radiofree.asia

Author: Eric Zuesse

  • EU Fails to Comply with Grain-Export Deal

    On Saturday, March 4, Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, at the G20 meeting in Delhi, announced that because the EU has refused to comply with its side of the U.N.-brokered 27 July 2022 “Grain [and fertilizer] Deal” that the U.N. brokered in Istanbul on 27 July 2022, Russia will likewise not comply with it, starting on March 18.

    On February 8, Reuters had headlined “Russia: EU not fulfilling promises on grain deal,” and reported that the deal was in jeopardy because of the EU’s continued violations of it that were supplying super-inexpensive food to the EU while continuing to block food going to Africa — for which latter purpose the deal had been mainly designed.

    Then, on Saturday March 4, Russia’s Tsargrad news site headlined “The Rejection of the Grain Deal Will Force Russia to Resolve the Issue of Odessa. And This is a Significant Event.” By implication, it was interpreting Lavrov’s statement to reflect that Ukraine’s main Black Sea port of Odessa (which has historically been overwhelmingly pro-Russian), which is the port through which Ukraine’s agricultural exports are shipped, might soon be taken over by Russia because the EU is using it to provide economic benefits to the EU and to Ukraine while starving and/or soaring food-cost inflation in Africa, will no longer continue to be tolerated by Russia. In other words: Africa and Russia were being cheated by the EU and Ukraine, and Russia will cease that starting March 18.

    On March 3, Tsargrad had bannered “Ammonia Instead of Wheat. What Will Russia Gain by Breaking the ‘Grain Deal’,” and it explained that:

    The grain deal, about the need for which “our Western partners” spoke so much, can be terminated without any possibility of renewal in the near future. If this happens, then Ukraine will lose the opportunity to earn money on dumped wheat exports, Turkey will lose a fair amount of profits from participating in the transit of this grain and a fair amount of political influence as an intermediary between Russia and its opponents. The European Union will lose a significant part of the grain in its market – the very one that it had promised the poorest African countries would be the deal’s primary beneficiaries, but which turned out to be much more necessary for EU bakers and confectioners, instead of gto Africans who need bread and fertilizers.

    In general, it will be bad for everyone. Except Russia. Russia will not lose anything, because it didn’t gain anything from the deal.

    If Russia takes over Odessa, then Ukraine could very well become an entirely land-locked country, without its only sea-access, which now is via Odessa. The EU and Ukraine would have — by their refusals to comply with the grain deal — considerably increased that likelihood (which would harm the longer-term interests both of Ukraine and the EU).

    In any case, the status of Odessa is now going to be a far more important issue in this war that it had been until now. It will no longer be an issue for Africa, because the July 27 deal didn’t benefit Africa at all (which it had been promised to do). Odessa will instead be purely an issue between Ukraine and Russia.

    The post EU Fails to Comply with Grain-Export Deal first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Why Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022 Was Legal

    Under international law, “aggression” (or “aggressive war”) has never yet been defined so as to separate it clearly from “defensive war” (or “defense”), and this murkiness is the U.N.’s most fundamental failure to-date, because the U.N. was supposed to have been formed in order to prevent a World War Three (WW III), which is impossible to do unless the meaning of “defense” is clear and defense is clearly legal, and the meaning of “aggression” is clear and aggression is clearly illegal; but, a definition is here employed in which “aggression” is anything that endangers a country’s existence or sovereignty over its legal territory, and “defense” is anything that is provoked by (i.e., in response to) “aggression” and that consequently has been forced upon a country as the only reasonable alternative to allowing itself to be taken over by an “aggressor” country. In this definition (a reasonable and practical definition — as opposed to the U.N.’s absence of any definition), “aggression” can be perpetrated by any means, not ONLY military, but also by such means as a coup, or international subversion, or illegal international sanctions — any means whatsoever that can be used in order to seize control over another country (i.e., over a different sovereign nation’s Government). The U.S. Government has always opposed any definition of “aggression” and has always refused even to consider any proposed definition of it that would include anything else than military aggression because America routinely uses non-military forms of aggression (such as coups, and sanctions) and demands to be always able to continue to do so without being called an “aggressor.” This is simply a fact and is the reason why the U.N. is nothing more than a talking-forum and a sump for refugees and any other problems that powerful countries intend to give only lip-service to addressing — it has no significant international power at all. (NOTE: Anyone who doubts that the U.N. has utterly failed to define “aggression” will see in the final paragraph here — which will be entirely in parentheses — a discussion of the U.N.’s absurd, even outright circular, latest formal proposal to deal with that matter.)

    The war in Ukraine is further complicated in international law because clearly Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022 constitutes a danger to Ukraine’s sovereignty; but the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis established a fundamental case-law precedent thereafter, by means of which any major international power — in that instance the United States — has a right in international law to prevent any nearby nation from being able to be used by another major international power — in that instance the Soviet Union — to position military forces there that endanger the national security or sovereignty of a major power (in that instance of the United States); and, consequently, the U.S. Government was behaving defensively (against the Soviet Union), instead of aggressively (against Cuba), when it restricted Cuba’s Government from enabling the Soviet Government to position its forces (specifically its nuclear forces) on that island.

    What will be argued here is that that international legal precedent applies universally in international law and that the war in Ukraine was started by the U.S. Government by means of its coup in Ukraine, which replaced an authentically neutral Government there by a rabidly anti-Russian government there (that possessed and possesses no legitimacy even under Ukraine’s Constitution at that time), and that Russia’s Government consequently has an international-law right to take control over Ukraine’s Government in order for Russia to be able to protect itself against America’s Government — which is the aggressor here. Russia is the defender of its own sovereign territory; and Ukraine is merely the battlefield upon which this war between the aggressor America and the defender Russia is being waged.

    Since the topic here is international law, not any national law, only national Governments are involved; and this means that a civil war, or war within a country, is NOT even possibly a matter that the U.N. can reasonably become involved in or have any authority to make pronouncements about. (Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who invented the U.N., did it with that aim — clear separation of international law from national law — in mind, but his immediate successor, who designed the U.N., nullified that and some other aspects of FDR’s plan for the U.N. This is the reason why the U.N. fails. Truman was determined that the U.S. Government itself will ultimately take control over the entire world.)

    The documentation of each step in this case is immediately accessible to the reader simply by clicking onto the links in it at any point where the reader wants to see what the evidence for the given allegation there is:

    On 8 February 2010, Britain’s Guardian headlined “Yanukovych set to become president as observers say Ukraine election was fair.”

    On 12 April 2010 was reported in Ukraine that,

    The president of Ukraine Viktor Yanukovych met in Washington with the American counterpart Barack Obama.

    On the Ukrainian side, the Minister of Foreign Affairs Konstantin Grishchenko, Minister for fuel and Energy Yurii Boyko, head of the presidential administration Serhiy Lovochkin, deputies head of the administration Hanna Herman and Yuri Lacnyy were also taking part in the meeting.

    The American side represents Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, national security advisor to the U.S. President James Jones, senior director of the U.S. National Security Council on non-proliferation Laura Holgate.

    On 2 July 2010, Clinton again met privately with Yanukovych, this time in Kiev; and, on this occasion, spoke publicly about the meeting, and said that while the United States supported Ukraine’s independence, “the United States welcomes Ukrainian parliament’s decision to approve foreign military exercises on Ukrainian territory in 2010 and we thank Ukraine and the Ukrainian people for your important contributions to NATO and other international security operations.” This means that the U.S. Government actually did not support Ukraine’s independence but instead wanted Ukraine to join its NATO military alliance that had repeatedly rejected Russia’s requests to apply to join it. The U.S. wanted Russia’s bordering nations in NATO, but not Russia itself. Apparently, Yanukovych again said no. That doomed him.

    By no later than June 2011, the United States Government commenced its planning for the coup that occurred in Ukraine in February 2014.

    By no later than 1 March 2013, the U.S. Government in its Embassy in Ukraine, started training members of the far-right Svoboda and Right Sector political organizations in Ukraine how to use the internet in order to raise a crowd to demonstrate against Ukraine’s President, Viktor Yanukovych, to demand his removal from office.

    On 14 April 2014, an article was published in the Polish NIE investigative-journalism magazine saying that in the months prior to Yanukovych’s overthrow, especially during the spring of 2013, paramilitaries of Ukraine’s Right Sector organization were training secretly in Poland, under the direction of America’s CIA, and Poland’s Government.

    By no later than June 2013, the U.S. Government began soliciting for Pentagon-authorized U.S. contractors to convert a school in Sevastopol Crimea, in Ukraine, near Russia’s largest naval base, which is there. This was while Yanukovych was still in office, when the U.S. had no business in Crimea.

    On 19 November 2013, Yanukovych was informed the results by Ukraine’s Academy of Sciences, of its analysis which he had requested, of the EU’s offer to Ukraine to join the EU, which found that it required an up-front expenditure by Ukraine of $160 billion, which Ukraine did not have and the EU refused to supply. So, whomever designed the EU’s proposal knew, in advance, that Yanukovych would turn it down. That was to become the pretext for overthrowing him. It had been set up in advance.

    On 20 November 2013, the Maidan square anti-Yanukovych public demonstrations began. They were led by Andrei Parubiy (“the Commandant of Maidan”), one of the two co-founders of the Social-Nationalist Party of Ukraine, which the CIA had advised to change its name from that Nazi-inspired one, to the “Freedom” or Svoboda Party — which they did. Parubiy’s 2nd-in-command was the founder of the Right Sector Party, Dmitriy Yarosh, who organized the U.S.-backed paramilitaries there that had been trained in Ukraine and in Poland.

    The coup itself occurred during 20-27 February 2014; and here (and its transcript is here) is its smoking-gun evidence that it was a U.S. coup; and there is proof that even the EU’s Foreign Affairs Minister at the time, Catherine Ashton, did not know that it had been any coup at all until her investigator in Kiev reported back to her on 26 February 2014 that it had been. (Here is that phone-conversation, and here is its transcript.) So: Obama had kept the operation secret even from her. (In fact, Obama’s designer of the coup, Victoria Nuland, in that smoking-gun phone-call, said “Fuck the EU”: the EU were vassal-nations of the U.S. empire, and so didn’t need to understand what was happening.)

    At that time, and throughout the post-Soviet history of polling of Ukrainians regarding their attitudes toward the EU and especially toward NATO, that attitude was around two-to-one that NATO was an enemy of Ukrainians, and economic relations east of Ukraine were more important to Ukraine than economic relations west of Ukraine (the EU) were; but this situation reversed itself virtually overnight after America’s 20-27 February 2014 coup. Still, in Crimea and Ukraine’s southeast, NATO and the U.S. were viewed overwhelmingly as enemies, not friends — and the U.S. Government itself knew this because it had commissioned some of those polls. Nonetheless: the U.S. Government insisted that Ukraine must treat as “terrorists” and ethnically cleanse away any residents in those increasingly breakaway regions who refused to accept the U.S.-imposed rulers as being their rulers. And this was done, starting on 15 April 2014. The war against the breakaway-supporters was officially labeled, by the new coup-government, an “Anti-Terrorist Operation” or “ATO” for short. The voters for Yanukovich had to be cleared out, killed and/or escaped into adjoining Russia, so that anti-Russian politicians would win future Ukrainian elections, and the U.S. Government will continue to control Ukraine.

    The United States and its ‘allies’ (colonies, vassal-nations) insist upon having the right to place any weapons onto Russia’s borders especially in Ukraine, because ONLY Ukraine borders less than 800 miles from The Kremlin; it borders only 300 miles from it, and is therefore by far the best place for the U.S. Government ultimately to place its missiles, because that would be only five minutes of missile-flying-time away and would therefore constitute its checkmate of Russia’s Government — far too little time in which for The Kremlin to be certain that America had launched them and for the Kremlin thence to launch its retaliatory weapons. This is the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis in reverse and on steroids.

    On 17 December 2021, Russia submitted separately to the U.S. and to NATO extremely reasonable, even necessary, national-security proposals to discuss and negotiate with them, but instead got from both on 7 January 2022 resounding and contemptuous rejections of all of Russia’s national-security concerns. Since what were now clearly Russia’s mortal enemies were not approachable any other way than by means of Russia invading and taking control of Ukraine itself, that is what they did, on 24 February 2023. It was a self-protective act that America and its vassal nations had forced upon Russia, and which was done. This was, and is, essential self-defense, by Russia, against a long and consistent history of U.S.-and-allied aggression.

    The reason why the U.N., as presently constituted, is unable to define “aggression” (not only the military forms of it but also and especially the non-military forms, which precede the military forms) is that U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who invented and originally planned a U.N. that would have succeeded, died on 12 April 1945, and the U.N. that we have was instead designed by his immediate successor, Harry Truman, who despised him and wanted the U.S. Government itself to become the ultimate imperial Government — a global dictator — over the entire world, which was a direct contradiction of what FDR had so carefully planned and intended: the U.N. as a federal global democracy of nations, a democratic federal republic of nations, replacing all empires, and in possession of the Executive, Legislative, and Judicial powers to do that.

    So: whereas we now have (as a direct result of what Truman did) no existing definition of “aggression” and of “defense,” and instead have a chaos in international laws of war, Russia is at least as much in the right, as America would have been in the Cuban Missile Crisis to launch an all-out invasion against Cuba and/or the Soviet Union if the Soviet Union had refused to remove its missiles from Cuba. Russia didn’t launch nuclear war against the U.S., but did launch a conventional war against Ukraine, which was forced upon Russia by the U.S. and NATO decisions to reject on 7 January 2022 Russia’s essential national security demands.

    (CLOSING NOTE: The U.N.’s latest formal proposal to address its lack of a definition of “aggression” was on 11 June 2010, and can be seen here. It pertains to the Rome Statute that controls the International Criminal Court (ICC) — a body to which the U.S. Government never joined, so it is immune to. It says: “Crime of aggression: 1. For the purpose of this Statute, “crime of aggression” means the planning, preparation, initiation or execution, by a person in a position effectively to exercise control over or to direct the political or military action of a State, of an act of aggression which, by its character, gravity and scale, constitutes a manifest violation of the Charter of the United Nations. 2. For the purpose of paragraph 1, “act of aggression” means the use of armed force by a State against the sovereignty, territorial integrity or political independence of another State, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Charter of the United Nations. Any of the following acts, regardless of a declaration of war, shall, in accordance with United Nations General Assembly resolution 3314 (XXIX) of 14 December 1974, qualify as an act of aggression.” Number 1 there entails the phrase “an act of aggression,” and therefore this ‘defintion is circular: it defines “aggression” by relying upon a presumably already defined usage of the word “aggression,” and is therefore blatantly stupid. Number 2 there uses the phrase “inconsistent with the Charter of the United Nations,” but the purpose here was supposed to be to give meaning to that term in the Charter. The U.N.’s Charter employs the word “aggression” 3 times: Articles Numbered 1, 39, and 53, but never defines it. That’s the problem here — not a solution to it. However, this definition of “aggression” does pertain to the U.N.-authorized ICC. And this definition does include as examples of “aggression”: Article 8, #2, paragraphs e and f: “(e) The use of armed forces of one State which are within the territory of another State with the agreement of the receiving State, in contravention of the conditions provided for in the agreement or any extension of their presence in such territory beyond the termination of the agreement; (f) The action of a State in allowing its territory, which it has placed at the disposal of another State, to be used by that other State for perpetrating an act of aggression against a third State.” Notice that (f) uses the word “aggression” in ‘defining’ “aggression” — yet again that shocking stupidity. However, ignoring that for a moment: (f) clearly describes “aggression” by Ukraine against Russia; (e) describes “aggression” that’s “The use of the armed forces of America which are within the territory of Ukraine with the agreement of Ukraine, in contravention of the conditions provided for in the agreement or any extension of their presence in Ukraine beyond the termination of the agreement” — except that no such “agreement” exists or is known to exist — and if it does exist, then who, precisely, are the “aggressor(s)” supposed to be? It doesn’t say. So: (e) is also stupid. But (f) describes Ukraine’s aggression against Russia (but entails circularity in doing so). Whether (f) also would be categorizing America as being an “aggressor” against Russia is unknown. However, beyond those problems: Nothing in that ICC ‘definition’ of “aggression” would have bearing upon America’s coup against Ukraine in 2014, which was the actual and precipitating initial act of aggression directly against Ukraine and indirectly (but also very powerfully) against Russia (and to which Russia then ultimately responded on 24 February 2022 by its invasion). Furthermore: None of the three nations — America, Russia, and Ukraine — have ratified the Rome Statute that authorizes the ICC; so, none of the three can be prosecuted by the ICC; so, there can be, under the sole entity that the U.N. has authorized to try cases in international criminal law, no prosecution of any of these three.

    In conclusion: It is clear that anyone who alleges that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is an international war crime or in any other way a violation of international law is a mere anti-Russia propagandist; and, moreover, even if all three of these nations had ratified the Rome Statute, the only one that could be prosecuted for having committed an international war-crime, the crime of “aggression,” would be Ukraine, though the ambiguity of (e) might possibly then allow prosecution of America too; but no prosecution could be allowed against Russia, because even then there would be no rational way to interpret anything that Russia has done in this matter as constituting “aggression.” In the U.S.-and-allied countries, it’s all propaganda; and, unfortunately, publics are stupid enough to believe it, so it’s effective.)

    The post Why Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022 Was Legal first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Calling the Overthrow of Yanukovych a U.S. Coup is True

    On February 25, Elon Musk tweeted, “That election was arguably dodgy, but no question that there was indeed a coup.” By “That election,” he was referring to Viktor Yanukovych’s having won the Presidency of Ukraine in an election about which even the British Guardian newspaper had headlined on 8 February 2010, “Yanukovych set to become president as observers say Ukraine election was fair,” and it made clear that even Western international observers in Ukraine were testifying to the authenticity of that electoral win by Yanukovych: “Observers from the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) said there were no indications of serious fraud and described the vote as an ‘impressive display’ of democracy.” However, Elon Musk, without citing any evidence, was now saying otherwise: that Yanukovych’s win had been “arguably dodgy” — and (despite that tweet) he provided no argument at all to back up that ‘arguably’ allegation.

    It is foolish to cite tweets that have no links to any evidence, as being evidence for anything other than the tweeter had made that assertion. As a general rule, tweets are the least-reliable source of information. Certainly Musk’s tweet was. However, he also said there that there was “no question that there was indeed a coup.” Anyone who has at all followed the evidence on that matter knows that it unquestionably was a coup that overthrew Yanukovych in February 2014; and even the head of the “private-CIA” firm Stratfor said on 19 December 2014 that the overthrow of Yanukovych that had occurred then was “the most blatant coup in history.” It was that, because the evidence that it was is not only this smoking gun that it was a U.S. coup, but because there was plenty more of high quality evidence and all of it showed the same thing: it was a coup by (or “on behalf of”) the Obama Administration. (Obama and his team, and all ‘allied’ countries, however, and all of the Western news-media, called it instead a ‘democratic revolution’. This is George Orwell’s 1984 made real. It’s not real history, but real deceit.)

    The fools who follow Musk’s opinions should know that he himself thinks that coups are just fine: when Elon Musk received on 24 July 2020 a tweet from an “Armani” saying, “You know what wasnt in the best interest of people? the U.S. government organizing a coup against Evo Morales in Bolivia so you could obtain the lithium there [for Tesla cars’ batteries].” Later that day, Musk replied:

    “We will coup whoever we want! Deal with it.”

    He likes coups that profit himself personally, but apparently there are some coups that he disfavors — and he doesn’t ever explain (or at least not honestly) why. Maybe, for twitter-followers, “why” just isn’t an interesting question? (Maybe that’s why they use social media — instead of articles like this, that link to their primary sources — to ‘know’ what’s ‘going on’ in ‘the news’?)

    Musk’s stupid tweet about Ukraine was likewise in response to something that one of his followers had tweeted: He was responding to one of his twitter followers, “KanekoaTheGreat” having tweeted quoting Professor John Mearsheimer who said in the September/October 2014 issue of America’s most prestigious — and strongly pro-U.S.-empire or “neoconservative” or pro-Military-Industrial-Complex — Foreign Affairs magazine, “For Putin, the illegal overthrow of Ukraine’s democratically elected and pro-Russian president—which he rightly labeled a ‘coup’—was the final straw.” Ultimately, that’s what Musk was responding to — not the evidence, but instead the opinion there, in that overwhelmingly pro-U.S.-coups and empire magazine, from (as it turns out) a professor who was arguing that the coup had been merely (and only) a mistake:

    On February 17, under the headline “John Mearsheimer’s Misrepresentations In Order To Be Allowed Space On U.S. Propaganda-Media (i.e., U.S. ‘News’-Media),” I had pointed out numerous distortions of the historical record regarding that coup — such as his alleging it to have been due to a “flawed view” (not a vicious, or even just a “false” view, but merely “flawed”. He doesn’t so much as hint in what way “flawed”) including “such liberal principles as the rule of law, economic interdependence, and democracy,” which “went awry in Ukraine [and, again, he doesn’t hint at in what way ‘awry’],” and on and on — as-if it weren’t what it actually was: which was the U.S. Government’s bipartisan neoconservative obsession to trap Russia’s Government, to checkmate it into its being forced to yield, finally and inexorably, to the control by the U.S. Government. That’s imperialism — and there wasn’t a word about it — except one passing reference, which was 180 degrees in the false direction: against actually the victim-country, not against the aggressor:

    In September 2013, Gershman wrote in The Washington Post, “Ukraine’s choice to join Europe will accelerate the demise of the ideology of Russian imperialism that Putin represents.” He added: “Russians, too, face a choice, and Putin may find himself on the losing end not just in the near abroad but within Russia itself.”

    And that distractive and deceptive reference is to Russia’s ‘imperialism’, NOT to America’s own authentic hyper-imperialism that Russia is now responding to (and which imperialism entails a military budget that now (including what’s hidden in non-‘Defense’-Department agencies but is still for military purposes) is half of the entire world’s military spending, and it pays for 900 foreign military bases and much more that is counterproductive if it has any real impact at all on protecting U.S. national security. (It’s not “the Defense Department”; it is “the Aggression Department.”)

    This is the hidden reality: and neither Musk nor Mearsheimer, nor any other mouthpiece of the U.S. Establishment or the “Deep State” lets its audience in on it — and on the evidence that this is the reality.

    The U.S. coup against and that grabbed Ukraine was a very intentional, and very evil — not at all unintentional or ‘by mistake’ — U.S. coup, and Putin is being villainized in U.S.-and-allied media for finally responding to it in Russia’s case. Not only was it “a coup” but it was a U.S. coup, and it was by careful and evil design, no mere (nor Mearsheimer) ‘error’.

    This is — on steroids — the 1962 Cuban-Missile-Crisis in reverse: Ukraine is only a 300-mile or five-minute missile-flying-time distance away from the Kremlin and decapitation of Russia’s ability to fire-off its retaliatory weapons (within less than five minutes) against a U.S. blitz-attack. Russia needs to prevent that.

    “The West” — including all of NATO — are 100% the aggressors in this matter. And that fact is unmentionable in U.S.-and-allied media.

    To top it all off: on February 25, another budding U.S. politician, entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, is apparently entering the U.S. Presidential primaries campaigning for the Republican (traditional fascist) nomination, by tweeting:

    The main thing should be the main thing: focus on China. China wants the Ukraine war to last as long as possible to deplete Western military capacity before invading Taiwan. It’s working: we think we *look* stronger by helping Ukraine, but we actually *become* weaker vs. China.

    Perhaps in foreign affairs, while the Democrats (liberal fascists) will be campaigning for war against Russia to precede war against China, the Republicans (conservative fascists) will be campaigning for war against China to precede war against Russia. It’ll be a contest about which ‘enemy’ to hate first. Either way, the owners of mega-corporations such as Lockheed Martin and ExxonMobil will be beaming. They’re the real constituency in this ‘democracy’.

    It’s like: Will the flavor be chocolate, or will it be vanilla? Either way, it’ll be loaded with sugar, artificial flavoring, and artificial coloring, and will fatten you, and rot your teeth just the same, no matter how different the taste is. And those are the only two ‘choices’. That’s all the billionaires are offering, in the political market. Truth isn’t anywhere on the menu, from either Party.

    The post Calling the Overthrow of Yanukovych a U.S. Coup is True first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The US Empire is Starting to Fall Apart

    In order to understand why, the nature of imperialism, and thus of all empires, needs first to be explained (especially because almost no one knows about this):

    Whereas a merely domestic dictatorship is no danger to other nations, an international dictatorship — or “empire” — is a danger to other nations, because every empire (i.e., each of the individuals who actually control it) craves to increase or expand its (their) control, and because this imperialistic craving is or ought to be part of the very definition of “empire” because every empire is built in that way (insatiable desire for growth), and also because any empire is heading for extinction to the extent that it quits this aspiration and abandons any area that it formerly did control. The difference between the regime of Franco in Spain, and the regime of Hitler in Germany, that necessitated a World War (specifically WWII) in order for other nations to protect themselves from Hitler’s fascism but not from Franco’s fascism, was precisely that Hitler’s was imperialistic and Franco’s was not. If Hitler and Hirohito and Mussolini had not been imperialistic, then there would have been no WWII. (The public in every nation were opposed to entering war against the imperialistic fascists but ultimately only the most rigid fools could any longer deny that the only alternative to war against the imperialistic fascists would be surrender to them — and so there was WWII. Isolationism and preaching ‘peace’ in the face of imperialists is short-sighted foolishness. That foolishness ends by being invaded: by means of subversion, sanctions, coup, and/or military action.) There can be no peace with an empire, unless it’s an expired one. Empires are the very engines of war, and of nearly constant war.

    Starting from 25 July 1945, America became imperialistic — adopted, in fact, the goal of taking control over the entire world — when its new President, Harry S. Truman, decided to accept the advice from his hero, General Dwight Eisenhower (supported by the British imperialist Winston Churchill) for the United States to become not only an empire but the ONLY empire (which Churchill’s nation U.K., would, Churchill hoped, secretly control behind-the-scenes) and take over the entire world, but especially win the Soviet Union — and so the “Cold War” that was to be (so the fool Truman was led to believe) ‘between communism=dictatorship versus capitalism=democracy’ started and then became permanently installed by Truman’s immediate successor, President Eisenhower. Those two Presidents actually created the military-industrial complex (MIC) or the U.S. Government that would become controlled by the largest corporations (such as Lockheed) whose main or entire market would be the U.S. Government and its vassal-nations or ‘allies’ (such as Germany, Japan, South Korea, and the entirety of the former British Empire), which would be the customer-Governments for those U.S.-and-allied, or imperial, weapons-manufacturers. And, when the biggest weapons-manufacturers control the Government, rather than the Government controlling the biggest weapons-manufacturers, that isn’t merely capitalism, but it is dictatorial capitalism: it is “fascism.” In fact: it is imperialistic fascism — the most dangerous type of Government that exists in the modern era.

    What Churchill in 1946 dubbed “the Special Relationship” (the umbilical cord connecting the U.S. to the U.K.) had actually been invented by the British magnate Cecil Rhodes, privately, in 1877, before it was institutionalized by Rhodes in his will upon his death in 1902. One of his friends and followers was the then-young Winston Churchill. The 1911 book Cecil Rhodes: His Private Life, says of Rhodes (p. 256), “He was very much entertained by Mr. Churchill’s ready wit and clever conversation, and he listened intently to his views on the political questions of the day. He admired his intellectual powers, which, in conjunction with his dash and ‘go,’ he said must inevitably bring him to front.” Whatever else might be said of Rhodes, he was both extraordinarily prophetic and extraordinarily effective. (Likewise so, is Rhodes’s follower in the present day, George Soros, who cites the philosopher Karl Popper but acts like, and channels, instead, Cecil Rhodes.) However, now, after Rhodes’s operation’s enormous success, starting on 25 July 1945, it is taking desperate gambles to continue in control, which gambles are effective only in a short-term sense because the sheer corruption within it is rotting it out so much as to be bringing it down. And that is what is happening.

    The U.K.-U.S. operation is now in its decline-phase and is responding the more desperately and destructively as that decline becomes evermore clear. Its arrogance is placing such pressure upon their vassal-nations as to be increasingly forcing a breaking-up of “The Western Alliance” — the (U.K.)-U.S.-and-allied countries. Yet, at the same time, the U.K.-U.S. alliance is doing all it can to bring some of its vassal-nations, such as Japan, South Korea, Finland, and Sweden, even more tightly into the fold. However, any success in that regard will come at a higher cost to the U.K.-U.S. empire than has been the case in the past. To most observers, the decline and fall of “The West” is now at least as apparent as what had been the case during the Roman embodiment; and if the U.K.-U.S. will persist now, the result will be even more catastrophic than what happened to the empires of Germany, Italy, and Japan from WWII. It will be even uglier than WWII.

    On February 3, I headlined “RT: NATO Nations Start to Go Public About U.S. Government’s International Dictatorship” and remarked upon how amazing it was that on that date, both Türkiye and Hungary were publicly insulting the U.S. Government. Such boldness and independence from two of the current era’s lone remaining empire’s vassal-nations (or at least they had been, up till that point in time) is historically unprecedented. How the U.S. dictatorship will be able to continue to call itself a “democracy” after having been declared simultaneously by two of its vassal-nations to be instead an arrogantly bullying dictatorship, seems hard to fathom. Maybe it will even cause some other of the dictatorship’s vassal-nations, such as Japan, South Korea, Finland, and Sweden, to have second thoughts about drawing themselves even closer than they already are.

    America’s Government is on the war-path and has been since 1945, in the name of ‘freedom, democracy, and human rights’ but lying all the way and now getting too close to the precipice of WW III. How many of its ‘allies’ will stay with it to that end?

    There is sound reason why global polls show that America is the #1 country that is cited as posing the world’s biggest threat to peace. Global polls didn’t exist during World War II, but if they had, then America certainly wouldn’t have been viewed that way then; probably Nazi Germany would have been. And America has risen to take its place.

    The U.S. Congressional Research Service’s list of U.S. invasions (including increases in existing invasions) lists and briefly describes 297 such invasions after WW II (i.e., during 1945-2022, a 77-year period), and is titled “Instances of Use of United States Armed Forces Abroad, 1798-2022.” That 297 U.S. invasions in the past 77 years is more than all of the instances put together during 1798-1945 — a 147-year period. And none of those 297 invasions was defensive. All were unConstitutional. Most of them were purely aggressions (some in order to help a foreign tyrant suppress his own population). America’s Founders had insisted there be no “standing army” in this nation. Until Truman established the ‘Defense’ Department and CIA in 1947, there wasn’t any. That created America’s military-industrial complex.

    Anyway, Ukraine’s and Russia’s Defense Ministers agree (but NATO disagrees) that the war in Ukraine is between NATO and Russia, not between Ukraine and Russia; this is already WWIII, and the only significant question about it now is whether it’s going to reach a final nuclear stage. This will depend upon how far Washington is willing to go in order to persist in the objective that Hitler had, to control ultimately the entire world. And the likelihood of its going all the way to global annihilation will considerably reduce if the U.S. empire soon starts to break up. Which could happen, starting soon.

    The post The US Empire is Starting to Fall Apart first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The U.S. Dictatorship

    Only by means of intense deceit does the U.S. Government allege that it and its allies are ‘democratic’ and that the countries that they impose sanctions against and overthrow (or try to overthrow) in coups and invasions are not. Irrespective of whether some of the countries that the U.S. Government targets for overthrow are or are not dictatorships, America itself certainly is, and it has the world’s highest percentage of its population living in prison — which might suffice alone to qualify America as being a police-state — and perhaps the worst one.

    Some of America’s allies are among the world’s best-known dictatorships, such as Saudi Arabia and Bahrain; and such cases as those, alone, demonstrate without any doubt, that America’s many sanctions and coups and invasions have nothing to do with democracy versus dictatorship, but are pure PR in order to fool the gullible throughout the world to believe the U.S. Government’s lies to the effect that these aggressions against so many countries (such as Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Guatemala, Chile, Iran, Libya, Indonesia and so many others) are decent or even nobly intentioned, when the fact is that America is simply the world’s worst police-state, and is lying in order to deceive the global public to believe that it’s instead the global champion of democracy and of freedom. All of America’s foreign policies are justified wholly or partly on the basis of lies. Is it not by now clear that the time is long-since past when anyone should continue to accept that intensely deceitful regime’s lies and its constant aggressions?

    What kind of international leadership is it that the world’s most powerful country — a country such as this — is any longer allowed to lie and claim that it represents democracy and freedom while the countries that it sanctions and coups and invades represent the opposite? When will a profoundly corrupt Government such as this, become condemned by a majority of the nations in the U.N. General Assembly — instead of for the UNGA members to continue to cower in fear of it and so to refrain from saying what is by now manifestly the case: that “This Emperor has no clothes”?

    If hypocrisy is the worst sin, then can there any longer remain doubt as to which of the world’s Governments is the the world’s worst sinner? Would the world be better off to continue allowing such a Government to continue touting itself to be ‘the leader of the free world’ which is actually leading the world into what keeps getting closer to a World War Three against Russia and against China and against Iran; or, instead, for the countries of the world to state clearly and openly, that this fraud must now end, and that all of the global bully’s honors and privileges are founded on fraud, and must now cease?

    After WW II, the U.S. regime perpetrated at least 130+ U.S. invasions (out of 161 foreign military deployments of U.S. troops during 1945-2021, not even including The U.S. Government’s usage of proxy-forces instead of U.S. troops, such as is now the U.S. regime’s standard way of invading).

    After World War II ended, the U.S. regime slaughtered or assisted in slaughtering, between 1945 and 2007 (and not even counting more recently, such as in Syria and Yemen), “between 20 and 30 million people in wars and conflicts scattered over the world”. (This count also doesn’t include the numbers, such as in Iraq after the 1990 war, which died as a result of U.S.-initiated sanctions against countries that America’s billionaires wanted to bring under their control that weren’t yet under their control.)

    As a consequence of the reality of post-1944 America’s being fascist-imperialist (and its consequent record of doing far more invasions and coups, and sanctions, than any other country does), overwhelmingly the highest percentage of people polled throughout the world on questions of which country poses the greatest or biggest threat to peace in the world say that that country is the United States. No other country comes even close.

    When will the world speak out against the global bully? Has not the time yet come to do so?

    The post The U.S. Dictatorship first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Google Hides the Main Reason for America’s Arming of Ukraine

    On Wednesday, January 25th, at 5:52 UTC, Reuters headlined “U.S. arms exports up 49% in fiscal 2022.” After more than 24 hours, at 22:00 UTC on the 26th, a Google search for that Reuters headline produced “Your search – “U.S. arms exports up 49% in fiscal 2022” – did not match any documents.” Five hours later, at  2:37 UTC on the 27th, the findings were “Your search – ‘U.S. arms exports up 49% in fiscal 2022’ – did not match any documents.” — exactly the same thing.

    If that news wasn’t actually published anywhere, then all of the ‘news’-media fail their most-basic obligation to the public: to provide facts that are crucial in order for the public to understand — instead of to mislead the public to misinterpret and misunderstand — the most important news of the day:  to misunderstand the events that are shaping our future history.

    If, instead, that news was published somewhere but Google refused to produce a find of that extremely important news-report, then Google fails its most-basic obligation to the public, because it’s not letting the public understand the world; it is instead hiding crucial important facts so as to encourage misunderstanding.

    So, I then did a Yandex search for that headline, “U.S. arms exports up 49% in fiscal 2022,” and it found only four finds, which were the Reuters direct news-report, plus three obscure appearances of that headline, one from Moldova, one from Vietnam, and one from Poland — nothing at all mainstream or even ‘alt-news’ anywhere. And, five hours later, it was the same four finds plus two more — one from Tanzania, and the other an obscure personal-finance site, neither of which two additional sites, when I clicked onto it, actually had that headline or news-report on it.

    Yandex isn’t American but Russian. Its main person and founder is the Russian-Maltese-Israeli (all three citizenships) billionaire Arkady Volozh who resigned as the company’s CEO on 30 December 2022 because he had been sanctioned by the EU for being a Russian billionaire who had kept his Russian citizenship and residence after Russia invaded Ukraine on 24 February 2022.

    As for Google, it was, behind the scenes, founded and is controlled by the Pentagon, CIA, and some Stanford University professors.

    So far as I can tell from those two Web-searches, that Reuters news-report, which like all such had been sent out from that news-agency to thousands of news-media around the world, wasn’t published by any of them.

    It’s remarkable but — otherwise than here — unremarked-upon. And, though investors in America’s suppliers to the military benefit from controlling their markets (the U.S Government and its ‘allies’ or vassal-nations), the actual performance of the U.S. military ever since the end of WW II (in places such as Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and many others) has been poor. When profits instead of the nation’s actual defense are the main motivation for a nation’s military expenditures, enormous waste and a stunningly unsucessful military are the result. For example, Russia, where the Government controls the corporations that make its weapons, spends one-twentieth what the U.S. does on its military, but no one would say that its military is only one-twentieth as effective.

    A good case can be made that this Ukraine-war boom in American-made military-equipment sales is the main immediate aim of the individuals who control U.S.-and-allied countries. Maybe that’s the reason why the Reuters news-report is, evidently, unpublishable, at least in any mainstream ‘news’-medium, or by any search-engine. Otherwise, it’s just a total mystery, why it went unpublished (except by Reuters itself).

    The post Google Hides the Main Reason for America’s Arming of Ukraine first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • U.S. Now Considering to Invade Russia: NYT

    An obliquely-written news-report in the New York Times on January 18th headlined “U.S. Warms to Helping Ukraine Target Crimea” and subheaded “The Biden administration is considering the argument that Kyiv needs the power to strike at the Ukrainian peninsula annexed by Russia in 2014.” It reported that, “the Biden administration is finally starting to concede that Kyiv may need the power to strike the Russian sanctuary, even if such a move increases the risk of escalation, according to several U.S. officials who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive debate. Crimea, between the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov, is home to tens of thousands of dug-in Russian troops and numerous Russian military bases.”

    It goes on to say that this “would be one of its boldest moves yet, helping Ukraine to attack the peninsula that President Vladimir V. Putin views as an integral part of his quest to restore past Russian glory.” This news-story omitted to mention that according to Russian law, Crimea (which was part of Russia throughout 1783-1954 when the Soviet Union’s dictator, a Ukrainian, arbitrarily transferred it to Ukraine) was restored to Russia on 16 March 2014, when a vote by Crimea’s residents supported by over 90% the return of Crimea to being a part of Russia, and Russia accepted that application by the Crimean people, for Crimea to become again a part of Russia. None of this was mentioned in the NYT’s news-report, nor was the fact mentioned there that even U.S. polling of the residents of Crimea, both before and after the 2014 plebiscite there, found over 90% of respondents to want restoration of Crimea as being a part of Russia. All of that crucial information has been kept secret from the American people, and from the people in U.S.-allied countries — they don’t know it. The NYT’s article says only that Crimea is “the peninsula that President Vladimir V. Putin views as an integral part of his quest to restore past Russian glory.”

    Furthermore, the NYT’s news-report fails to mention that on 8 June 2020, Russia published from Putin’s office, “Basic Principles of State Policy of the Russian Federation on Nuclear Deterrence,” which presented four circumstances, lettered “a” through “d”, under which “the possibility of nuclear weapons use by the Russian Federation” would exist; and letter “a” there is: “arrival of reliable data on a launch of ballistic missiles attacking the territory of the Russian Federation and/or its allies.” In other words: “the possibility of nuclear weapons use by the Russian Federation” would exist if America and Ukraine carry out “a launch of ballistic missiles attacking” Crimea. According to Russian law, Crimea is, again, a part of Russia; it certainly is part of “the territory of the Russian Federation and/or its allies.” It falls under Russia’s stated nuclear umbrella, Russia’s protection up to and including the use of nuclear weapons — the four official conditions under which Russia MIGHT respond by means of nuclear weapons. (And: it falls under “circumstance” “a” — the first one that is listed.)

    Russia might not employ nuclear weapons in the event of such an attack against Crimea — it might instead respond without nuclear warheads, but only with non-nuclear ones; and, since the invasion of Crimea would have been carried out by both Ukraine and America, Ukraine and/or America would be targeted. If Ukraine would be targeted, then America might defend Ukraine by further attacking Russia — perhaps only in Crimea, but perhaps not. In any case: Washington and Kiev would jointly have violated the top condition in which Russia might respond with nuclear weapons; and, so, a second attack by America and Ukraine against Russia would almost certainly result in a nuclear response by Russia; and, as Scott Ritter has already noted, any circumstance in which one or more of Russia’s red lines have already been crossed by America and/or by one of America’s allies would precipitate a launch by Russia of its entire nuclear stockpile of thousands of nuclear weapons, from land, sea, and air, which would mean, within perhaps 30 minutes to an hour, game-over for everyone, and the end of life on Earth — not by some delayed “nuclear winter,” but immediately by the direct blast-effects and the intense nuclear radiation then spread throughout the entire atmosphere of the planet.

    Though the NYT hid this crucial additional information, I don’t, though perhaps the hundreds of U.S.-and-allied news-media that I am submitting this news-report to might all decide not to publish it. Anyway: they all are receiving it on January 22nd. We’ll see which ones publish it, and whether ONLY ones that Google bans do publish it, in which case this news-report still will appear here, even if that turns out to be the only place that does.

    The post U.S. Now Considering to Invade Russia: NYT first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • How America’s “Defense” Contractors Control America’s Government

    Probably no corporation possesses a bigger share of control over America’s Government than does the one that sells more to the U.S. Government than does any other: Lockheed Martin. Actually, its top owners, or the group of stockholders who dominate the firm and cooperatively together control its policies and determine whom the corporation’s top executives are, are, together with one-another, the individual persons who cooperatively produce the decisions that constitute this “bigger share of control over America’s Government” than any other corporation does (and vastly more than the American public does). Some of these top owners are, themselves, in one way or another, employees or other official agents of Lockheed Martin, but others are not: one needn’t be officially a “part of” the firm in order for the firm to be one’s agent. This is instead the power of money and of ownership — not of any official status. Usually, stockholding is the main means by which it’s exercized. Corporations were planned and designed in this way, in the years 1600 and 1602, in England and in Holland, partly because the then-rising public opposition against the official, titled, nobility or aristocrats, was beginning to raise questions among the aristocracy, as to whether, some day, official titles might become more of a personal burden to be borne than of a personal asset to continue to flaunt publicly (such as by such titles as “Duke” “Lord” “Baron” or etc.). That was one of the main motives for the creation of the corporate form.

    From its very outset, empire was to have its own army and armed forces, in order to be able to coerce the local aristocracy in a seized vassal-nation to cooperate with the imperial power, so as for those two national aristocracies jointly to exploit and extract wealth from the vassal nation and from its population. This was the start of capitalism. The armaments-makers and mercenaries have always been crucial to its foundation, and the result is popularly called “imperialism” or (in the United States, “neoconservatism,” though there is nothing really “neo” about it, except, as Mussolini called the two synonyms, “corporationism” and “fascism,” marking the historical transition away from agrarian-based feudalism, into its replacement by the international-corporate version of aristocracy — which is based on ownership of stock instead of land).

    So: as the world’s largest armaments-maker, Lockheed Martin is quite naturally itself foundational to the U.S. empire. A few instances of how it functions that way will here be described:

    On 26 January 2020, I headlined “Joe Biden Is as Corrupt as They Come,” and opened:

    Bernard Schwartz, a former Vice Chairman and top investor in Lockheed Martin (which is by far the largest seller to the U.S. Government, and also the largest seller to most of America’s allied Governments), is one of Joe Biden’s top donors. CNN headlined, on October 24th, “Biden allies intensify push for super PAC after lackluster fundraising quarter”, and reported that, “Bernard Schwartz, a private investor and donor to the former vice president’s campaign, said he spoke with Biden within the last two weeks and encouraged him to do just that.

    And Biden did then follow Schwartz’s advice, and has remained loyal to him. This was an example of Lockheed’s impact upon a Democratic Party public official who serves the military-industrial complex (MIC) instead of the public.

    Here is what I wrote on 26 March 2019, under the heading “Mueller’s Record of Framing Innocent People to Protect the Guilty, an excerpt concerning a Republican Party official, James Comey, who likewise serves Lockheed and the rest of the MIC instead of the public:

    *****
    The liberal Republican James Comey became the Senior Vice President and General Counsel of Lockheed Martin Corporation during 2005-2010, where his 2009 pay was $6,113,797. During that time, he also was a Director of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s National Chamber Litigation Center, which works to support business interests in the courts, especially the interests of U.S.-based international corporations, including Lockheed Martin. Furthermore, as-of 12 March 2010, Comey also had been granted 162,482 free shares of stock in Lockheed Martin, which number was higher than that of anyone except the Chairman, the CEO President, and an Executive Vice President; so, Comey was among the very top people at Lockheed Martin. Lockheed Martin’s largest foreign customer was the Saudi Government, which is 100% owned by the Saud family. Today, those Comey shares are worth $47,119,780 — after his five years with the company, plus nearly nine years of growth in that stock, from the war-producing policies that Comey had helped to initiate.

    Then, Comey bought a $3M mansion in Connecticut and became the General Counsel and a Member of the Executive Committee at the gigantic hedge Fund, Ray Dalio’s Bridgewater Associates, in Connecticut, where Comey’s only publicly known pay was $6,632,616 in 2012. Dalio and Comey became very close — Dalio called Comey his “hero.” But Obama then hired the liberal Republican Comey as FBI Director in 2013, replacing the liberal Republican Mueller in that role, from which Obama’s successor President Trump fired Comey, and congressional Democrats then succeeded in getting Mueller assigned to become the Special Counsel who would supposedly investigate the legitimacy of that firing.

    On 21 May 2013, Marketwatch bannered “Bridgewater Associates’ trades for Q2” and reported that

    After a number of tech companies — including those we’ve mentioned [Microsoft, Oracle, and Intel] and EMC — the largest single-stock holding in the fund’s portfolio was its roughly 220,000 shares of Lockheed Martin LMT, +1.93%. The company recently reported an increase in earnings compared with the first quarter of 2012, but revenue was down slightly and there is a good deal of speculation that the business will be impacted by cuts in U.S. military spending. … Billionaire Ken Griffin’s Citadel Investment Group reported a position of 1.2 million shares at the end of December.

    Lockheed Martin is by far the largest U.S. ‘defense’ contractor, taking 8.3% of all U.S. Government purchases during 2015, as compared to #2 Boeing’s 3.8%, and #3 General Dynamics’s 3.1%.

    Other than sales to the U.S. Government, the largest customer of Lockheed Martin is the Saud family, who own Saudi Arabia and own the world’s largest oil company, Aramco, and who hate Shia Muslims and especially hate Iran, which has the most Shia.

    As Open Secrets has reported about Comey:

    He left Bridgewater and became senior research scholar and Hertog Fellow on National Security at Columbia Law School in February 2013, and also joined the board of London-based HSBC Holdings. As the Center has reported, Comey maxed out his contributions to Mitt Romney in 2012 in an effort to unseat his new boss, and also gave to Obama’s 2008 opponent, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.).

    This is a team that’s pro-Saud and pro U.S. billionaires, and pro Israeli billionaires, but rabidly anti Iran and Russia and China, and looking for a fight — war and increased ‘defense’-spending — against any nation (such as Syria) that’s favorable toward those ‘enemies of America’.

    *****
    The MIC has far more key agencies than are generally known. One is In-Q-Tel, whose pernicious character is so obvious that practically nothing can be said about that corporation without revealing its inconsistency with any democratic republic.

    Even the CIA-affiliated Wikipedia, in its article “In-Q-Tel”, opens:

    In-Q-Tel (IQT), formerly Peleus and In-Q-It, is an American not-for-profit venture capital firm based in Arlington, Virginia. It invests in high-tech companies to keep the Central Intelligence Agency, and other intelligence agencies, equipped with the latest in information technology in support of United States intelligence capability.[4] The name “In-Q-Tel” is an intentional reference to Q, the fictional inventor who supplies technology to James Bond.[5]

    In-Q-Tel has stated that the average dollar invested by In-Q-Tel in 2016 attracts fifteen dollars from other investors.[6]

    History [edit]

    Originally named Peleus and known as In-Q-It, In-Q-Tel was founded by Norm Augustine, a former CEO of Lockheed Martin, and by Gilman Louie, who was In-Q-Tel’s first CEO.[4][5][7] In-Q-Tel’s mission is to identify and invest in companies developing cutting-edge technologies that serve United States national security interests. According to the Washington post, In-Q-Tel started as the idea of then CIA director George Tenet [the man who told G.W. Bush that fooling the American people to believe that Saddam had WMD would be “a slam dunk”]. Congress approved funding for In-Q-Tel, which was increased in later years.[6] Origins of the corporation can also be traced to Ruth A. David, who headed the Central Intelligence Agency Directorate of Science & Technology in the 1990s and promoted the importance of rapidly advancing information technology for the CIA.[5] In-Q-Tel now engages with entrepreneurs, growth companies, researchers, and venture capitalists to deliver technologies that provide superior capabilities for the CIA, DIA, NGA, and the wider intelligence community.[8] In-Q-Tel concentrates on three broad commercial technology areas: software, infrastructure and materials sciences.

    Former CIA director George Tenet says,

    “We [the CIA] decided to use our limited dollars to leverage technology developed elsewhere. In 1999 we chartered … In-Q-Tel. … While we pay the bills, In-Q-Tel is independent of CIA. CIA identifies pressing problems, and In-Q-Tel provides the technology to address them. The In-Q-Tel alliance has put the Agency back at the leading edge of technology … This … collaboration … enabled CIA to take advantage of the technology that Las Vegas uses to identify corrupt card players and apply it to link analysis for terrorists [cf. the parallel data-mining effort by the SOCOM–DIA operation Able Danger], and to adapt the technology that online booksellers use and convert it to scour millions of pages of documents looking for unexpected results.[9]“

    In-Q-Tel sold 5,636 shares of Google, worth over US$2.2 million, on November 15, 2005.[10] The shares were a result of Google’s acquisition of Keyhole, Inc, the CIA-funded satellite mapping software now known as Google Earth.[11]

    “Nonprofit” — isn’t that nice?

    On 22 January 2015, Nafeez Ahmed posted two articles, both researched and documented in depth, “How the CIA made Google”, and “Why Google made the NSA”.

    The more that goes to the MIC, the less that goes to everything (and everyone) else; the public increasingly fend for themselves. For example: in a country where the Government doesn’t protect small businesses but only giant ones, this is how they protect themselves — no thanks to, and maybe against the laws of, that MIC-dominated Government. It’s what happens when and where 57.16% of the money that is legally donated to politicians comes from the wealthiest 0.1% — the richest one in ten thousand — of the nation’s population.

    Such a nation censors-out the truth, instead of allows it to be reported. Only the lies against those truths are allowed: such as the lie that what happened in February 2014 in Ukraine was a democratic revolution instead of a U.S. coup; and such as the lie regarding Taiwan 5 miles away from mainland China’s coast (or 1.2 miles away, or 100 miles away) — that it belongs to America instead of to China, of which Taiwan has actually been a part since 1684 (except when Japan conquered Taiwan in 1895 and then America seized it in 1945 — as-if Japan’s surrender gave Japan’s conqueror the U.S. a right to control that island 3,236 miles away from America — as-if Taiwan were American instead of Chinese). (Of course: the U.S. says instead that Taiwan is an independent country, which is just as big a lie.) It’s another lie-based land-grab by the voracious U.S. empire, and can be sustained only by means of censorship against essential relevant truths that contradict those lies.

    However, at the lower levels — the hirees of the mega-corporations that are doing this, instead of at the top levels that more-directly represent the controlling stockholders — there is far more confusion, and even outright stupidity, as those front-line workers who carry out the censorship are struggling to do their jobs in the face of the multiple self-contradictory hypocritical instructions they get from corporate management, gobblydegook such as this, which is a link from Matt Taibbi’s 2 December 2022 “1. Thread: THE TWITTER FILES”: his report about how the heavily Democratic-Party suckers who had been hired by the heavily Democratic-Party billionaires who control that corporation (Twitter) managed to hide from most Americans (until AFTER the 2022 mid-term elections) the reality of the scandal about what was contained in Hunter Biden’s laptop. Only at the topmost level — the board members and the top executives — is the actual motive (U.S. imperialism. a.k.a., “neoconservatism”) actually known and understood. Blaming the suckers down below can’t even possibly endanger, but instead protects, the real culprits (the beneficiaries — in BOTH Parties — of this imperialism). Censorship itself poisons and kills democracies: all of it is inconsistent with democracy and advances ONLY aristocracy, theocracy or any other form of dictatorship. Whereas the employees of firms such as Google, Twitter, Facebook, New York Times, CNN, Washington Post, Guardian, NewsGuard, etc., might not know this, the top-level people there do, and they are the ones who have selected and hired those lower-level workers, to carry out their dirty-work, for the billionaires, and especially for their ‘defense’ contractors, who control the Government. It’s the controlling mega-corporate investors, basically, who are the beneficiaries of what this Government does, and this is the reality of neoconservatism (U.S. imperialism).

    The post How America’s “Defense” Contractors Control America’s Government first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Russian News-media are More Honest than U.S.-and-Allied Media

    How many times have the publics in U.S.-and-allied countries been lied-to about invasions their Governments had made on the basis of falsehoods that their ‘news’-media knew at the time were false but nonetheless reported to them as being true? How many times have those ‘news’-media reported as being ‘a democratic revolution’ the overthrow of a foreign Government when those ‘news’-media knew, either while it was going on or else less than a month afterward, that it had actually been just another U.S. coup — and yet those same ‘news’-media still, even to this day, refuse to refer to that coup as HAVING BEEN a “coup”?

    Russia’s news-media are far more honest, and this will be documented here, by recent examples:

    On Friday, January 13, Russia’s U.N. Ambassador, Vassily Nebenzia, told the members of the U.N. Security Council, which includes all of the “Big 5” Permanent Members, including (besides Russia), U.S., China, France, and UK, that a negotiated end of the war in Ukraine “will only present itself once Ukraine stops posing a threat to Russia and discriminating against Russian-speaking Ukrainians,” and that, “If this result can be achieved through negotiations, we stand ready for this scenario. If not, then our tasks will be achieved by military means,” meaning that Ukraine’s current government will be replaced by one that will be imposed upon that country by means of that government’s surrender to Russia’s Government.

    This was an extremely important statement. It indicates that Russia will not negotiate an end to its invasion of Ukraine unless and until Ukraine’s government will first have accepted Russia’s fundamental terms — which Russia had actually stated on 24 February 2022 when starting its invasion — and that there no longer remain any other demands by Ukraine’s government upon Russia’s Government that Russia’s Government will consider or discuss with anyone. First must come Ukraine’s acceptance of those demands by Russia.

    This reflects a historic turning-point in the war. It means that either Ukraine and its allies — especially the U.S. — will defeat Russia in this war, or else Russia will defeat the U.S. and its allies in this war. It lays down the gauntlet, to the United States Government, and to its allies on the Security Council — France and UK — that either Russia or else the U.S. and its allies (including all of NATO) will win this war; or else the U.S. and its allies (including Ukraine’s government) will peaceably accept Russia’s basic demand, that “Ukraine stops posing a threat to Russia and discriminating against Russian-speaking Ukrainians.” In order for Ukraine to “stop posing a threat to Russia,” Ukraine and its allies would need to guarantee that Ukraine will NEVER become a member of the U.S. Government’s anti-Russian NATO military alliance, nor ever become in any other way a military ally of the U.S. Government. Russia will accept Ukraine’s returning to its prior neutrality, which it had during the period 1991 up to 20 February 2014, or else to become an ally of Russia, but Russia will no longer accept (as it had during 20 February 2014 to 24 February 2022) Ukraine’s being allied with Russia’s enemies. Russia won’t ever accept that, he is saying.

    Nebenzia’s historic announcement on Friday still has not yet been reported by any U.S.-and-allied news-medium. As this article is being written, on the afternoon of Saturday, 14 January 2023, at 2PM Eastern Standard Time in NYC — late enough for any U.S.-and-allied news-medium to have reported this momentous news — none reported it. A Web-search at that time showed “5 results” and the only mainstream one was Russia’s RT News headlining “Russia speaks on endgame for Ukraine conflict.” The other 4 were only copying that report. The news-report by Russia’s Tass News Agency, “Russia’s special operation will be over when its goals are achieved – envoy to UN,” was — like all other news-reports, besides RT’s, that aren’t basically controlled by the U.S. Government, filtered out — NOT shown — by a Web-search by the CIA-created Google, which still has a monopoly in the English language because all other search-engines use Google’s as their own base, from which they might further-censor-out their finds. (And here is another way that truth is suppressed in the U.S.-and-allied world.)

    That’s an example of momentous, historic news, which is NOT reported by the Washington Post, New York Times, CNN, BBC, Telegraph, Daily Mail, Fox News, Atlantic Monthly, The Spectator, The Nation, Deutsche Welle, and all other U.S.-Government-controlled ‘news’-media. They’re not controlled directly by the U.S. Government, but instead by means of the few super-wealthy individuals (billionaires and centi-millionaires) who (by means of their corporations, think tanks, universities, etc.) control that Government by vetting any prospective candidate by either of the nation’s two political Parties who seeks to win his Party’s nomination to become a federal official. These are the political mega-donors. Their media hide this news, instead of report it. That’s why it’s NOT reported.

    They also hide supporting details, such as the reality that after Obama’s coup in Ukraine grabbed Ukraine for America’s billionaire masters, his junta called the residents in the far-eastern Donbass region where the coup was rejected the most vociferously, ‘terrorists’, and launched against them an ‘Anti-Terrorist Operation’, which has been slaughtering uncounted thousands of them ever since. The German independent journalist Alina Lipp has been filming there and trying to get the reality — such as this on January 12 — reported back to her homeland, but (as-of January 11) “German prosecutors claim that Ms Lipp’s Telegram channel is intended to destabilise the country’s [Germany’s] democracy and undermine public faith in established media,” so, her ‘“endorsing serious crime’ [in that way] is an offence that can be punished with up to three years in jail.”

    Another recent mega-news event they all hide was the news-report from Tass on January 10, “Corporate trail apparent in all four assassinations of US presidents — security official: Nikolay Patrushev believes that an increasingly large number of Americans say that the Republicans and the Democrats are merely “two actors in one staging that has nothing to do with democracy.” Patrushev is one of the top officials in Russia’s Government; and, according to the the CIA-edited and written Wikipedia, which blacklists (blocks from linking to) sites that aren’t CIA-approved, he is a very important man. Wikipedia’s article about Patrushev says: “Belonging to the siloviki faction of president Vladimir Putin’s inner circle, [3] Patrushev is believed to be one of the closest advisors to Putin and a leading figure behind Russia’s national security affairs.[4] He is considered as very hawkish towards the West and the US and has promoted various conspiracy theories. Patrushev is seen by observers as one of the likeliest candidates for succeeding Putin.[5]” So, America’s Deep State (America’s billionaires and their employees and many thousands of other hired agents) takes seriously what he says. On January 14, I Googled a key assertion by Patrushev in that article, saying that the U.S. Government is “cover for a conglomerate of huge corporations that rule the country and try to dominate the world.” It found “6 results” and those were this Tass article and 5 others, all of which were based upon this tass article — none of which were by any U.S.-and-allied ‘news’-media, all of which instead hide his statement, which was made in a Russian national TV interview of him. So: here is that complete Tass article:

    MOSCOW, January 10. /TASS/. A corporate trail can be traced in all assassinations of US presidents, Russian Security Council Secretary Nikolay Patrushev said in an interview for aif.ru.

    “All four assassinations of American leaders are tied to a corporate trail,” he said in an interview published Tuesday.

    He explained that the American state is only a “cover for a conglomerate of huge corporations that rule the country and try to dominate the world.” According to the official, transnational corporations treat even US presidents as “mere figureheads that can be silenced, as it happened with [Donald] Trump.”

    He believes that an increasingly large number of Americans say that the Republicans and the Democrats are merely “two actors in one staging that has nothing to do with democracy.”

    “The US authorities, allied to big business, serve the interests of trans-national corporations, including the military-industrial complex. The assertive policy of the White House, the unbridled aggressiveness of NATO, the emergence of the AUKUS military bloc and others – are also a consequence of corporate influence,” he concluded.

    Colonies and corporations

    Patrushev also noted that, in the past, the West achieved prosperity and global dominance through colonial conquests. He drew a parallel with transnational corporations that behave in a similar fashion, preferring to increase their capital by pumping resources from other countries and “using their system of dumbing down the masses to impose the idea about some rules that they have themselves invented and that do not correspond to international law.”

    The official stated that transnational corporations seriously influence local political and social and economic processes.

    “On the one hand , they introduce new technologies through direct investments, they increase labor productivity. But the population is unable to use these results, because the companies permanently supplant the local producer, becoming monopolies. By moving the main volume of income abroad, they devoid countries of an opportunity to increase their national welfare,” he elaborated.

    Meanwhile, according to Patrushev, national legal regulation is not enough to solve this problem, and the existing international legal regulation of economic activities of transnational corporations has been shaped in their interests and with their direct involvement.

    “Its amendment in favor of national interests of countries is being sabotaged,” he noted.

    “Amid the fundamental changes in the world, the corporations have one goal – to preserve the system of global exploitation. It is headed by an elite of businessmen that do not tie themselves to any states. Beneath it are the so-called developed countries and the ‘golden billion.’ And further below is the rest of humanity, contemptuously referred to as the ‘third world’,” the Secretary concluded.

    The assertions that Patrushev made there are documented true in my latest book, America’s Empire of Evil , except that his allegation regarding those assassinations concerns matters that the book doesn’t discuss, because — though I believe those allegations to be probably true — I’ve not yet researched those assassinations sufficiently to be writing about them. All the rest of his statement there is documented in my book, and the history of how it came to be this way is likewise fully described and documented there, so that the reader can understand how this came about. But, anyway, even if what Patrushev said there weren’t true, his having said it is of historic importance, because it indicates the extent to which Russia now, finally, recognizes the implacability of America’s Government regarding Russia — an implacability that started on 25 July 1945.

    The post Russian News-media are More Honest than U.S.-and-Allied Media first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • America’s “War against Communism” Was Really a War against Advocates for the Poor

    Two examples — Korea and Indonesia — will be documented here in order to display that America’s Cold War against communism was/is a cover-story, or deceptive cloak, for a war actually against the poor (and the political Left) in all nations: in other words, a fascist war, meaning that America’s Government became fascist-imperialist as soon as World War II ended, despite FDR (Franklin Delano Roosevelt — America’s President throughout WW II) having been passionately anti-fascist and anti-imperialist. All of this will be explained here, and documented in the article’s links. First, however, will be explained the underlying economic mechanism employed by means of this war that’s actually against the poor, not ONLY against communists. This modern version of fascist-imperialism relies more on deception — on sophisticated propaganda — than Hitler’s did, because Hitler never pretended to advocate for democracy, whereas America does. So, here it is:

    In third-world countries, where labor is non-unionized and cheap, an international corporation can supply the latest industrial machinery, to be worked by the fewest dirt-wage workers in order to undercut the prices of any merely intranational (or ‘local’) corporation while still making intranational (within-nation) profits that are vastly higher than any merely local corporations (which are competing against the multinational ones) in any country can and do; and this is the secret of billionaires (who control international corporations) by which they consequently generate vastly higher rates of return on investment than any merely local entrepreneurs possibly can. Offshoring production thus greatly increases return-on-investment for the billionaires while it drives wages down for the workers in the industrialized countries. On a global scale, it’s a war by the super-rich against the poor. In both respects (by lowering wages in industrialized countries and prohibiting labor unions in the banana republics), the result is to cause an ever-increasing proportion of the world’s wealth to become concentrated amongst the billionaires — the people who control international corporations. From the standpoint of billionaires, it’s the system that surpasses any other. From the standpoint of the world’s poor, however, it is the worst system imaginable, because it funnels wealth from the masses to the super-rich; it impoverishes billions while pouring a bigger and bigger share of the world’s wealth into the control of the world’s mere 3,000-or-so billionaires. That’s the way the world works and ever-increasingly has worked ever since 1945.

    Here’s how it happened:

    Korea

    “The secret genocide in South Korea you’ve probably never heard of”

    (The sources in the article, by Écspielle Kay, excerpted here are mainly hidden behind paywalls because the U.S. Government has always suppressed what this article is reporting. But I have accessed every source here, and find the article to be fully honest and accurately documented. I have removed the photos but retain their descriptions.)

    … What had really happened in Daejeon in the summer of 1950 … was later termed the Bodo League massacre.

    The centre of Daejeon, South Korea, appearing as an ordinary industrial city. Also the site of one of history’s largest massacres.

    Song Joon-ae immediately told the manager of the site. The manager of the site called the Daejeon division of the construction contractor company. It continued upwards until the discovery was brought to the attention to South Korean authorities. The construction site became an excavation site, and the bones which Soon Joon-ae found were not the last to be unearthed.

    Government officials at the various sites around Daejeon found hundreds of sites with hundreds of bodies, some children, some infants, some civilians, some wearing peasant clothing, others wearing military uniform. Park Rae-mun, an archaeologist who appeared at the site estimated that 1.2 million people were massacred at the various sites around Daejeon. Kim Dong-Choon of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, a South Korean governmental body, conservatively estimates that approximately 100,000 were executed by the South Korean military on October 1950, while many point to 400,000 as a likely figure. Both executioners and escapees came forward, and a picture gradually built up that these people were massacred on the suspicion of being leftists. …

    The story of South Korea’s past starts with a provisional government often forgotten about in history textbooks. The People’s Republic of Korea lasted only from 1945 to 1946, and its capital was in Seoul. Through people’s committees all over the Korean peninsula, a twenty-seven-point programme was formed through democratic participation in government, a relatively novel experience for Korean people at the time.

    “the confiscation without compensation of lands held by the Japanese and collaborators; free distribution of that land to the peasants; rent limits on the non-redistributed land; nationalization of such major industries as mining, transportation, banking, and communication; state supervision of small and mid-sized companies; …guaranteed basic human rights and freedoms, including those of speech, press, assembly, and faith; universal suffrage to adults over the age of eighteen; equality for women; labor law reforms including an eight-hour day, a minimum wage, and prohibition of child labor; and “establishment of close relations with the United States, USSR, England (ed. should be the United Kingdom), and China, and positive opposition to any foreign influences interfering with the domestic affairs of the state.”…

    As soon as American troops landed in September of 1945, something seemed off about the People’s Republic of Korea. Nationalisation of major industries? Free distribution of land to peasants? People’s committees? Strong labour-unions and an eight-hour work day? To the United States, this experiment in a united Korean peninsula under democratic rule whiffed of communism.

    What immediately occurred afterwards was the abolition of the People’s Republic of Korea by military decree. Officials serving under the government were shot, buildings were bombed, and supposedly “communist-sympathetic” Korean troops stationed in the country were summarily executed in a bloodbath lasting for several months. The United States Army Military Government was established, causing the eruption of mass public outrage at military personnel from the former Japanese Empire serving in office in South Korea.

    To even further outrage, Lieutenant General John R. Hodge of the 24 Corps of the U.S. Tenth Army, assessing the situation badly, announced that the Japanese colonial government in Incheon would be kept, and, surprised at the poor reaction from Korean citizens his decision had elicited, tried to placate them by creating the Korean Advisory Council to represent the voice of ordinary Koreans. Unsurprisingly, his council was composed of landowners, wealthy businessmen, and officials from the Japanese colonial government.

    Still not taking the hint, the military government continued to rule over months of civil unrest and outbursts of violence after outlawing the people’s committees and the PRK government. On September 23, 1946, 8,000 railway workers in Busan lead a strike, quickly spreading to hundreds of other towns and cities. A police station in Yeongcheon went under siege as a crowd numbering in the tens of thousands converged all at once, killing 40 policemen. More rebellions killed more than 20 Japanese officials and landlords. The situation escalated, and the American military declared martial law, tens of thousands being killed as military troops fired into mass crowds of demonstrators.

    With haste, the First Republic of Korea, what we now know as South Korea, was declared in 1948. Syngman Rhee was flown abroad a US military aircraft to Tokyo, travelling to Seoul, and was installed as [president of the First Republic of Korea]. Rhee immediately arrested the remaining left-wing opponents in the political arena, setting his sights on Kim Koo, a former independence activist, an increasingly popular statesman, and advocate of unification. Syngman Rhee, as a fierce anti-communist and nationalist who would later be forced into exile by his own citizens, had him killed on 26 June 1949. …

    *****

    “South Korea’s Embattled Truth and Reconciliation Commission,” 1 March 2010

    MS [Mark Selden]: How have the media covered the work of the Commission?

    KDC [Kim Dong-chun, retired Standing Commissioner of South Korea’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission]: We have had to contend with the fact that the biggest Korean newspapers have ignored or suppressed our important findings and resolutions. The conservative press fails to recognize the relationship between past wrongs and present injustices facing many Korean citizens and those of other countries.

    *****

    “The Road to the Truth: Lessons from South Korea’s Truth Commissions” (2021)

    1 The Final Report of the Jeju Commission confirmed systemic massacres, indiscriminate arrests, torture, and summary executions by the Rhee government during the U.S. military occupation of Korea. 72 The release of the Final Report in 2003 resulted in a public apology from then President Roh Moo-hyun, the inclusion of the Final Report in Korea’s educational curriculum, and the creation of memorials for the deceased.73 Unlike the Anti-Nation Commission, the Jeju Commission had a clear mandate that authorized the Jeju Commission to freely conduct investigations into the Jeju Uprising.74 The extensive involvement of the Office of the Prime Minister also showed how proper governmental support helped the Jeju Commission succeed.75 The apology from President Roh was particularly significant because it marked the first apology by a head of state for human rights abuses in Korea.76 Furthermore, the allowance of the Final Report in high school classrooms allowed for a more neutral understanding of what really happened in the period leading up to the Korean War.77 C. South Korean Truth Commissions and the Korean War The Korean War claimed the lives of over 1,000,000 civilians, which made it the deadliest civilian event in Korean history.78 During the Korean war, atrocities were committed by the South Korean government against its own citizens. 79 For example, the 1949 Bodo League massacres that occurred during the Rhee presidency claimed the lives of nearly 200,000 South Koreans for allegedly being North Korean spies or communist sympathizers. 80 …

    Although the TRCK made efforts to locate remains from mass graves related to the Bodo League Massacres and the Geochang massacres, the TRCK’s efforts were cut short due to an abrupt change in leadership in 2008, when President Lee Myung-bak came to power.89 When established in 2005, the TRCK had the full support of then President Roh Moo-hyun who was committed to using truth commissions as a vehicle for uncovering the violent truths of Korea’s past.90 In contrast, President Lee saw truth commissions as an obstacle to his goal of bolstering Korea’s economy.91 The TRCK’s resources and mandate became even more vulnerable when Lee appointed “new leaders” to the TRCK commission to better serve his policy agendas.92

    *****

    “The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Korea: Uncovering the Hidden Korean War”

    1 March 2010, by Kim Dong-choon

    The Other War: Korean War Massacres

    More than 2 million people were killed during the Korean War. The casualties included not only military personnel but also innocent civilians. Few are aware that the Korean authorities as well as US and allied forces massacred hundreds of thousands of South Korean civilians at the dawn of the Korean War on June 25, 1950. The official records of government, military and police, as well as survivor testimonies, reveal that mass killings committed by South Korean and U.N forces occurred before and during the Korean War (June 1950 to July 1953).

    *****

    “Truman put Nukes in Guam and Gave the Order to Nuke North Korea”

    (Based upon key details that slipped through in the academic book by Bruce Cumings; (2011) The Korean War, Robert Barsocchini documents that President Truman had an order drawn up to nuke North Korea but, for some unclear reason, “the order [to nuke North Korea] was never sent.” This was already after Truman had –)

    managed to kill millions of Koreans, many, if not most, with “oceans” of napalm produced largely by the Dow Chemical Company, which the US air-force “loved”, referring to it as the “wonder weapon” for its ability to wipe out whole cities of people.

    One day Pfc. James Ransome, Jr.’s unit suffered a “friendly” hit of this wonder weapon: his men rolled in the snow in agony and begged him to shoot them, as their skin burned to a crisp and peeled back “like fried potato chips.” Reporters saw case after case of civilians drenched in napalm — the whole body “covered with a hard, black crust sprinkled with yellow pus.”

    US “intent was to destroy Korean society down to the individual constituent”.

    Cities were destroyed, civilians burned to death and blown to bits with zero “tactical or strategic value”.  Killing was an “end in itself”.

    “[T]he United States Air Force was inflicting genocide”, Cumings notes, “on the citizens of North Korea.”

    *****

    “The Case Against North Korea”

    (I had posted this on 23 September 2019, to place into historical perspective the U.S. regime’s war against North Korea:)

    So, Iran didn’t ever invade America, nor did Russia. What about North Korea, then? Did North Korea ever invade America? No, neither did that alleged ‘enemy’ of America. But America did  invade North Korea during the Korean War. Have you ever seen the 764-page “Report of the International Scientific Commission for the Investigation of the Facts Concerning Bacterial Warfare in Korea and China”? It documents America’s biological warfare program against North Korea in 1952. You probably haven’t even heard about it, because the U.S. regime managed to keep it hidden from the public until just this year, and because America’s ‘news’-media continue to blacklist its existence so as to continue the ‘justification’ for the U.S. regime’s still-ongoing efforts to conquer North Korea. But look at it here, as soon as its 764 pages have finished loading into your computer. Now that the U.S. regime is increasing its threats against both North Korea and China, the Governments in those countries recently released this document to the public, and thereby are challenging the U.S. propaganda-media to allow the publics in the U.S. and its vassal nations to see it — to see real history about this matter, not just propaganda (such as the U.S. is the world’s champion of).

    This massive historical document opens:

    On the 22nd. Feb. 1952, Mr. Bak Hun-Yung, Foreign Minister of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, and on the 8th. March, Mr. Chou En-Lai, Foreign Minister of the People’s Republic of China, protested officially against the use of bacteriological warfare by the U.S.A. On the 25th. Feb., Dr. Kuo Mo-Jo, President of the Chinese People’s Committee for World Peace, addressed an appeal to the World Peace Council.

    At the meeting of the Executive Committee of the World Peace Council held at Oslo on the 29th. March, Dr. Kuo Mo-Jo, with the assistance of the Chinese delegates who accompanied him, and in the presence of the Korean representative, Mr. Li Ki-len, placed the members of the Committee, and other national delegates, in possession of much information concerning the phenomena in question. Dr. Kuo declared that the governments of China and (North) Korea did not consider the International Red Cross Committee sufficiently free from political influence to be capable of instituting an unbiassed enquiry in the field. This objection was later extended to the World Health Organisation, as a specialised agency of the United Nations. However, the two governments were entirely desirous of inviting an international group of impartial and independent scientists to proceed to China and to investigate personally the facts on which the allegations were based. They might or might not be connected with organisations working for peace, but they would naturally be persons known for their devotion to humanitarian causes. The group would have the mission of verifying or invalidating the allegations. After thorough discussion, the Executive Committee adopted unanimously a resolution calling for the formation of such an International Scientific Commission.

    Ultimately, as Jeffrey S. Kay recently explained in his superb article at Global Research introducing this document to U.S.-and-allied publics:

    Written largely by the most prestigious British scientist of his day, this report was effectively suppressed upon its release in 1952. Published now in text-searchable format, it includes hundreds of pages of evidence about the use of U.S. biological weapons during the Korean War, available for the first time to the general public.

    Back in the early 1950s, the U.S. conducted a furious bombing campaign during the Korean War, dropping hundreds of thousands of tons of ordnance, much of it napalm, on North Korea. The bombardment, worse than any country had received up to that point, excepting the effects on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, wiped out nearly every city in North Korea, contributing to well over a million civilian deaths. Because of the relentless bombing, the people were reduced to living in tunnels. Even the normally bellicose Gen. MacArthur claimed to find the devastation wreaked by the U.S. to be sickening.[1]

    The massive document itself authenticates numerous reports of the U.S. flying planes over North Korea and dropping containers of fleas, clams, and other creatures, that were tested and verified as being contaminated with plague and cholera. For example, on pages 24-26 are described several such incidents. Typical was one in which “the Commission had no option but to conclude that the American air force was employing in Korea methods very similar to, if not exactly identical with, those employed to spread plague by the Japanese during the second world war.” Furthermore, one expert “gave evidence to the effect that he had urged the Kuomintang government to make known to the world the facts concerning Japanese bacterial warfare, but without success, partly, he thought, as the result of American dissuasion.” In other words: the U.S. regime not only protected and hired ‘former’ Nazis to use against USSR, but it did the same with Japan to use against China and North Korea. This 1952 operation against North Korea was perpetrated by the regime under U.S. President Harry S. Truman — the former Vice President who had been forced onto FDR’s final ticket by that Party’s top donors in order to get a war started against the Soviet Union and thereby keep their enormous government contracts continuing after WW II. Right after FDR died, Truman got fooled by Churchill and Eisenhower into starting the Cold War against the Soviet Union; and this 1952 international war-crime against China and North Korea was part of that.

    (The Netflix series from South Korea, The Glory, is fictional but its portrayal of current South Korean culture is relevant here because it portrays South Korea as having a rigid and brutal caste-system that honors the rich and damns the poor, and thus it exemplifies in today’s generation of South Koreans the values-system that the U.S. regime has inculcated into their culture. This is an extreme version of neoliberalism-libertarianism, a zero-sum-game view of life in which individuals are evaluated mainly if not entirely by how wealthy or poor they are: rights come ONLY from wealth, and the poor are worth nothing and deserve to be trashed.)

    *****

    Indonesia

    The October 1965 through March 1966 Indonesian government extermination of anywhere from 500,000 to two million Indonesian supporters of communism and of any other left-wing (or pro-poor) political party — including supporters of Indonesia’s leader, General Sukarno, who had some leftist supporters, including some that were communists — was probably masterminded, ordered, by U.S. President Lyndon Johnson, on behalf of the owners of the mega-corporations who were backing the Democratic Party. Certainly, LBJ was behind this ‘ethnic cleansing’, even well before it began. As early as March 1965, Johnson’s people were privately vitriolic against Sukarno, who was making noises about land-reform and possibly nationalizing natural resources. For example, on 18 March 1965, “118. Memorandum From the Under Secretary of State (Ball) to President Johnson” opened:

    Our relations with Indonesia are on the verge of falling apart. Sukarno is turning more and more toward the Communist PKI. The Army, which has been the traditional countervailing force, has its own problems of internal cohesion. Within the past few days the situation has grown increasingly more ominous. Not only has the management of the American rubber plants been taken over, but there are dangers of an imminent seizure of the American oil companies.

    The coup started on 1 October 1965; General Suharto was installed to replace Sukarno, and promptly began the extermination-campaign. But he didn’t know whom to slaughter; so, as one excellent review of Vincent Bevins’s excellent book about the slaughters, The Jakarta Method: Washington’s Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World, succinctly put the matter, “The US provided arms, training, communication equipment and lists of thousands of real and alleged leftists to be killed. US-owned plantations furnished lists of ‘troublesome’ employees. US officials repeatedly sent cables to the leader of the butchery, General Suharto, to kill the leftists faster.” Other fine reviews of this book are here and here. However, like the other books that have been published about that extermination-campaign, Bevins’s focus isn’t on the masterminds who planned and bribed to get it done (its beneficiaries), but instead on the physical perpetrators and their victims. The coup-and-extermination’s ultimate beneficiaries aren’t named, nor identified.

    The U.S. did that extermination in conjunction with other members of the American gang, mainly in Europe. The Judge in the International People’s Tribunal stated that “the United States of America, the United Kingdom and Australia were all complicit to differing degrees in the commission of these crimes against humanity.” It was a Rhodesist operation, done for the U.S.-and-allied (especially Netherlands) aristocracies.

    As I have documented elsewhere, FDR was intensely opposed to all imperialisms, but on 25 July 1945, Truman made the decision to reverse FDR’s foreign policies and aim for the U.S. itself to take control over the entire world.

    (The 1982 Peter Weir movie, The Year of Living Dangerously, dramatically represents, from the standpoints of diplomats who were serving in Indonesia at the time leading up to and during the extermination-campaign, the chaotic conditions in Indonesia during that period, but sheds little light upon the reasons, methods, perpetrators, and beneficiaries, behind the massacres.)

    The post America’s “War against Communism” Was Really a War against Advocates for the Poor first appeared on Dissident Voice.

  • The U.S. Regime Made me a Non-Person

    This is what happens to anyone who happens to report the types of things that America’s billionaires want to be hidden from the public.

    To understand how it happened to me (and has happened to lots of others), an introduction is needed, first, about the American Government:

    America’s First Amendment to its Constitution is this sentence: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

    The best summary-description of what that means (as interpreted by the U.S. Supreme Court) is by the American Library Association, and includes the following crucial statement:

    “The First Amendment only prevents government restrictions on speech. It does not prevent restrictions on speech imposed by private individuals or businesses. Facebook and other social media can regulate or restrict speech hosted on their platforms because they are private entities.”

    So long as a “private” entity censors public debate, the nation’s laws cannot get involved in that — that censorship cannot be outlawed. If public debate can be squelched by private entities, that’s okay, in America’s system of Government.

    The false assumption of this system is that allowing private entities to squelch “the press” or “the news media,” is okay because different private entities will squelch different truths from being presented to the public; and, so, each citizen will select which types of truths not to know, and which types of lies to believe instead — and that’s ‘democracy’ in America. Having different private entities black-out different truths and filter-in different lies instead, will give each citizen whatever he or she wants to believe. The individual will select on the basis of one’s own prejudices. That’s the individual’s ‘freedom’. The consumer will choose which type of fool to be (such as a fool of Democratic Party billionaires, or a fool of Republican Party billionaires), and will buy (believe) whatever lies he or she wants. But is that — belief in the political falsehoods that the individual prefers — really democracy? Won’t the result be instead to cement-in whatever myths that are setting different groups in the society against each other — instead of going against whatever is actually wrong with the Government? How will whatever is wrong with the Government get fixed, that way? Is it even possible?

    Scientific empirical studies that compare what the American public want to become laws in America and of what they don’t want to become laws, versus what actually does become law and what does not, have shown that only the preferences of the very wealthiest Americans affect and shape the nation’s laws. This is a one-dollar-one-vote country, not a one-person-one-vote country. (This is an empirical fact, not a theory.) America’s Government is an aristocracy, not a democracy. It’s controlled by counting the wealth, not really by counting the persons. Furthermore, 57.16% of the money that is donated to political campaigns in the U.S. comes from the richest one-ten-thousandth (top 0.01% wealthiest) of the American people (the “original donors” — the actual individuals who donated it); so, the individuals who own the controlling interests in the corporations, think tanks, foundations, and media that shape public opinion in America and who thus determine who becomes elected and who does not, are only the very richest few, America’s actual aristocrats, the people who control the public. The public thus vote the way that the super-rich of both Parties want them to vote. There is a technology of “manufactured ‘public’ consent,” and it’s controlled by the billionaires — NOT by the public. And whereas Democratic Party billionaires determine who get nominated by their Party, and Republican billionaires determine who get nominated by their Party, virtually no one gets elected who wasn’t first selected and backed by that Party’s billionaires.

    Since those few individuals control the media, they ALSO are the ULTIMATE employers of the various censors — both on the Republican side and on the Democratic side.

    All of the media that are NOT controlled by the super-rich are small (none of them are large, or even medium-sized), and one of those is “Ms. Cat’s Chronicles”. On January 3rd, they headlined linking through to one of the 5 (out of the 200+ that I submitted it to) sites that had published my December 30th article, “Censorship Prohibits Spreading Truths, And Demands Spreading Lies”, and they gave an excerpt from the full article, and they noted “Related: Eric Zuesse’s Now-Deleted Profile at Modern Diplomacy” but here is what became of that profile. It’s gone. All of my hundreds of articles which had been published at Modern Diplomacy are gone. I am now a non-person there (which had been one of the few remaining sites that the billionaires hadn’t yet gotten under their control). And here is the full article that was linked-through to, by “Ms. Cat”: it was published at Oriental Review, “Censorship Prohibits Spreading Truths, And Demands Spreading Lies”, and it explains, and fully documents, how the owner of Modern Diplomacy was forced, by ‘NewsGuard’ in Washington DC, to remove me — the author there that had drawn more page-views than any other author there. And yet, all of those articles now are gone. And you can see described there how it was done, and you can also see that truthfulness had nothing whatsoever to do with my being removed, but that my reporting the ‘wrong’ truths had everything to do with it. A censoring organization that had been funded by some billionaires’ agents, and called itself a “news guard” for the general public, did it. I report truths that all American billionaires (the people who actually control the U.S. Government) want Americans NOT to know. And now, the billionaires are going after EVEN the few (all of them very small) remaining sites, that publish SOME articles that the billionaires want the public NOT to see.

    There is no way to solve this, other than by outlawing ALL censorship, and allowing the public to see everything — regardless of whether or not some ‘news’-media owner, or billionaire-funded ‘NewsGuard’ service, doesn’t like it.

    Censorship that’s done by the agents of the billionaires who control a Government is just as vile as is censorship that’s done DIRECTLY BY that Government. ALL censorship should be outlawed, regardless of who does that censorship. Otherwise, how is an authentic democracy even possible?

    This problem can exist ONLY in a country that has enormous wealth-inequality (such as the U.S. does) and that allows by law (such as the U.S. does) agents of its very wealthiest few to coerce all but a few of the smallest news media to eliminate — not to publish — whatever those super-wealthy individuals want to be blacklisted (not published). The reality in the U.S. today is a ‘democracy’ of, by, and for, only its super-rich, none of whom want the public to know this fact. One way or another, a country that has enormous wealth-inequality will be a dictatorship; and no dictatorship can exist and be perpetuated without censorship. Censorship is the cardinal mark of any dictatorship. Only without censorship can democracy exist, at all. To censor is to mentally control another person — not to inform that person. It is mentally to enslave, not to free, that person. It is not to educate but to miseducate and manipulate that person. Any authentic democracy will do everything possible to prevent censorship.

    Julian Assange has been imprisoned by the UK on the demand by the U.S. for over a decade now, though never convicted of anything, but ONLY because he was the world’s most effective champion against censorship and for international democracy and personal accountability. To call either of these countries a democracy is to lie, and to insult the very term “democracy.” What Governments deserve to be overthrown and replaced more than those two do? However, any such revolution must be against censorship, and must itself be overthrown and replaced if it entails any censorship. To replace one dictatorship by another is no path toward freedom.

    The post The U.S. Regime Made me a Non-Person first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Censorship Prohibits Spreading Truths and Demands Spreading Lies

    When U.S. President George W. Bush, on 7 September 2002, said that the IAEA had just come out with a “new report” concluding that Saddam Hussein was only six months away from having a nuclear weapon, and the IAEA three times denied it, the President’s allegation grew into, and became the basis for, America’s ‘justification’ to invade Iraq on 20 March 2003, while the IAEA’s denial was hidden by the ‘news’-media — censored-out by them all (except for only one tiny and unclear news-story that only one small news-medium published three weeks later and few people even noticed — and which news-report didn’t even so much as just mention that it had related to the U.S. President’s allegation, much less that it disproved that allegation: that America’s President had lied his country into — deceived his own public into supporting — that invasion).

    This is an example of censorship to require lies, and to prohibit truths. And that is what censorship is generally intended to do. An author can write or say truths, but if no one will publish it, what good is it? What good is such ‘freedom of the press’? What good was it? (The IAEA knew.) None, at all (except for the international corporations that profited from America’s takeover of Iraq, and that served them by publishing those clients’ propaganda as ‘news’, such as in “You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours”).

    I specialize in documenting such censorship to enforce lies and prohibit truths, but I find that the public isn’t much concerned about this problem; most people simply assume it doesn’t even exist, and that if any censorship does exist, it is to prohibit lies instead of truths (the exact opposite of what it really is). They are thus doubly deceived. On December 27th, Russia’s RT headlined “Every social media firm censors for US government”, documenting that claim with links to the sources, and noting that it pertains to at least Twitter, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Reddit, and Pinterest, and that it’s controlled by collusion between those corporations and the Government in order to hide truths — including partisan political truths — so as to pump up the public’s support for current Governmental policies, to continue those policies by continuing those leaders in office. It’s essential to retaining the regime.

    This censorship is so normal in America so that on 24 November 2016, the Washington Post headlined “Russian propaganda effort helped spread ‘fake news’ during election, experts say”, and it reported that a

    group, called PropOrNot, a nonpartisan collection of researchers with foreign policy, military and technology backgrounds, planned to release its own findings Friday showing the startling reach and effectiveness of Russian propaganda campaigns. (Update: The report came out on Saturday).

    The researchers used Internet analytics tools to trace the origins of particular tweets and mapped the connections among social-media accounts that consistently delivered synchronized messages. Identifying website codes sometimes revealed common ownership. In other cases, exact phrases or sentences were echoed by sites and social-media accounts in rapid succession, signaling membership in connected networks controlled by a single entity.

    PropOrNot’s monitoring report, which was provided to The Washington Post in advance of its public release, identifies more than 200 websites as routine peddlers of Russian propaganda during the election season, with combined audiences of at least 15 million Americans. On Facebook, PropOrNot estimates that stories planted or promoted by the disinformation campaign were viewed more than 213 million times.

    It wasn’t “nonpartisan,” and it was, instead, censorship to enforce lies — not to prohibit them — and that ‘news’paper was praising it by spreading its lies about itself (i.e., that the WP wasn’t itself one of the top spreaders of “fake ‘news’” — which, like all mainstream (and many non-mainstream) ‘news’-peddlers, it was and is). In fact: many of the “more than 200 websites as routine peddlers of Russian propaganda” were publishing more truths and less lies than such mainstream ‘news’-media as the WP itself was and does. But that’s an unpublishable truth, because it’s a truth that exposes themselves to be precisely what they condemn.

    If you want to be censored-out from America’s mainstream — and from most of America’s non-mainstream — ‘news’ media, just prove that they are fraudulent; that’ll do it, every time.

    There was no accountability for either Bush’s, or his ‘news’-media’s, lying America into invading and occupying Iraq — providing knowingly false ‘justifications’ for that (in order to do it ‘democratically’ — with support by the majority of voters). However, to expose, such lying, gets a journalist censored-out 100% (in this anything-but-democratic country).

    On 5 February 2003, U.S. SecState Colin Powell addressed the U.N. Security Council urging its authorization to invade (which didn’t come). He said that Saddam’s Government was hiding crucial information, and “Some of the material is classified and related to Iraq’s nuclear program. Tell me, answer me, are the inspectors to search the house of every government official, every Baath Party member and every scientist in the country to find the truth, to get the information they need, to satisfy the demands of our council?” The next day, all major U.S. newspapers editorialized that, as the Washington Post headlined “Irrefutable”, saying that, “Whether Iraq is disarmed through the authority of the United Nations or whether the United States effectively assumes responsibility depends on how the Security Council responds.” In other words: this issue was to stand as a test not of the U.S., but of the U.N. And definitely not of the ‘news’-media, at all. On 22 March 2019, the WP’s “Fact Checker” columnist issued a 2,000+word retrospective, “The Iraq War and WMDs: An intelligence failure or White House spin?” which concluded “It’s too fuzzy for the Pinocchio Test [“True” vs. “False”], as it also falls in the realm of opinion [supposedly meaning statements that are neither true nor false but ONLY about what the person wants others to believe — and that statement about “opinion” is itself FALSE]”; and, so, he was alleging, both the “Bush administration” and its intelligence agencies had failed (even though both actually succeeded because they — with the assistance of the Washington Post and others — had deceived the public). His lengthy column 100% avoided any reference to the IAEA — whose Bush-alleged but non-existent “new report” had gotten the regime’s PR campaign to invade Iraq started. Nobody (certainly no U.S. ‘news’-medium) even noticed that the IAEA as the alleged source of the nuclear allegation had somehow mysteriously disappeared (much less wondered why it disappeared in the press, and from the Government). Colin Powell’s speech made no mention of the IAEA. There was constant hiding of the fact that America’s President had lied in order to start the allegation as having originated from the IAEA (the U.N.-authorized investigation-agency on nuclear matters — and Powell was addressing the U.N.). The media hid his lies, and their own lies, to back up the U.S. president’s lies. And (unlike on issues that are politically partisan in the U.S.) this was unanimous lying, by the U.S.-and-allied press.

    I shall here cite my own personal experience to explain why I think that the public (which is so deceived as to be largely supportive of censorship) should be very much concerned about this (censorship), if they care at all about democracy. The incident in which the invasion of Iraq resulted from censorship is what had caused me, in 2002, to focus upon this problem, because it made clear to me that I was living under a dictatorship. I hadn’t previously been certain of this subsequently proven fact about America. So: that incident was a turning-point for me. A second such turning-point for me was the start in 2014 of the war in Ukraine:

    Back in or around 2014, 43 international-news media were publishing my articles, and some of them were mainstream liberal media, some were mainstream conservative, and others were libertarian, but the vast majority were non-mainstream. When Barack Obama in February 2014 perpetrated a coup in Ukraine that installed a rabidly anti-Russian government there on Russia’s border and that was instead ‘reported’ as-if it had been a ‘democratic revolution’, which coup-imposed regime perpetrated a massacre against its pro-Russian protestors inside the Trade Unions Building in Odessa on 2 May 2014 (see especially the charred bodies of its victims at 1:50:00- in that video), I started writing about Ukraine; and, then, those 43 international-news sites gradually whittled themselves down to only 7; and, yet, none of them ever alleged that anything in any of my articles was false and asked me to prove it true, but they were instead getting pressure from Google, and from the FBI, and from other Establishment U.S. entities, and were afraid of being forced out of business (which many of them ultimately were) by them. The personal narrative that will now be provided here is about the latest of these cases, which threatens the site Modern Diplomacy, which had been an excellent international-affairs news site and included writers from all across the international-affairs news spectrum, for and against every Government’s policies, and from practically every angle. I had long been expecting MD (because of its impartiality) to receive a warning from the U.S. regime, and this finally happened late in December 2022, when the site’s founder, D., sent me this notice:

    Dear Eric, do you know who are these guys? https://www.newsguardtech.com/ratings/rating-process-criteria/

    They sent me an email with allegations mentioning your articles as false claims and MD as a pro-kremlin propaganda website due to these.

    Do they have any influence on Search engines and social media? Will we have any problems at all?

    Thanks

    D.

    I replied with an email

    Subject: Since you are a co-founder,

    Date: Dec 24, 2022 at 9:20 AM

    To: moc.hcetdraugswennull@llirb.nevets

    Cc: [D.]

    I ask you please to explain to me, and to the webmaster at moderndiplomacy.eu, why your organization — well, here is what he sent me about what your organization did:

    [I pasted in D.’s message to me.]

    As you can see there, he is afraid (that’s a weak version of terrorized) that your organization will downgrade his site because of his site’s posting some of my articles.

    It seems to me that there are two reasonable types of responses that you can give him and me:

    Either you will cite falsehoods in one or more of my articles at his site 

    https://moderndiplomacy.eu/author/ericzuesse/ 

    (but, of course, you could also do that regarding any edition of the New York Times or Washington Post; so, why would that be a reason?), or else:

    You could search to find such falsehoods, find none, ask your employee why he or she is terrorizing that webmaster and (essentially) indirectly threatening me; and, if that employee fails to provide a reasonable and entirely true answer, which justifies what he or she has done, fire that person and inform the rest of your staff that you have done so and explain to all of them WHY you fired the employee, so that they all can then know to STOP DOING THIS!!!

    Sincerely,

    Eric Zuesse

    Brill didn’t respond. So, I sent to D.:

    I take my not having received a reply from either Steven Brill or you to be an ominous sign, because, suddenly, none of my recent articles has been posted by your site. Would you please explain? (If you are cancelling me as an author, I shall remove your site from my submissions-list.) After all, you said “They sent me an email with allegations mentioning your articles as false claims and MD as a pro-kremlin propaganda website due to these.” Did they state what those “false claims” were? Did you ask them? I very much doubt that they were able to find anything in any of my articles that is false. No one has ever before, to my knowledge, alleged any assertion in any of my articles to be false. I don’t ever make a claim that is false. I am EXCEEDINGLY careful. And any assertion in any of my articles that I think some readers MIGHT find questionable I provide a link to its documentation. So, I would distrust that allegation from Brill’s organization and consider it to be likely a lie from them in order to censor out from the news-media information that the U.S. regime wishes the public not to know. Would you not want to know whether that allegation from them was merely an excuse to censor out from your site information that they don’t want the public to know?

    D. responded:

    Dear Eric,

    Sorry for the late reply. Thank you for your efforts in contacting newsguard, although I was surprised to see that you used my message I sent you in your contact email without my consent. Now they know I took it seriously. Anyway, I decided to stop publishing your articles — at least for a while and see how it goes. Part of my decision was of course the threats (not only from them) but also the fact that you are spreading them to a lot of websites and that google considers it as “scraped content”. I will try to stay in exclusive content although I appreciate your work and your courage.

    I worked really hard these 10 years for MD and still can’t monetize it to support the expenses and me of course. Also I am tired and I am thinking about the possibility to find a buyer and stand back. Just keep it in mind, in case you find someone interested in it.

    Of course we can stay in touch and keep sending me your articles — at least to have the opportunity to read them.

    Below, you will find newsguard allegations concerning your articles. Please don’t use it to reply to them — we both know that there is no use. Instead, maybe you can write a new piece debunking them.

    Kind Regards

    D.

    Here is what he had received from News Guard, and which I shall here debunk [between brackets]:

    We found that Modern Diplomacy articles often link to sites rated as unreliable by NewsGuard for promoting false information, such as OrientalReview.org, pro-Kremlin site TheDuran.com, and en.interaffairs.ru <http://en.interaffairs.ru> , owned by the Russian Foreign Ministry. The site has also republished articles from sites such as The Gray Zone, rated unfavorably by NewsGuard for repeatedly publishing false claims about the Russia-Ukraine war and Syrian chemical attacks. Could you comment on why Modern Diplomacy republishes or links to sites which consistently promote false claims?

    [Rating allegations as “true” or as “false” ON THE BASIS OF the identity of the SITE instead of on the basis of the specific allegation in the specific article (or video) is a standard method of deception of the public, which censors employ to distract and manipulate individuals (readers, etc.) by appealing to their existing prejudices such as (for an American conservative or Republican) “Don’t trust the N.Y. Times” or (for an American liberal or Democrat) “Don’t trust the N.Y. Post” (or, for both, “Russia is bad and wrong, and America is good and right”). It is appealing to prejudices and emotions, instead of to facts and evidence — it is NOT appealing to actual truth and falsity. It is a method of deception.]

                   We also found that ModernDiplomacy.eu has repeatedly published false and misleading claims about the Russia-Ukraine war.

                   For example, a June 2022 article titled “Have Europeans been profoundly deceived?,” claims to provide evidence that “A coup occurred in Ukraine during February 2014 under the cover of pro-EU demonstrations that the U.S. Government had been organizing ever since at least June 2011.”

    [The word “coup” in that article was linked to this video, every detail of which I have carefully checked and verified to include ONLY evidence that is authentic — and no one has contested any of the evidence in it. The first item of evidence that is referred-to in this video is at 0:35, which item is the audio of a private phone-conversation between two top EU officials in which one, who was in Kiev while the coup was occurring, reported to his boss, who wanted to know whether it was a revolution or instead a coup, and he reported to her that it was a coup, and described to her the evidence, which convinced her. My article later says “Here is that phone-conversation, and here is its transcript along with explanations (to enable understanding of what he was telling her, and of what her response to it indicated — that though it was a disappointment to her, she wouldn’t let the fact that it had been a coup affect EU policies).” This news-reporting is of real evidence, not distractions, not any appeal to the reader’s (and listener’s) prejudices, either. But Mr. Brill’s employee apparently didn’t check my article’s sources (gave no indication of having clicked onto any of my links), because he or she was judging on the basis purely of that person’s own prejudices — NOT upon the basis of any evidence. Then, at 3:35 in that video, is audio of another private phone-conversation, which was of Obama’s planner of the coup, Victoria Nuland, telling his Ambassador in Ukraine, Geoffrey Pyatt, whom to get appointed to run the stooge-regime after the coup will be over, “Yats” Yatsenyuk, which then was done. My article also says “Here is that phone-conversation, and here is its transcript along with explanations (to enable understanding of whom she was referring to in it, and why).” The reference to “June 2011” had appeared in this passage from a prior article of mine, where that two-word phrase linked to Julian Assange’s personal account of the matter — the Obama Administration’s early planning-stage for the coup in Ukraine — that explains how those “pro-EU demonstrations” had been engineered by Obama’s agents. So: everything in that paragraph by Brill’s employee was fully documented in my links — which that person didn’t care to check.]

                   However, there is no evidence that the 2014 Maidan revolution in Ukraine that led to the ouster of then-president Viktor Yanukovych was a coup orchestrated by the United States. … Angry protesters demanded Yanukovych’s immediate resignation, and hundreds of police officers guarding government buildings abandoned their posts. Yanukovych fled the same day the agreement was signed, and protesters took control of several government buildings the next day. The Ukrainian parliament then voted 328-0 to remove Yanukovych from office and scheduled early presidential elections the following May, the BBC reported. These events, often collectively referred to as the “Maidan revolution,” were extensively covered by international media organizations with correspondents in Ukraine, including the BBC, the Associated Press, and The New York Times.

                   Could you please comment on why Modern Diplomacy repeated this false claim, despite evidence to the contrary?

                   A March 2022 article titled “Who actually CAUSED this war in Ukraine?” states that “Russia had done everything it could to avoid needing to invade Ukraine in order to disempower the nazis who have been running the country ever since Obama’s 2014 coup placed it into the hands of rabidly anti-Russian racist-fascists there.”

                   In fact, Nazis are not running Ukraine. … Svoboda won 2.2 percent of the vote. Svoboda currently holds one parliamentary seat.

                   In February 2022, U.S. news site the Jewish Journal published a statement signed by 300 scholars of the Holocaust, Nazism and World War II, which said that “the equation of the Ukrainian state with the Nazi regime” is “factually wrong, morally repugnant and deeply offensive to the memory of millions of victims of Nazism and those who courageously fought against it.” Additionally, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who is Jewish, addressed the Russian public in a Feb. 24, 2022, speech, saying that these claims do not reflect the “real” Ukraine. “You are told we are Nazis. But could people who lost more than 8 million lives in the battle against Nazism support Nazism?”

                   Could you please comment on why Modern Diplomacy repeated this false claim [that “the nazis who have been running the country ever since Obama’s 2014 coup placed it into the hands of rabidly anti-Russian racist-fascists there”], despite evidence to the contrary?

    [Yet again, Mr. Brill’s employee simply ignores my evidence — fails even to click onto my links whenever he disagrees with an allegation that has a link. Here was my published assertion, as it was published: “Russia had done everything it could to avoid needing to invade Ukraine in order to disempower the nazis who have been running the country ever since Obama’s 2014 coup placed it into the hands of rabidly anti-Russian racist-fascists there.” The evidence is right there, just a click away, but Mr. Brill’s employee again wasn’t interested in seeing the evidence. (Nor is Brill himself.)]

                   An April 2022 article titled “Authentic War-Reporting From Ukraine,” promotes a video report by pro-Kremlin journalist, Patrick Lancaster, filmed in the Eastern Donbas region of Ukraine. The article asserts that Ukraine was “constantly shelling into that region in order to kill and/or compell to flee anybody who lived in that region […] It was an ethnic cleansing in order to get rid of enough of those residents so that, if ever that area would again become integrated into Ukraine and its remaining residents would therefore be voting again in Ukrainian national elections, the U.S.-installed nazi Ukrainian regime will ‘democratically’ be able to continue to rule in Ukraine.” (The article also repeats the claim that the 2014 revolution was a US-backed coup, and makes the unverified claim that “The CIA has instructed all of Ukraine’s nazis (or racist-fascists) to suppress their anti-Semitism and White Supremacy until after Ukraine has become admitted into NATO.”)

                   The claim that Ukraine conducted an “ethnic cleansing” in the Donbas echoes a falsehood propagated by the Russian government for years. There is no evidence supporting the claim that genocide occurred in Ukraine’s eastern region of Donbas. The International Criminal Court, the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, and the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe have all said they have found no evidence of genocide in Donbas. The U.S. mission to the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe called the genocide claim a “reprehensible falsehood” in a Feb. 16, 2022 post on its official Twitter account. It said that the mission “has complete access to the government-controlled areas of Ukraine and HAS NEVER reported anything remotely resembling Russia’s claims.”

                   Could you please comment on why Modern Diplomacy repeated this false claim, despite evidence to the contrary?

    [Yet again, Mr. Brill’s employee relies upon people’s opinions — but ONLY ones who agree with his — instead of any evidence at all. Here, on behalf of myself, and of Modern Diplomacy, and of Patrick Lancaster (INSTEAD OF on behalf of Lockheed Martin and the other U.S.-and-allied international-corporate entities that are profiting from this war), are nine news-reports linking to actual evidence which disproves those opinions:

    “Mortar shelling in Kramatorsk. Nazis attacking city district.” 18 May 2014

    “Ukraine crisis: ‘Those fascists killed this girl and they will be in hell’” 5 May 2014

    “Ukraine Crisis: Kiev’s Slovyansk ‘Anti-Terrorist Operation’ Kills 300 Pro-Russian Separatists” 4 June 2014

    “Luhansk. After Air Strike. Part 4 (of 6)” 2 June 2014

    “AP’s Matt Lee challenges White House’s lies on Ukraine” 7 July 2014

    “Obama Definitely Caused the Malaysian Airliner to Be Downed” 18 July 2014

    “How Our People Do Their Extermination-Jobs In Ukraine” 23 October 2014

    “What Obama’s Ukrainian Stooges Did” 10 October 2014

    “Brookings Wants More Villages Firebombed in Ukraine’s ‘Anti Terrorist Operation’” 3 February 2015]

    My final reply to D.’s final rejection of my position was:

    As regards myself, I am with Chris Hedges (who quit the N.Y. Times over this) and with Consortium News (which is standing up against the same pressure that you are caving to), in order to have any hope that the future might possibly be better than the present.

    At the same time when News Guard was threatening Modern Diplomacy and perhaps forcing that site to reject all future submissions from me, the news-site, Consortium News, was likewise being threatened by Brill’s shills. On December 29th, Consortium News headlined “On the Influence of Neo-Nazism in Ukraine: A short history of neo-Nazism in Ukraine in response to NewsGuard’s charge that Consortium News published false content about its extent”. That, too, is an excellent example of censors killing truths and leaving only lies. However, mega-corporate America has a number of such ‘fact-checking’ truth-destroying organizations: New Guard is only one of them.

    These self-styled truth-policemen of the Web represent the regime, and came into being after the Web itself did. The Web enabled — for the first time in history — articles to be published and read that link to their sources, and this opened up a new possibility and reality, in which the online readers could actually evaluate ON THEIR OWN (by clicking onto such links) the evidence. That upset the billionaires’ applecarts of ‘authoritative opinion’ (which they have hired) so that authoritarianism (which they control) could become replaced by facts (which they can’t).

    The least reliable means of forming or even of changing one’s opinions are means such as ink-on-paper allegations (newspapers, magazines, etc.) that cannot even POSSIBLY provide immediate direct online links to the items of evidence; and the MOST reliable means are online articles and books (such as my new one, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL, whose ebook versions do document allegations by means of such online links — it’s the first-ever book to do so) which constantly bring directly to one’s computer or other Web-online device the items of evidence whenever the reader has any doubt about a given allegation’s veracity or not. That way the individual can form one’s opinion on the basis only of the evidence.

    Anyone whose opinions are based upon the opinions of other people who believe as that person does, instead of on the basis of purely the facts of the matter and of ONE’S OWN investigations seeking out evidence both for and evidence against any alleged fact, will simply believe the myths that one already believes, and will only become more and more convinced of those falsehoods, as one grows older.

    The function of censorship is to prohibit spreading truths. It poisons democracy, to death. Censors kill democracies. That’s what they are being paid to do. And they do it.

    The post Censorship Prohibits Spreading Truths and Demands Spreading Lies first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • America’s 2022 Allocations to Ukraine Total $112 Billion

    During this year, the U.S. Government has allocated $112 billion to Ukraine, in order to defeat Russia in the battlefields of Ukraine. Russia allocates normally $60 billion per year for its entire military, but this year has increased that 40% to $84 billion, because of its invasion of Ukraine. Russia invaded Ukraine because, on 17 December 2021, Russia had demanded that the U.S. Government and its NATO anti-Russian military alliance stop trying to place its missiles on and near Russia’s borders (especially in Ukraine, which is the nearest of all bordering nations to Moscow); and, on 7 January 2022 America and NATO said no. Russia then invaded Ukraine on 24 February 2022, in order to prevent Ukraine from becoming a launch-pad for U.S. missiles. That’s what the war in Ukraine is — and always has been — about, from the Russian viewpoint: not being faced with U.S. missiles that are only a five-minute missile-flight-time away from Russia’s central command in Moscow.

    The war in Ukraine started in February 2014, by America’s coup there that overthrew Ukraine’s democratically elected neutralist Government and replaced it by a rabidly anti-Russian and pro-American one on Russia’s border, in order ultimately to become able to place just 317 miles away from the Kremlin U.S. missiles which would be only a five-minute flight-time away from nuking Russia’s central command — far too little time in order for Russia’s central command to be able to verify that launch and then to launch its own retaliatory missiles. It would be nuclear checkmate of Russia, by the U.S. (with the assistance of its NATO allies, which then would include Ukraine).

    Whereas Russia’s objective is to not become nuclear checkmated by America placing its missiles that close to Moscow, America’s objective is to nuclear checkmate Russia in order to capture the world’s largest and most resource-rich country — to force Russia to capitulate and become another U.S. ‘ally’ (that is, vassal-nation).

    President Biden had requested Congress to add $38 billion more this year for Ukraine than the $67 billion that was funded earlier in the year, but Congress decided to increase his requested amount by $7 billion (almost a 20% increase in his suggested increase), so that there will be a total of $45 billion added to the $67 billion previously allocated, for a total U.S. allocation to Ukraine this year of $112 billion. That amount is $28 billion more than Russia will have spent this year for all of its military — the vast majority of which Russian military expenditure isn’t being allocated to the war in Ukraine, but instead to other aspects of Russia’s defense against the threat to its national security from America and its allies. America alone has been spending annually  on its military around 20 times what Russia has been spending on its; and, in order to make America’s expenditure appear not to be so gargantuan as it actually is, large portions of it are being paid out from other federal Departments than the Defense (or Aggression) Department, but the total annual U.S. military expenditures have, for over a decade, been over a trillion dollars per year.

    On November 16, I headlined “U.S. Will Have Spent $100B on Ukraine This Year,” and now it’s clear that my prediction was on the conservative side, by $12 billion.

    The post America’s 2022 Allocations to Ukraine Total $112 Billion first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Foreign Affairs are of Virtually No Interest to American Voters

    Foreign affairs, including national security, don’t show among the 14 types of issues in the recent Gallup article, “Government Remains Americans’ Top Problem in 2022”: all of the 14 issue-areas that did show were the top issue for at least 3% of Gallup’s respondents in 2022, and all of them were domestic issues, not international— not foreign-affairs issues. However, one of them was “Immigration,” which was #6 and was the top issue for 6% of the respondents. Though not an international issue, it’s a border issue, and therefore borders on being an international one.

    Here are the 14 issues, and the % for each of them:

    Government 19%
    High cost of living/Inflation 16%
    Economy in general 12%
    Immigration 6%
    Unifying the country 5%
    COVID-19 4%
    Race relations 4%
    Crime 4%
    Gas prices 3%
    Judicial system 3%
    Poverty/Hunger/Homelessness 3%
    Abortion 3%
    Ethics/Morals 3%
    Environment 3%

    *****

    And here, as reported on November 9th, by the Washington Post, were “How different groups are voting according to exit polls and AP VoteCast”:

    Network exit poll

    Abortion (27%)
    76% [Democrat]
    23% [Republican]
    Inflation     (31%)
    28%
    71%
    Crime (11%)
    41%
    57%
    Immigration     (10%)
    25%
    73%
    Gun policy (11%)
    60%
    37%

    About 3 in 10 voters said inflation was the most important issue in their vote according to the exit poll, and roughly 7 in 10 of those voters supported Republicans. Almost as many voters said abortion was their most important issue and those voters supported Democrats by an even wider margin. About 1 in 10 voters each said crime, immigration and gun policy were their most important issues.

    *****

    The reason why abortion was only 3% in the Gallup polling but was 27% (nine times higher) in the election is that whereas the Gallup number was an average throughout the entire year of Gallup’s sampling American public opinion, the election happened less than six months after the U.S. Supreme Court ended the 1973 Roe v. Wade Supreme Court ruling that had ended the national and state laws that had banned abortions; this was a shocker because all of the ‘Justices’ had promised in their confirmation-hearings that they’d respect and adhere-to existing longstanding Supreme-Court precedents, including that one. Apparently, Democratic women became increasingly fearful of the impact that the overturning-decision would have, as Election Day drew closer and news-reports about the decision’s results were published; and, so, election forecasters underestimated the electoral impact that this court-ruling would have. The Republican Donald Trump had done the most of any President to enable Roe to become overturned, and when it was, millions of American women became increasingly terrified and determined to vote.

    But, anyway, the U.S. Government can do virtually anything in international affairs and not have any need to worry that it will significantly affect electoral outcomes. Perhaps none of the U.S. Presidential and congressional elections since 1945 would have had any different outcomes if U.S. foreign policies had been different. If foreign affairs are important — and they do constitute (including nation ‘defense’ in all federal Departments, not only the ‘Defense’ Department) the vast majority of the U.S. Government’s discretionary spending — then they nonetheless are quite beyond the reach of whatever democracy might possibly exist in America (which is little-to-none, in any case). Whatever their actual importance may be, the U.S. public doesn’t care, to any significant extent, about such issues. 

    The post Foreign Affairs are of Virtually No Interest to American Voters first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • U.S. Asks More Nations to Become Targets of Russian and Chinese Missiles

    According to a December 6th report by the Congressional Research Service, the United States Government is, and since May has been, offering inducements to foreign countries that are not yet bases from which the U.S. is being allowed to position and launch missiles against Russia and/or China, to become such bases, which would make those nations become additional targets for Russian and/or Chinese missiles. The U.S. is seeking to spread Russia’s and China’s military targets to countries that aren’t yet such targets. Doing this would increase the amounts of weaponry that are being sold, and that would especially benefit American weapons-manufacturers because America is the world’s largest manufacturer of military weapons, and also because the second and third largest such manufacturers, Russia and China, have weapons-producers that are majority-owned by their Government itself, and therefore the weapons-makers there don’t respond primarily to investors, but instead to the nation’s actual and authentic national-defense needs (the Government’s needs). America’s ‘Defense’ firms, such as Lockheed Martin, fund the careers of and thereby control its politicians and Government and its ‘defense’-policies, in order to be able to control their own markets, which are mainly the U.S. Government but also the U.S.-allied Governments (which likewise are controlled largely by such private investors in military-related firms), but in both Russia and China, which still retain socialism regarding their military manufacturers, the Government controls its “Defense” firms; and, so, their defense-policies are strictly for defense (that national, instead of private, purpose), whereas in America and its allied countries, the ‘defense’-firms are for aggression (because producing wars is what benefits the investors in those firms, which control their own Government and its ‘allies’ or vassal-Governments).

    Here is the passage from the Congressional Research Service report:

    Reportedly, in May 2022, the Secretary of the Army stated the Army did not yet have basing agreements for longrange systems but “discussions were ongoing” with a number of countries in the Indo-Pacific region. Given the importance of basing, Congress might examine ongoing efforts to secure Army long-range precision fires unit basing in both Europe and the Indo-Pacific region.

    These Governments “in both Europe and the Indo-Pacific region” are close enough to Russia, and to China, so that if the United States goes to war against Russia and/or China directly (instead of, as now, indirectly — such as it does in both Ukraine on Russia’s border, and Taiwan on China’s border) to conquer Russia and/or China, then those missiles, which will be targeted against one or both of those two countries, will be within range of either Moscow or else Beijing, and will, therefore, become assets adding to America’s likelihood of entirely controlling a post-WW-III world. Largely because military weapons are, in the U.S. and its ‘allied’ countries, controlled by private investors (basically by U.S.-and-allied billionaires), the U.S. Government’s main objective is to control a post-WW-III world. In other words: that Government’s main objective is aggression (defense is actually only secondary). By contrast, in both Russia and China, the entire militaries are designed and function solely for the purpose of national defense, which means preventing, instead of winning, a WW III. In both Russia and China, the ONLY objective of the military, and the MAIN objective of all OTHER policies, is, in fact, defense of the nation. In the U.S. and its ‘allied’ nations, the MAIN objective of the entire Government is expansion of the U.S. empire for it to control ultimately every nation — which means the conquest of every nation that isn’t already part of it. Whereas the top objective of the U.S. Government is imperial — not to prevent but to win a WW III — the top objective of its targeted nations (or ‘enemies’) is instead national (actually to prevent a WW III). And this explains the respective foreign (including military and diplomatic) policies, on each of the two sides: imperialistic versus anti-imperialistic. That is how to interpret and understand each side: it is the difference in perspective — that of the predator (on America’s side), versus that of its prey (on the side of the predator’s intended victims).

    A commonly expressed view by proponents of the predator’s side in international relations is that if its side becomes defeated or fades, then there will be no basic change except the identity of the predator. That viewpoint (everyone’s being psychopathic) might be universally true in the state of nature, but not necessarily in the state of civilization. Both Russia and China have repeatedly condemned, on a moral basis — an anti-imperialistic basis — the predatory perspective in international relations, the win-lose or “zero-sum-game” view, and have — at least verbally — promised that if and when the U.S. becomes defeated or simply fades-out, both Russia and China will move forward ONLY on a win-win (i.e., anti-imperialistic) basis regarding all other nations. America’s President Franklin Delano Roosevelt passionately expressed, repeatedly, both in private and in public, the same commitment, to an only win-win future, that Russia and China now express: a repugnance and rejection of any and all imperialism. However, his immediate two successors, Truman and Eisenhower, despised FDR and promptly committed the U.S., on 25 July 1945, to America’s ultimately conquering the entire world. America has been on that path ever since (to win WW III), and the Biden Administration is especially obsessively so. (Perhaps Biden fears he’ll die soon and wants to be around to see America controlling the entire world, so is rushing things along; but, in any case, he is turning out to be a terrific performer for the people who invested in him, among the mega-donors, including, for example, a former Vice Chairman and top investor in Lockheed Martin who helped organize Biden’s billionaires, and — as a Democrat, which means hypocrite — had said publicly that “I frankly believe that both Democrats and Republicans [referring only to members of Congress — the people whom people such as he himself buy] … are overly influenced by the defense industry in this country.” Biden keeps his secret promises to his mega-donors, but ignores his public promises to his voters. That’s the way America’s ‘democracy’ works.)

    In the imperial world of government-by-corruption, government is for sale always to the highest bidders, and in the vassal-nations it means that “ongoing efforts to secure Army long-range precision fires unit basing in both Europe and the Indo-Pacific region” will — since that will necessarily mean their own nation’s becoming targeted by the missiles of Russia and/or China — a “public/private partnership” or legal bribe being paid to the vassal-nation’s leaders in order for the U.S. Government to be able to win that ultimate sacrifice of the given vassal-nation. Of course, such bribes are private, not public, since those are vassal-nations and their ‘democracy’ is only a mockery of the real thing.

    The post U.S. Asks More Nations to Become Targets of Russian and Chinese Missiles first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The Stupidity of Russia’s Legislated Heterosexuality

    Legislating heterosexuality is laws that impose penalties for being or publicly expressing non-coercive or “mutually consensual” sexuality of other than the heterosexual type. Such laws can affect lots of people — especially young people, and here is why we know that they hit especially the young:

    On 16 August 2015, Britain’s YouGov polling firm headlined “1 in 2 young people say they are not 100% heterosexual”  and opened: “Asked to plot themselves on a ‘sexuality scale’, 23% of British people choose something other than 100% heterosexual – and the figure rises to 49% among 18-24 year olds.” It went on to report, “With each generation, people see their sexuality as less fixed in stone. The results for 18-24 year-olds are particularly striking, as 43% place themselves in the non-binary area between 1 and 5 and 52% place themselves at one end or the other. Of these, only 46% say they are completely heterosexual and 6% as completely homosexual.”

    On 31 March 2022, Bloomberg News headlined “One in Five High Schoolers Isn’t Heterosexual, CDC Survey Finds” and opened “One in five high school students does not identify as heterosexual.” It said:

    The Adolescent Behaviors and Experiences Survey issued by the [U.S.] Centers for Disease Control and Prevention polled just under 8,000 U.S. high school students between Jan. and June of 2021. … Some 22.5% of respondents said they were gay, lesbian or bisexual, or that they identified in some other way or were questioning their sexual identity.

    The findings are in keeping with a Gallup poll released last month, in which almost 21% of Gen-Z respondents aged 18 and over identified as members of the LGBTQ community — more than any other generation.

    The fact that a higher percentage of younger people than of older people (who have become more acculturated to norms with the passage of their years) self-identify as not being exclusively heterosexual, indicates that as people get older, they increasingly self-identify as being heterosexual. This fact suggests that, at least to some extent, a person’s sexual orientation is not natural but instead is acculturated — the result of conforming to the norm (which norm is naturally heterosexual).

    What is normal (or even natural) is not necessarily better than something that is abnormal (or even unnatural). For example: genius is abnormal, but it is certainly better than normal. (And an effective and safe medication is unnatural, but it is certainly an improvement.) On the opposite side, sadism is abnormal, and it is certainly worse than normal. (And going without things that don’t occur in nature can shorten a person’s lifespan.) Popular prejudices to the contrary notwithstanding. However, regarding sexual orientation, there is no reason to prefer one over another, other than to conform to the normal (in order to “fit in”). In other words: the only reason to prefer what is the norm in this matter (sexual orientation), is not, at all, ethical but is instead self-interested (or pejoratively called “selfish”) — the preference for heterosexuality is pragmatic, NOT ethical. Many religions have this all wrong, and they distort the public’s view regarding sexuality (deceiving the public to believe that this is an ‘ethical decision’ instead of a pragmatic statement — true or false — about the given individual, “oneself”). Prejudices harm a society; they don’t help it.

    In this case, such bigotries not only produce misery amongst the targeted individuals, but cause millions of gifted persons to leave the bigoted country, or to become vastly less productive in their professions than if that bigotry had not been the norm there.

    The preamble to a nation’s Constitution states the ultimate goal that that nation’s — the Constitution’s — writers, their Constitution (the country’s Founders’ Constitution), [Historical evidence points to the US Constitution being based on the Kaienerekowa, the Great Law of the Haudenosaunee — DV ed] aims for; and, in any authentic democracy (if it IS a democratic Constitution), that nation’s Supreme Court is obligated to interpret ALL laws (the Constitutionality or NOT of all laws), not ONLY by every clause in the Constitution but ESPECIALLY by the ULTIMATE OBJECTIVE that the Founders stated: the Constitution’s Preamble. Here is the Preamble to Russia’s Constitution (also seen here):

    We, the multinational people of the Russian Federation, united by a common fate on our land, establishing human rights and freedoms, civic peace and accord, preserving the historically established state unity, proceeding from the universally recognized principles of equality and self-determination of peoples, revering the memory of ancestors who have conveyed to us the love for the Fatherland, belief in the good and justice, reviving the sovereign statehood of Russia and asserting the firmness of its democratic basic, striving to ensure the well-being and prosperity of Russia, proceeding from the responsibility for our Fatherland before the present and future generations, recognizing ourselves as part of the world community, adopt the CONSTITUTION OF THE RUSSIAN FEDERATION.

    The next-most-important clauses are the first ones; here are the first two:

    Article 1

    The Russian Federation – Russia is a democratic federal law-bound State with a republican form of government.

    The names “Russian Federation” and “Russia” shall be equal.

    Article 2

    Man, his rights and freedoms are the supreme value. The recognition, observance and protection of the rights and freedoms of man and citizen shall be the obligation of the State.

    Moreover:

    Article 14

    1. The Russian Federation is a secular state. No religion may be established as a state or obligatory one.

    2. Religious associations shall be separated from the State and shall be equal before the law.

    Article 15

    1. The Constitution of the Russian Federation shall have the supreme juridical force, direct action and shall be used on the whole territory of the Russian Federation. Laws and other legal acts adopted in the Russian Federation shall not contradict the Constitution of the Russian Federation.

    So: the authors of Russia’s Government stated clearly the non-participation of religious organizations in the decisions concerning the Constitutionality or not of a law in Russia.

    Furthermore:

    Article 19

    1. All people shall be equal before the law and court.

    2. The State shall guarantee the equality of rights and freedoms of man and citizen, regardless of sex, race, nationality, language, origin, property and official status, place of residence, religion, convictions, membership of public associations, and also of other circumstances. All forms of limitations of human rights on social, racial, national, linguistic or religious grounds shall be banned.

    3. Man and woman shall enjoy equal rights and freedoms and have equal possibilities to exercise them. …

    Article 24

    1. The collection, keeping, use and dissemination of information about the private life of a person shall not be allowed without his or her consent. …

    Article 28

    Everyone shall be guaranteed the freedom of conscience, the freedom of religion, including the right to profess individually or together with others any religion or to profess no religion at all, to freely choose, possess and disseminate religious and other views and act according to them.

    Article 29

    1. Everyone shall be guaranteed the freedom of ideas and speech.

    2. The propaganda or agitation instigating social, racial, national or religious hatred and strife shall not be allowed. The propaganda of social, racial, national, religious or linguistic supremacy shall be banned. …

    Article 55

    2. In the Russian Federation no laws may be adopted which abolish or diminish human and civil rights and freedoms. 

    What “human rights” and “freedom” and “civil peace” and “principles of equality” would be advanced, instead of opposed, by the new law that recently was unanimously passed by Russia’s Duma or legislature and signed into law by Putin (and which is so badly reported-on that its text is not yet available in a U.S. Web-search)? Russia’s Constitution CLEARLY prohibits anything like the new Russian law, even saying that “All forms of limitations of human rights on social, racial, national, linguistic or religious grounds shall be banned.” “BANNED.” (The fact that Russia’s Supreme Court has not been enforcing, but ignoring or denying, the Constitution is damning.)

    Basically, what the new law (whatever it is) does is to impose anti-gay censorship upon commerce, and the arts, and the sciences, and on the educational system, so as to satisfy the prejudices of bigots.

    Russia’s Duma, and President, and Supreme Court, have thus been driving out LGBT people — including great performers in all fields, scientific, artistic and otherwise — in order to satisfy the public’s bigotries that are promoted by all religions, and they are doing this in blatant and direct violation of their own Constitution. The stupidity of this is awesome. It hurts Russia; bigotries hurt ANY country.

    Russia’s Constitution is just a piece of paper, no different from America’s Constitution (and remarkably similar to that), which likewise is no longer actually in force. The traitors have taken over, not only in this or that country but in most countries. To be a bigot isn’t only to be stupid; it is to be a traitor in any country that has a democratic Constitution.

    Furthermore: censorship, of anything, is toxic to any democracy. Not only is it unConstitutional in any democracy, but it is inconsistent with any democracy. Religions love it; but democracies can’t survive it.

    The post The Stupidity of Russia’s Legislated Heterosexuality first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Putin at Valdai

    SOCHI, RUSSIA – OCTOBER 21, 2021: Russia’s President Vladimir Putin addresses the 18th Annual Meeting of the Valdai Discussion Club titled “Global Shake-Up in the 21st Century: The Individual, Values, and the State.” Dmitry Feoktistov/TASS

    Russia’s President Vladimir Putin, speaking at the Valdai International Discussion Club meeting on October 27, gave a speech that described his ideology, and he took questions from the audience and answered further regarding a number of highly important issues. Everything that he said there is consistent with what he has previously stated, but this event was perhaps the fullest-ever exposition of his views, which I, as an American historian, have always found to be remarkably similar to the views that U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) stated, especially in private, and which guided his actions both domestically and especially in international affairs. FDR was passionately anti-imperialistic, and believed that both of the two World Wars resulted from clashes between imperialistic powers, and that the top goal for the post-WW-II world must be to outlaw all empires and replace them all by a United Nations (he even named it) that would be a global federation of all nations and in whose General Assembly each nation will have one vote, but which will also have a Security Council in which each one of the major world powers will negotiate differences between themselves so that no major world power will be able to violate the national sovereignty of any other major world power — and this would include allowing the ability (such as JFK negotiated with Khrushchev during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis) to prevent any other major world power from using any nation that borders any other major world power (such as Cuba does near America), to ally itself (especially militarily) with another major world power. (This principle would likewise limit complete sovereignty both for Ukraine and Taiwan — and for any other nation that borders a major world power.) FDR also believed that the U.N. must have the global monopoly control over all geostrategic weaponry, as a further means of outlawing imperialism and the wars that imperialism produces. (Harry S. Truman castrated FDR’s U.N. plan, which he despised.)

    Too little attention has been paid by historians to FDR’s ideology, which really drew very heavily from Abraham Lincoln’s, which, in turn, drew very heavily from the authors of the Declaration of Independence and of the U.S. Constitution — especially from Thomas Jefferson and James Wilson. Consequently, readers here who are acquainted with the writings by those authors (the people who wrote those two documents) will find here a 21st Century version of that ideology, coming from a Russian historical and cultural perspective. These are highlights only, both from Putin’s speech and from his answers to questions which were posed to him after it:

    Valdai International Discussion Club meeting

    27 October 2022

    Ladies and gentlemen, friends. …

    We have used the Valdai Club platform to discuss, more than once, the major and serious shifts that have already taken place and are taking place around the world, the risks posed by the degradation of global institutions, the erosion of collective security principles and the substitution of “rules” for international law. I was tempted to say “we are clear about who came up with these rules,” but, perhaps, that would not be an accurate statement. We have no idea whatsoever who made these rules up, what these rules are based on, or what is contained inside these rules. …

    The so-called West which is, of course, a theoretical construct since it is not united and clearly is a highly complex conglomerate, but I will still say that the West has taken a number of steps in recent years and especially in recent months that are designed to escalate the situation. As a matter of fact, they always seek to aggravate matters, which is nothing new, either. This includes the stoking of war in Ukraine, the provocations around Taiwan, and the destabilisation of the global food and energy markets. To be sure, the latter was, of course, not done on purpose, there is no doubt about it. The destabilisation of the energy market resulted from a number of systemic missteps made by the Western authorities that I mentioned above. As we can see now, the situation was further aggravated by the destruction of the pan-European gas pipelines. This is something otherworldly altogether, but we are nevertheless witnessing these sad developments.

    Global power is exactly what the so-called West has at stake in its game. But this game is certainly dangerous, bloody and, I would say, dirty. It denies the sovereignty of countries and peoples, their identity and uniqueness, and tramples upon other states’ interests. In any case, even if denial is the not the word used, they are doing it in real life. No one, except those who create these rules I have mentioned is entitled to retain their identity: everyone else must comply with these rules. …

    Belief in one’s infallibility is very dangerous; it is only one step away from the desire of the infallible to destroy those they do not like, or as they say, to cancel them. Just think about the meaning of this word.

    Even at the very peak of the Cold War, the peak of the confrontation of the two systems, ideologies and military rivalry, it did not occur to anyone to deny the very existence of the culture, art, and science of other peoples, their opponents. …

    At one time, the Nazis reached the point of burning books, and now the Western “guardians of liberalism and progress” have reached the point of banning Dostoyevsky and Tchaikovsky. The so-called “cancel culture” and in reality – as we said many times – the real cancellation of culture is eradicating everything that is alive and creative and stifles free thought in all areas, be it economics, politics or culture.

    Today, liberal ideology itself has changed beyond recognition. If initially, classic liberalism was understood to mean the freedom of every person to do and say as they pleased, in the 20th century the liberals started saying that the so-called open society had enemies and that the freedom of these enemies could and should be restricted if not cancelled. …

    But Dostoevsky will live on, as will Tchaikovsky, Pushkin, no matter how much they would have liked the opposite.

    Standardisation, financial and technological monopoly, the erasure of all differences is what underlies the Western model of globalisation, which is neocolonial in nature. Their goal was clear – to establish the unconditional dominance of the West in the global economy and politics. To do that, the West put at its service the entire planet’s natural and financial resources, as well as all intellectual, human and economic capabilities, while alleging it was a natural feature of the so-called new global interdependence.

    As soon as non-western countries began to derive some benefits from globalisation, above all, the large nations in Asia, the West immediately changed or fully abolished many of those rules. And the so-called sacred principles of free trade, economic openness, equal competition, even property rights were suddenly forgotten, completely. They change the rules on the go, on the spot wherever they see an opportunity for themselves. …

    So currently, an overwhelming majority of the international community is demanding democracy in international affairs and rejecting all forms of authoritarian dictate by individual countries or groups of countries. What is this if not the direct application of democratic principles to international relations?

    What stance has the “civilised” West adopted? If you are democrats, you are supposed to welcome the natural desire for freedom expressed by billions of people, but no. The West is calling it undermining the liberal rules-based order. It is resorting to economic and trade wars, sanctions, boycotts and colour revolutions, and preparing and carrying out all sorts of coups.

    One of them led to tragic consequences in Ukraine in 2014. They supported it and even specified the amount of money they had spent on this coup. They have the cheek to act as they please and have no scruples about anything they do. They killed [Qasem] Soleimani, an Iranian general. You can think whatever you want about Soleimani, but he was a foreign state official. They killed him in a third country and assumed responsibility. What is that supposed to mean, for crying out loud? What kind of world are we living in? …

    Over a thousand years, Russia has developed a unique culture of interaction between all world religions. There is no need to cancel anything, be it Christian values, Islamic values or Jewish values. We have other world religions as well. All you need to do is respect each other. In a number of our regions – I just know this firsthand – people celebrate Christian, Islamic, Buddhist and Jewish holidays together, and they enjoy doing so, as they congratulate each other and are happy for each other. …

    I am convinced that real democracy in a multipolar world is primarily about the ability of any nation – I emphasise – any society or any civilisation to follow its own path and organise its own socio-political system. …

    The world is diverse by nature and Western attempts to squeeze everyone into the same pattern are clearly doomed. Nothing will come out of them.

    The conceited aspiration to achieve global supremacy and, essentially, to dictate or preserve leadership by dictate is really reducing the international prestige of the leaders of the Western world, including the United States, and increasing mistrust in their ability to negotiate in general. They say one thing today and another tomorrow; they sign documents and renounce them, they do what they want. There is no stability in anything. How documents are signed, what was discussed, what can we hope for – all this is completely unclear.

    Previously, only a few countries dared argue with America and it looked almost sensational, whereas now it has become routine for all manner of states to reject Washington’s unfounded demands despite its continued attempts to exert pressure on everyone. …

    As an independent and distinctive civilization, Russia has never considered and does not consider itself an enemy of the West. Americophobia, Anglophobia, Francophobia, and Germanophobia are the same forms of racism as Russophobia or anti-Semitism, and, incidentally, xenophobia in all its guises. …

    In 2000, after I was elected President, I will always remember what I faced: I will remember the price we paid for destroying the den of terrorism in the North Caucasus, which the West almost openly supported at the time. …

    What is more, not only did the West actively support terrorists on Russian territory, but in many ways it nurtured this threat. We know this. Nevertheless, after the situation had stabilised, when the main terrorist gangs had been defeated, including thanks to the bravery of the Chechen people, we decided not to turn back, not to play the offended, but to move forward, to build relations even with those who actually acted against us, to establish and develop relations with all who wanted them, based on mutual benefit and respect for one another. …

    Russia is not challenging the Western elites. Russia is simply upholding its right to exist and to develop freely. Importantly, we will not become a new hegemon ourselves. Russia is not suggesting replacing a unipolar world with a bipolar, tripolar or other dominating order, or replacing Western domination with domination from the East, North or South. This would inevitably lead to another impasse. …

    I am convinced that dictatorship can only be countered through free development of countries and peoples; the degradation of the individual can be set off by the love of a person as a creator; primitive simplification and prohibition can be replaced with the flourishing complexity of culture and tradition.

    The significance of today’s historical moment lies in the opportunities for everyone’s democratic and distinct development path, which is opening up before all civilisations, states and integration associations. We believe above all that the new world order must be based on law and right, and must be free, distinctive and fair.

    The world economy and trade also need to become fairer and more open. Russia considers the creation of new international financial platforms inevitable; this includes international transactions. These platforms should be above national jurisdictions. They should be secure, depoliticized and automated and should not depend on any single control centre. Is it possible to do this or not? Of course it is possible. This will require a lot of effort. Many countries will have to pool their efforts, but it is possible. …

    Clearly, we have a common and very pragmatic interest in free and open scientific and technological exchange. United, we stand to win more than if we act separately. The majority should benefit from these exchanges, not individual super-rich corporations.

    How are things going today? If the West is selling medicines or crop seeds to other countries, it tells them to kill their national pharmaceutical industries and selection. In fact, it all comes down to this: its machine tool and equipment supplies destroy the local engineering industry. I realised this back when I served as Prime Minister. Once you open your market to a certain product group, the local manufacturer instantly goes belly up and it is almost impossible for him to raise his head. That’s how they build relationships. That’s how they take over markets and resources, and countries lose their technological and scientific potential. This is not progress; it is enslavement and reducing economies to primitive levels.

    Technological development should not increase global inequality, but rather reduce it. …

    Let me emphasise again that sovereignty and a unique path of development in no way mean isolation or autarky. On the contrary, they are about energetic and mutually beneficial cooperation based on the principles of fairness and equality. …

    Unity among humankind cannot be created by issuing commands such as “do as I do” or “be like us.” It is created with consideration for everyone’s opinion and with a careful approach to the identity of every society and every nation. This is the principle that can underlie long-term cooperation in a multipolar world. …

    Thank you very much.

    Fyodor Lukyanov: Thank you very much, Mr President, for such an all-encompassing speech.

    I cannot but spontaneously grasp at the conclusion, as long as you mentioned the revolutionary situation, those at the top and those at the bottom. Those of us who are a bit older studied all this at school. Who do you associate yourself with, those at the top or the bottom?

    Vladimir Putin: With the bottom, of course, I am from the bottom.

    My mother was… As you know, I said it many times that I come from a working family. My father was a foreman, he graduated from a vocational school. My mother did not receive education, even secondary, she was a mere worker, and had many jobs; she worked as a nurse in a hospital, and as a janitor and a night watchman. She did not want to leave me in kindergarten or in nursery.

    So therefore, I naturally am very sensitive – thank God this has been the case until now and, I hope, will continue – to the pulse of what an ordinary person lives though.

    Fyodor Lukyanov: So, on the global level, you are among those who “don’t want to [live in the old way]?”

    Vladimir Putin: At the global level, naturally, it is one of my responsibilities to monitor what is going on the global level. I stand for what I just said, for democratic relations with regard to the interests of all participants in international communication, not just the interests of the so-called golden billion. …

    Fyodor Lukyanov: Excellent.

    Mr President, your decision to start a special military operation in February came as a big surprise for everyone, including the majority of Russian citizens. We know that you have described the logic and reasons for that decision many times. However, decisions of this importance are hardly made without a special motive. What happened before you made the decision?

    Vladimir Putin: I have said this many times, and you will hardly hear anything new today. What happened? I will not speak about NATO’s expansion to Ukraine, which was absolutely unacceptable to us, and everyone knew that but simply disregarded our security interests. … I said at the outset, on the day the operation started, that the most important thing for us is to help Donbass. I have already mentioned this, and if we had acted differently, we would not have been able to deploy our Armed Forces on both sides of Donbass. …

    Ivan Safranchuk: Ivan Safranchuk, MGIMO University.

    … Is it true that the world is on the verge of the possible use of nuclear weapons? How will Russia act in these circumstances? …

    Vladimir Putin: Nuclear provocation and the inflaming of the possibility that Russia might theoretically use nuclear weapons are being used to reach these goals: to influence our friends, our allies, and neutral states by telling them, look at whom you support; Russia is such a scary country, do not support it, do not cooperate with it, do not trade with it. This is, in fact, a primitive goal.

    What is happening in reality? After all, we have never said anything proactively about Russia potentially using nuclear weapons. All we did was hint in response to statements made by Western leaders. …

    Finally, about using or not using [nuclear weapons]. The only country in the world which has used nuclear weapons against a non-nuclear state was the United States of America; they used it twice against Japan. What was the goal? There was no military need for it at all. What was the military practicability to use nuclear weapons against Hiroshima and Nagasaki, against civilians? Had there been a threat to the US territorial integrity? Of course not. It was not practical from the military point of view either, because Japan’s war machine had already been destroyed, it was not able to resist, so what was the point in dealing the final blow with nuclear weapons?

    By the way, Japanese textbooks usually say that it was the Allies that struck a nuclear blow at Japan. They have such a firm grip over Japan that the Japanese cannot even write the truth in their school textbooks. … As for Russia…We have the Military Doctrine, and they should read it. One of its articles explains the cases when, why, in relation to what and how Russia considers it possible to use weapons of mass destruction in the form of nuclear weapons to protect its sovereignty, territorial integrity and to ensure the safety of the Russian people. …

    Fyodor Lukyanov: All right. And what about the role of a leader who has to make a decision on this issue?

    Vladimir Putin: We are ready to settle any issues. We are not refusing. Last December we offered the United States to continue the dialogue on strategic stability but received no response. It was in December of last year. Silence. …

    Fyodor Lukyanov: Two years ago, you spoke highly about President Erdogan at the Valdai Club meeting, saying that he did not go back on his words but did what he said he would do. Many things have happened over the past two years. Has your opinion of him changed?

    Vladimir Putin: No. He is a competent and strong leader who is guided above all, and possibly exclusively, by the interests of Turkiye, its people and its economy. This largely explains his position on energy issues and, for example, on the construction of TurkStream.

    We have proposed building a gas hub in Turkiye for European consumers. Turkiye has supported this idea, of course, first of all, based on its own interests. We have many common interests in tourism, the construction sector and agriculture. There are many areas where we have common interests.

    President Erdogan never lets anyone get a free ride or acts in the interests of third countries. He upholds above all the interests of Turkiye, including in dialogue with us. In this sense, Turkiye as a whole and personally President Erdogan are not easy partners; many of our decisions are born amid long and difficult debates and negotiations.

    But there is a desire on both sides to reach agreements, and we usually do it. In this sense, President Erdogan is a consistent and reliable partner. This is probably his most important trait, that he is a reliable partner. …

    Kubat Rakhimov: I am Kubat Rakhimov from the Kyrgyz Republic.

    … What do you think of the possibility of relocating the capital of the Russian Federation to the centre of the country, that is, to the centre of the Eurasian continent, so it can be closer to countries in the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation?

    Thank you.

    Vladimir Putin: … Yes, we have talked about this. The Russian capital has been moved several times in the history of the Russian state. Historically and mentally, the centre of Russia is always associated with Moscow and, in my opinion, there is no need.

    There are problems in the capital’s development as a metropolitan area, but I must say that, with Mayor Sobyanin’s team, these problems are addressed and resolved much better than in many other countries and metropolitan areas. …

    Alexander Prokhanov: Mr President, very often foreigners ask us, “What can you, Russians, offer to the modern world? Where are your Nobel Prize winners? Where are your great discoveries, industrial and scientific achievements?” My colleagues often answer, “Well, what about the great Russian culture? Pushkin? Rublev? Russian icons? The marvellous Russian architecture?” They say, “But this was all in the past. What about today?”

    When I listened to you today, it dawned on me what Russia can offer to the world: Russia can offer a religion of justice, because this religion, this feeling is at the heart of all Russian culture and Russian self-sacrifice. And today, Russia is making this sacrifice, essentially, it is standing up alone to the rest of the world, the cruel Western world, waging this fight for justice. … Maybe we should make the current Russian ideology a religion of justice?

    Vladimir Putin: You know, you just said that we are making sacrifices for the sake of other peoples. I’ll argue with you here. We are not sacrificing anything. We are working to strengthen our sovereignty, and it is in our own interests. First of all, strengthening our financial and economic sovereignty, it will lay the foundation for our future growth – technological, educational and scientific growth.

    Whether we have Nobel Prize laureates or not. When did Alferov make his invention? He was awarded the Nobel Prize for it after 30 years – or how many? Is that all that matters? The former President of the United States was awarded a Nobel prize. Is this an indicator of real achievement? With all due respect to both the Nobel Committee and the winner of this remarkable Nobel Prize, is that the only indicator?

    The post Putin at Valdai first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • U.S. Regime Threatens to “Hang” Pakistan’s Deposed Leader if He Holds Anti-Coup March

    Imran Khan had been the extremely popular progressive populist secular (non-sectarian) democratically elected Prime Minister (PM) of Pakistan during 18 August 2018 to 10 April 2022, when he then became overthrown by a U.S. coup and replaced by Shebaz Sharif, the younger brother of Pakistan’s Nawaz Sharif, who was Pakistan’s 5th-wealthiest billionaire and who had been Imran Khan’s immediate predecessor as the PM. On October 14th, Geo TV in Islamabad Pakistan headlined “Imran Khan to be hung upside down if he launches long march: Rana Sanaullah,” and reported that Imran Khan was being threatened now with execution if he would actually hold his promised march protesting the coup that had forced him out. Nawaz Sharif had championed and built upon the Islamist General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq’s military government’s policy of empowering the fundamentalist-Sunni (Saudi-Wahhabist-trained pro-jihadist) clerics in uniting Islamic law with Pakistan’s laws, so as to unite the aristocracy with the theocracy in Pakistan, with the aim being to benefit both the billionaires and the clergy, at the Pakistani public’s expense. Imran Khan is now organizing this protest march to call for a restoration of democracy to Pakistan, and to oust the Government’s control by the appointees of the aristocrats and the clergy.

    That headline’s phrase “long march” refers to Imran Khan’s promise to lead a million-plus-person “long march” to the capital city, which is Islamabad, to bring the downfall of the U.S.-led recently-installed coup-regime, which had installed Shebaz Sharif. “Rana Sanaullah,” in that headline, refers to the coup-imposed Federal Minister of the Interior, under Shebaz Sharif. Sanaullah was in a position to be able — with the rest of Shebaz Sharif’s Government (backed by the U.S.) — to carry out that threat.

    Also on October 14th, Geo TV bannered “Rana Sanaullah will be arrested if he enters Punjab: Cheema,” and reported that, “Advisor to Chief Minister Punjab on Interior Omar Sarfraz Cheema said that Federal Interior Minister Rana Sanaullah Khan will be arrested if he enters Punjab.” Both the dictators (the aristocrats and theocrats), and the democrats (Imran Khan’s group), are “gunning” against each other; and, right now, the dictators — with the crucial help of America — have the upper hand. For this reason, Imran Khan has not yet announced a date on which his proposed march will take place. He is instead travelling the country to campaign for it.

    Imran Khan refers to himself as being a “party of one,” because he is up against the entire existing corrupt Government of Pakistan, and so he founded and leads his own Party, PTI. A joint web-search for “Imran Khan” “PTI” and “wikipedia” brings up no “PTI” but instead shows just “Imran Khan,” and that article says “He is the founder and chairman of the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI), one of the largest political parties in the country.” However, though PTI is “one of the largest,” all of the others are opposed to it, because PTI is opposed to both the aristocracy and the theocracy. They are, and have been, united with the U.S. Government, in order to oust Imran Khan from power. (Today’s U.S. Government always supports aristocrats and theocrats against democrats, in order to be able to extract its cut, for the benefit of America’s billionaires, via the IMF etc. — various money-laundering institutions of this global-gangland operation, America’s “rules-based international order.”) The way they did this was by Pakistan’s Supreme Court ruling for a no-confidence vote against Imran Khan in the parliament to oust him as the Prime Minister; and the parliament then appointed Nawaz Sharif’s brother to replace Imran Khan. They would have liked to appoint Nawaz, except that, as Reuters had headlined on 24 December 2018, “Ousted Pakistani PM Sharif gets seven years’ jail for graft,” and, like any other pretend-‘democracy’, the aristocrats and theocrats who controlled Pakistan’s Government needed a public-electoral fig-leaf in order to give any permanency to their joint dictatorship over the country; so, they chose Nawaz’s younger brother instead.

    Omar Sarfraz Cheema, in that headline “Rana Sanaullah will be arrested if he enters Punjab: Cheema,” is a member of Imran Khan’s PTI Party, which is the dominant Party in the Punjab region of Pakistan. When Rana Sanaulah threatened to get Imran Khan “hung upside down,” that was a threat which came not only from Pakistan’s aristocracy, and not only from Pakistan’s clergy, but also from the U.S. White House and Congress, which constitute the imperial center that has been enabling Pakistan’s aristocrats and clergy to control Pakistan. In the 15 October 2021 video “Imran Khan: The extended interview with MEE” (MEE being Middle East Eye, a news-source that isn’t under the U.S. regime’s thumb), at 5:40 in the interview, Khan, when he was asked what U.S. President Biden had said to him about Pakistan’s situation, Khan reluctantly admitted that Biden had refused to be in contact with him. (That interview is archived here, in case it might become removed from the internet.)  At that time, a year back, Khan was still hoping that the U.S. regime wouldn’t overthrow him (as it did).

    Another, and even more telling, interview with Imran Khan had occurred on the night of 19 June 2012, when Julian Assange interviewed him by remote from the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, and its youtube version started being copied over six hundred times to the main Web archive, web dot archive dot org, but then all of those hundreds became mysteriously destroyed so that even at that archive, which is headquartered in the U.S., none of those copies any longer functions. However, the show can still be seen at RT, https://assange.rt.com/khan-episode-nine.html, from which it has been archived twice, such as here, and copies elsewhere also remain online, such as here and here and here and here and here, and the transcript of it is here; so, the U.S.-and-allied regimes might not be able to eliminate all copies of it from online. Anyway, this interview shows not only why Assange is being destroyed by the U.S./UK regime, but that they also are doing all they can to destroy Imran Khan.

    19 June 2012 happened to be Assange’s first night being protected from the UK/U.S. regime inside the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, which was when the democrat, Rafael Correa, was leading that country. Correa himself became replaced by the secret U.S. agent Lenin Moreno as Correa’s successor, who on 2 April 2019 allowed UK to drag Assange out to supermax solitary confinement in London’s Belmarsh Prison awaiting ultimate extradition to the U.S. (Assange isn’t a citizen of either country, but of Australia, which has done nothing to protect him or his rights as an Australian citizen, and is therefore obviously a slave-regime to the UK/U.S. regime — and yet Australians aren’t revolting against that slavery by their Government.) Ever since, Assange has been effectively blocked to communicate to or with the public, so that he presumably will die either in that prison or else in one in the United States, basically a dead man, ever since 2 April 2019, who has never been tried in any court on any criminal charge (other than jumping bail on a cooked-up rape charge that was then dropped). It’s interesting that in the 19 June 2012 — the 9th — installment of “The Julian Assange Show,” interview with Imran Khan, both men were stoic about their likely becoming ultimately crushed by the global U.S./UK regime. Religions have their martyrs, but, so, too, do democrats. Aristocrats have only their greed, and their pretenses; but that is backed up by their enormous power — against which to revolt is the extreme form of courage and heroism.

    The post U.S. Regime Threatens to “Hang” Pakistan’s Deposed Leader if He Holds Anti-Coup March first appeared on Dissident Voice.

  • How and Why Billionaires’ Charities’ Efforts to Help the World Are Now Turning It Rapidly Worse

    On September 13th, two very grim reports about the world’s future were published, one by America’s Melinda and Bill Gates Foundation, and the other by America’s Gallup polling organization; and both are data-based — as Melinda and Bill Gates expressed it in their joint Introduction to their new report, which is titled “The Future of Progress”: “We are data people, and this is a data report.”

    Bill Gates’s essay there is titled “We need to change how we think about world hunger,” and opens: “In February, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine interrupted the flow of grain from Europe to Africa, creating another humanitarian crisis on a second continent.” Melinda Gates’s essay is titled “Gender equality depends on women having power, not just ‘empowerment’,” and opens, “Economic progress for women is stalling worldwide — and COVID-19 is not the only reason why. But frankly, blaming COVID-19 alone would be a cop-out. We have to ask harder questions: Why do gender-neutral events like pandemics have gendered effects? And why, after decades of high-profile efforts to improve the lives of women and girls, is equality still generations out of reach?” Both essays focus on different topics, but neither focuses on the chief driver of increased economic inequality itself, which is fundamental to everything that they discuss: its chief driver is their own and fellow-billionaires’ imperialism and the resultant soaring taxpayer-funded military-weapons-manufacturers’ and extraction-industries’ profits that derive from the resulting unique advantages that these billionaires derive from the empire that the Government that they and their fellow billionaires control for their own special economic benefit. Only this structure empowers these billionaires to grab, for themselves and their friends, control over yet more of the world’s resources. Whereas Melinda Gates mentions economic inequality as supposedly needing to be reduced in order to reduce gender-inequality (something which also has biological sources, which her essay ignores, as-if they don’t even exist at all); and, whereas Bill Gates equally falsely assumes that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was not a necessary defensive measure by Russia against these billionaires’ obsession to gain control of Russia, to make it yet another U.S. vassal-nation; America’s billionaires, themselves, collectively control the insatiable global-hegemonic-control-obsessed U.S. imperial Government, which systematically is forcing-up economic inequality throughout the entire world. They refuse to see what they don’t want to see; and, so, it gets censored-out of every organization that they control.

    Gallup’s new report is a book, about which Gallup headlines “NEW BOOK: Blind Spot is now available. Get your copy today.” They announce:

    The World Is Suffering
    Anger, stress, sadness, physical pain and worry have reached new global highs. While it’s easy to blame everything on the COVID-19 pandemic, negative emotions have been rising for a decade.
    A big problem is that leaders don’t know just how much unhappiness there is in the world today. They don’t know because they haven’t been paying attention to the right metrics. But they can start now.
    Gallup’s new book, Blind Spot, shows leaders why measuring happiness and wellbeing is crucial to reversing the trend of rising global misery and the serious outcomes of unhappiness. …
    Improving the world starts with improving people’s lives. And the first step is knowing how people’s lives are going. Find out what some companies are already doing to lead the way in this excerpt from Blind Spot.
    From governments and corporations to communities and workplaces, leaders everywhere need to watch emotional and behavioral indicators as much as traditional economic indicators — and start focusing more on how people feel.
    Full of captivating questions, answers and Gallup’s global research, Blind Spot shows them how.

    The Gallup Press page on their book is bannered “Blind Spot: The Global Rise of Unhappiness and How Leaders Missed It” (no: they — agents of the billionaires —  created it, in serving their masters), and says:

    Rising Unhappiness
    Anger, stress, worry and sadness reached record highs in 2021.
    Unhappiness has been increasing globally for a decade, according to Gallup — and its rise has been missed by almost every world leader. That’s because while leaders pay close attention to measures like GDP or unemployment, almost none of them track their citizens’ wellbeing.
    The implications of this blind spot are significant and far-reaching — leaders missed the citizen unhappiness that triggered events ranging from the Arab uprisings to Brexit to the election of Donald Trump.

    However, in fact: an accompanying graph there, of “The Global Rise of Unhappiness” shows that, actually, this rise in unhappiness had started in 2014, after a significant decline in unhappiness was registered during 2013; so, the statement, by Gallup, that “Unhappiness has been increasing globally for a decade,” is actually false, according to Gallup’s own figures. It has been sharply rising for eight years. Globally, unhappiness has been soaring ever since 2014, not since 2012 — such as Gallup arbitrarily, and falsely, alleges by asserting that “Unhappiness has been increasing globally for a decade.”

    In February 2014, the U.S. Government’s coup taking over control of Ukraine’s Government occurred, and the breakaway of two regions of Ukraine which had voted overwhelmingly for the democratically elected President of Ukraine that Obama had just replaced with a racist-fascist anti-Russian Government, produced the war in Ukraine, which has continued ever since. The U.S. Government’s objective throughout this is to get its nuclear missiles based on Ukraine’s border with Russia, which is the closest part of Russia’s entire border to Moscow, so that America will then be able to launch from there and so blitz-annihilate Russia’s central command, in the Kremlin, in order that Russia won’t have more than five minutes from that launch in order to be able to launch its own missiles against America and all of NATO. The Obama Administration were determined to overthrow and replace the democratically-elected-in-2010 President of Ukraine as soon as Ukraine’s new President said no, that same year, to both Barack Obama’s and Hillary Clinton’s personal urgings to bring Ukraine into the EU as a steppingstone for Ukraine to become admitted into NATO. He said no; and, in this, he was expressing the will of the overwhelming majority of Ukrainians who, prior to Obama’s 2014 coup, feared NATO and considered it to be their enemy.

    The U.S. Government and its allies, or vassal nations, have announced that they are going to get Ukraine into NATO, one way or another. Whatever else the war between Russia and Ukraine is, it is actually the war between the United States (America’s billionaires) and Russia (the people who live there and who overwhelmingly support Vladimir Putin as being their leader), and this war is being waged on the battlefield of Ukraine because that country has a border nearer to Moscow than any other nation does. Ukrainians are America’s proxy army in this war. Russia is using its own army there, to protect Russians and Russia, against America and against Ukraine and the U.S. Government’s other vassal-nations.

    If America’s billionaires were not so insatiable as to demand hegemony — controlling the entire world as they already control America’s own Government — then the negative trends since 2014, that both Gallup and the Gateses claim to care so much about, would reverse. And America’s billionaires will probably resist that fact with all of the wealth that they possess, and with all of the tax-monies that they and their vassal-nations can collect from their residents to pay for.

    The deep insincerity of billionaires worldwide is likewise displayed in their fraudulent recommendations on global warming — another issue that is especially dangerous to the world’s poor.

    The post How and Why Billionaires’ Charities’ Efforts to Help the World Are Now Turning It Rapidly Worse first appeared on Dissident Voice.

  • How 2019 Coup in Bolivia Exemplified Millennia of Global History


    Throughout thousands of years of human history, dictatorships have been the norm, not the exception, and all of them have been by the aristocracy, against the public. (Sometimes, the aristocrats are led by one person, a “monarch,” Führer, etc.; but he or she then REPRESENTS the aristocracy, NOT the public.)

    Aristocrats are the nation’s few super-rich; the public are everyone else.

    Usually, the aristocracy ‘justifies’ its ‘superiority’ as being god-ordained, and they hire (donate to) some clergy to allege this in order to keep the public fighting for them and maybe dying for them, in their wars of conquest, against the aristocracies who control foreign lands. Another way to fool their publics is to declare that these conquests will ‘free’ those foreign publics by replacing their local aristocracy with the invading country’s aristocracy (a ‘better’ one; those others are instead being called “oligarchs”), and so creating an empire, which represents ‘us’ against the foreigners’ ‘them’, while also making those foreigners ‘free’ from their “oligarchs.” This is called ‘spreading democracy’.

    Throughout thousands of years, aristocracies have operated this way, deceiving masses of people so as to create empires, which expand the local aristocracy’s thefts, from being merely thefts against their local public, to becoming thefts against an entire empire’s public (using those local “oligarchs” as their vassals).

    Here is how this worked out recently in Bolivia:

    On 11 November 2011, the US White House issued this “Statement from President Donald J. Trump Regarding the Resignation of Bolivian President Evo Morales”:

    The resignation yesterday of Bolivian President Evo Morales is a significant moment for democracy in the Western Hemisphere.  After nearly 14 years and his recent attempt to override the Bolivian constitution and the will of the people, Morales’s departure preserves democracy and paves the way for the Bolivian people to have their voices heard.  The United States applauds the Bolivian people for demanding freedom and the Bolivian military for abiding by its oath to protect not just a single person, but Bolivia’s constitution.  These events send a strong signal to the illegitimate regimes in Venezuela and Nicaragua that democracy and the will of the people will always prevail.  We are now one step closer to a completely democratic, prosperous, and free Western Hemisphere.

    On 13 November 2019, the billionaire Rupert Murdoch’s Fox ‘News’ headlined “Bolivia interim president declares ‘Bible has returned to the palace’ amid growing uncertainty,” and reported:

    A day after brandishing a giant leather-bound Bible and declaring herself Bolivia’s interim president, Jeanine Añez set to the task of trying to steady a nation divided by bloody political disputes and create the stability necessary to organize national elections.
    The 52-year-old second-vice president of the Senate claimed the presidency on Tuesday following the ousting of socialist leader Evo Morales due to alleged election fraud and resignations from several high-ranking successors that left a power void in the country.“The Bible has returned to the government palace,” Añez declared as part of an effort to separate herself from Morales, who had banned the Bible from the site after he reformed the constitution and recognized an Andean earth deity instead of the Roman Catholic Church.

    Then, two days later, on November 15, Antiwar.com bannered “Finally Got Him: The Bolivian Coup,” and reported:

    The US says it wasn’t a coup.

    Trump’s official statement “applauds” the Bolivian regime change for preserving democracy. Trump identifies the event as “a significant moment in democracy” because it stymied Bolivian President Evo Morales’ attempt “to override the Bolivian constitution and the will of the people….”

    But all three White House claims are false: Morales didn’t go against the constitution, he didn’t override the will of the people and it was a coup.

    If it wasn’t a coup, why was Morales forced from office by the military? Why was he driven out of office in Bolivia and into asylum in Mexico for the sake of his safety, while a coup leader announced that the police and military were hunting Morales down and putting Bolivia into lockdown? Why as he fled and sought asylum was his house ransacked, his sister’s house set on fire, and the families of his cabinet ministers kidnapped and held hostage until the ministers resigned? Though reported in the mainstream media as abandoning Morales, Victor Borda resigned as president of the Bolivian congress and resigned his position as MP because his brother was kidnapped to force him to do so.

    If it wasn’t a coup, why did the opposition assume power before the legislature voted on approving Morales’ resignation as the constitution demands? Why did Jeanine Añez declare herself interim president in the absence of the quorum that is legally required to make that decision after meeting with the military high command for over an hour? And why did the opposition force Morales out and assume power before Morales’ term in office would end in January?

    If it wasn’t a coup, why did Morales’ opponent, Carlos Mesa, begin his claims of fraud before the voting began, before he could know there had been any fraud? Why did Mesa insist, according to Mark Weisbrot, that he would not accept the election results if Morales wins long before the votes were even counted?
    And why, perhaps most damningly, did a cabal of coup plotters discuss between October 8th and 10th – days ahead of the October 20th election – a plan for social disturbance that would prevent Morales from staying in power, as revealed by leaked audio of their conversations?

    Then, on 24 July 2020, the Twitter site of an American centi-billionaire, Elon Musk, received a tweet from an “Armani” saying, “You know what wasnt in the best interest of people? the US government organizing a coup against Evo Morales in Bolivia so you could obtain the lithium there.” Later that day, Musk replied:

          “We will coup whoever we want! Deal with it.”

    Why, then, was the Bible being presented, on 13 November 2019, as the coup’s justification?

    Not enough suckers would have been fooled to support this fascist coup as having been a fascist coup — a coup by an aristocracy. It was actually even a racist-fascist coup, a “nazi” coup (a coup by a racist aristocracy), which aimed to steal from the native-Indian masses in Bolivia, for the benefit of the supremacist-White aristocracy there, who were subordinates, or vassals, of America’s own overwhelmingly White aristocracy, its billionaires, such as the racist-fascist Elon Musk. Fox ‘News’ had broadcast that biblical display to its own overwhelmingly White Christian audience so as to portray that theft against Bolivians as having been in service to their god and consequently ‘justifiable’. It’s simply the way that aristocracies have functioned, for thousands of years.

    Then, on 14 July 2022, the “Declassified UK” investigative-news site headlined “EVO MORALES: ‘WE LAMENT THE ENGLISH WERE CELEBRATING THE SIGHT OF DEAD PEOPLE’”, and delivered from Matt Kennard a terrific, linked-to-sources, extensive interview with the US-UK-Bolivian aristocracy-overthrown former Bolivian President, who explained, as Kennard’s summary at its front stated:

    • THE COUP: ‘The UK participated in it – all for lithium’
    • THE BRITISH: ‘Superiority is so important to them, the ability to dominate’
    • THE US: ‘Any relationship with them is always subject to conditions’
    • NEW MODEL: ‘We no longer submit to transnational corporations’
    • JULIAN ASSANGE: ‘The detention of our friend is an intimidation’
    • NATO: ‘We need a global campaign to eliminate it’
    • BOLIVIA: ‘We are putting anti-imperialism into practice’

    Morales, while he had held power in Bolivia, had produced, for the Bolivian people, results that publics elsewhere could only dream of.

    Of course, the US/UK regime will be trying to reconquer Bolivia.

    History teaches lots of lessons, to whomever in the public is open-minded to it and who is lucky enough to become exposed to its truths (despite the aristocracy’s overwhelming censorship against those truths — which are historical truths).

    The post How 2019 Coup in Bolivia Exemplified Millennia of Global History first appeared on Dissident Voice.

  • How the US Government Steals from Other Countries

    The American Government explains its thefts from other countries as being justifiable because the U.S. Government has slapped sanctions upon those countries, and because these sanctions authorize the U.S. Government to steal whatever it wants to steal, from them, that it can grab. Here are just a few such examples:

    On May 26, Reuters headlined “U.S. seizes Iranian oil cargo near Greek island,” and reported:

    The United States has confiscated an Iranian oil cargo held on a Russian-operated ship near Greece and will send the cargo to the United States. …
    “The cargo has been transferred to another ship that was hired by the U.S.,” the source added, without providing further details.
    The development comes after the United States on Wednesday imposed sanctions on what it described as a Russian-backed oil smuggling and money laundering network for Iran’s Revolutionary Guards’ Quds Force. …
    U.S. advocacy group United Against Nuclear Iran (UANI), which monitors Iran-related tanker traffic, said the Pegas had loaded around 700,000 barrels of crude oil from Iran’s Sirri Island on Aug. 19, 2021.
    Prior to this load, the Pegas transported over 3 million barrels of Iranian oil in 2021, with over 2.6 million of those barrels ending up in China, according to UANI analysis.
    In 2020, Washington confiscated four cargoes of Iranian fuel that were bound for Venezuela and transferred them with the help of undisclosed foreign partners onto two other ships which then sailed to the United States. …

    On 24 October 2019, USA Today bannered “Pentagon planning to send tanks, armored vehicles to Syrian oil fields” and pretended that if (Syria’s actual invader) America wouldn’t be stealing Syria’s oil, then (Syria’s actual defender, invited into the country in order to help defeat the U.S.-led invasion of it) Russia would be stealing it. Their article closed by saying that: “Nicholas Heras, an expert on Syria with the Center for a New American Security [CNAS], … said, ‘the Pentagon is making contingencies for a big fight with Russia for Syria’s oil.’” Perhaps the intention of that article was to help build Americans’ support for stealing Syria’s oil. (The CNAS is a Democratic Party think tank, and was there endorsing the Republican President Trump’s operation to steal Syria’s oil — it’s a bipartisan goal of the U.S. Government.) By contrast, two days later, Russia’s Sputnik News headlined about America’s thefts of oil from Syria, “The Russian military described the US scheme as nothing less than ‘international state banditism.’” (Russia had no need to deceive anyone about that.)

    On 14 December 2019, Syria Times headlined “A huge convoy for US occupation forces enters Syria’s Qameshli city,” and reported that:

    In a new breach of international laws, the US occupation forces sent today to Qameshli city in Hasaka province a new convoy composed of tanks, ambulances and dozens of vehicles and cars loading military and logistic materials. According to local sources, the convoy illegally entered this morning from Iraq in order to fortify the US occupation forces’ positions in the Syrian Jazeera.
    This convoy is the biggest one that entered the Syrian territories since several months.
    Over the few past months, the US occupation forces sent through illegal crossing points thousands of vehicles loaded with weapons, military equipment and logistic materials to reinforce their existence in the Syrian Jazeera region and to steal Syrian oil and wealth.

    On 2 August 2020, Reuters bannered “Syria says U.S. oil firm signed deal with Kurdish-led rebels” and reported that,

    Damascus “condemns in the strongest terms the agreement signed between al-Qasd militia (SDF) and an American oil company to steal Syria’s oil under the sponsorship and support of the American administration”, the Syrian statement said. “This agreement is null and void and has no legal basis.”

    Furthermore: “There was no immediate response from SDF officials to a Reuters’ request for comment. There was no immediate comment from U.S. officials.”

    The U.S. Government has done this also to Venezuela and other countries that it likewise wants to take over.

    On 13 March 2022, Reuters headlined “Sanctions have frozen around $300 bln of Russian reserves, FinMin says,” and reported that “Foreign sanctions have frozen around $300 billion out of $640 billion that Russia had in its gold and forex reserves, Finance Minister Anton Siluanov said in an interview with state TV.”

    The lawyer and geostrategic analyst Alexander Mercouris explains how and why America’s blocking Russia’s international payments of Russia’s sovereign debt, and Germany’s seizure of some of Gazprom’s German assets, “violate the [international-law] principle of sovereign immunity; both the central bank and Gazprom are, after all, owned by the Russian Government. … These were the sort of acts that, once upon a time, governments could legally make only in time of war. But of course Germany and the United States are not formally at war with Russia. So we see how another extraordinary step has been taken, towards … ever-greater illegality.” He wonders “what damage” will be done “to the international legal system and to the international financial system.”

    Many of these actions, by America and its allies, are alleged to be done not in order to reinforce existing international laws (which, of course, they instead violate), but the opposite: to advance “the international rules-based order,” which “rules,” that will be made by the U.S. Government, will be introduced as constituting new legal precedents in order to replace the current source of international laws, which is the U.N. and its authorized agencies. The U.S. Government would gradually replace the U.N., except as the U.N.’s being a sump for unprofitable expeditions that the ‘humanitarian’ and ‘democratic’ U.S. Government can endorse. There would be a further weakening of the U.N., which is already so weak so that, even now, anything which is done by the U.S. and its allies is, practically speaking, not possible to be prosecuted in international courts such as the International Criminal Court, which body is allowed to prosecute alleged crimes only by leaders of “third world” nations. America’s “rules-based international order” would replace that toothless U.N.-based system, and would be backed up by America’s over-800 military bases around the world. Unlike the existing U.N., which has no military, this “rules-based international order” would be enforced at gunpoint, everywhere.

    However, even America’s allied nations are getting fleeced, though in different ways, by the U.S. Government. This is being done via international corruption. For example: America’s F-35 warplanes from Lockheed Martin Corporation and its sub-contractors (Northrop-Grumman, Pratt & Whitney, and BAE Systems), are so bad and so very expensive that the U.S. Government wants to cut its losses on the plane without cutting the profits by Lockheed Martin and other ‘defense’-contractors’ on it, and therefore needs to increase its allies’ purchases of these warplanes. NATO is the main marketing organization for U.S. ‘defense’ contractors; and, so, on 15 April 2022, Russia’s RT news headlined “US nuclear bombs ‘shared’ with European allies will be deployed on Lockheed Martin jets, NATO explains,”and reported that,

    Jessica Cox, director of the NATO nuclear policy directorate in Brussels, said … that “By the end of the decade, most if not all of our allies will have transitioned” to the F-35. …
    Germany would replace its aging Tornado jets with F-35s, committing to buy up to three dozen and specifically citing the nuclear sharing mission as factoring in the decision. …
    Finland and Sweden have recently voiced a desire to join NATO, and Helsinki already announced it would buy some 60 F-35s in early February [notably, BEFORE Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24th]. …
    The F-35 was originally proposed as a cost-effective modular design that could replace multiple older models in service with the US Air Force, Navy, and the Marines. In reality, it turned into three distinct designs with a lifetime project cost of over $1.7 trillion, the most expensive weapons program in US [and in all of global] history.
    In addition to the price tag, the fifth-generation stealth fighter has also been plagued with performance issues, to the point where the new USAF chief of staff requested a study into a different aircraft in February 2021.
    General Charles Q. Brown Jr. compared the F-35 to a “high end” sports car, a Ferrari one drives on Sundays only, and sought proposals for a “clean sheet design” of a “5th-gen minus” workhorse jet instead. Multiple US outlets characterized his proposal as a “tacit admission” that the F-35 program had failed.

    That word “characterized” was there linked through to a number of informative articles, such as these, about the F-35:

    Forbes: “The U.S. Air Force Just Admitted The F-35 Stealth Fighter Has Failed”
    Defense News: “The Hidden Troubles of the F-35: The Pentagon will have to live with limits on F-35’s supersonic flights”

    That Defense News report said that the basic design-requirements for the F-35 prohibit any speed higher than the speed of sound (Mach 1), because the air-friction above that speed would instantly melt the stealth coating, and,

    The potential damage from sustained high speeds would influence not only the F-35’s airframe and the low-observable coating that keeps it stealthy, but also the myriad antennas located on the back of the plane that are currently vulnerable to damage, according to documents exclusively obtained by Defense News.

    Though that publication — which could not exist apart from the funding that is provided directly or indirectly from America’s ‘defense’ contractors — used euphemisms to describe this problem, such as “potential damage” and that there would need to be imposed “a time limit on high-speed flight” and that “the F-35 jet can only fly at supersonic speeds for short bursts of time before there is a risk of structural damage and loss of stealth capability,” the actual facts are: those “short bursts” would, in the practical world, be virtually instantaneous, approximating zero seconds, and the phrase “a risk” would be referring to 100% — a certainty. That’s virtually the opposite of the ‘news’-report’s allegation that the F-35 would need to avoid “sustained high speeds,” because the plane would instead need to avoid ANY supersonic speed. In other words: the plane’s stealth capability would need to be virtually 100% effective and at speeds only below the speed of sound, in order for the plane to be, at all, effective, and deserving to be called a “stealth” warplane. The only exception to that would be the F-35A, for the Air Force (not usable by the Navy — from aircraft carriers — nor by the Army).

    As regards the F-35A (Air Force F-35 version), Wikipedia says about the F-35 that its maximum speed is Mach 1.6 (1.6 times the speed of sound). By contrast, Russia’s Su-57 (which is less expensive), has a maximum speed of Mach 2.0. The reason why Russia’s is both a better plane and far less costly is that Russia’s military-industrial complex is controlled ONLY by the Government, whereas America’s Government is instead controlled mainly by its ‘defense’-contractors, and is, therefore, overwhelmingly corrupt, which is also the reason why America is the permanent and unceasing warfare-state, ever since 25 July 1945, when its “Cold War” started, and has never ceased.

    One of the few honest statements that the world-champion liar and the world’s most respected living person, U.S. President Barack Obama, made about his goals as President, was his 28 May 2014 statement to the graduating class at the West Point Military Academy, that,

    The United States is and remains the one indispensable nation. That has been true for the century passed and it will be true for the century to come. … Russia’s aggression toward former Soviet states unnerves capitals in Europe, while China’s economic rise and military reach worries its neighbors. From Brazil to India, rising middle classes compete with us, and governments seek a greater say in global forums. … It will be your generation’s task to respond to this new world.

    He was saying there that all other nations — including U.S. ‘allies’ — are “dispensable.” Consequently, of course, in that view: stealing by the U.S. Government, from any other Government, is acceptable. It’s the U.S. Government’s viewpoint, and is politically bipartisan in America. At least until now, it is an acceptable viewpoint, to most people. Perhaps truths have been hidden from them. Who has been doing this, and why, would then be the natural question on any intelligent individuals’ minds. But certainly there can be no reasonable doubt that the U.S. Government does — and rather routinely — steal from other countries. That’s a fact, if anything is.

    The post How the US Government Steals from Other Countries first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • NYT Pundit Thinks U.S. Should Be “Calling the Shots” in Ukraine’s War

    This is a commentary upon N.Y. Times columnist Thomas Friedman’s statement on May 6 that Ukraine’s Government is and ought to be the U.S. Government’s agent in its war against Russia, not representing the interests of the Ukrainian people in it. He introduced the statement by noting that Ukraine is a bad country,

    a country marbled with corruption. That doesn’t mean we should not be helping it. I am glad we are. I insist we do. But my sense is that the Biden team is walking much more of a tightrope with Zelensky than it would appear to the eye — wanting to do everything possible to make sure he wins this war but doing so in a way that still keeps some distance between us and Ukraine’s leadership. That’s so Kyiv is not calling the shots [I boldfaced that — he didn’t] and so we’ll not be embarrassed by messy Ukrainian politics in the war’s aftermath.

    He starts there by putting down Ukraine as a “country,” and then asserts that, fortunately, “Kyiv is not calling the shots and so we’ll not be embarrassed by messy Ukrainian politics in the war’s aftermath.” Perhaps an underlying assumption of his in saying this is that America is NOT “a country riddled with corruption,” and, so, that it is right and good that Ukraine is America’s slave in this matter.

    He continues there:

    The view of Biden and his team, according to my reporting, is that America needs to help Ukraine restore its sovereignty and beat the Russians back — but not let Ukraine turn itself into an American protectorate on the border of Russia. We need to stay laser-focused on what is our national interest and not stray in ways that lead to exposures and risks we don’t want.

    I believe that Friedman truly does represent the U.S. Establishment that he is a part of, and that “Biden and his team” likewise do. I accept Friedman’s statement as reflecting accurately the way that “Biden and his team” (which, given the U.S. Congress’s virtually 100% voting for it in this matter of Ukraine, also includes virtually every U.S. Senator and Representative) feel about the matter: they feel that Ukraine must be their slave in it and must do whatever the U.S. Government demands that it do in its war with Ukraine’s next-door-neighbor, Russia.

    That view — the view that it’s not only true but good that “Kyiv is not calling the shots” in this matter — reflects the view that an imperialist government has toward one of its colonies or vassal-nations (which the imperialist nation nowadays calls instead its ‘allies’). And this is the reason why they treat not only their armies but all of the residents in their ‘allies’ as being appropriate cannon-fodder or ‘proxy soldiers’ in their foreign wars, wars to conquer other countries — such as, in this case, Russia.

    Here was how the former U.S. President, Barack Obama, phrased the matter to America’s graduating cadets at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, on 28 May 2014:

    The United States is and remains the one indispensable nation. That has been true for the century passed and it will be true for the century to come. … Russia’s aggression toward former Soviet states unnerves capitals in Europe, while China’s economic rise and military reach worries its neighbors. From Brazil to India, rising middle classes compete with us, and governments seek a greater say in global forums. … It will be your generation’s task to respond to this new world.

    It could as well have been said by England’s royals and other aristocrats during their imperialistic heyday.

    All other nations are “dispensable.” America’s military is an extension of international economic competition so that America’s billionaires will continue to rule the world in the future, as they do now. “Rising middle classes compete with us” and are consequently America’s enemies in the “dispensable” countries (everywhere in which vassalage to America’s billionaires — being “America’s allies” — is rejected), so that “it will be your generation’s task to respond to this new world.” So he told America’s future generals, regarding those who live (as the 2017 U.S. Army report put it) “in the shadow of significant U.S. military capability and the implied promise of unacceptable consequences in the event that capability is unleashed.” America’s military are the global gendarmes not of Hitler’s nazi regime in WW II, but of America’s nazi regime in the lead-up to WW III.

    Thomas Friedman, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and all of the other U.S. major ‘news’-media, feel this way about it, and report and comment upon the ’news’ that way, but I think that it was a slip-up that Friedman and the Times expressed it, for once, so honestly, especially given that they are master-liars on most international-news reporting and commentary. The pièce de résistance in his commentary was its ludicrously hypocritical line that “America needs to help Ukraine restore its sovereignty.” (They must be America’s slaves but restore their sovereignty. How stupid do they think that the American public is?) That too is typical of aristocrats’ hypocrisies and general corruptness — including that of the U.S. Government itself, which represents ONLY America’s billionaires and other super-rich — it’s a regime and no democracy at all.

    Moreover, whereas America has no business at all to be involved in this war, Russia very much does, and the U.S. regime’s involvement there is ONLY in order to conquer Russia — which is a psychopathic and super-imperialistic objective to have, and not MERELY a real and soaring threat against the safety of all parts of the world — the real and now rapidly growing danger of there being a World War III.

    Incidentally, the title of Friedman’s commentary was “The War Is Getting More Dangerous for America, and Biden Knows It.” It’s an interesting title, because it concerns ONLY what Friedman and America’s other aristocrats care about, which is themselves, and not at all about what any of the ‘dispensable’ countries (including Ukraine) care about. Since the publics everywhere care about preventing a WW III (nuclear war between Russia and America — including all NATO countries), that is a stunningly narrow sphere of concern regarding a potentially world-ending catastrophe. Clearly, America’s aristocrats are rank psychopaths. They control the U.S. Government, and this is the result of that. It’s a Government in which the worst come first, the public last. Russia is up against that: it is up against America, and Ukraine is only the first battleground of WW III, now only at the proxy stage for the U.S. regime but not for the Russian Government, which, in this matter, truly does represent the most-vital national-security interests of its citizens. Everyone except U.S.-and-allied aristocracies (many of whom are buyers of billionaires’ bunkers) have an overriding interest in America’s defeat in this war, before it ever reaches the nuclear stage, of direct Russia vs. U.S. warfare.

    The shame of today’s U.N. is that it’s not enraged against the U.S. Government. This is shaping up to be the biggest scandal and failure in the U.N.’s entire history, virtually its own collapse.

    The post NYT Pundit Thinks U.S. Should Be “Calling the Shots” in Ukraine’s War first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • CNN Unintentionally Confirms Major Russian Accusation against Zelensky

    One of the Russian Government’s main accusations against the Government of Ukraine’s President Volodmyr Zelensky is that Zelensky’s forces are using Ukraine’s civilians as “human shields” in order to prevent Russian forces from bombing Ukrainian Government forces: in other words, Russia says that a major reason for civilian casualties in this war is the Ukrainian Government’s using its own citizenry as hostages to the conflict, so as to rely upon the non-brutality of Russia’s forces in order to protect Ukraine’s own forces.

    On Tuesday, March 15th, CNN headlined “Mariupol deputy mayor says Russian troops are destroying his city” and reported that “Sergei Orlov, deputy mayor of Mariupol, said Russian forces are ‘destroying’ the besieged Ukrainian city and that patients in a hospital were used as captives.”

    CNN wasn’t intentionally confirming a Russian-Government accusation, but merely reported what their source, Orlov, had said. No context was provided for his statement which would call attention to the fact that Orlov was actually confirming what Russia’s Government has been saying about this war. The CNN report didn’t even so much as just mention that Mr. Orlov is an official of the existing Ukrainian government in Mariupol, and that the Russian forces are trying to take over the city from that government — the government of which he is an official.

    The CNN report went on to quote Orlov as saying, “the Russian army used doctors and patients as hostages in this building,” but that is obviously false, because the attacking forces there are the Russian soldiers, and the defending forces there are the Ukrainian soldiers — and, consequently, any “human shields” there would be used as “shields” BY the Ukrainian soldiers. The report went on to assert that “A Ukrainian official has also accused Russian troops of holding people captive at the hospital,” and this is yet more of the Ukrainian government’s assumption that CNN’s audience are incredibly stupid — stupid enough to think that “human shields” are used by attacking forces instead of by only the most despicable type of defending forces: ones that protect themselves at the expense of the civilians they’re supposed to be protecting.

    Mariupol happens to be a city just outside the Donbass breakaway region from Ukraine in Ukraine’s southeast, and its citizenry were publicly protesting against the February 2014 forced overthrow of Ukraine’s democratically elected President Viktor Yanukovych, for whom Mariupol’s residents had overwhelmingly voted in the latest Ukrainian Presidential election, which was in 2010. U.S. President Barack Obama’s Administration had hired Ukraine’s highly organized racist-fascist anti-Russian “Right Sector” and other far-right forces to prepare and lead the 2013 “Maidan” demonstrations against Yanukovych and subsequently to be appointed themselves to the top national-security positions in the new, U.S.-installed, post-coup Ukrainian government. Here is a video, on 9 May 2014, showing Mariupol residents protesting peacefully against the overthrow of their President, and being shot by the newly installed government’s police:

    The pro-coup-regime (i.e., pro-U.S.) national Ukrainian newspaper Kyiv Post headlined “Avakov says 21 dead in Mariupol after clashes between police and separatists” and reported violent actions by the opponents of this new government:

    Kremlin-backed “terrorists” kidnapped Mariupol police chief Valeriy Androshchuk during today’s firefight over the local police headquarters, said lawmaker Oleh Liashko on his Facebook page who is in the Donetsk Oblast city at the moment.

    He “fought until the end” but “terrorists” took him from the “burning police station in a car that was cut off by a sports utility vehicle,” wrote Liashko. “The fighters stabbed the jeep driver with a knife and placed Androshchuk inside the car trunk and drove off in an unknown direction.”

    Liashko was one of Ukraine’s leading far-right politicians and a strong backer of the U.S.-installed government; so, Liashko called the protesters “terrorists‘; and, soon thereafter, the Ukrainian government officially introduced what they called an “Anti Terrorist Operation” in order to kill as many resisting people as possible anywhere in the country. (To resist the coup-installed government was to be a ‘terrorist’.) This was virtually the beginning of Ukraine’s civil war. But, even earlier, on 2 May 2014, the new government’s murderous character was displayed in Odessa (in south-central Ukraine), where Right Sector forces trapped an unknown number of protesters in the Trade Unions Building — and burned them alive in it. The most heart-rending compendium of videos of that was shown here. This horrific event immediately sparked the protests throughout Ukraine’s southeast, which started on May 9th, which began the civil war.

    So, it’s not surprising that, in the current battles, between the invading Russian soldiers and the soldiers of today’s Ukraine (the defenders of the U.S.-imposed Ukrainian regime), human shields are being used for protecting (‘shielding’) the latter (America’s proxy-forces in Ukraine).

    The post CNN Unintentionally Confirms Major Russian Accusation against Zelensky first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Which is More Trustworthy: America’s Press, or China’s Press?

    On March 2, the New York Times bannered “China Asked Russia to Delay Ukraine War Until After Olympics, U.S. Officials Say,” and reported that:

    A Western intelligence report said senior Chinese officials told senior Russian officials in early February not to invade Ukraine before the end of the Winter Olympics in Beijing, according to senior Biden administration officials and a European official. …
    The intelligence on the exchange between the Chinese and Russian officials was classified. It was collected by a Western intelligence service and considered credible by officials. Senior officials in the United States and allied governments passed it around as they discussed when Mr. Putin might attack Ukraine.
    However, different intelligence services had varying interpretations, and it is not clear how widely the information was shared.
    One official familiar with the intelligence said the material did not necessarily indicate the conversations about an invasion took place between Mr. Xi and Mr. Putin. Other officials briefed on the intelligence declined to give further details. The officials spoke about the report on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the intelligence.

    On March 8, the Chinese-Government-(Communist-Party)-owned Global Times headlined “disinformation on Ukraine crisis to smear China”, and reported that,

    Citing “anonymous officials” to release disinformation is an old trick that the US has been using to mislead the public. The Global Times learned from various sources that “anonymous officials” who previous reports cited to claim that China had asked Russia not to take action in Ukraine before the end of the Winter Olympics are from the US National Security Council, and their purpose was to shift the US’ responsibility in the conflict to profit from it and smear China.
    In two reports, published on February 25 and March 2, the New York Times cited “anonymous US officials” saying that China had learned about Russia’s plans in Ukraine and asked Russia not to take action before the end of the Winter Olympics. The reports accused China of standing with Russia to criticize the US and opposing US sanctions on Russia.
    The Chinese Foreign Ministry has refuted these reports and pointed out that the US fabricated information to smear China.
    Through various sources, the Global Times has learned that the “anonymous officials” cited by the New York Times are from the National Security Council of the White House. …
    Analysts said that the problems associated with the Ukraine situation are clear, and the US and NATO are together pushing Ukraine into the fire. As the initiator of the conflict in Ukraine, the US is adding fuel to the fire, while accusing China …, which is irresponsible and immoral, the analysts said.

    The NYT article published February 25 had been headlined “China may have played a role Friday in inducing Russia to look more accommodating, even as Russian forces advanced into Kyiv,” and it didn’t actually rely upon “anonymous officials” (or “anonymous US officials”), but, instead, upon individuals whom it purported to be experts on the subject, and whom that newspaper’s employees had selected, all of whom happened to be supporting the U.S. Government’s anti-Russia and anti-China positions on this matter, but none of whom were being alleged to have had personal knowledge regarding that particular matter. It also said that “In private, some Chinese academics have shared misgivings about Mr. Xi’s embrace of Mr. Putin. And on the Chinese internet, some users have robustly questioned how China’s position on the Ukraine war squares with its longstanding precept that countries should steer their own fates.” However, none of those “academics” was identified by the NYT’s journalist.

    The post Which is More Trustworthy: America’s Press, or China’s Press? first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Biden’s Bottomless Cruelty to Afghans

    On February 11th, the New York Times bannered “Spurning Demand by the Taliban, Biden Moves to Split $7 Billion in Frozen Afghan Funds,” and reported that “President Biden will start to clear a legal path for certain relatives of victims of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to pursue $3.5 billion from assets that Afghanistan’s central bank had deposited in New York,” though Afghanistan is facing “a mass starvation that is in turn creating an enormous and destabilizing new wave of refugees — and raising a clear need for extensive spending on humanitarian relief” (greatly burdening the U.N. and other relief-agencies). This Afghan starvation is largely due to Biden’s having frozen the Afghan Government’s funds as retaliation for Afghans’ having so unceremoniously driven out the U.S. occupying forces and enormously embarrassed him by so publicly displaying their revulsion at what America had done to them, and at the supreme corruption of the Government that America had installed to rule them.

    America’s Government is now stealing $3.5 billion from starving Afghans — who had had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks — in order to pay this money to “a group of relatives of victims of the Sept. 11 attacks” who felt that this money from the savings and checking accounts of Afghan citizens should go to them instead.

    This is how Biden panders for votes in order to keep a Democratic Party majority in Congress, instead of a Republican Party majority (which, of course, would be no less cruel).

    The NYT report said that Biden has concluded that it “is in the national interest” for this money to go to these American families, instead of to starving Afghans, though “It is highly unusual for the United States government to commandeer a foreign country’s assets on domestic soil.” If this is the price that ‘ungrateful’ starving Afghans will have to pay in order for Biden to be able to retain his Party’s dominance in Congress, then they’ll just have to pay it, even if many thousands of Afghans might starve to death as a result.

    On January 17 Oxfam headlined “Ten richest men double their fortunes in pandemic while incomes of 99 percent of humanity fall,” but hid the identities of those 10; however, Investopedia bannered just two days later, “The 10 Richest People in the World” and reported that these 10 men were: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Bernard Arnault, Bill Gates, Larry Page, Mark Zuckerberg, Sergey Brin, Warren Buffett, Steve Ballmer, and Larry Ellison — 9 out of ten were Americans (only Arnault was not). So: those were the people who have doubled their wealth during the Covid-19 plague, while the bottom 99% (including maybe all Afghans) have experienced “falling incomes,” and while Afghan families can’t even get their own money out of their banks, because Biden needs his revenge against Afghans, and needs a Democratic Party majority in Congress.

    By no means do all 9/11 families feel that this money from poor Afghans should go to these Americans instead. The NYT said:

    Not all relatives of the Sept. 11 victims agree. This week, Barry Amundson, whose brother Craig was killed in the Pentagon that day, said his group — September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows — thought all of the money should go to benefit Afghans.

    “I can’t think of a worse betrayal of the people of Afghanistan than to freeze their assets and give it to 9/11 families,” Mr. Amundson said.

    Furthermore, largely because of Biden’s revenge, “the value of the Afghan currency has plummeted, and with it, the ability of millions of people who were already living on the edge to buy enough food to eat. … The situation has rapidly grown dire.”

    Also on February 11th, the Moon of Alabama blogger headlined “When Cruelty Is The Point – U.S. Decides To Kill More Afghan People”, and he explained the Biden Administration’s legal argument, and concluded that, “To give money that is owned by Afghanistan’s central bank and is needed to help Afghan people to relatives of people who died in 9/11 is completely unjustified.” But Biden is trying to find a way to get it done.

    Moreover, though Trump started the policy of stealing Syria’s oil, that barbaric policy has continued under Biden, such as has been reported here and here and here. America is now all-out a gangster-country, but it arrogantly pontificates ‘morality’ to the whole world.  And it’s the ONLY country (except its 2014 coup-grabbed vassal, Ukraine), that at the U.N. votes (and repeatedly) against resolutions to condemn nazism and racism. Even if there might possibly be another country’s Government that is as evil as America’s is, there is none that compares with the U.S. Government for the number and barbarism of its sanctions, coups, subversions, and outright military invasions (all being against countries that never threatened America, far less invaded it), nor for the U.S. Government’s sheer hypocrisy: it’s by far the worst international gangster.

    So: what Biden is doing to Afghanistan is really just par for the course. And, just as the U.S. public in 2002-3 were overwhelmingly suckered to believe the Government’s (and newsmedia’s) lies against Iraq that led to the U.S. invasion and destruction of Iraq in 2003, the U.S. public still are overwhelmingly suckered to believe the Government’s (and news media’s) lies against Russia and China in 2022 — apparently, once a fool, always a fool, and most people are fools. Even the outright cruelty of America’s leaders can’t shake the public’s trusting “their” Government (and that ‘their’ links to identifying whom it actually represents — the billionaires, the people who have doubled their wealth during covid-19 while everybody else has become less wealthy than before — and that group are also the world’s most rapacious individuals, and are also the most corrupt, and the most corrupting).

    Before one can understand a problem, one must first know what the problem actually is. America’s public don’t know what the problem is, because the people who are the problem don’t want them to.

    The post Biden’s Bottomless Cruelty to Afghans first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The Washington Post Publishes a Commentary Full of Lies Against Putin

    On January 29, the Washington Post published an op-ed by the well-known Yale neoconservative Timothy Snyder, titled “Putin’s case for invading Ukraine rests on phony grievances and ancient myths.” Key passages in Snyder’s article are:

    Last July, Vladimir Putin supplied the mythical basis [BAD LINK FROM SNYDER: here is a functional link to see Putin’s article] for Russian war propaganda in an essay titled “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians.” The essential idea is that Russia has the right to Ukraine because of things that happened a thousand years ago in Kyiv. … It takes some fanciful thinking to see here a reason for Russia to invade Ukraine in the 21st century, as it seems prepared to do. … Putin’s idea is that Ukraine is a fraternal nation because of how he personally feels about the past. This is known as imperialism. It flies in the face of the basic legal principle of state sovereignty and the basic moral principle of democracy.

    Putin’s article did NOT assert that “Russia has the right to Ukraine because of things that happened a thousand years ago in Kyiv.” It didn’t even assert that “Russia has the right to invade Ukraine.” Furthermore, the allegation that Putin’s view that’s expressed there advocates “imperialism. It flies in the face of the basic legal principle of state sovereignty and the basic moral principle of democracy” is likewise a boldfaced lie. Moreover, Russia’s Government has consistently denied that it has any intention to invade Ukraine, but instead asserts that if Ukraine invades Donbass, then Russia will not allow that invasion to conquer the residents there. Russia’s position has consistently been that only the people who live in Donbass have the right to determine whether or not — and the terms under which — they will be ruled by the government in Kiev that was installed (against the will of over 90% of them) in February 2014 when the democratically elected President of Ukraine was forcibly overthrown by what America’s Government calls a “democratic revolution,” and by what Russia’s Government and the head of the “private-CIA” U.S. firm Stratfor, and many historians, call a coup, which was imposed by the Nobel-Peace-Prize-winning U.S. President Barack Obama’s Administration, in order to replace Russia’s naval base on Crimea by a new U.S. naval base there (which Obama wasn’t able to do, though his coup conquering Ukraine otherwise succeeded). Several of the mercenaries that the U.S. hired (some from Georgia, for example, as shown in these videos) subsequently confessed to having participated in it. (And, subsequently, the U.S. regime charged Putin with ‘aggression against Ukraine’, and with ‘seizing Crimea’, and issued sanctions against Russia for that.)

    Here are some key passages from Putin’s article (the article that Snyder lies against):

    The determination of nationality, particularly in mixed families, is the right of every individual, free to make his or her own choice. But the fact is that the situation in Ukraine today is completely different because it involves a forced change of identity. And the most despicable thing is that the Russians in Ukraine are being forced not only to deny their roots, generations of their ancestors but also to believe that Russia is their enemy. … And I will say one thing – Russia has never been and will never be ‘anti-Ukraine’. And what Ukraine will be – it is up to its citizens to decide.

    Putin, as well as Francois Hollande of France, and Angela Merkel of Germany, brought the Donbass government and the Ukraine government together in 2015 and got the Donbass and Ukraine to sign onto an agreement in Minsk, promising that those two then-warring parties would call a truce until both of them would agree to negotiate together and arrange some degree of autonomy for Donbass within the Ukrainian federation, but after it was all signed, Ukraine (with backing from the U.S.) steadily refused to negotiate at all with Donbass. Merkel, Hollande, and Putin, had worked together to get the Minsk accords agreed-to and signed by the two sides, but the Ukrainian side then stonewalled, refusing to comply with the agreement. Putin’s consistent position has been the same as Hollande’s and Merkel’s, on this, and remains so to this day: BOTH sides must comply. (Donbass has always been willing, but Ukraine never.)

    The rest of Putin’s article is a history of the relationship that has existed between Russia and Ukraine. Snyder’s article that alleges to be about Putin’s article ignores that history, just as he lies about the rest of the article. And that’s from a Professor at Yale.

    (The present article is being submitted to over 200 U.S.-and-allied ‘news’-media including the Washington Post, for possible publication.)

    The post The Washington Post Publishes a Commentary Full of Lies Against Putin first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • How Israel’s Actions Against Iran Are Rooted in Cecil Rhodes’s 1877 Plan

    There has been much speculation about why Israel was allowed in 1967 to intentionally bomb the USS Liberty and slaughter 34 American soldiers on that ship which the U.S. Government has covered-up. And there also is much speculation about why, as reported to Congress by the Congressional Research Service on 7 August 2019, “Israel is the largest cumulative recipient of U.S. foreign assistance since World War II. To date, the United States has provided Israel $142.3 billion (current, or noninflation-adjusted, dollars) in bilateral assistance and missile defense funding. Almost all U.S. bilateral aid to Israel is in the form of military assistance.” (That “noninflation-adjusted”  figure might be closer to a trillion dollars in today’s money. For example, a billion dollars in 1971 is worth $6.83 billion today. This means that in 1971, $146.4 billion was worth the same as a trillion dollars is worth in today’s money. So: in today’s money, what U.S. taxpayers have donated to Israel in order for it to pay for U.S. missiles, etc., was almost a trillion dollars, and that’s been a gift to U.S. armaments-firms — to the people who own those firms — for them to sell (and U.S. taxpayers to pay for) to Israel. Nowadays, Americans donate $3.8 billion annually to Israel. $3.3 billion of that is for U.S.-made weapons. Why? It’s to subsidize America’s billionaires. And look at how phenomenally profitable such subsidies have helped to make their investments! In other words: merely by misrepresenting “foreign aid” as if it were something that it overwhelmingly is not (and closer to being the very opposite of “charitable”), the U.S. aristocracy become further-enriched by (and they purchase — with taxpayer-money — the alliance, the backing, from) other nations’ aristocracies (such as Israel’s). Some gang-of-thieves!

    75% of Americans approve of Israel. Only 30% approve of the “Palestinian Authority” that  represents the people whom the Israelis conquered. Obviously, America’s ‘news’-media are strongly favorable toward Israel, and portray Israel’s victims in as-negative-a-light as is possible to do — and they portray opposition to Israel as being necessarily ‘anti-Semitic’. Certainly in the Palestinian case, it’s not that — it is against evil (by Israel).

    Americans aren’t outraged that their Government donates to Israel’s constant war against Palestinians (to crush them), but instead blame the Palestinians for Israel’s decades-long ethnic-cleansing of Palestinians — it’s ethnic-cleansing to retain Israel’s ‘democracy’ of Jewish rule against Muslims. Americans are imperialists; but, in this particular instance, they are for imperialism by Jews (especially the wealthiest of them) in that land, against Muslims (especially the poorest of them) there, instead of being by Americans against Cubans, or by Americans against Venezuelans, or by Americans against Ukrainians (the normal type of attempted or achieved takeover by America’s billionaires — which group the U.S. Government represents).

    The main people among the American public who oppose “foreign aid” are misinformed conservatives, who think it’s stupid idealism; and the main supporters of “foreign aid” among the American public are misinformed liberals, who think it’s a policy to benefit the people in poor countries; but, overall, 49% of Americans say that “U.S. Is Spending Too Much On Foreign Aid,” and only 13% say that the U.S. is spending “too little” on it. Only very few Americans know that foreign aid is mainly to buy U.S. weapons. It is a subsidy to firms such as Lockheed Martin. It is a secret (“off-the-balance-sheet”) addition to America’s ‘defense’-budget. (Even on-budget — or Pentagon — U.S. ‘defense’-spending constitutes 37% of the entire world’s military expenditures.) And that is defense only for the aristocracy of the given recipient-nation, in order to keep them in power so that the U.S. aristocracy can control foreign Governments by getting the misinformed American public to pay for those foreign regimes, which are more like the opposite of charity — it is U.S. imperialism. And those foreign regimes are U.S. vassal-nations. So: though the total American public are buying this ‘aid’, it’s actually for the investors in firms such as General Dynamics. And the owners of those firms are also in control over all of America’s major ‘news’-media, which promote those weapons-sales by pretending that foreign aid is mainly charitable (though perhaps ‘misguided’, not intentionally evil — which it is).

    In the case of Israel, the origin of the arrangement goes all the way back to the late 1800s, when the very concept of today’s Israel was merely a dream for some biblically inspired and highly ethnocentric Jews (Zionists).

    Here’s how that happened:

    In 1871, the well-connected young prospector, Cecil Rhodes (son of an Anglican clergyman), got his start. “In October 1871, 18-year-old Rhodes and his 26-year-old brother Herbert left the colony for the diamond fields of Kimberley in Northern Cape Province. Financed by N M Rothschild & Sons, Rhodes succeeded over the next 17 years in buying up all the smaller diamond mining operations in the Kimberley area.” And then, starting in 1877, Rhodes drew up his will, to create a “secret” organization, for the UK empire to take over (“take back”), by means of subversion, first the U.S. Government, and then (with that force behind it) take control over the entire rest of the world, so that secretly the U.S. would become the chief enforcer, globally, for, actually, England’s aristocracy.

    Part of this plan was for an “Israel” to come into existence and serve as the English aristocracy’s enforcer over the entire Middle East.

    Franklin Delano Roosevelt, as U.S. President just prior to Israel’s formation, opposed the creation of any “Jewish state.” He was as opposed to that as he was to any theocracy, and especially because this one wouldn’t be able to be brought about or function except by means of an ethnic-cleansing in order to make Jews the majority there (if a democracy was intended there) or else the controlling minority (if an outright and clear-cut dictatorship there was the intention there). But, as I shall document fully in my book to be published in 2022, AMERICA’S EVIL EMPIRE, President Truman, who succeeded him on 12 April 1945, soon came entirely under the influence and control of — and surrounded himself by other supporters of — Churchill and other Rhodesists, and this included support for the new state of Israel, though Albert Einstein and many other leading progressive U.S. Jews opposed it, and especially  opposed Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir, who ended up becoming leaders of Israel. Truman and Churchill were Rhodesists, and Judaism was not actually much involved in their advocacy for Israel and against the “natives” or Palestinians; imperialism was involved, and this Israel was to be a part of this Rhodesist empire.

    In fact, Truman was the very first world-leader to recognize the Jewish state, on 14 May 1948 — little more than a month after the extermination-phase of the ethnic-cleansing there had already begun. And it kept on coming. David Ben-Gurion privately described to his son on 5 October 1937 the plan for the ethnic-cleansing, but it couldn’t be carried-out until it had the U.S. Government’s support. Truman was key, and he was assisting there — as throughout his international policies — the Rhodesist agenda. This was to be a British operation, fronted by the U.S. Government. They knew what they were doing — that the U.S. Government was fronting for Britain’s Government. And, actually, the forced evacuations of Arabs, and emptying-out of entire Arab towns, was planned to start in, and did start in, December 1947; so, Truman and his British masters had to have known what they were endorsing. And Israel was fronting for them. All subsequent U.S. Presidents were also Rhodesists, except Kennedy, who had been but was abandoning them shortly before he mysteriously became assassinated.

    So, here’s additional background for how that is playing-out today:

    As everybody knows, Britain had controlled Iran (to extract its oil) before 1953, until Mohammad Mossadegh came to power there by popular acclaim, despite the British attempts to prevent that. And then America’s CIA operated a 1953 coup to remove the progressive Mossadegh and replace him by the Shah, who subsequently became famous for his prisons and their tortures (so that, this time, it would be U.S. oil firms that would be doing the extractions instead — this was acceptable to the Brits because they received a cut; and, furthermore, UK depended now upon America’s military might, so, this was part of their “Special Relationship”). But, then, in 1979, Iranians overthrew their dictatorial Shah, and installed their own Shiite Islamic, socialistic, but largely theocratic (and therefore at least partially dictatorial) Government. It was/is populist, instead of like the U.S.-&-UK-backed Arab Governments, which were (and are) monarchical and totally aristocratic (hereditary) dictatorships. The U.S. regime has, ever since, tried to reconquer Iran. (The monarchical Arab Governments also fear Iran because Iran is — after overthrowing the Shah — populist, anti-monarchical. Therefore, the Arab regimes rely largely upon the U.S. regime in order for them to be able to stay in power.)

    Iran, because of its populism, is strongly supportive of the Palestinians. Therefore, it is ideologically at war against Israel — not because of its Judaism, but because of its ethnic-cleansing of fellow-Muslims. Israel — not Judaism — is what Iran is opposed to. Iran, because of Iran’s past long history of being exploited by, first, British, and then American, imperialism, is passionately anti-Rhodesist. Consequently, the U.S. and UK regimes want to destroy Iran — and Israel is their chosen Rhodesist entity that fronts this U.S./UK/Israel operation.

    And, therefore, we now have the present situation:

    On December 2nd, Israel’s Jewish Chronicle (or “JC”) headlined “EXCLUSIVE: Mossad recruited top Iranian scientists to blow up key nuclear facility: 90 per cent of the plant’s centrifuges were destroyed” in that 2 July 2020 explosion. The same day they also headlined “Israel to hit ‘head of octopus’ in covert attacks on Tehran.” Already on November 29th they had headlined “UK and Israel foreign ministers vow to work ‘night and day’ to stop Iran developing nukes: Liz Truss and Yair Lapid sign agreement to take UK-Israel relations into a ‘bold new era’.” These are Rhodesist operations, just as America’s operations to destroy Iran have been and are. There is no change under Biden. He, too, is Rhodesist, as his predecessors have been.

    On December 3rd, the New York Times bannered “Iran Nuclear Talks Head for Collapse Unless Tehran Shifts, Europeans Say: In Vienna talks, the new hard-line Iranian government has staked out positions that are incompatible with the 2015 deal, European negotiators say.” It lied to imply that “the new hard-line Iranian government” was any different in its negotiating position than its predecessor’s, which was: Iran was demanding that the U.S. Government, which had broken the Agreement by cancelling its commitments under it, must first rejoin that Agreement, before Iran would make any concessions that would be in addition to that Agreement; and any such additional concessions by Iran (such as Trump and then Biden were demanding) would then be made ONLY in trade for additional concessions becoming simultaneously made by the U.S. Government. The EU (which essentially had been part of that existing Agreement the U.S. had abandoned) is a Rhodesist vassal entity, and Biden is just as much of a Rhodesist as was Trump before him, and even more than Obama was before Trump. America’s billionaires get the U.S. Presidents that they’ve bought (which is all of them post-1944), but it’s all actually part of the restored UK empire, in accord with Cecil Rhodes’s plan. That is the U.S. Deep State, and the UK Deep State, and the Israeli Deep State. And the Deep State in all of the vassal-nations.

    The post How Israel’s Actions Against Iran Are Rooted in Cecil Rhodes’s 1877 Plan first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The Russia-China-Iran Alliance

    NATO, the U.S. Government, and all other “neoconservatives” (adherents to Cecil Rhodes’s 1877 plan for a global U.S. empire that would be run, behind the scenes, by the UK’s aristocracy) have been treating Russia, China, and Iran, as being their enemies. In consequence of this: Russia, China, and Iran, have increasingly been coordinating their international policies, so as to assist each other in withstanding (defending themselves against) the neoconservative efforts that are designed to conquer them, and to add them to the existing U.S. empire.

    The U.S. empire is the largest empire that the world has ever known, and has approximately 800 military bases in foreign countries, all over the planet. This is historically unprecedented. But it is — like all historical phenomena — only temporary. However, its many propagandists — not only in the news-media but also in academia and NGOs (and Rhodesists predominate in all of those categories) — allege the U.S. (or UK-U.S.) empire to be permanent, or else to be necessary to become permanent. Many suppose that “the rise and fall of the great powers” won’t necessarily relate to the United States (i.e., that America will never fall from being the world’s dominant power); and, so, they believe that the “American Century” (which has experienced so many disastrous wars, and so many unnecessary wars) will — and even should — last indefinitely, into the future. That viewpoint is the permanent-warfare-for-permanent-peace lie: it asserts that a world in which America’s billionaires, who control the U.S. Government (and the American public now have no influence over their Government whatsoever), should continue their ‘rules-based international order’, in which these billionaires determine what ‘rules’ will be enforced, and what ‘rules’ won’t be enforced; and in which ‘rules-based international order’ international laws (coming from the United Nations) will be enforced ONLY if and when America’s billionaires want them to be enforced. The ideal, to them, is an all-encompassing global dictatorship, by U.S. (& UK) billionaires.

    In other words: Russia, China, Iran, and also any nation (such as Syria, Belarus, and Venezuela) whose current government relies upon any of those three for international support, don’t want to become part of the U.S. empire. They don’t want to be occupied by U.S. troops. They don’t want their national security to depend upon serving the interests of America’s billionaires. Basically, they want the U.N. to possess the powers that its inventor, FDR, had intended it to have, which were that it would serve as the one-and-only international democratic republic of nation-states; and, as such, would have the exclusive ultimate control over all nuclear and other strategic weapons and military forces, so that there will be no World War III. Whereas Rhodes wanted a global dictatorship by a unified U.S./UK aristocracy, their ‘enemies’ want a global democracy of nations (FDR named it “the United Nations”), ruling over all international relations, and being settled in U.N.-authorized courts, having jurisdiction over all international-relations issues.

    In other words: they don’t want an invasion such as the U.S. and its allies (vassal nations) did against Iraq in 2003 — an invasion without an okay from the U.N Security Council and from the General Assembly — to be able to be perpetrated, ever again, against ANY nation. They want aggressive wars (which U.S.-and-allied aristocracies ‘justify’ as being necessary to impose ‘democracy’ and ‘humanitarian values’ on other nations) to be treated as being the international war-crimes that they actually are.

    However, under the prevailing reality — that international law is whatever the U.S. regime says it is — a U.N.-controlled international order doesn’t exist, and maybe never will exist; and, so, the U.S. regime’s declared (or anointed, or appointed) ‘enemies’ (because none of them actually is their enemy — none wants to be in conflict against the U.S.) propose instead a “multilateral order” to replace “the American hegemony” or global dictatorship by the U.S. regime. They want, instead, an international democracy, like FDR had hoped for, but they are willing to settle merely for international pluralism — and this is (and always has been) called “an international balance of powers.” They recognize that this (balance of powers) had produced WW I, and WW II, but — ever since the moment when Harry S. Truman, on 25 July 1945, finally ditched FDR’s intentions for the U.N., and replaced that by the Cold War for the U.S. to conquer the whole world (and then formed NATO, which FDR would have opposed doing) — they want to go back (at least temporarily) to the pre-WW-I balance-of-powers system, instead of to capitulate to the international hegemon (America’s billionaires, the controller of the U.S. empire).

    So: the Russia-China-Iran alliance isn’t against the U.S. regime, but is merely doing whatever they can to avoid being conquered by it. They want to retain their national sovereignty, and ultimately to become nation-states within a replacement-U.N. which will be designed to fit FDR’s pattern, instead of Truman’s pattern (the current, powerless, talking-forum U.N.).

    Take, as an example of what they fear, not only the case of the Rhodesists’ 2003 invasion of Iraq, but the case of America’s coup against Ukraine, which Obama had started planning by no later than 2011, and which by 2013 entailed his scheme to grab Russia’s top naval base, in Crimea (which had been part of Russia from 1783 to 1954 when the Soviet leader transferred Crimea to Ukraine). Obama installed nazis to run his Ukrainian regime, and he hoped ultimately for Ukraine to be accepted into NATO so that U.S. missiles could be installed there on Russia’s border only a five-minute missile-flight away from Moscow. Alexander Mercouris at The Duran headlined on 4 July 2021, “Ukraine’s Black Sea NATO dilemma”, and he clearly explained the coordinated U.S.-and-allied aggression that was involved in the U.S.-and-allied maneuvering. U.S.-and-allied ‘news’-media hid it. Also that day, Mercouris bannered “In Joint Statement Russia-China Agree Deeper Alliance, Balancing US And NATO,” and he reported a historic agreement between those two countries, to coordinate together to create the very EurAsian superpower that Rhodesists have always dreaded. It’s exactly the opposite of what the U.S.-and-allied regimes had been aiming for. But it was the response to the Rhodesists’ insatiable imperialism.

    To drive both Russia and China into a corner was to drive them together. They went into the same corner, not different corners. They were coming together, not coming apart. And Iran made it a threesome.

    So: that’s how the U.S. regime’s appointed ‘enemies’ have come to join together into a virtual counterpart to America’s NATO alliance of pro-imperialist nations. It’s a defensive alliance, against an aggressive alliance — an anti-imperialist alliance, against a pro-imperialist alliance. America’s insatiably imperialistic foreign policies have, essentially, forced its ‘enemies’ to form their own alliance. It’s the only way for them to survive as independent nations, given Truman’s abortion of FDR’s plan for the U.N. — the replacement, by Truman of that, by the U.N. that became created, after FDR died on 12 April 1945.

    The post The Russia-China-Iran Alliance first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Israel is Ethnically Cleansing Gaza

    This started becoming clear on May 12th, and has become increasingly confirmed by events since then.

    On May 12th, Al-Arabia, CBS News, and other media, reported Israel’s Defense Minister Benny Gantz as promising that “The army will continue to attack to bring a total, long-term quiet.” And, “Only when we reach that goal will we be able to speak about a truce.” Britain’s Guardian reported his speech as having said that “Israel vows not to stop Gaza attacks until there is complete quiet.” Britain’s The Express reported him as saying that “There is no end date and we will not receive moral sermons from any organization on our right to protect the citizens of Israel. Only when we reach that goal will we be able to speak about a truce.”

    In other words, Israel is promising that until Gazans are totally conquered, there will be no “truce”: Israel will continue this until total victory is achieved — conquest, surrender by all Gazans.

    Throughout the conflict, U.S. President Joe Biden has said that America’s policy is to request that there be a truce. However, ever since at least May 12th, Israel has made clear that a “truce” will occur only when the Gazans are totally defeated, so that there is, in Gaza, “a total, long-term quiet.” Does that differ from Israel’s announcing that they are ethnically cleansing Gazans from Gaza?

    The difference would be equivalent to the difference between offering Gazans a choice ultimately between remaining quiet in the world’s largest-ever open-air prison, versus becoming totally exterminated by their enemy. What type of choice is that, actually?

    On 15 April 2018, Elliott Gabriel reported from Gaza City, that

    Palestinians confined to Gaza have faced several devastating onslaughts by the Israelis, as well as a crippling blockade by Tel Aviv and Cairo that has resulted in the collapse of the coastal strip’s economy. Monitors and advocates across the world have decried the grave humanitarian crisis prevailing in Gaza that has resulted directly from its being deprived of needed goods including construction material, electricity, food, water and medicine.

    In a report on Gaza last November, local human rights monitor B’Tselem noted:
    “Israel used its control over the crossings to put Gaza under a blockade, turning almost two million people into prisoners inside the Gaza Strip, effecting an economic collapse and propelling Gaza residents into dependency on international aid.”

    On 15 May 2019, the Guardian bannered “One million face hunger in Gaza after US cut to Palestine aid,” and noted that,

    The UNRWA, created in 1949 to provide short-term relief for Palestinian refugees after the 1948 Arab-Israeli conflict, runs schools, hospitals and social services in five areas including the West Bank, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria.

    It is largely propping up Gaza, subject to a total blockade by air, land and sea since 2007. Political stalemate, conflict with Israel and divisions among Palestinian factions have left the territory an economic ruin, without health and social services and with almost no access to clean water and only four or five hours of electricity a day.

    With no peace in sight, a generation is growing up in Gaza who have only known the fenced-in territory and never met an Israeli.

    So, if that is the reality there, then how is this ‘choice’ anything other than an ethnic cleansing of Gaza, turning it into a prison that’s designed for its inhabitants to be “quietly” exterminated until Israelis can then ultimately take over that land and make it a new land for settlement by Israelis?

    On 14 May 2021, U.S. Professor Juan Cole, an internationally recognized expert on the Middle East, headlined “Shooting Fish in a Barrel: Israel bombs Palestinian Refugees from Israel in Gaza, 50% of them Children,” and he wrote:

    At one point in the zeros the Israeli military made a plan to only allow enough food into Gaza to keep the population from becoming malnourished, but nothing more. No chocolate for the children. It was one of the creepiest moments in the history of colonialism.

    The unemployment rate in Gaza is 50%, the highest in the world. Half the population depends on food aid. The aquifer is polluted and increasingly salty from rising seas owing to climate change, so truly clean water is available to only about 5 percent of the population. Israel has several water purification plants. The Palestinians of Gaza do not.

    There is no equivalence between Israel and Gaza. Israel has the best-equipped military in the Middle East and has several hundred nuclear bombs, Its gross domestic product (nominal) per capita is on the order of $42,000 per year.

    The nominal GDP per capita in Palestine is $3000, and those who live in Gaza earn less yet.

    On 19 May 2021, U.S. President Joe Biden’s Secretary of Defense, Lloyd Austin who was selected because he is both a Black and a neoconservative, headlined at the ‘Defense’ department, “Readout of Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III’s Phone Call With Israeli Minister of Defense Benjamin ‘Benny’ Gantz,” and here is the entirety of that news-report:

    Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III spoke today with Israeli Minister of Defense Benjamin “Benny” Gantz.  Secretary Austin underscored his continued support for Israel’s right to defend itself, reviewed assessments of Israel’s military campaign in Gaza, and urged de-escalation of the conflict.

    The United States Government has ‘urged de-escalation’ but “underscored [its] continued support for Israel’s right to defend itself,” while exterminating Gazans.

    Also on May 19th, the White House issued a statement about the phone conversation that day between Biden and Netanyahu, “The president conveyed to the Prime Minister that he expected a significant de-escalation today on the path to a cease-fire.”

    However, on the morning of Thursday, May 20th, CNBC reported that, “Israel launched a fresh wave of airstrikes over the Gaza strip early Thursday in what it says are continued operations to take out Hamas targets.” That action by Netanyahu — a flagrant disregard for what U.S. President Biden had publicly instructed him to do (and the United States Government donates annually $3.8 billion to Israel for purchase of U.S.-made weapons) — was very embarrassing for Biden. However, Biden had not publicly threatened Netanyahu, but had only instructed him. Therefore, the question, at this point, was whether Netanyahu’s disobedience would be publicly punished (such as by means of applying U.S. sanctions against Israel and against Netanyahu personally). Which was the master, and which was the slave, in the U.S.-Israel relationship? Absent a public punishment of Israel for its disobedience, Israel would appear to be the master, and the U.S. its slave.

    Also on May 20th, Al Jazeera, a news-operation that represents the royal family of Qatar, headlined “Death, destruction in Gaza as Israel defies truce call: Live”, and reported that, “Israeli fighter jets continued to pound the Gaza Strip on Thursday, … as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu defied calls for a de-escalation.” This was specific public recognition that Israel was defying the publicly announced policy of the U.S. Government.

    It’s good to know what America stands for, and has been standing for, at least after the Presidency of Jimmy Carter, if not ever since Harry S. Truman became America’s President in 1945. The United States has certainly been like this, continually, for a very long time.

    So has Israel.

    It is now out in the open. If Biden will retaliate strongly against Israel, he will change U.S. foreign policy since 1945. If he fails to retaliate at all, he will be profoundly embarrassed. If he continues to try to walk the fence on this matter, then, since it’s all out in the open now, the United States itself will be profoundly embarrassed. No matter what he does, the future will not be like the past. This juncture is a historical turning-point, whichever way he might turn.

    The post Israel is Ethnically Cleansing Gaza first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • How and Why the $2,000 Covid-19 Stimulus Checks Were Defeated

    The People Who Run the U.S. Government Despise Their Voters

    On December 30th, U.S. Senators voted 80 to 12 not to increase the Covid-19 relief one-time payments from $600 per qualifying person, to $2,000. The same bill had already passed, December 28th, in the U.S. House, by a vote of 322 to 87.

    Here is how the great investigative-reporting team of David Sirota and Andrew Perez reported this on December 31st, under the headline “Senate Democrats’ Motion To Concede On $2,000 Checks,”

    Only six members of the Senate Democratic Caucus mustered the courage to vote against [Republican leader Mitch] McConnell’s maneuver — [Bernie] Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Chris Van Hollen, Jeff Merkley, Ed Markey and Ron Wyden. Democratic senators in fact provided the majority of the votes for the measure that lets the defense bill proceed without a vote on the $2,000 checks. …

    Liberal Economists And Pundits Gave McConnell His Talking Points 

    McConnell’s crusade to stop direct aid was abetted not only by Senate Democrats’ surrender, but also by media elites who loyally represent the party’s corporate wing and who began promoting canned talking points to undermine the direct aid. 

    First came a barrage of attacks on the $2,000 checks initiative from [Lawrence] Summers, a former hedge fund executive who as President Barack Obama’s national economic director stymied the push for more stimulus after the 2008 financial crisis.

    Then the New York Times’ Paul Krugman pretended the wildly popular initiative is “divisive” and said “the economics aren’t very good.” Timesman Tom Friedman, who married into a real estate empire, called the idea “crazy” and fretted that checks might go to “people who don’t need the help.” The minions of billionaire Michael Bloomberg joined in with a house editorial demanding Congress block the checks. 

    Meanwhile, only weeks after the Washington Post news page told the harrowing tales of rising poverty and starvation in America, the paper’s editorial board argued against stimulus by insisting that “the economy has healed significantly.” 

    The Post — which is owned by the world’s richest man, Jeff Bezos — argued against the $2,000 checks by saying it is unjust that some rich people might in theory end up benefiting from the proposal. …

    All of this noise was quickly weaponized by McConnell, who in a Senate floor speech directly cited Summers and the Post as justification to stop the $2,000 checks to the two thirds of households in his own state who would benefit. 

    “The liberal economist Larry Summers, President Clinton’s Treasury Secretary and President Obama’s NEC director says, ‘There’s no good economic argument for universal $2,000 checks at this moment.’ McConnell said, adding: “Even the liberal Washington Post today is laughing at the political left demanding more huge giveaways with no relationship to actual need.”

    Basically, what Sirota and Perez were reporting is that with the exception of only 12 members in the U.S. Senate and 87 members in the U.S. House, all members of the U.S. Congress are owned 100% by America’s billionaires.

    Those billionaires also own and control America’s 100 corporations that sell the most to the U.S. Government and to its allies, firms such as Lockheed Martin, and Raytheon, which derive all or most of their sales — and especially their profits — from selling to those governments, and which therefore are obsessed to keep ‘defense’-spending high (and organization such as NATO going). Since these same people also donate the most to America’s politicians, one can now say that their corporations, and especially the ones which sell the most to the U.S. Government, effectively own the U.S. Government, and are the actual constituency that every U.S. President, and almost every member of the U.S. Congress, represents above all. Consequently, attaching the $600 Covid-19 relief payment, instead of the $2,000 amount, to the annual ‘defense’-spending bill, assured that the $1,400-per-person difference would be able to be spent on companies such as Lockheed Martin, and go into the pockets of America’s billionaires — the people who really count, to ‘democratically’ elected U.S. Government officials.

    Whereas the overt, the official, position of the Republican Party was opposing the proposal to increase the $600 to $2,000, the overt, the official, position of the Democratic Party was to support that increase. Why, then, did only 6 of the 46 Democratic Senators (including the ‘independent’ Bernie Sanders) vote in favor of that official position, and only 20 of the 233 Democratic Representatives vote in favor of it? It certainly wasn’t being done in order to please their electorate.

    The proposal to increase the $600 to $2,000 was supported by 78% of Americans and opposed by only 17%; so, if the Congress were authentically democratic instead of aristocratic, then the proposal would have passed overwhelmingly. But it’s not. Nor is the U.S. House democratic.  And why are they not? (Furthermore, even 73% of Republicans in that nationwide poll supported the proposal to raise the $600 to $2,000; so, even their Party’s official position on this was hostile toward themselves. The only difference between Republican politicians and Democratic politicians is that Democratic ones are lots more hypocritical, claiming that they support ‘workers and regular people’ instead of only their own megadonors.)

    On December 31st, The Hill bannered, “Graham calls for stand-alone vote on $2K checks” and reported that,

    Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) broke with his party’s Senate leader Thursday, calling for a stand-alone vote on $2,000 stimulus checks.

    “If you had a stand-alone vote on the $2,000 check, it might pass,” Graham said while appearing on “Fox & Friends.”

    Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has knocked the prospect of raising the stimulus checks that are going out to many Americans from $600 to $2,000, vowing the Senate would not pass a stand-alone bill increasing the amount. President Trump has pushed for the increase and the House passed one earlier this week, but most Senate Republicans are wary.

    “The Senate is not going to be bullied into rushing out more borrowed money into the hands of Democrats’ rich friends who don’t need the help,” McConnell said.

    (The $1,400 difference wouldn’t go to the American people, he was implying: it would instead go “into the hands of Democrats’ rich friends.”)

    (Graham’s top donor was the “Republican Jewish Coalition” — extremely wealthy supporters of Israel, the nation that America’s taxpayers already donate $3.8 billion per year to, for it to purchase weapons from the U.S. — and second was employees of the U.S. Department of Defense, which likewise benefits from Senator Graham’s consistent neoconservatism. Fifth was Boeing, which is the second-largest ‘defense’ contractor, after only Lockheed. So: why was he ‘fighting for the little man’ here? It was only theater, to satisfy the voters back home, who need the extra $1,400 far more than Graham’s megadonors do.)

    America’s billionaires despise the American public and control both of the political Parties. In fact, at the Presidential level, each contest is always between a Republican nominee and a Democratic nominee, both of whom have been approved by the given Party’s billionaires. The billionaires have an effective veto-power over the nominees of both of the Parties. If the billionaires don’t like a given candidate in the primaries, then not only will that candidate get none of their money, but all of the billionaire-owned-and-or-controlled media will be against that candidate and will spread hostile ‘news’-reports against that person. The public are fooled, because however much the billionaires need to spend in order to fool them, it will be done. Owning the Government is seen by them as being their right, just as has always been the case in every aristocracy throughout history. The difference is that, in America, the billionaires’ Government and their press call this a ‘democracy’, so as to fool the public even more. Only if the American public come to recognize that it’s definitely not a democracy (it’s even a police-state but the billionaires hide that fact from the public) will there be a revolution against the billionaires. However, the billionaires control the public’s mind; so, a second American Revolution — this time to defeat not Britain’s aristocrats but America’s — appears to be impossible. It certainly wouldn’t be supported by any successful American politician. That’s the basic difference between 1776 America and 2021 America. Overthrowing a foreign aristocracy is far easier than overthrowing a domestic one.

    This is the reason why the poor, who get hardest hit by plagues and who are getting especially hard hit by Covid-19 in America, will now increasingly become homeless and die. And they’ll be getting the least help.

    On December 30th, David Wallace-Wells at New York magazine bannered “America’s Vaccine Rollout Is Already a Disaster” and documented that when compared against UK and Israel — neither of which is among the world’s relatively successful countries at restraining this virus — the U.S. is doing vastly worse than those (unsuccessful) countries at distributing vaccines against it. (Since that magazine is owned by the family of a Democratic billionaire, its report actually ignored all of the countries that have performed effectively against the virus, because none of the best performers were allied with U.S. billionaires. The news-report was true, but was aimed against the Republican Party — specifically the Republican President — instead of opposing the entire American Government, which is actually to blame. It’s partisan propaganda, but truthful — as far as it goes. Even truthful propaganda like that, however, is harmful, because it’s not criticizing the source of the problem, which is all of America’s billionaires — the people who control the U.S. Government. None of them even cares about the source of America’s problem, because they are part of it, and won’t oppose it.)

    U.S. actually has even higher percentages of its population infected with Covid-19, and higher percentages dying from it, than Brazil — an infamous basket-case. If this isn’t a pre-revolutionary situation, then nothing could be. How much longer will Americans be deceived, and tolerate this — this “socialism for the rich and capitalism for the poor”?

    On January 1st, the same reporting team of Sirota and Perez headlined “Schumer Begins 2021 Promising To Fight — Then Immediately Surrenders,” and described how the Democratic leader in the Senate, Senator Schumer, had been promising that “Democrats will not stop fighting” for the $2,000 figure, and within hours cooperated with Republicans to block it from being passed. The reporters concluded:

    Schumer doesn’t want any of this out in the open — he wants everyone to think he and his caucus are doing all they can to actually fight for the things they insist they support. But the mask is now off — this morning, he showed what’s really going on here. 

    Whether or not anyone wants to look at what he showed us remains an open question. The situation is demoralizing, and there is an entire misinformation infrastructure of cable TV news and partisan punditry designed to avert our eyes.

    Almost all Democrats in Congress had merely been playing the ‘good cop’ to their Republican counterparts’ ‘bad cop’, in order to get that money to the Pentagon instead of to the public. Getting it to the public would be ‘waste, fraud, and abuse’, but getting it to the Pentagon — the most corrupt Department in an extremely corrupt Government — would be ‘essential for national security’.

    Going back and forth between Democrats and Republicans will no longer work and hasn’t worked for a long time now; it has become a dead end, because neither Party is, any longer, either democratic or republican. The problem isn’t the Constitution; it is the individuals who have hired the personnel, in all branches of the U.S. Government, to transform that Constitution into just a piece of parchment and to defile its meaning by lies. That can happen even to the best of constitutions. America now is a limited democracy only on parchment, no longer in practice. It’s a dictatorship (by the billionaires) in practice. This time around, a revolution won’t require a new constitution. It requires, instead, merely new personnel. And that’s a fact. Changing the Constitution won’t get us out of this mess. The problem is more drastic, even though a new Constitution won’t be required. New Amendments (such as, perhaps, this) will be required, but a new Constitution won’t. And those Amendments will be propagandized against ferociously by America’s billionaires. So, all billionaires will need to be removed from power before it happens. Their stranglehold on the American mind must be ended first. Then, the issue of Amendments can be discussed.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.