attack.
As I see it their options are:
1. To let KSA respond to the Houthi attack and continue with their campaign to shut down Iranian oil production, without any
direct U.S. response to the attack. However this will achieve nothing, as next month Iran will up pressure again with another
attack on Middle-East oil assets, and we'll be back to the same place.
2. To bomb Iran's oil industry, as Pompeo and Graham suggest. However this risks blowing up the whole Middle East, as well
as the World's oil market and their own (Western) economies.
3. Forget about Iran and move the fight to maintain U.S. global hegemony to another front: back to Venezuela? Serbia? Hong
Kong? Taiwan? However the end result of such a move would more than likely be another humuliating defeat for the U.S.
4. Do as Stephen Wertheim / New York Times suggest and sue for peace. This will end the dream of U.S. World dominance, Globalization
and the current western based financial system. The U.S. will become no more than a heavily indebted regional power in a 'Multi-polar
World Order' led by China and Russia.
As I see it, the U.S. is out of options to continue their war for global dominance. #4 is the only viable option. But, as one
author argued in a recent paper (I don't have the reference), wars continue long after the victor is clear, because the loser
can't admit defeat (at heavy additional costs to the loser). I think that this is the position that the U.S. finds itself in now.
What the attack on Saudi oil infrastructure shows us, is that now Iran has united her proxys into one united front.
While they were cautious to not leave evidence of their involvment with the Houtis before, they now are putting their support
more and more into the open.
The attack seemed to have involved not only Houti drones (already build with help from Iran), but also Iranian backed forces
in Iraq, AND pro Iranian forces in Saudi Arabia itself. And maybe even other actors.
This is a major new development. Not only for the war on Yemen, but also in the context of Iran providing a credile detterence
against US+Saudi aggression.
They excalated with increasing levels, and one wonders, what could top this last attack off.
And i am pretty sure, we will find out sooner rather than later.
@ 27
WaPo: Abqaiq . .damaged on the west-northwest sides
That's it! It was Hezbollah for sure. (not)
Actually there were two targets, the Buqaiq (Abqaiq) oil processing plant and the Khurais oil field, both in the Eastern Province.
These attacks are not the first -- from longwarjournal:
Last month, the Houthis claimed another drone operation against Saudi's Shaybah oil field near the United Arab Emirates. At
more than 1,000 miles away from it's Yemen territory, that strike marked one of the Houthis farthest claimed attacks.
The Houthis also claimed a drone strike on the Abu Dhabi airport last year, but that has been denied by Emirati officials.
Additionally, a drone strike on Saudi's East-West oil pipeline near Riyadh earlier this year, which the Houthis claimed responsibility,
was allegedly conducted by Iranian-backed Iraqi militants. If accurate, that means the Houthi claim of responsibility acted
as a type of diplomatic cover for the Iraqi militants.
Since beginning its drone program last year, the Houthis have launched at least 103 drone strikes in Yemen and Saudi Arabia
according to data compiled by FDD's Long War Journal. . .
here . . .and more
here .
Really appreciated the write up on the Houthis attack.
Sounds like the attack left substantial damage. Another bigger issue underlying all of this, aside from Saudi inability to get
what it wants now from it's IPO, is the fact that the US Patriots did not detect this attack.
The Saudis spent billions last year on this defense system. Sounds like the clown Prince better give Russians a call about their
S-400.
But the US wouldn't appreciate that much, would they?
DNC is a criminal organization and the fact that Debbie Wasserman
Schultz escaped justice is deeply regreatable.
Notable quotes:
"... The problem facing the Democratic National Committee today remains the same as in 2016: How to block even a moderately left-wing social democrat by picking a candidate guaranteed to lose to Trump, so as to continue the policies that serve banks, the financial markets and military spending for Cold War 2.0. ..."
"... Trump meanwhile has done most everything the Democratic Donor Class wants: He has cut taxes on the wealthy, cut social spending for the population at large, backed Quantitative Easing to inflate the stock and bond markets, and pursued Cold War 2.0. Best of all, his abrasive style has enabled Democrats to blame the Republicans for the giveaway to the rich, as if they would have followed a different policy. ..."
"... The effect has been to make America into a one-party state. Republicans act as the most blatant lobbyists for the Donor Class. But people can vote for a representative of the One Percent and the military-industrial complex in either the Republican or Democratic column. That is why most Americans owe allegiance to no party. ..."
"... I'm just curious about how much longer this log-jam situation can persist before real political realignment takes place. Bernie Sander is ultimately a relic not a representative of new political vigor running through the party, like Trump he would be largely be on his own without much congressional support from his own party. ..."
"... As the 2016 election and Brexit have illuminated, globalisation is a religion for the upper middle classes. ..."
"... They just refuse to understand that political solidarity, key to any such policies is permanently damaged by immigration. ..."
"... If you make people chose between their ethnicity being displaced and class conflict, they'll pick the preservation of their ethnicity and it's territory every time. I ..."
"... My prediction: The elites in the US won't give way, people will simply become demoralised and the Trump/Sanders moment will pass with significant damage done to the legitimacy of American democracy and media but with progressives unable to deal with immigration (Much like the right can't deal with global warming) they will fail to get much done. The general population has become too atomised and detached, beaten-down bystanders to their own politics and society to mount a popular political movement. Immigrants, recent descendants of immigrants and the upper middle classes will continue to instinctually understand globalisation is how they loot America and will not vote for 'extreme' candidates that threaten this. The upper middle class will continue to dominate the overton window and use it to inject utter economic lies to the public. ..."
I hope that the candidate who is clearly the voters' choice, Bernie Sanders, may end up as the party's nominee. If he is, I'm
sure he'll beat Donald Trump handily, as he would have done four years ago. But I fear that the DNC's Donor Class will push Joe Biden,
Kamala Harris or even Pete Buttigieg down the throats of voters. Just as when they backed Hillary the last time around, they hope
that their anointed neoliberal will be viewed as the lesser evil for a program little different from that of the Republicans.
So Thursday's reality TV run-off is about "who's the least evil?" An honest reality show's questions would focus on "What are
you against ?" That would attract a real audience, because people are much clearer about what they're against: the vested
interests, Wall Street, the drug companies and other monopolies, the banks, landlords, corporate raiders and private-equity asset
strippers. But none of this is to be permitted on the magic island of authorized candidates (not including Tulsi Gabbard, who was
purged from further debates for having dared to mention the unmentionable).
Donald Trump as the DNC's nominee
The problem facing the Democratic National Committee today remains the same as in 2016: How to block even a moderately left-wing
social democrat by picking a candidate guaranteed to lose to Trump, so as to continue the policies that serve banks, the financial
markets and military spending for Cold War 2.0.
DNC donors favor Joe Biden, long-time senator from the credit-card and corporate-shell state of Delaware, and opportunistic California
prosecutor Kamala Harris, with a hopey-changey grab bag alternative in smooth-talking small-town Rorschach blot candidate Pete Buttigieg.
These easy victims are presented as "electable" in full knowledge that they will fail against Trump.
Trump meanwhile has done most everything the Democratic Donor Class wants: He has cut taxes on the wealthy, cut social spending
for the population at large, backed Quantitative Easing to inflate the stock and bond markets, and pursued Cold War 2.0. Best of
all, his abrasive style has enabled Democrats to blame the Republicans for the giveaway to the rich, as if they would have followed
a different policy.
The Democratic Party's role is to protect Republicans from attack from the left, steadily following the Republican march rightward.
Claiming that this is at least in the direction of being "centrist," the Democrats present themselves as the lesser evil (which is
still evil, of course), simply as pragmatic in not letting hopes for "the perfect" (meaning moderate social democracy) block the
spirit of compromise with what is attainable, "getting things done" by cooperating across the aisle and winning Republican support.
That is what Joe Biden promises.
The effect has been to make America into a one-party state. Republicans act as the most blatant lobbyists for the Donor Class.
But people can vote for a representative of the One Percent and the military-industrial complex in either the Republican or Democratic
column. That is why most Americans owe allegiance to no party.
The Democratic National Committee worries that voters may disturb this alliance by nominating a left-wing reform candidate. The
DNC easily solved this problem in 2016: When Bernie Sanders intruded into its space, it the threw the election. It scheduled the
party's early defining primaries in Republican states whose voters leaned right, and packed the nominating convention with Donor
Class super-delegates.
After the dust settled, having given many party members political asthma, the DNC pretended that it was all an unfortunate political
error. But of course it was not a mistake at all. The DNC preferred to lose with Hillary than win with Bernie, whom springtime polls
showed would be the easy winner over Trump. Potential voters who didn't buy into the program either stayed home or voted green.
No votes will be cast for months, so I don't know how Mr. Hudson can say that Sanders is "clearly the voters choice." He would
be 79 on election day, well above the age when most men die, which is something that voters should seriously consider. Whoever
his VP is will probably be president before the end of Old Bernie's first term, so I hope he chooses his VP wisely.
In any case I laugh at how the media always reports that Biden, who has obviously lost more than a few brain cells, has such
a commanding lead over this field of second-raters. The voters, having much better things to do, haven't even started to pay attention
yet.
And, how could anyone seriously believe in these polls anyway? Only older people have land lines today. If calling people is
the methodology pollsters are using, then the results would be heavily skewed towards former VP Biden, whose name everyone knows.
I lost all faith in polls when the media was saying, with certainty, that Hillary was a lock to win against the insurgent Trump.
Tulsi Gabbard is the only candidate beside Trump with charisma today. With her cool demeanor, she is certainly the least unlikeable.
She would be Trump's most formidable opponent. But the democrats, like their counterparts, are owned by Wall Street and the Military
Industrial Complex. Sadly, most democrats still believe that the party is working in their best interests, while the republicans
are the party of the rich.
If you watch the debates tonight, which I will not be, you will notice that Tulsi Gabbard won't be on stage. That is by design.
She is a leper. At least the republicans allowed Trump to be onstage in 2016, which makes them more democratic than the democrats.
Plus they didn't have Super Delegates to prevent Trump from achieving the nomination he had rightfully won. Something to think
about since the DNC, not the voters, annointed Hillary last time.
If the YouTube Oligarchs still allow it, I plan on watching the post-debate analysis with characters like Richard Spencer and
Eric Striker. Those guys are most entertaining, and have insights that are not permitted to be uttered in the controlled, mind-numbing
farce of the mainstream media.
Elizabeth Warren seems a more likely nominee than Sanders.
Elizabeth Warren is phony as phuck(PAP). Just like forked tongued Obama she's really just a tool for the neo-liberal establishment,
which does make her more likely.
Here is another question. Can the DNC or RNC really change institutionally fast enough?
I'm just curious about how much longer this log-jam situation can persist before real political realignment takes place.
Bernie Sander is ultimately a relic not a representative of new political vigor running through the party, like Trump he would
be largely be on his own without much congressional support from his own party.
As the 2016 election and Brexit have illuminated, globalisation is a religion for the upper middle classes. Many of
them may be progressives but they refuse to understand the very non-progressive consequences of mass immigration (Or, one should
say over-immigration) or globalisation more generally. The increasing defection of such individuals to the Liberal Democrats in
Britain is a fascinating example. They just refuse to understand that political solidarity, key to any such policies is permanently
damaged by immigration.
It is interesting to see the see-saw effect of UKip and now the Brexit party in the UK (Well, in England). With them first
drawing working class voters from Labour without increasing Conservative performance, bringing about a massive conservative majority
and now threatening to siphon voters from the Tories with the opposite effect.
But UKip and later the Brexit party almost exist through the indispensable leadership of Nigel Farage and a very specific motivating
goal of leaving the EU. I can't see a third party rising to put pressure on the mainstream parties.
If you make people chose between their ethnicity being displaced and class conflict, they'll pick the preservation of their
ethnicity and it's territory every time. I f the centre left refuses to understand this (Something that wouldn't have been
hard for them to understand when they still drew candidates from the working classes) they will continue their slide into oblivion
as they have done across the Western world. (Excluding 2 party systems and Denmark where they do understand this)
My prediction: The elites in the US won't give way, people will simply become demoralised and the Trump/Sanders moment
will pass with significant damage done to the legitimacy of American democracy and media but with progressives unable to deal
with immigration (Much like the right can't deal with global warming) they will fail to get much done. The general population
has become too atomised and detached, beaten-down bystanders to their own politics and society to mount a popular political movement.
Immigrants, recent descendants of immigrants and the upper middle classes will continue to instinctually understand globalisation
is how they loot America and will not vote for 'extreme' candidates that threaten this. The upper middle class will continue to
dominate the overton window and use it to inject utter economic lies to the public.
The novel internet mass media outlets that allowed such unpoliced political discussion to reach mass audiences will be pacified
by whatever means and America will slide into an Italian style trans-generational malaise at a national level for some time.
Here is another question. Can the DNC or RNC really change institutionally fast enough?
Trump is trying to change the RNC away from Globalist elites and towards Christian Populist beliefs and Main Street America.
I am some what hopeful, as the U.S. is not alone in this trajectory. There is a global tail wind that should help the GOP change
quickly enough.
The true test will be the 2024 GOP nomination. A bold choice will have to break through to keep the RNC from backsliding into
the clutches of Globalist failure.
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