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Category: Disinformation

  • Sanitized Tyranny: The Weaponization of Truth


    On Jan. 8, 2021, two days after the Capitol Hill “insurrection”, the Parler social media app was the number #1 most downloaded app in the Apple App Store. On “January 10, 2021, Parler CEO John Matze announced the company had been ‘dropped by virtually all of its business alliances after Amazon, Apple and Google ended their agreements … Every vendor from text message services to email providers to our lawyers all ditched us too on the same day.’” By Jan. 11, Apple, Google, and Amazon had successfully colluded to destroy the capacity of one of the most popular apps on the web to operate.

    It was a blatant violation of antitrust laws during a period in which Big Tech has been repeatedly investigated and accused of similar infractions. In October 2020 top Democratic congressional lawmakers reported that “… Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google engage in a range of anti-competitive behavior, and antitrust laws need an overhaul to allow for more competition in the US internet economy.” The report recommended new legislation that could lead to the breakup of tech giants such as Facebook and Google.

    Yet the overnight shutdown of Parler was accompanied by deafening cheers from the media and politicians across the country. While the elimination of a rising competitor no doubt played a significant role in the takedown, ensuring coordinated messaging across the major social media platforms was likely the deciding factor in Parler’s demise. The same journalists and politicians applauded the heroic tech titans just as loudly when Twitter suppressed evidence of Hunter Biden’s corrupt dealings three weeks before the election and when Trump was permanently banned from Facebook.

    Parler’s targeted takedown by a conspiracy of tech giants signaled a new phase in the war for strategic reality control. The narrative managers find it quite inconvenient that the pandemic propaganda campaign has not gone completely according to plan. Resistance to the mainstream covid story has turned out to be more widespread than expected. There was a whiff of desperation about this open crushing of a rival platform.

    Parler’s real offense was to offer a media delivery system designed to foster free speech. Their service was a reaction against the rapidly multiplying and often inscrutable rules about what speech is allowed and what forbidden on the major platforms. Unlike Facebook and Google, Parler’s users choose what they want to see and are allowed to express their beliefs without the risk of being booted off the service for inadequate doublethink.

    Parler was not shut down because it allowed violent postings. Calls for violence were far more prevalent on Facebook and Twitter during the Capital Hill “coup attempt.” Its real crime was to provide a platform where users could express ideas that undercut the dominant narrative without fear of censorship. Its brutal shutdown sent a stark warning to potential competitors who might be similarly tempted to open their platforms to free speech.

    Domestic Netwar

    Since the beginning of the 2020 U.S. election cycle, the tech giants have unleashed multiple large-scale crackdowns on the content that challenges elite narratives. To understand the scale of the current censorship drive, consider a few of the major actions by Facebook and Twitter:

    • (10/14/2020) The New York Post, which has the 4th largest distribution rank of all newspapers in the U.S., published an article about Joe Biden’s son, Hunter, claiming that he traded on his father’s position to obtain a seat worth $50,000 a month on the Board of the Ukrainian energy company Burisma. Two hours after the story broke, Facebook announced that it was “’… reducing [the article’s] distribution on our platform’: in other words, tinkering with its own algorithms to suppress the ability of users to discuss or share the news article.” This was done before the article had been fact-checked. Shortly after this, Twitter banned “… entirely all users’ ability to share the Post article — not just on their public timeline but even using the platform’s private Direct Messaging feature.” Twitter users who tried to link to the New York Post article received an error message explaining that such linking was disabled due to the potentially harmful nature of the content. Shortly after, Twitter prevented the New York Post from posting any content, though later it was allowed to resume posting. It was a blatant act of censorship designed to influence the election.
    • (1/7/2021) Facebook bans the sitting President of the United States from further Facebook posting due to events that, according to Mark Zuckerberg, “… clearly demonstrate that President Donald Trump intends to use his remaining time in office to undermine the peaceful and lawful transition of power to his elected successor, Joe Biden.” Note that Zuckerberg directly accuses Trump of planning to impede his lawfully elected successor from assuming power with minimal evidence.
    • (1/8/2021) Twitter permanently removes Trump’s account, “After close review of recent Tweets from the @realDonaldTrump account … we have permanently suspended the account due to the risk of further incitement of violence.” Once again, a social media giant accuses the President of inciting violence on the basis of weak evidence.
    • (1/19/2021) Facebook announced that “As of January 12, 2021, we have identified over 890 militarized social movements to date and in total, removed about 3,400 Pages, 19,500 groups, 120 events, 25,300 Facebook profiles and 7500 Instagram accounts. We’ve also removed about 3,300 Pages, 10,500 groups, 510 events, 18,300 Facebook profiles and 27,300 Instagram accounts for violating our policy against QAnon.”
    • (2/8/2021) Facebook reported that, “Today … we are expanding the list of false claims we will remove to include additional debunked claims about the coronavirus and vaccines. This includes claims such as:
      • COVID-19 is man-made or manufactured
      • Vaccines are not effective at preventing the disease they are meant to protect against
      • It’s safer to get the disease than to get the vaccine
      • Vaccines are toxic, dangerous or cause autism”

    In each case, the de facto union formed between media outlets and the tech giants initiated a massive censorship campaign without provoking the journalistic outrage that would have erupted a few years ago. Open censorship is now not only accepted by mainstream media but celebrated in the post-pandemic world as a much needed “weaponization of truth.”

    Accompanying this unprecedented wave of repression is a new subgenre of journalism which Glenn Greenwald describes as “… an unholy mix of junior high hall-monitor tattling and Stasi-like citizen surveillance. Its primary objectives are control, censorship, and the destruction of reputations for fun and power.” These journalists rationalize their sanitized tyranny as “working in the disinformation space” where their job is to identify offensive memes and shame those responsible for them.

    One reason the tech giants have recently abandoned their earlier restraint in eliminating dissident perspectives is that they are now being ridiculed by the world’s most influential media organizations whenever they fail to suppress so-called “fake news” with sufficient zeal. But the more significant reason is that mainstream media outlets are an organic extension of the intelligence apparatus that helped build Google, Facebook, and several other tech giants. These companies supply the tools to detect, demote, and remove content when it threatens their control over internet information.

    The attitude of many mainstream journalists is encapsulated in the recent recommendation by a New York Times reporter who called on the Biden administration to, “… put together a cross-agency task force to tackle disinformation and domestic extremism, which would be led by something like a ‘reality czar.’” This cross-agency task force leader “… would allow platforms to share data about QAnon and other conspiracy theory communities with researchers and government agencies without running afoul of privacy laws … it could become the tip of the spear for the federal government’s response to the reality crisis.” This task force would coordinate the forces required for strikes against those found guilty of offering alternative accounts to officially defined reality.

    A Wilderness of Mirrors

    “It’s easier to fool people than to convince them that they’ve been fooled.” – Unknown.

    According to his press, Tristan Harris is the trusted voice of the technological conscience. He co-founded the Center for Humane Technology (CHT) to drive a shift toward technology that operationalizes our informational well-being. The top priority in the site’s “Ledger of Harms” is social media users’ rampant addiction to disinformation.

    The CHT cites a finding from a recent scientific study that false news “… spreads six times faster than true news. According to researchers, this is because … fake news items usually have a higher emotional content and contain unexpected information which inevitably means that they will be shared and reposted more often.” This finding was based on the work of six fact-checking organizations.

    Unfortunately for Tristan, there is a fundamental deception lurking behind the “fake news” meme. Whenever we hear the term it evokes a conditioned reflex that tends to short-circuit any reflection on its actual meaning. “Fake news” is intended to signify falsehoods that qualified information professionals are able to refute based on careful research. This is the rarely questioned myth behind “fact-checking.” However, it is more accurately understood as an ideological trap intended to inculcate a reductive concept of truth that can be easily manipulated to advance elite agendas.

    How reliable is the “fact-checking”, the mechanism used by the major platforms to find and remove false news? A few months ago, OffGuardian published an article titled “WHO (Accidentally) Confirms Covid is No More Dangerous Than Flu.” According to a follow-up article, “… the WHO’s Dr Michale Ryan claimed ‘about 10%’ of the global population had been infected with Sars-Cov-2. With an alleged death toll of roughly 1 million, that puts the infection-fatality ratio at roughly 0.14%.” 0.14% is 24 times lower than WHO’s “provisional figure” of 3.4% which was used to justify the lockdowns that devastated the world economy. That would put the IFR rate for covid right in line with the seasonal flu, which has a mortality rate of about 0.1 percent.

    However, the fact-checking organization known as Health Feedback claimed the following statement to be false, “The coronavirus is no more deadly or dangerous than seasonal flu.” Health Feedback is a member of the WHO-led project Vaccine Safety Net (VSN) which claims that each reviewer “… contributing to our analyses holds a Ph.D. and has recently published articles in top-tier peer-reviewed science journals.” Their parent organization Science Feedback works with Facebook as part of its fact-checking program.

    Close analysis of the article indicates that the fact-checkers lied about Dr. Ryan’s actual claims. The lie was this: “Ryan said that, according to the WHO’s best estimates, the virus that causes COVID-19 could have infected up to 10% of the global population.” In fact, Ryan stated that “about 10%” was infected, not “up to 10%.” By reducing the size of the infected population, the IFR rate for covid can be bloated to the pandemic proportions needed to drive the elite agenda. To camouflage their mendacity, the fact-checker found a way to avoid directly quoting Dr. Ryan’s actual words by linking to Zero Hedge’s reblog of the article which provides a summary of his statements without quoting them directly.

    This egregious example is only one of many that demonstrate how fact-checkers squeeze the facts into the straitjacket of official truth. Since fact-checking is the central pillar of disinformation detection, its failure to stand up to analysis means that the entire superstructure behind the disinformation purge falls apart. As one fact-checking critic put it, “… this is what is known as a ‘wilderness of mirrors’ – a chaotic information environment that so perfectly blends truth, half-truth and fiction that even the best can no longer tell what’s real and what’s not.” Propaganda can be much amplified by technology, but it is the believability of its stories that drives the strategic reality operation. Its goal is to bury the text of truth under a scaffolding of interpretive lies.

    A Bodyguard of Lies

    “In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.” – Winston Churchill

    In the eyes of the elite, it is not the COVID-19 disease that is the existential threat to humanity, but alternative viewpoints about it. The “Doomsday Clock” released by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists on Jan. 27, 2021 highlighted three existential threats to humanity “… a resurgent nuclear arms race, climate change, and online misinformation about the Covid-19 epidemic.” The key question is whose existence is being threatened by covid misinformation – the planetary population or the great resetters who unleashed it? This could be a sign that the covid propaganda campaign has not lived up to elite expectations.

    It’s clear that in the last several months the elite have felt compelled to pursue a much more aggressive disinformation campaign. Facebook recently decided to prohibit all COVID-19 or vaccine-related posts that contain erroneous claims as defined in the “COVID-19 and Vaccine Policy Updates & Protections” posting. The new rule is that any claim that calls into question information provided by the World Health Organization (WHO) or other reliable health sources will be removed.

    While Mark Zuckerberg constantly invokes AI as the ultimate solution to fake news, research shows that it can support, but not solve the problem of finding and suppressing news stories that undermine dominant narratives. Evaluating the threat, a story might pose depends on awareness of its social and political context. Yet even the most advanced natural language processing (NLP) algorithms are currently incapable of identifying such contexts. Therefore AI-based content analysis does not yet provide reliable methods for the initial identification of misinformation except in straightforward scenarios such as detecting duplicates of previously debunked stories. Automation can speed up the work of professional fact-checkers, but at this time it can’t replace them.

    However, some advanced AI-based approaches have shown promise in the initial detection of dangerous postings. One method is to use AI to detect a story’s pattern of propagation. Since, according to the scientific study by the CHT previously cited, “fake news spreads six times faster than true news”, by scanning for stories with rapid spread patterns, researchers believe that AI might automatically detect information that could endanger official narratives. Using this method, fact-checkers can rapidly sift through a much greater volume of material to uncover offensive memes. The tech giants never seem to consider the possibility that the rapid spread pattern might in some cases be driven by a massive unsatisfied hunger for truth.

    Once a story has been tagged as disinformation, both defensive and offensive options need to be evaluated. If it is posted on a controlled social media platform such as Facebook or Twitter, the platform can reduce its distribution, label it, or directly remove it. If it is on a platform that permits free speech such as Parler, the platform itself can be targeted by removing its hosting service in the way Amazon did in the wake of the “violent insurrection” on Capitol Hill.

    In the case of websites not hosted on an elite-controlled platform, these can be deplatformed by removing its domain name from the centralized DNS (Domain Name System) that controls access to web sites through its registered name. Since DNS is a centralised system, legal pressure from law enforcement agencies can force the domain name to be deleted so that the website becomes inaccessible. From 2018 to 2019, several police agencies seized 30,500 domain names in 20 different countries.

    Further steps may be needed in some cases. In November 2020, “… the national-security states of the U.S. and UK have discreetly let it be known that the cyber tools and online tactics previously designed for use in the post-9/11 ‘war on terror’ are now being repurposed for use against information sources promoting ‘vaccine hesitancy’ and information related to COVID-19 that runs counter to their state narratives.” Journalists who raise unwelcome concerns about covid vaccines can be de-platformed and where feasible, their stories algorithmically erased from the internet.

    The UK signal intelligence agency, Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) has been assigned the task of targeting websites that raise concerns about the COVID-19 vaccine. GHCQ’s cyberwar will not only take down anti-vaccine propaganda but will also seek to “… disrupt the operations of the cyber-actors responsible for it, including encrypting their data so they cannot access it and blocking their communications with each other.’” These targeted strikes against information terrorists will be coordinated through the “Five Eyes” alliance of intelligence agencies (U.S., Australia, New Zealand and Canada).

    Resisting the Reality Engineers

    An alliance of intelligence agencies, fact-checkers, and think tanks have decided that the world population must be electronically immunized against information which undermines approved biosecurity narratives. Their tactical strikes against “disinformation” cloaks an attack on our capacity for independent thought. The algorithms used by the social media giants to generate obsessive user engagement transform us into easily manipulated slaves of semiconscious emotional stimuli. They are not protecting us from “fake news”, but from our own collective powers of discernment.

    Yet the current hysteria about “disinformation” is also a tacit admission that mainstream media has lost so much credibility that it has to resort to increasingly harsh censorship to force their former audience to listen to them. An effective resistance strategy must include developing the tools of critical thinking such as the ability to detect logical fallacies. Only by keeping our powers of discernment switched on at all times can we retain both our freedom of thought and the sane vision of the world that it empowers.

    Despite the social unrest that false news stories could and did cause, the founding fathers of the United States thought, in the words of Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, that those “… who won our independence believed that the final end of the State was to make men free to develop their faculties … They valued liberty both as an end, and as a means. They believed liberty to be the secret of happiness, and courage to be the secret of liberty. They believed that freedom to think as you will and to speak as you think are means indispensable to the discovery and spread of political truth …”1 In their minds, part of being an adult was the often-difficult art of distinguishing true from false information. The founders believed that truth is only accessible to free minds and that any attempt to curtail freedom weakens our access to truth.

  • Image credit: MSNBC
    1. Wu, Tim. 2016. The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads. Kindle Edition. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. p. 49.
    The post Sanitized Tyranny: The Weaponization of Truth first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The Watchdogs of Imperialism and the Uyghur Genocide Slander

    On February 26 the Canadian Parliament passed a motion, by a vote of 226 to 0, expressing the opinion that “the People’s Republic of China has” implemented “measures intended to prevent” Uyghur and other Turkic Muslim births and that these measures are “consistent with” the United Nations Genocide Convention.

    The reality is that Beijing is not preventing Uyghur and other Turkic Muslim births, and a report by a German anthropologist widely cited as evidence that it is, contradicts this claim. That report, by Adrian Zenz, a fellow at a US government-created foundation whose mission is to bring about the end of communism and the Chinese Communist Party,  reveals that while Chinese family planning policy restricts the number of children Chinese couples are allowed to have, it does not prevent couples in any group, including Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslims, from bearing children. Moreover, limits on family size are the same between the Han Chinese ethnic majority and religious minorities. There is, therefore, no discrimination in Chinese family planning policy on the basis of national, religious, or ethnic affiliation.

    Perhaps aware their position was untenable, the parliamentarians sought to buttress their motion by citing political opinion in the United States, where “it has been the position of two consecutive administrations that Uyghur and other Turkic Muslims are being subjected to a genocide by the Government of the People’s Republic of China,” the motion observed. In an act of unseemly subservience to imperial power, Canada’s parliament constructed a motion, based on no evidence, to echo a point of view articulated in Washington, also based on no evidence.

    Significantly, the last two consecutive administrations have designated China a rival, and therefore have politically-motivated reasons for slandering their challenger. Moreover, apart from using the hyper-aggressive US military to extort economic and strategic concessions from other countries, US administrations have a long record of fabrication to justify their aggressive actions. That “two consecutive administrations” have held that the Chinese are carrying out a genocide is evidence of nothing more than Washington continuing to operate in its accustomed fashion of churning out lies about states that refuse to be integrated into the US economic, military and political orbit. A Serb-orchestrated genocide against ethnic Albanians in Kosovo; hidden weapons of mass destruction in Iraq; moderate rebels in Syria: these are only the tip of the iceberg of US lies and calumnies offered as pretexts for imperial aggression. Genocide in Xinjiang is but the latest.

    Below, I look at the genocide slander from four perspectives:

    1. The geostrategic context.
    2. Who is behind the accusations?
    3. How do the accusers define genocide?
    4. What is the evidence?

    The geostrategic context

    In 2003, Graham E. Fuller, a former vice-chair of the US National Intelligence Estimate and one-time CIA station chief in Kabul, wrote a book for the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Study at the Johns Hopkins University, titled The Xinjiang Problem. His co-author was the academic S. Frederick Starr.

    Fuller and Starr wrote that:

    the historical record suggests that the decision of countries and even of international organizations to raise specific human rights issues is often politicized and highly selective. Many countries will devote attention to human rights issues in China in inverse proportion to the quality of their overall bilateral relationship.

    It need not be said that today, 18 years later, the quality of overall bilateral relations between the United States and China has deteriorated sharply. China has emerged as a formidable competitor to US economic and technological supremacy, and US policy has shifted, beginning with the Obama administration, toward an explicit program of eclipsing China’s rise.

    In recent days, US president Joe Biden has said, “American leadership must meet … the growing ambitions of China to rival the United States.” The Wall Street Journal reports that Biden’s “goal is to stay ahead of China in semiconductors, artificial intelligence and other advances that are expected to define the economy and military of the future.” However, the US president, according to the newspaper, intends to portray the conflict as one based on “a clash of values: democracy vs. autocracy,” rather than a clash of economic interests.

    At the base of a deteriorating Sino-US relationship, then, lies a commercial rivalry, on top of which Washington has layered a narrative about a clash of values. In a Foreign Affairs article written before he became president, Biden outlined a strategy of confronting China over the economic challenges it poses to US businesses, US domination of the industries of tomorrow, and US technological (and concomitant military) supremacy. Biden said he would use a human rights narrative to rally support for a US-led campaign against China.

    Fuller and Starr continued: “It would be unrealistic,” they wrote, “to rule out categorically American willingness to play the ‘Uyghur card’ as a means of exerting pressure on China in the event of some future crisis or confrontation.” Many “of China’s rivals have in the past pursued active policies in Xinjiang and exploited the Uyghur issue for their benefit.” Almost two decades later, with US hostility rising as Washington’s claim to primacy on the world stage is under challenge, the United States has decided to play the Uyghur card.

    Who is behind the accusations?

    A network of groups and individuals, animated by an antagonism to the Chinese Communist Party, and supportive of continued US global supremacy, are involved in originating the slanders against Beijing. At the center is the German anthropologist, Adrian Zenz.

    Zenz’s opposition to Beijing lies in his religious beliefs. A fundamentalist Christian, he views communism, feminism and homosexuality, as abominations against God. Zenz also believes that he is on a divinely-inspired mission to bring about the demise of communist rule in China.

    Zenz is a senior fellow at the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation. The foundation, created by the US government to discredit an ideology which competes against the United States’ first favorite religion, US state-capitalism (Christianity being the second) seeks to free the world “from the false hope of Marxism” and save it from “the tyranny of communism” (the leitmotif of Hitler’s political career.) This it strives to do by educating future generations that “Marxist socialism is the deadliest ideology in history,” (one that, by this view, is fully capable of carrying out a genocide), a task the foundation sees as especially pressing today, when “Positive attitudes toward communism and socialism are at an all-time high in the United States.”

    Zenz has also written anti-Beijing reports for the Jamestown Foundation,  an anti-Communist outfit supported by corporations, foundations, and wealthy individuals, whose mission is to shape public opinion against China and North Korea.

    The slanderers also include a number of Uyghur exile groups, including the World Uyghur Congress, funded by the National Endowment for Democracy. The NED is a US government-bankrolled organization whose first president conceded that it does overtly what the CIA used to do covertly, namely destabilize foreign governments by strengthening fifth columns. The NED does so under the cover of promoting democracy and human rights.  The organization has boasted on Twitter that it has been funding fifth columnists in Xinjiang since 2004.

    Another propagator of anti-Beijing slanders is the Epoch Times, the newspaper of the Falun Gong. Like Zenz, the roots of Falun Gong’s anti-Beijing animus lie in reactionary religious convictions. The cult deplores gender equality, homosexuality, and communism as affronts against God.

    How do the accusers define genocide?

    Those who accuse Beijing of carrying out a genocide employ a ruse regularly used in the corporate world to dupe consumers and employees. The subterfuge is to redefine a word to mean something other than what the word would be reasonably interpreted to mean.

    Former US secretary of state Mike Pompeo used this ruse. He accused Beijing of trying to integrate Xinjiang and its Turkic people into the larger Chinese society. While this did not meet the definition of genocide, Pompeo labelled Beijing’s actions as genocide all the same.  According to the magazine Foreign Policy, State Department lawyers told Pompeo that Beijing’s actions in Xinjiang did not satisfy the UN convention’s definition of genocide. Pompeo, who has no respect for the truth, much less the contrary opinions of government lawyers, was undeterred.

    The current US secretary of state Anthony Blinken also accused Beijing of genocide. Using the same ruse, Blinken pointed to non-genocidal actions, namely one million Uyghurs in ‘concentration camps’, to make the claim that Beijing was trying to destroy a Muslim minority.  The claim was a double deception. First, there are no Uyghur concentration camps in Xinjiang, and second, even if there were, concentration camps do not equal genocide. Blinken was likely trying to exploit the association of the Holocaust with German death camps to insinuate that concentration camps and genocide go together, like the artic and snow, and that the Chinese government, and its Communist Party, are contemporary expressions of Nazi horror.

    The source of the concentration camp allegation is yet another of Beijing’s political foes, an Islamist media outlet run by Uyghur separatists in Turkey, which serves as a platform for the East Turkistan Islamic Movement, an al-Qaeda affiliated jihadist outfit which seeks to transform Xinjiang into an Islamic State. ETIM is considered a terrorist organization by the United Nations, the European Union, and the United States—or was considered a terrorist organization by the United States until Pompeo removed the group from the US terrorism list in October, thereby eliminating an impediment that had limited the contribution the jihadists could make to the US project of destabilizing Xinjiang, propagating calumnies about the Chinese government, and ultimately undermining China’s ability to compete with US businesses on the world stage.

    In July of last year, Zenz wrote a paper for the Jamestown Foundation on Uyghur birthrates, which appears to be the basis for the claim cited by Canadian parliamentarians that China is carrying out a genocide in Xinjiang. Zenz’s report raised the question of genocide only in its final sentence, and then only tentatively. It was, instead, the Jamestown Foundation editor, John Dotson, a former US naval officer and US Congressional staff researcher, who concluded in an introductory note that “Zenz presents a compelling case that the CCP party-state apparatus in Xinjiang is engaged in severe human rights violations that meet the criteria for genocide as defined by the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.” Zenz, however, concluded only that Chinese policies “might be characterized” as constituting “a demographic campaign of genocide per” the UN convention. To be sure, any policy might be characterized in any particular way one wants, but the ad rem question isn’t, can policy x be characterized as y, but is it y? Zenz, unlike Dotson, was not prepared to say that Chinese birth control policy constitutes genocide. And there’s a good reason for this; it clearly doesn’t.

    Zenz’s paper was a political tract erected on the foundations of a report on Beijing’s family planning policies and their effects on Uyghur and Han birthrates in Xinjiang. What the report showed, notwithstanding Dotson’s politically-motivated misinterpretation, was that:

    • Previously, Han Chinese couples were limited to one child, while Uyghur couples were allowed two in urban areas, and three in rural areas. Family planning restrictions were not rigidly enforced on Uyghur couples.
    • Today, Han Chinese couples are permitted to have as many children as Uyghur couples are permitted (two children in urban areas, and three in rural areas.)
    • Family planning restrictions are now rigidly enforced.
    • The change from lax to rigid enforcement has been accompanied by a decrease in the Uyghur birth rate.

    Zenz’s report showed that the Uyghur population continued to grow, despite enforcement of family planning policies; Uyghur couples are not prevented from having children, (they’re only limited in the number of children they can have); and family planning rules apply equally to Han Chinese.

    Article II of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, reads as follows:

    In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

    (a) Killing members of the group;

    (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;

    (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;

    (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;

    (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

    The relevant consideration is the fourth item, namely, imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group. Chinese family planning policy does not prevent births within the Uyghur population; it only restricts them, and the restriction is non-discriminatory; it applies equally to all groups.

    What is the evidence?

    US State Department lawyers told Pompeo there is no evidence of genocide in Xinjiang. As we have seen, that didn’t stop Pompeo–who once boasted that as CIA director “we lied, cheated, and stole”– from making the accusation. He simply changed the definition of genocide, carrying on the US state tradition of fabricating lies to advance its interests.

    Bob Rae, Canada’s representative to the UN, accused China of committing genocide, and then said efforts should be made to gather evidence to demonstrate this to be true.

    John Ibbitson, a columnist with Canada’s Globe and Mail, conceded that Chinese government actions in Xinjiang do not meet the UN definition of genocide, but that Beijing is carrying out a genocide all the same.

    The watchdogs of imperialism

    The United States is waging an economic and information war on China, to preserve its economic,  military, and technological supremacy. Washington is recruiting its citizens, its allies and their citizens, and the progressive community, into a campaign to protect the international dictatorship of the United States from the challenge posed by the peaceful rise of China. Every manner of slander has been hurled at China to galvanize popular opposition to Beijing and mobilize popular support for economic aggression and growing military intimidation against the People’s Republic, from accusations that Chinese officials concealed the spread of the coronavirus; to calumnies about Muslims being immured in concentration camps, subjected to forced labor, and targeted for genocide; that Beijing is violating the one state-two systems agreement in Hong Kong (when in fact it’s only implementing a security law to undergird the one state part of the accord) and that Beijing’s efforts to reunify the country by re-integrating a territory the US Seventh Fleet prevented it from reintegrating in 1950, are really acts of aggression against an independent country named Taiwan.

    Progressive forces, from Democracy Now!, which has provided Adrian Zenz a platform to traduce Beijing, to the New Democratic and Green parties in Canada, which voted for the motion declaring a genocide is in progress in Xinjiang, collude in the campaign to protect and promote the profits of Western shareholders, investors, and bankers from the challenges posed by China’s rise. Lenin, who knew a thing or two about communism, international rivalries, and the perfidy of progressives, described the predecessors of today’s Democracy Nows, Greens, and New Democrats as the watchdogs of imperialism. His words echo through the corridors of time.

  • Originally published at Gowan’s blog.
    • The post The Watchdogs of Imperialism and the Uyghur Genocide Slander first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The Watchdogs of Imperialism and the Uyghur Genocide Slander

    On February 26 the Canadian Parliament passed a motion, by a vote of 226 to 0, expressing the opinion that “the People’s Republic of China has” implemented “measures intended to prevent” Uyghur and other Turkic Muslim births and that these measures are “consistent with” the United Nations Genocide Convention.

    The reality is that Beijing is not preventing Uyghur and other Turkic Muslim births, and a report by a German anthropologist widely cited as evidence that it is, contradicts this claim. That report, by Adrian Zenz, a fellow at a US government-created foundation whose mission is to bring about the end of communism and the Chinese Communist Party,  reveals that while Chinese family planning policy restricts the number of children Chinese couples are allowed to have, it does not prevent couples in any group, including Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslims, from bearing children. Moreover, limits on family size are the same between the Han Chinese ethnic majority and religious minorities. There is, therefore, no discrimination in Chinese family planning policy on the basis of national, religious, or ethnic affiliation.

    Perhaps aware their position was untenable, the parliamentarians sought to buttress their motion by citing political opinion in the United States, where “it has been the position of two consecutive administrations that Uyghur and other Turkic Muslims are being subjected to a genocide by the Government of the People’s Republic of China,” the motion observed. In an act of unseemly subservience to imperial power, Canada’s parliament constructed a motion, based on no evidence, to echo a point of view articulated in Washington, also based on no evidence.

    Significantly, the last two consecutive administrations have designated China a rival, and therefore have politically-motivated reasons for slandering their challenger. Moreover, apart from using the hyper-aggressive US military to extort economic and strategic concessions from other countries, US administrations have a long record of fabrication to justify their aggressive actions. That “two consecutive administrations” have held that the Chinese are carrying out a genocide is evidence of nothing more than Washington continuing to operate in its accustomed fashion of churning out lies about states that refuse to be integrated into the US economic, military and political orbit. A Serb-orchestrated genocide against ethnic Albanians in Kosovo; hidden weapons of mass destruction in Iraq; moderate rebels in Syria: these are only the tip of the iceberg of US lies and calumnies offered as pretexts for imperial aggression. Genocide in Xinjiang is but the latest.

    Below, I look at the genocide slander from four perspectives:

    1. The geostrategic context.
    2. Who is behind the accusations?
    3. How do the accusers define genocide?
    4. What is the evidence?

    The geostrategic context

    In 2003, Graham E. Fuller, a former vice-chair of the US National Intelligence Estimate and one-time CIA station chief in Kabul, wrote a book for the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Study at the Johns Hopkins University, titled The Xinjiang Problem. His co-author was the academic S. Frederick Starr.

    Fuller and Starr wrote that:

    the historical record suggests that the decision of countries and even of international organizations to raise specific human rights issues is often politicized and highly selective. Many countries will devote attention to human rights issues in China in inverse proportion to the quality of their overall bilateral relationship.

    It need not be said that today, 18 years later, the quality of overall bilateral relations between the United States and China has deteriorated sharply. China has emerged as a formidable competitor to US economic and technological supremacy, and US policy has shifted, beginning with the Obama administration, toward an explicit program of eclipsing China’s rise.

    In recent days, US president Joe Biden has said, “American leadership must meet … the growing ambitions of China to rival the United States.” The Wall Street Journal reports that Biden’s “goal is to stay ahead of China in semiconductors, artificial intelligence and other advances that are expected to define the economy and military of the future.” However, the US president, according to the newspaper, intends to portray the conflict as one based on “a clash of values: democracy vs. autocracy,” rather than a clash of economic interests.

    At the base of a deteriorating Sino-US relationship, then, lies a commercial rivalry, on top of which Washington has layered a narrative about a clash of values. In a Foreign Affairs article written before he became president, Biden outlined a strategy of confronting China over the economic challenges it poses to US businesses, US domination of the industries of tomorrow, and US technological (and concomitant military) supremacy. Biden said he would use a human rights narrative to rally support for a US-led campaign against China.

    Fuller and Starr continued: “It would be unrealistic,” they wrote, “to rule out categorically American willingness to play the ‘Uyghur card’ as a means of exerting pressure on China in the event of some future crisis or confrontation.” Many “of China’s rivals have in the past pursued active policies in Xinjiang and exploited the Uyghur issue for their benefit.” Almost two decades later, with US hostility rising as Washington’s claim to primacy on the world stage is under challenge, the United States has decided to play the Uyghur card.

    Who is behind the accusations?

    A network of groups and individuals, animated by an antagonism to the Chinese Communist Party, and supportive of continued US global supremacy, are involved in originating the slanders against Beijing. At the center is the German anthropologist, Adrian Zenz.

    Zenz’s opposition to Beijing lies in his religious beliefs. A fundamentalist Christian, he views communism, feminism and homosexuality, as abominations against God. Zenz also believes that he is on a divinely-inspired mission to bring about the demise of communist rule in China.

    Zenz is a senior fellow at the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation. The foundation, created by the US government to discredit an ideology which competes against the United States’ first favorite religion, US state-capitalism (Christianity being the second) seeks to free the world “from the false hope of Marxism” and save it from “the tyranny of communism” (the leitmotif of Hitler’s political career.) This it strives to do by educating future generations that “Marxist socialism is the deadliest ideology in history,” (one that, by this view, is fully capable of carrying out a genocide), a task the foundation sees as especially pressing today, when “Positive attitudes toward communism and socialism are at an all-time high in the United States.”

    Zenz has also written anti-Beijing reports for the Jamestown Foundation,  an anti-Communist outfit supported by corporations, foundations, and wealthy individuals, whose mission is to shape public opinion against China and North Korea.

    The slanderers also include a number of Uyghur exile groups, including the World Uyghur Congress, funded by the National Endowment for Democracy. The NED is a US government-bankrolled organization whose first president conceded that it does overtly what the CIA used to do covertly, namely destabilize foreign governments by strengthening fifth columns. The NED does so under the cover of promoting democracy and human rights.  The organization has boasted on Twitter that it has been funding fifth columnists in Xinjiang since 2004.

    Another propagator of anti-Beijing slanders is the Epoch Times, the newspaper of the Falun Gong. Like Zenz, the roots of Falun Gong’s anti-Beijing animus lie in reactionary religious convictions. The cult deplores gender equality, homosexuality, and communism as affronts against God.

    How do the accusers define genocide?

    Those who accuse Beijing of carrying out a genocide employ a ruse regularly used in the corporate world to dupe consumers and employees. The subterfuge is to redefine a word to mean something other than what the word would be reasonably interpreted to mean.

    Former US secretary of state Mike Pompeo used this ruse. He accused Beijing of trying to integrate Xinjiang and its Turkic people into the larger Chinese society. While this did not meet the definition of genocide, Pompeo labelled Beijing’s actions as genocide all the same.  According to the magazine Foreign Policy, State Department lawyers told Pompeo that Beijing’s actions in Xinjiang did not satisfy the UN convention’s definition of genocide. Pompeo, who has no respect for the truth, much less the contrary opinions of government lawyers, was undeterred.

    The current US secretary of state Anthony Blinken also accused Beijing of genocide. Using the same ruse, Blinken pointed to non-genocidal actions, namely one million Uyghurs in ‘concentration camps’, to make the claim that Beijing was trying to destroy a Muslim minority.  The claim was a double deception. First, there are no Uyghur concentration camps in Xinjiang, and second, even if there were, concentration camps do not equal genocide. Blinken was likely trying to exploit the association of the Holocaust with German death camps to insinuate that concentration camps and genocide go together, like the artic and snow, and that the Chinese government, and its Communist Party, are contemporary expressions of Nazi horror.

    The source of the concentration camp allegation is yet another of Beijing’s political foes, an Islamist media outlet run by Uyghur separatists in Turkey, which serves as a platform for the East Turkistan Islamic Movement, an al-Qaeda affiliated jihadist outfit which seeks to transform Xinjiang into an Islamic State. ETIM is considered a terrorist organization by the United Nations, the European Union, and the United States—or was considered a terrorist organization by the United States until Pompeo removed the group from the US terrorism list in October, thereby eliminating an impediment that had limited the contribution the jihadists could make to the US project of destabilizing Xinjiang, propagating calumnies about the Chinese government, and ultimately undermining China’s ability to compete with US businesses on the world stage.

    In July of last year, Zenz wrote a paper for the Jamestown Foundation on Uyghur birthrates, which appears to be the basis for the claim cited by Canadian parliamentarians that China is carrying out a genocide in Xinjiang. Zenz’s report raised the question of genocide only in its final sentence, and then only tentatively. It was, instead, the Jamestown Foundation editor, John Dotson, a former US naval officer and US Congressional staff researcher, who concluded in an introductory note that “Zenz presents a compelling case that the CCP party-state apparatus in Xinjiang is engaged in severe human rights violations that meet the criteria for genocide as defined by the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.” Zenz, however, concluded only that Chinese policies “might be characterized” as constituting “a demographic campaign of genocide per” the UN convention. To be sure, any policy might be characterized in any particular way one wants, but the ad rem question isn’t, can policy x be characterized as y, but is it y? Zenz, unlike Dotson, was not prepared to say that Chinese birth control policy constitutes genocide. And there’s a good reason for this; it clearly doesn’t.

    Zenz’s paper was a political tract erected on the foundations of a report on Beijing’s family planning policies and their effects on Uyghur and Han birthrates in Xinjiang. What the report showed, notwithstanding Dotson’s politically-motivated misinterpretation, was that:

    • Previously, Han Chinese couples were limited to one child, while Uyghur couples were allowed two in urban areas, and three in rural areas. Family planning restrictions were not rigidly enforced on Uyghur couples.
    • Today, Han Chinese couples are permitted to have as many children as Uyghur couples are permitted (two children in urban areas, and three in rural areas.)
    • Family planning restrictions are now rigidly enforced.
    • The change from lax to rigid enforcement has been accompanied by a decrease in the Uyghur birth rate.

    Zenz’s report showed that the Uyghur population continued to grow, despite enforcement of family planning policies; Uyghur couples are not prevented from having children, (they’re only limited in the number of children they can have); and family planning rules apply equally to Han Chinese.

    Article II of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, reads as follows:

    In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

    (a) Killing members of the group;

    (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;

    (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;

    (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;

    (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

    The relevant consideration is the fourth item, namely, imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group. Chinese family planning policy does not prevent births within the Uyghur population; it only restricts them, and the restriction is non-discriminatory; it applies equally to all groups.

    What is the evidence?

    US State Department lawyers told Pompeo there is no evidence of genocide in Xinjiang. As we have seen, that didn’t stop Pompeo–who once boasted that as CIA director “we lied, cheated, and stole”– from making the accusation. He simply changed the definition of genocide, carrying on the US state tradition of fabricating lies to advance its interests.

    Bob Rae, Canada’s representative to the UN, accused China of committing genocide, and then said efforts should be made to gather evidence to demonstrate this to be true.

    John Ibbitson, a columnist with Canada’s Globe and Mail, conceded that Chinese government actions in Xinjiang do not meet the UN definition of genocide, but that Beijing is carrying out a genocide all the same.

    The watchdogs of imperialism

    The United States is waging an economic and information war on China, to preserve its economic,  military, and technological supremacy. Washington is recruiting its citizens, its allies and their citizens, and the progressive community, into a campaign to protect the international dictatorship of the United States from the challenge posed by the peaceful rise of China. Every manner of slander has been hurled at China to galvanize popular opposition to Beijing and mobilize popular support for economic aggression and growing military intimidation against the People’s Republic, from accusations that Chinese officials concealed the spread of the coronavirus; to calumnies about Muslims being immured in concentration camps, subjected to forced labor, and targeted for genocide; that Beijing is violating the one state-two systems agreement in Hong Kong (when in fact it’s only implementing a security law to undergird the one state part of the accord) and that Beijing’s efforts to reunify the country by re-integrating a territory the US Seventh Fleet prevented it from reintegrating in 1950, are really acts of aggression against an independent country named Taiwan.

    Progressive forces, from Democracy Now!, which has provided Adrian Zenz a platform to traduce Beijing, to the New Democratic and Green parties in Canada, which voted for the motion declaring a genocide is in progress in Xinjiang, collude in the campaign to protect and promote the profits of Western shareholders, investors, and bankers from the challenges posed by China’s rise. Lenin, who knew a thing or two about communism, international rivalries, and the perfidy of progressives, described the predecessors of today’s Democracy Nows, Greens, and New Democrats as the watchdogs of imperialism. His words echo through the corridors of time.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • NZ covid: Calls to dump ‘dangerous’ fringe anti-vaccine magazine

    By Katie Doyle of RNZ News

    A new anti-vaccine publication with links to the Advance New Zealand fringe political party should be ripped up and thrown in the bin, a health expert says.

    From Te Puke, Dr Christine Williams discovered the magazine in her work staff room.

    It had been brought in by a concerned receptionist, who found it in their letterbox at home and wanted to show their colleagues what was being circulated.

    The first and special edition of a magazine claimed to tell the real story about covid-19 and vaccines.

    “The danger of it to me is that it’s sitting around. Like you can find something on a Facebook site or something and you see it and it’s gone.

    “Whereas this is sitting around. Lots of people can come and read it and it’s not truthful,” Dr Williams said.

    The more than 40-page magazine contains conspiracy theories about vaccines, billionaire Bill Gates, herbal cures and lockdown.

    Hold editors to account
    Dr Williams wanted the editors held to account.

    “I think it’s dangerous. [They should be] held to account I think … made to defend their views based on science, which they wouldn’t be able to do,” Dr Williams said.

    Near the end is a half-page advertisement for the Advance New Zealand Party, formed in 2020 by former National MP Jami-Lee Ross.

    The magazine’s website credits Advance NZ for fundraising to print the magazine and inviting members and supporters to get in touch if they want to help with mailbox drops in their area.

    It says the party invited members and supporters to touch base if they wanted to help with mailbox drops in their area.

    However, the website also states its editors are not members of Advance NZ or any other political party.

    Advance NZ has also been promoting the magazine on its website and fundraising to print, post, and package 100,000 copies.

    Contact attempts unsuccessful
    Attempts by RNZ to contact Ross and Advance NZ have been unsuccessful.

    The magazine has been cropping up throughout the country, including Wairarapa and Northland.

    A Facebook post from Advance NZ in February states some 300 volunteers had received 60,000 copies for distribution.

    Masterton resident Katy McClean discovered one in her letterbox last week.

    “To me, it’s kind of scaremongering, there’s a lot of stuff in there that doesn’t seem to be very factual,” she said.

    Her husband Aiden was equally unimpressed.

    “If people don’t have an understanding of how to critically look at publications, they may take this information on face value,” he said.

    Undermining covid efforts
    “And that can really undermine the effort of everybody in order to keep covid suppressed in this country.”

    In Kerikeri, Sylvie Dickson found two copies at her local takeaway.

    “I didn’t know if they’d left it there for customers or if somebody had just left it there, but I saw the rubbish bin there and I thought I’ll do everyone a favour and put it in there.”

    University of Auckland professor of medicine Des Gorman said anyone who received the magazine should “rip it up and throw it away”.

    “In the context of encouraging free and open speech, there is a fine line, and this publication crosses that line,” he said.

    “There is no merit in this publication, so my advice to people would be not to read it, and to rely upon the advice they get from their family doctor.”

    Professor Gorman said if people were genuinely worried about health issues and vaccines they needed to speak with a trusted health professional.

    ‘Dangerous’ publications
    He said publications that discouraged masks, basic public health measures and vaccinations were dangerous and should be discouraged.

    “I’m not sure, if I read this 20 times, I could find any merit in this,” he said.

    “I’m the last person to discourage free speech and freedom of speech but there’s a helluva big difference between an honest opinion well-held and this sort of stuff.”

    Professor Gorman told RNZ Morning Report the magazine “dangerously, looks quite professionally done”.

    “It has an aura of credibility around it in terms of its construct and that’s one of the many things that worries me. For the people who are vulnerable to these sorts of arguments, and those who are already vaccine hesitant, this may look like a quasi-official or even perhaps a scientifically underpinned piece of writing, which of course it isn’t,” Professor Gorman said.

    The magazine gave an impression of a solid body of work – but really, it was a “recitation of a range of conspiracy theories”.

    He was concerned it was targeted to disadvantaged communities in terms of healthcare or access to healthcare professionals, or those who felt the health system had not met their needs.

    “This magazine violates freedom of expression because it is a litany of lies.”

    The editors of the publication said they would not speak with RNZ unless it was in a live broadcast.

    This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • NZ covid: Calls to dump ‘dangerous’ fringe anti-vaccine magazine

    By Katie Doyle of RNZ News

    A new anti-vaccine publication with links to the Advance New Zealand fringe political party should be ripped up and thrown in the bin, a health expert says.

    From Te Puke, Dr Christine Williams discovered the magazine in her work staff room.

    It had been brought in by a concerned receptionist, who found it in their letterbox at home and wanted to show their colleagues what was being circulated.

    The first and special edition of a magazine claimed to tell the real story about covid-19 and vaccines.

    “The danger of it to me is that it’s sitting around. Like you can find something on a Facebook site or something and you see it and it’s gone.

    “Whereas this is sitting around. Lots of people can come and read it and it’s not truthful,” Dr Williams said.

    The more than 40-page magazine contains conspiracy theories about vaccines, billionaire Bill Gates, herbal cures and lockdown.

    Hold editors to account
    Dr Williams wanted the editors held to account.

    “I think it’s dangerous. [They should be] held to account I think … made to defend their views based on science, which they wouldn’t be able to do,” Dr Williams said.

    Near the end is a half-page advertisement for the Advance New Zealand Party, formed in 2020 by former National MP Jami-Lee Ross.

    The magazine’s website credits Advance NZ for fundraising to print the magazine and inviting members and supporters to get in touch if they want to help with mailbox drops in their area.

    It says the party invited members and supporters to touch base if they wanted to help with mailbox drops in their area.

    However, the website also states its editors are not members of Advance NZ or any other political party.

    Advance NZ has also been promoting the magazine on its website and fundraising to print, post, and package 100,000 copies.

    Contact attempts unsuccessful
    Attempts by RNZ to contact Ross and Advance NZ have been unsuccessful.

    The magazine has been cropping up throughout the country, including Wairarapa and Northland.

    A Facebook post from Advance NZ in February states some 300 volunteers had received 60,000 copies for distribution.

    Masterton resident Katy McClean discovered one in her letterbox last week.

    “To me, it’s kind of scaremongering, there’s a lot of stuff in there that doesn’t seem to be very factual,” she said.

    Her husband Aiden was equally unimpressed.

    “If people don’t have an understanding of how to critically look at publications, they may take this information on face value,” he said.

    Undermining covid efforts
    “And that can really undermine the effort of everybody in order to keep covid suppressed in this country.”

    In Kerikeri, Sylvie Dickson found two copies at her local takeaway.

    “I didn’t know if they’d left it there for customers or if somebody had just left it there, but I saw the rubbish bin there and I thought I’ll do everyone a favour and put it in there.”

    University of Auckland professor of medicine Des Gorman said anyone who received the magazine should “rip it up and throw it away”.

    “In the context of encouraging free and open speech, there is a fine line, and this publication crosses that line,” he said.

    “There is no merit in this publication, so my advice to people would be not to read it, and to rely upon the advice they get from their family doctor.”

    Professor Gorman said if people were genuinely worried about health issues and vaccines they needed to speak with a trusted health professional.

    ‘Dangerous’ publications
    He said publications that discouraged masks, basic public health measures and vaccinations were dangerous and should be discouraged.

    “I’m not sure, if I read this 20 times, I could find any merit in this,” he said.

    “I’m the last person to discourage free speech and freedom of speech but there’s a helluva big difference between an honest opinion well-held and this sort of stuff.”

    Professor Gorman told RNZ Morning Report the magazine “dangerously, looks quite professionally done”.

    “It has an aura of credibility around it in terms of its construct and that’s one of the many things that worries me. For the people who are vulnerable to these sorts of arguments, and those who are already vaccine hesitant, this may look like a quasi-official or even perhaps a scientifically underpinned piece of writing, which of course it isn’t,” Professor Gorman said.

    The magazine gave an impression of a solid body of work – but really, it was a “recitation of a range of conspiracy theories”.

    He was concerned it was targeted to disadvantaged communities in terms of healthcare or access to healthcare professionals, or those who felt the health system had not met their needs.

    “This magazine violates freedom of expression because it is a litany of lies.”

    The editors of the publication said they would not speak with RNZ unless it was in a live broadcast.

    This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

    Print Friendly, PDF & Email

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Climate Disinformation Is Real: So What Should Journalists Do?

    6 Mins Read By: Andrew McCormick Texas had only just frozen over.  In the wake of a devastating winter storm, millions in the state were without power and struggling to find warmth. They boiled snow for water; some were dying. And against all evidence the anti-climate political right was grousing about windmills and blaming a Green New Deal […]

    The post Climate Disinformation Is Real: So What Should Journalists Do? appeared first on Green Queen.

    This post was originally published on Green Queen.

  • Charter School Disinformation About Families Being the Most Important “Stakeholders”

    Since day one, advocates of privately-operated charter schools have tried to convince everyone that segregated charter schools “empower parents” and that parents are not only “stakeholders” but the most important “stakeholders” in education. Everything in education is supposedly all about parents first and foremost. Parents are the end-all and be-all. Education apparently serves no one else or 10 other broad functions. Education exists mainly to serve parents. Everyone and everything else is secondary at best. Oddly enough, while the “parent empowerment” theme is central to charter school disinformation it is actually charter schools that choose parents and students, not the other way around.

    Such a narrow notion of parents-first-last-and-always deliberately degrades and debases the historical, cultural, social, political, and economic role, significance, and importance of public education in a modern society based on mass industrial production. The days of petty production, small estates,  small farms, and feudal manors are long gone. Humans today are born to a complex modern society in which all production is highly technical, scientific, advanced, large-scale, and cooperative. Everything is interdependent and impossible without millions of skilled working people. The problem is that this modern mass production system is based on outdated relations of production, that is, it is owned and controlled by competing private owners of capital whose only aim is to maximize profit as fast as possible no matter the damage to the natural and social environment. Such a set-up reinforces old ideas such as consumerism, individualism, competition, and a fend-for-yourself culture. It renders education a commodity and parents become consumers who individually shop for schools the way they shop for a car. If things work out, that’s great, but if they don’t work out, then you are screwed. “Buyer Beware” is the only defense you have against getting ambushed in a “survival-of-the-fittest” society. In such a society, government abdicates its responsibility to people and nothing is guaranteed. Privileges, competition, and opportunities replace rights. Education is never upheld as a right that must be provided a guarantee by government, it is simply a commodity and an opportunity.

    Neoliberal “Stakeholder”

    The core idea behind the neoliberal notion of a “stakeholder” is that there are no social classes. We supposedly live in a “no-class” society. In this way, the 50 problems that exist in class-divided societies magically disappear. All that exists is isolated, abstract, allegedly equal self-interested calculating consumers with an “equal stake” in capitalism. We are to casually ignore massive and constantly-growing inequality and the fact that only the top 1% have a stake in capitalism and that the majority of humanity urgently needs an alternative to this crisis-prone economic system that leaves millions behind every year. The neoliberal idea of a “stakeholder” is a way to apologize for capitalism and to block any thinking that considers a modern alternative to this obsolete system.

    Parents are not stakeholders. Nor are students, teachers, and principals. Women, workers, and senior citizens are not “stakeholders” either. They are human beings and citizens with basic human rights, not consumers, shoppers, or “market citizens” who fend-for-themselves in a chaotic and insecure “dog-eat-dog” world. Parents are members of the polity, just like everyone else, and they necessarily share the same objective interests as students, teachers, principals, and others. Education serves parents, as well as students, teachers, principals, society, the economy, and people who are not parents. The value of education is not based on parenthood. A modern society based on mass industrial production would not be possible without a modern mass public education system that is world-class, fully-funded, and locally-controlled.

    The role of education is to pass on the accumulated knowledge of humanity to the next generation so that society can progress. Everyone has a “stake” in education. The same can be said about healthcare, transportation, postal services, food production, municipal services, and more. Everyone needs these services—parents and non-parents. Education must serve everyone in a modern society, not this or that “stakeholder” or “special interest.”

    Government must take up its social responsibility to provide the rights of individuals and collectives with a guarantee in practice, not leave everyone to fend for themselves in a society that perpetuates insecurity, poverty, debt, unemployment, and inequality. Everyone should reject all attempts by narrow private interests to impose neoliberal ideas and arrangements on people, institutions,  public enterprises, and different spheres of life. Defend the right to an education that serves all individuals, collectives, and society.

    The post Charter School Disinformation About Families Being the Most Important “Stakeholders” first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Charter School Disinformation About Families Being the Most Important “Stakeholders”

    Since day one, advocates of privately-operated charter schools have tried to convince everyone that segregated charter schools “empower parents” and that parents are not only “stakeholders” but the most important “stakeholders” in education. Everything in education is supposedly all about parents first and foremost. Parents are the end-all and be-all. Education apparently serves no one else or 10 other broad functions. Education exists mainly to serve parents. Everyone and everything else is secondary at best. Oddly enough, while the “parent empowerment” theme is central to charter school disinformation it is actually charter schools that choose parents and students, not the other way around.

    Such a narrow notion of parents-first-last-and-always deliberately degrades and debases the historical, cultural, social, political, and economic role, significance, and importance of public education in a modern society based on mass industrial production. The days of petty production, small estates,  small farms, and feudal manors are long gone. Humans today are born to a complex modern society in which all production is highly technical, scientific, advanced, large-scale, and cooperative. Everything is interdependent and impossible without millions of skilled working people. The problem is that this modern mass production system is based on outdated relations of production, that is, it is owned and controlled by competing private owners of capital whose only aim is to maximize profit as fast as possible no matter the damage to the natural and social environment. Such a set-up reinforces old ideas such as consumerism, individualism, competition, and a fend-for-yourself culture. It renders education a commodity and parents become consumers who individually shop for schools the way they shop for a car. If things work out, that’s great, but if they don’t work out, then you are screwed. “Buyer Beware” is the only defense you have against getting ambushed in a “survival-of-the-fittest” society. In such a society, government abdicates its responsibility to people and nothing is guaranteed. Privileges, competition, and opportunities replace rights. Education is never upheld as a right that must be provided a guarantee by government, it is simply a commodity and an opportunity.

    Neoliberal “Stakeholder”

    The core idea behind the neoliberal notion of a “stakeholder” is that there are no social classes. We supposedly live in a “no-class” society. In this way, the 50 problems that exist in class-divided societies magically disappear. All that exists is isolated, abstract, allegedly equal self-interested calculating consumers with an “equal stake” in capitalism. We are to casually ignore massive and constantly-growing inequality and the fact that only the top 1% have a stake in capitalism and that the majority of humanity urgently needs an alternative to this crisis-prone economic system that leaves millions behind every year. The neoliberal idea of a “stakeholder” is a way to apologize for capitalism and to block any thinking that considers a modern alternative to this obsolete system.

    Parents are not stakeholders. Nor are students, teachers, and principals. Women, workers, and senior citizens are not “stakeholders” either. They are human beings and citizens with basic human rights, not consumers, shoppers, or “market citizens” who fend-for-themselves in a chaotic and insecure “dog-eat-dog” world. Parents are members of the polity, just like everyone else, and they necessarily share the same objective interests as students, teachers, principals, and others. Education serves parents, as well as students, teachers, principals, society, the economy, and people who are not parents. The value of education is not based on parenthood. A modern society based on mass industrial production would not be possible without a modern mass public education system that is world-class, fully-funded, and locally-controlled.

    The role of education is to pass on the accumulated knowledge of humanity to the next generation so that society can progress. Everyone has a “stake” in education. The same can be said about healthcare, transportation, postal services, food production, municipal services, and more. Everyone needs these services—parents and non-parents. Education must serve everyone in a modern society, not this or that “stakeholder” or “special interest.”

    Government must take up its social responsibility to provide the rights of individuals and collectives with a guarantee in practice, not leave everyone to fend for themselves in a society that perpetuates insecurity, poverty, debt, unemployment, and inequality. Everyone should reject all attempts by narrow private interests to impose neoliberal ideas and arrangements on people, institutions,  public enterprises, and different spheres of life. Defend the right to an education that serves all individuals, collectives, and society.

    This article was posted on Monday, March 8th, 2021 at 9:26am and is filed under Charter Schools, Disinformation, Education, Neoliberalism.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Gary Juffa: People, covid is real … and dangerous. I know, I’m recovering

    Oro Governor Gary Juffa … “It is no laughing matter. I don’t wish it upon anyone. I was fortunate it was not as bad as others.” Image: Gary Juffa FB

    OPEN LETTER: By Gary Juffa in Port Moresby

    Dear all,

    I had covid-19. I am now covid-free for 13 days now.

    Not sure where I contracted it, but I gave all details for contact tracing to the papua New Guinea’s National Department of Health (NDOH) who are doing the best they can despite circumstances.

    I was tested positive in Port Moresby and so cancelled all my programmes back home in Oro and isolated myself as advised by the NDOH.

    It is no laughing matter. I don’t wish it upon anyone. I was fortunate that it was not as bad as for others. I am still not 100 percent well although I am medically cleared of covid now.

    When I had it, it first felt like a mild flu but soon felt like malaria, typhoid and dengue all at once. I took only paracetamol for medication and vitamin supplements.

    I drank gallons of moringa leaf boiled and took it upon myself to steam myself regularly. I ate lots of fruit and vegetables every morning despite not having an appetite and tried to do basic bodyweight exercises daily.

    Sometimes it was too hard to do this even and I simply did stretches. A low grade fever was constant. Sometimes it broke at night other times I had to rely on paracetamol to bring it down. I was sick for about 3 full weeks.

    Thanks to family and friends who kept in touch daily and sent their well wishes and especially their prayers. This helped me maintain a positive mindset.

    Breathlessness and congestion
    “Towards the end of my experience with covid-19 I started to be breathless and experience congestion. That was worrying but thankfully it didn’t escalate. I found steaming helped immensely. I also drank lots of kulau daily.

    For steaming simply boil water in a large pot and cover yourself with a blanket over the pot.

    I also drank a lot of water with lemons and ginger throughout the day. I felt that helped but cannot say for certain as that’s just my personal assessment.

    Now I have some difficulty breathing at times and am slowly getting back to my fitness level. I tire easily and sometimes have difficulty sleeping at night.

    Covid affects each person in various ways. This is just how I was affected. Others have their own experiences.

    Meanwhile, some people were hospitalised and in the ICU. I believe in this recent outbreak two have since died.

    Yes it is like a very bad flu, but it is exceptionally dangerous to the most vulnerable such as those with underlying conditions and those who have immune system disorders, our elders especially.

    Dear all,

    I had COVID. I am now COVID free for 13 days now. I am not sure where I contracted it but gave all details…

    Posted by Gary Juffa on Friday, March 5, 2021

    Be safe. Sanitise
    Be safe. Practise safe distancing. Sanitise. Do not hug and touch everyone you meet. Protect our elders. Care for others. Wear a mask. Eat garden foods. Stay hydrated. Exercise regularly. Rest well.

    If you feel you have the symptoms, get tested.

    People, covid is real. I am especially convinced of this now after having had it and when hearing first hand accounts and observing that all nations treat it so seriously. I have friends overseas who have lost loved ones to covid in such short shocking moments. Their sad stories are real.

    In today’s age of information, misinformation and disinformation, it is daunting to seek the truth I am sure we all agree. But I am guided by the fact that ALL nations, whatever ideologies they have, agree that covid is real. For once China, Russia, India and the Western nations led by the US are on the same page.

    Because covid is so polarising to international trade and productivity, nations are doing everything to find solutions such as vaccines and possible cures.

    I am one who questions everything and somewhat of a conspiracy theorist too.

    But I doubt that even the most ardent evil powerful obscure world tyrant would be able to achieve this remarkable feat of convincing ALL governments to promote such a unipolar conspiracy.

    Huge thanks to the St Johns ambulance team and NDOH team. We need to be mindful of our frontliners out there and support them.

    Thank you, Papua New Guinea.

    Gary Juffa is a Papua New Guinea politician and Member of the 10th Parliament of Papua New Guinea as Governor of Oro province. He founded the People’s Movement for Change party, of which he is the sole Member of Parliament. This commentary was first published on Gary Juffa’s Facebook page and is republished here with permission.

    Print Friendly, PDF & Email

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Gary Juffa: People, covid is real … and dangerous. I know, I’m recovering


    OPEN LETTER: By Gary Juffa in Port Moresby

    Dear all,

    I had covid-19. I am now covid-free for 13 days now.

    Not sure where I contracted it, but I gave all details for contact tracing to the papua New Guinea’s National Department of Health (NDOH) who are doing the best they can despite circumstances.

    I was tested positive in Port Moresby and so cancelled all my programmes back home in Oro and isolated myself as advised by the NDOH.

    It is no laughing matter. I don’t wish it upon anyone. I was fortunate that it was not as bad as for others. I am still not 100 percent well although I am medically cleared of covid now.

    When I had it, it first felt like a mild flu but soon felt like malaria, typhoid and dengue all at once. I took only paracetamol for medication and vitamin supplements.

    I drank gallons of moringa leaf boiled and took it upon myself to steam myself regularly. I ate lots of fruit and vegetables every morning despite not having an appetite and tried to do basic bodyweight exercises daily.

    Sometimes it was too hard to do this even and I simply did stretches. A low grade fever was constant. Sometimes it broke at night other times I had to rely on paracetamol to bring it down. I was sick for about 3 full weeks.

    Thanks to family and friends who kept in touch daily and sent their well wishes and especially their prayers. This helped me maintain a positive mindset.

    Breathlessness and congestion
    “Towards the end of my experience with covid-19 I started to be breathless and experience congestion. That was worrying but thankfully it didn’t escalate. I found steaming helped immensely. I also drank lots of kulau daily.

    For steaming simply boil water in a large pot and cover yourself with a blanket over the pot.

    I also drank a lot of water with lemons and ginger throughout the day. I felt that helped but cannot say for certain as that’s just my personal assessment.

    Now I have some difficulty breathing at times and am slowly getting back to my fitness level. I tire easily and sometimes have difficulty sleeping at night.

    Covid affects each person in various ways. This is just how I was affected. Others have their own experiences.

    Meanwhile, some people were hospitalised and in the ICU. I believe in this recent outbreak two have since died.

    Yes it is like a very bad flu, but it is exceptionally dangerous to the most vulnerable such as those with underlying conditions and those who have immune system disorders, our elders especially.

    Dear all,

    I had COVID. I am now COVID free for 13 days now. I am not sure where I contracted it but gave all details…

    Posted by Gary Juffa on Friday, March 5, 2021

    Be safe. Sanitise
    Be safe. Practise safe distancing. Sanitise. Do not hug and touch everyone you meet. Protect our elders. Care for others. Wear a mask. Eat garden foods. Stay hydrated. Exercise regularly. Rest well.

    If you feel you have the symptoms, get tested.

    People, covid is real. I am especially convinced of this now after having had it and when hearing first hand accounts and observing that all nations treat it so seriously. I have friends overseas who have lost loved ones to covid in such short shocking moments. Their sad stories are real.

    In today’s age of information, misinformation and disinformation, it is daunting to seek the truth I am sure we all agree. But I am guided by the fact that ALL nations, whatever ideologies they have, agree that covid is real. For once China, Russia, India and the Western nations led by the US are on the same page.

    Because covid is so polarising to international trade and productivity, nations are doing everything to find solutions such as vaccines and possible cures.

    I am one who questions everything and somewhat of a conspiracy theorist too.

    But I doubt that even the most ardent evil powerful obscure world tyrant would be able to achieve this remarkable feat of convincing ALL governments to promote such a unipolar conspiracy.

    Huge thanks to the St Johns ambulance team and NDOH team. We need to be mindful of our frontliners out there and support them.

    Thank you, Papua New Guinea.

    Gary Juffa is a Papua New Guinea politician and Member of the 10th Parliament of Papua New Guinea as Governor of Oro province. He founded the People’s Movement for Change party, of which he is the sole Member of Parliament. This commentary was first published on Gary Juffa’s Facebook page and is republished here with permission.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Ready to Work with Netanyahu: Mansour Abbas Splinters Arab Vote in Israel

    At a glance, it may appear that the split of Arab political parties in Israel is consistent with a typical pattern of political and ideological divisions which have afflicted the Arab body politic for many years. This time, however, the reasons behind the split are quite different.

    As Israel readies for its fourth general elections within two years,  scheduled for March 23, Israel’s Palestinian Arab voters seem to be in a position of power, slated to become the kingmaker in the country’s future coalition government. But something peculiar has happened. The Joint List, which has successfully united the Arab vote in Israel in previous elections, suffered a major setback with the split of the United Arab List (Raam) on February 4.

    Raam is the political arm of the Southern Branch of the Islamic Movement in Israel. In April 2019, it entered the elections in a joint coalition with the National Democratic Alliance (Balad) Party. In September 2019 and, again, in March 2020, it contested in the general elections as part of the Joint List, an Arab alliance, which, in addition to al-Balad, included the Democratic Front for Peace and Equality (Hadash) and the Arab Movement for Renewal (Ta’al).

    Despite their ideological divides and different socio-economic visions, Arab parties in Israel have felt that their unity is more urgent than ever before. There are reasons for this.

    Israel has been rapidly moving to the right, where ultra-nationalist and religious groups now represent mainstream Israeli politics. The center, which temporarily unified under the banner of Kahol Lavan (Blue and White), has actively promoted a similar discourse to Israel’s traditional right of yesteryears.  Finally, the left has disintegrated, to play an unprecedentedly marginal role with little or no impact on Israeli politics.

    As the Israeli right has grown emboldened in recent years, various anti-Arab legislations were passed by the right-dominated Knesset (Parliament). The most obvious example is the ‘Nation-State Law’, which elevated the exclusive identity of Israel as a Jewish State, while devaluing Palestinian Arab rights, religions and language.

    In the September 2019 elections, Arab unity finally paid dividends, as the Joint List won 13 of the Knesset’s 120 contested seats. In April 2020, united Arab parties performed even better, emerging, for the first time in Israel’s history, as the country’s third-largest political bloc after Likud and Kahol Lavan.

    Clearly, Arab parties were ready to engage in the political process, not as marginal forces but active participants. Ayman Odeh, the head of the Joint List, had made several overtures to Benny Gantz, leader of the centrist Kahol Lavan. Odeh had reasoned that, with the help of the Joint List, a centrist-led coalition would finally be ready to dislodge right-wing Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, from power.

    Gantz refused to allow Arab parties into his government coalition, preferring instead to seek common ground with his archenemy, Netanyahu. Both formed a unity government in May 2020, which only lasted for seven months.

    By refusing to incorporate the Joint List, Gantz took the first step in destroying his own promising centrist coalition, which then included Yesh Atid and Telem. Leaders of the latter two factions officially split soon after Gantz agreed to the Netanyahu union. In the coming March elections, Yesh Atid will be contesting independently, while Telem decided to refrain from entering the election fray altogether so as, reportedly, not to further splinter the opposition’s votes.

    From a strategic point of view, this would have been the most opportune moment for the Arab Joint List to finally translate its electoral victories into political success. There is a growing realization that a coalition government in Israel, even if formed, would remain unsustainable without Arab support. Consequently, the country’s leading political camps are openly jockeying to court the Arab vote.

    Indeed, Netanyahu, who, in 2015 used fear mongering to rally the right behind him by saying that Arab voters were “heading to the polling stations in droves,’ is now turning around. During a visit to the Arab city of Nazareth on January 13, he claimed that his previous comments were misinterpreted. In other Arab towns, he boasted about his record in support of Arab communities and in fighting the coronavirus pandemic. His anti-Arab rhetoric is currently at an all-time low.

    The centrist, Yair Lapid, of Yesh Atid has also shown willingness to work with Arab politicians, stating on January 17 that “It was a loss that we did not do it in the current Knesset,” referring to Gantz’s rejection of Arab endorsement and exclusion of Arabs from the coalition government.

    Yet, instead of taking advantage of their electoral success, the Joint List, once again, splintered, or precisely, an important party, Raam, has exited the coalition. This time, however, the fragmentation was not an outcome of ideological differences but the result of the bewildering position of Raam’s leader, Mansour Abbas.

    In February, Abbas had indicated his willingness to join a Netanyahu-led coalition. He justified his shocking turnabout with unconvincing political platitudes as one “needs to be able to look to the future, and to build a better future for everyone,” and so on.

    The fact that Netanyahu is largely responsible for the despairing outlook of Israel’s Arabs’ future seems entirely irrelevant to Abbas, who is inexplicably keen on joining any future political alliance even if it includes Israel’s most chauvinistic political actors.

    Israeli right-wing newspaper, The Jerusalem Post, sums up Abbas’ devastating blow to Arab unity just before the elections, with this headline, “Meet Mansour Abbas, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s unlikely ally”.

    According to a recent poll conducted by Israel’s Channel 13, Abbas’ Raam party could potentially control 4 Knesset seats following the March elections. Also plausible, Raam might fail to achieve the required 3.25 percent threshold, thus receiving no political representation whatsoever. Either way, Abbas’ obvious self-serving folly could cost Arab parties a historic and unmatched opportunity to assert themselves as a decisive political force that could challenge Israeli racism and Palestinian Arab marginalization.

    Now that all electoral alliances have been finalized, Mansour Abbas has clearly made the wrong choice and, no matter the outcome, he has already lost.

    The post Ready to Work with Netanyahu: Mansour Abbas Splinters Arab Vote in Israel first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Ready to Work with Netanyahu: Mansour Abbas Splinters Arab Vote in Israel

    At a glance, it may appear that the split of Arab political parties in Israel is consistent with a typical pattern of political and ideological divisions which have afflicted the Arab body politic for many years. This time, however, the reasons behind the split are quite different.

    As Israel readies for its fourth general elections within two years,  scheduled for March 23, Israel’s Palestinian Arab voters seem to be in a position of power, slated to become the kingmaker in the country’s future coalition government. But something peculiar has happened. The Joint List, which has successfully united the Arab vote in Israel in previous elections, suffered a major setback with the split of the United Arab List (Raam) on February 4.

    Raam is the political arm of the Southern Branch of the Islamic Movement in Israel. In April 2019, it entered the elections in a joint coalition with the National Democratic Alliance (Balad) Party. In September 2019 and, again, in March 2020, it contested in the general elections as part of the Joint List, an Arab alliance, which, in addition to al-Balad, included the Democratic Front for Peace and Equality (Hadash) and the Arab Movement for Renewal (Ta’al).

    Despite their ideological divides and different socio-economic visions, Arab parties in Israel have felt that their unity is more urgent than ever before. There are reasons for this.

    Israel has been rapidly moving to the right, where ultra-nationalist and religious groups now represent mainstream Israeli politics. The center, which temporarily unified under the banner of Kahol Lavan (Blue and White), has actively promoted a similar discourse to Israel’s traditional right of yesteryears.  Finally, the left has disintegrated, to play an unprecedentedly marginal role with little or no impact on Israeli politics.

    As the Israeli right has grown emboldened in recent years, various anti-Arab legislations were passed by the right-dominated Knesset (Parliament). The most obvious example is the ‘Nation-State Law’, which elevated the exclusive identity of Israel as a Jewish State, while devaluing Palestinian Arab rights, religions and language.

    In the September 2019 elections, Arab unity finally paid dividends, as the Joint List won 13 of the Knesset’s 120 contested seats. In April 2020, united Arab parties performed even better, emerging, for the first time in Israel’s history, as the country’s third-largest political bloc after Likud and Kahol Lavan.

    Clearly, Arab parties were ready to engage in the political process, not as marginal forces but active participants. Ayman Odeh, the head of the Joint List, had made several overtures to Benny Gantz, leader of the centrist Kahol Lavan. Odeh had reasoned that, with the help of the Joint List, a centrist-led coalition would finally be ready to dislodge right-wing Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, from power.

    Gantz refused to allow Arab parties into his government coalition, preferring instead to seek common ground with his archenemy, Netanyahu. Both formed a unity government in May 2020, which only lasted for seven months.

    By refusing to incorporate the Joint List, Gantz took the first step in destroying his own promising centrist coalition, which then included Yesh Atid and Telem. Leaders of the latter two factions officially split soon after Gantz agreed to the Netanyahu union. In the coming March elections, Yesh Atid will be contesting independently, while Telem decided to refrain from entering the election fray altogether so as, reportedly, not to further splinter the opposition’s votes.

    From a strategic point of view, this would have been the most opportune moment for the Arab Joint List to finally translate its electoral victories into political success. There is a growing realization that a coalition government in Israel, even if formed, would remain unsustainable without Arab support. Consequently, the country’s leading political camps are openly jockeying to court the Arab vote.

    Indeed, Netanyahu, who, in 2015 used fear mongering to rally the right behind him by saying that Arab voters were “heading to the polling stations in droves,’ is now turning around. During a visit to the Arab city of Nazareth on January 13, he claimed that his previous comments were misinterpreted. In other Arab towns, he boasted about his record in support of Arab communities and in fighting the coronavirus pandemic. His anti-Arab rhetoric is currently at an all-time low.

    The centrist, Yair Lapid, of Yesh Atid has also shown willingness to work with Arab politicians, stating on January 17 that “It was a loss that we did not do it in the current Knesset,” referring to Gantz’s rejection of Arab endorsement and exclusion of Arabs from the coalition government.

    Yet, instead of taking advantage of their electoral success, the Joint List, once again, splintered, or precisely, an important party, Raam, has exited the coalition. This time, however, the fragmentation was not an outcome of ideological differences but the result of the bewildering position of Raam’s leader, Mansour Abbas.

    In February, Abbas had indicated his willingness to join a Netanyahu-led coalition. He justified his shocking turnabout with unconvincing political platitudes as one “needs to be able to look to the future, and to build a better future for everyone,” and so on.

    The fact that Netanyahu is largely responsible for the despairing outlook of Israel’s Arabs’ future seems entirely irrelevant to Abbas, who is inexplicably keen on joining any future political alliance even if it includes Israel’s most chauvinistic political actors.

    Israeli right-wing newspaper, The Jerusalem Post, sums up Abbas’ devastating blow to Arab unity just before the elections, with this headline, “Meet Mansour Abbas, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s unlikely ally”.

    According to a recent poll conducted by Israel’s Channel 13, Abbas’ Raam party could potentially control 4 Knesset seats following the March elections. Also plausible, Raam might fail to achieve the required 3.25 percent threshold, thus receiving no political representation whatsoever. Either way, Abbas’ obvious self-serving folly could cost Arab parties a historic and unmatched opportunity to assert themselves as a decisive political force that could challenge Israeli racism and Palestinian Arab marginalization.

    Now that all electoral alliances have been finalized, Mansour Abbas has clearly made the wrong choice and, no matter the outcome, he has already lost.

    This article was posted on Friday, March 5th, 2021 at 7:12pm and is filed under Benjamin Netanyahu, Benny Gantz, Disinformation, Elections, Fearmongering, Hypocrisy, Israel, Palestine, The “Right”, The Joint List, Transparency/Secrecy.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Israel is hiding the truth about the killing of Ahmad Erekat

    Once again, video footage reveals that Israel’s account of a Palestinian “terror attack” bears no relationship to what actually happened. Not only did Israel dissemble about the circumstances in which its soldiers shot dead 26-year-old Ahmad Erekat last June, but it is still inflicting appalling suffering on his family eight months later based on those lies.

    A new forensic investigation discredits Israel’s claim that Erekat used his car to launch a ramming attack on a military checkpoint near Bethlehem. It finds that the collision was more likely an accident, and that the soldiers responded by carrying out an extra-judicial execution.

    Nonetheless, Israel is still refusing to hand Erekat’s body back to his parents for burial, in what amounts to the psychological torture of the family while Israel insists on holding on to the bodies of Erekat and some 70 other Palestinians for use as bargaining chips in potential future negotiations with Hamas.

    Shot six times

    Erekat was shot six times by soldiers on 23 June. He had been driving through the occupied West Bank to complete errands on his sister’s wedding day, on what should have been a simple journey. But more than five decades of Israel’s belligerent – and seemingly permanent – occupation have created an obstacle course of checkpoints and traffic holdups that Erekat had to negotiate.

    By mid-afternoon, he arrived at the large “Container” checkpoint, one of many Israel has built to permanently divide up the West Bank. The purpose of these checkpoints is to limit Palestinian movement and thereby help Jews living in Israel’s illegal settlements to seize more Palestinian territory for themselves. In that sense, the checkpoints are integral to Israel’s decades-long effort to stop a Palestinian state from ever being born.

    Erekat’s killing was widely reported in both Israeli and international media, in part because he was a nephew of Saeb Erekat, a prominent Palestinian spokesperson until his own death late last year of complications related to Covid-19.

    In reporting Ahmad Erekat’s killing, most media faithfully echoed Israel’s official line. He had rammed his car into the checkpoint in a “terror attack” that lightly injured a soldier. He was then fatally shot – or “neutralised” – when he emerged from his car to attack other soldiers.

    None of this fitted with what was known even then. But Israel refused to conduct an investigation that risked clearing Erekat’s name. Witnesses were not interviewed and the the car was not checked for malfunctions.

    Extrajudicial executions

    Israel, however, has found it harder than usual to put Erekat’s killing in the rearview. As is often the case, Palestinians who witnessed the incident disputed the Israeli army’s account of an attack. Video from other drivers’ phones suggested that Erekat had been denied medical attention and left to bleed to death on the side of the road.

    But more significantly, Saeb Erekat intervened to deny that his nephew was carrying out an attack, and accused the soldiers of executing him “in cold blood”.

    Israel often refuses to release footage of these all-too-frequent checkpoint deaths. That alone should raise suspicions that in many cases, Israeli soldiers are not defending themselves – as the army claims – but carrying out extrajudicial executions when something, anything, takes them by surprise.

    Trigger-happy soldiers shoot first, and the army barely bothers to ask questions later – both because Palestinian lives are considered cheap and because soldiers know they are operating in a system with no accountability. Impunity is what happens when a belligerent occupation becomes permanent rule by a master class over a serf class.

    But in this case, with international pressure building, Israeli officials issued footage from one of the checkpoint’s cameras, assuming it would quiet the criticism. They were wrong.

    Optical illusion

    The problem for Israel is that today’s digital tools mean experts can reconstruct events in astonishing detail from even limited video.

    The footage was studied by Forensic Architecture, a research group based at the University of London and headed by British Israeli academic Eyal Weizman. The team was able to create a three-dimensional reconstruction of that afternoon’s events.

    To the untrained eye, the footage appears to show Erekat’s car accelerating as it swerves towards a concrete blast wall protecting soldiers. But as experts found, that was an optical illusion caused by changing perspective as the car altered direction.

    Forensic Architecture’s experts show that the car continued at roughly 15km per hour throughout. Had Erekat wished to, he could have driven the car much harder and faster into the checkpoint than he did.

    Jeremy Bauer, a US collision expert who was part of the team, said the movement of the wheels suggests that Erekat might have tried to brake during the swerve.

    ‘Confirming the kill’

    Many Israelis, of course, ignored this expert analysis and maintained last week that the incident was still a car-ramming. But they studiously avoided discussing the even more damning second and third parts of Forensic Architecture’s analysis.

    The team also found that, after the crash, Erekat got out of the car and was moving backwards while trying to raise his hands when he was struck by the first shot. He was four metres from the nearest soldier. A further two bullets were fired in quick succession. Three more rounds were fired into him as he lay wounded on the ground. 

    In other words, whether or not Erekat carried out a car-ramming – and the evidence suggests he did not – soldiers shot him even though he posed no threat.

    In Israeli military parlance, the soldiers “confirmed the kill”. They followed an unwritten army code that allows them to carry out an extrajudicial execution of any Palestinian they have unilaterally decided is a “terrorist”.

    Left to bleed

    It was exactly the same logic that dictated what happened next. In the third part of the analysis, Forensic Architecture noted that an Israeli medical team arrived within 10 minutes. They left Erekat to bleed to death, even though footage from a driver’s phone showed him moving his arm after he was shot.

    At the time, Israeli officials claimed that Erekat was given medical attention “within minutes”, but that it was determined he was dead. The truth is that Israeli paramedics attended solely to the lightly injured soldier, while a Palestinian ambulance was denied access to Erekat.

    In the video footage, an Israeli soldier can be seen wandering past Erekat’s head shortly after he was shot, but the soldier offered no assistance. The Forensic Architecture report points out that the denial of medical assistance to Palestinians is an established practice of “killing by time” – a bureaucratic version of “confirming the kill”.

    Erekat was left for around two hours on the ground. At some point his body was stripped of its clothes and, the report observes, he could be seen naked, surrounded by around 20 Israeli soldiers and police. How his family must feel about this additional indignity one can only imagine.

    But even this degrading treatment pales in comparison to the fact that his parents have been denied access to their son’s body and the right to bury him ever since.

    Erekat’s corpse – like those of 70 other Palestinians assumed to be “terrorists” – has been effectively kidnapped by the Israeli state and held as a bargaining chip.

    Nothing exceptional

    There is nothing exceptional about Israel’s treatment of Erekat. An earlier investigation by Forensic Architecture exposed almost identical lies justifying an extrajudicial execution in 2017 by police inside Israel of another Palestinian man – this one nominally an Israeli citizen.

    Fed by a similar culture of racism to the army’s, Israeli police shot Yacoub Abu al-Qiyan, a teacher, as he was driving down a hillside track in his Negev village. Badly injured, he lost control of the vehicle and hit and killed a police officer. In seeming revenge, Abu al-Qiyan was left to bleed to death for half an hour as police and medics milled around nearby.

    Even more notoriously, a video from 2016 shows an Israeli army medic, Elor Azaria, shooting a wounded Palestinian man in the head at close range as the man lies on the street in the occupied Palestinian city of Hebron.

    And last May, an unarmed, autistic Palestinian man, Iyad al-Halak, was shot seven times at close range by Israeli police as he lay on the ground, and while one of his teachers begged the officers not to harm him. Afterwards, Israel claimed that all the cameras at the site of his shooting in Jerusalem’s Old City were malfunctioning.

    Dark secret

    Despite Forensic Architecture’s work, Israeli police last week continued to claim that Erekat’s crash was “a documented terrorist attack”.

    A joint statement from the government, army and Shin Bet intelligence service still falsely claimed that Erekat moved “quickly towards Border Police fighters while waving his hands in a manner taken as threatening”, adding that the soldiers “were certain that they were in immediate mortal danger”.

    In Israel’s security worldview, even a Palestinian raising his hands in surrender proves only his “terrorist” intent.

    It is important to remember that last summer, in the days preceding Erekat’s execution, the Israeli army had braced for what it assumed would be a wave of “terror attacks” that ultimately failed to materialise. The military expected retaliation after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced Israel’s intent to annex swaths of the West Bank, in violation of international law.

    The truth is that Erekat died not only because Israeli soldiers misread his intentions. He died because those same soldiers – like their military commanders and political leaders – live with the repressed knowledge that their presence on another people’s land, and their efforts to displace those people by force, can never be accepted.

    Erekat was killed on his sister’s wedding day, and his body and his family continue to be abused to this day, so that Israel can avoid confronting what the occupation necessarily entails. He paid the price with his life so that Israelis can avoid facing that dark secret.

    • First published in Middle East Eye

    The post Israel is hiding the truth about the killing of Ahmad Erekat first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The Biden Administration Proving to Be More of the Same Old Discredited Policies as its Predecessor

    There were a number of political commentators who urged us to give newly elected United States president Joe Biden a chance to show that he would offer a new approach to the multiple problems facing the United States alliance. Well, he had an opportunity to do so. But the speech that Biden gave on 19th of February of this year that “an attack on one is an attack on all” tells a different story. This “attack” was going to be made by either Russia or China, whom he declared to be the greatest enemy of both the United States and Europe.

    What Biden hoped to achieve, beyond gratifying the exorbitant United States military budget, in attacking Russia and China as the United States’ main threats is unclear. Certainly, any kind of military attack on those two nations, or either of them, is a fantasy invoked by more than a few of the United States strategic planners. This fantasy has not stopped the United States from using its military to continue to threaten both Russia and China.

    Three days after his speech, the United States deployed four B1 heavy bombers to Norway. According to the CNN commentary on the move, the objective of this particular exercise was to send “a clear message” to Russia that the United States intended to operate in the strategically important Arctic region. The move was also apparently to send a message that the United States will defend allies in the Arctic area against “any Russian aggression.”

    That the United States is unable to point to a single instance of this alleged “Russian aggression” is apparently immaterial. That the placing of United States military assets within reach of Russia’s borders could reasonably be perceived as an American threat to Russia is a concept that appears beyond American minds to grasp.

    That the United States military deployment to threaten Russia and China is contrary to international law is apparently an idea that fails to trouble United States planners. Their double standard in this regard was exemplified in the United States’ response to a speech by China’s foreign minister Wang on 22nd of February indicating a continued Chinese willingness to communicate on problems that may exist.

    The conciliatory approach by the Chinese was rudely rebuffed by United States State Department spokesman Ned Price, who instead of welcoming the offer of constructive dialogue preferred to characterise it as reflecting the alleged continuing pattern of China’s tendency to “avert blame for its predatory economic practices, it’s lack of transparency, its failure to honour international agreements, and its repression of universal human rights.” This is a classic example of the pot calling the kettle black, because each and every one of Mr Price’s allegations could be applied to United States behaviour over the past 70+ years.

    Further convincing evidence that NATO (and Biden) are still singing from a long-discredited song sheet is found in the recently published document NATO 2030, prepared by a group of so-called “wise persons.” It contains 138 specific proposals that does nothing to modify French president Macron’s description of NATO as “brain dead.”

    In comments made just prior to the documents publication, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg declared that “China posed important challenges to our security.” At a press conference given to broadcast his views, Stoltenberg claimed that China did not share “our values” and tries to “intimidate other countries.”

    Unfortunately, Stoltenberg is locked in the same outdated time frame as Biden. China is now the largest trading partner for the European Union, replacing the United States in that role last year. A total of 18 of the European Union nations have now signed a Memorandum of Understanding regarding China’s Belt and Road Initiative. According to independent economic data the European Union member States that have signed up to the BRI are now experiencing faster economic growth rates than those who have not signed on.

    This development is a classic illustration of what Chinese president Xi refers to as a “win win situation”. Critics of the Chinese moves have claimed that it is all part of some undefined “Chinese plot” to take over the economies of Western Europe. The economic logic behind such a claim is manifestly lacking.

    NATO and the Biden administration are happy to promote this anti-China rhetoric, regardless of its detachment from reality, but also manifestly at odds with the experience of countries that have embraced the Chinese initiative.

    Similarly, on 20th February Biden repeated tired US claims that Russia had violated international law with its purported annexation of Crimea. This is a claim endlessly repeated in the western media. Such claims show a casual disregard for Crimea’s history. Alarmed at the manifestly illegal coup that replaced the legitimate Ukrainian government in early 2014, the Crimean parliament voted to re-join the Russian Federation.  I say “re-join” because Crimea had been part of Russia for centuries before being gifted to Ukraine in 1953 by then Russian President Khrushchev.

    The issue was then put to a referendum on whether or not the people wanted to re-join Russia. It is the “re-join” component that is notably lacking from western commentary. The people of Crimea voted overwhelmingly (>90%) in favour of reunification and the Russian parliament in turn voted to allow them to re-join. All of this relevant history is missing from western discussion of what happened. Instead, there is a constant misrepresentation of events that also ignores the right, guaranteed by the United Nations Charter, for such self-determination votes to occur.

    That Kosovo was similarly separated from Serbia in 2008 is a fact that the critics of Crimean separation from Ukraine carefully avoid, not least because the Kosovo government has become a major United States asset with an enormous military presence.  It also serves as a major conduit to Europe of heroin from Afghanistan. That the United States had similar visions for its navy in Crimea, replacing the Russians, is another part of the equation carefully avoided in western analysis.

    For the United States, what happened in Crimea is yet another stick with which to beat the Russians. That Biden, who had his own particular role in the Ukrainian revolution, is unlikely to have a change of heart on this topic is yet further proof that there will be no substantive changes in United States foreign policy under the new administration.

    Fortunately, the world has changed since he last held power. The sooner the United States recognises that fact and adjusts its foreign policy accordingly, the safer we are all likely to be.

    The post The Biden Administration Proving to Be More of the Same Old Discredited Policies as its Predecessor first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Coup Leaders, Aung San Suu Kyi Betrayed Democracy in Burma

    What is taking place in Burma right now is a military coup. There can be no other description for such an unwarranted action as the dismissal of the government by military decree and the imposition of Min Aung Hlaing, the Commander-in-Chief of the Army, as an unelected ruler.

    However, despite the endless talk about democratization, Burma was, in the years leading up to the coup, far from being a true democracy.

    Aung San Suu Kyi, leader of the country’s erstwhile ruling party, the National League for Democracy (NLD), has done very little to bring about meaningful change since she was designated State Counselor.

    Since her return to Rangoon in 1989 and placement under house arrest for many years, Suu Kyi was transformed from an activist making the case for democracy in her country, into a ‘democracy icon’ and, eventually, into an untouchable cult personality. The title, ‘State Counselor’, invented by NDL following the 2016 elections, was meant to place her authority above all others in government.

    The justification for this special status is that the military, which continued to have substantial sway over the government, would not allow Suu Kyi to serve as the Prime Minister, because her husband and children are British. But there is more to the story. On her relationship with her party, Richard C. Paddock recently wrote in the New York Times that Suu Kyi has controlled her party in a style that is similar to the previous military control of the country.

    “Critics began calling the party a cult of personality,” Paddock wrote, adding, “Often criticized for her stubbornness and imperious style, she has kept the party firmly under her command and is known to demand loyalty and obedience from her followers.”

    Those who have celebrated the ‘Lady’s’ legacy of yesteryear, were disappointed when the supposed human rights champion agreed to participate in the 2016 elections, despite the fact that millions of Burmese who belong to marginalized ethnic groups – like the country’s persecuted Rohingya – were excluded from the ballot box.

    Faint and bashful criticism was overpowered by the global celebration of Burma’s fledgling democracy. No sooner had Suu Kyi been made the de facto leader, although with direct alliance with the country’s former junta, than international conglomerates – mostly Western – rushed to Rangoon to capitalize on Burma’s largesse of natural resources, left unexploited because of economic sanctions imposed on the country.

    Many legitimate questions were brushed aside, so as not to blemish what was dubbed as a victory for democracy in Burma, miraculously won from a cruel military by a single woman who symbolized the determination and the decades-long struggle of her people. However, behind this carefully choreographed and romanticized veneer was a genocidal reality.

    The genocide of the Rohingya, a pogrom of murder, rape and ethnic cleansing, goes back many decades in Burma. When the Burmese junta carried out their ‘cleansing’ operations of Rohingya Muslims in the past, their violent campaigns were either entirely overlooked or conveniently classified under the encompassing discourse of human rights violations in that country.

    When the genocide intensified in 2016-17, and continued unabated, many legitimate questions arose about the culpability of Burma’s ruling NLD party and of Suu Kyi, personally.

    In the early months of the most recent episodes of the Rohingya genocide at the hands of government forces and local militias, Suu Kyi and her party behaved as if the country was gripped by mere communal violence and that, ultimately, blame was to be shared by all of those involved. That discourse proved unsustainable.

    Internationally, the Rohingya became a recurring theme in the media as hundreds of thousands of refugees were forced to flee, mostly into Bangladesh. The magnitude of their misery became daily and horrific headlines. Stories of rape and murder were documented by the United Nations and other international rights groups. As a result, thanks to efforts championed by a group of 57 Muslim countries, a landmark lawsuit, accusing Burma of genocide, was filed at the UN International Court of Justice in the Hague in 2019.

    For Suu Kyi and her party, ethnic allegiances and realpolitik superseded any platitudes about democracy and human rights, as she defiantly objected to international criticism and openly defended her government and military. In her testimony at the UN Court in December, Suu Kyi described the genocidal violence of the Rohingya as “cycles of inter-communal violence going back to the 1940s”.  Moreover, she harangued the ‘impatience’ of international investigators and human rights groups, blaming them for rushing to judgment.

    By dismissing what “many human rights experts have called some of the worst pogroms of this century,” Suu Kyi turned from “champion of human rights and democracy to apparent apologist for brutality,” NYT reported.

    Though we must insist that the return to rule by the military in Burma is unacceptable, we must equally demand that Burma embraces true democracy for all of its citizens, regardless of race, ethnicity or religion. A good start would be to disassociate Aung San Suu Kyi from any inclusive democratic movement in this country. The Lady of Burma had her opportunity but, sadly, failed.

    The post Coup Leaders, Aung San Suu Kyi Betrayed Democracy in Burma first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Coup Leaders, Aung San Suu Kyi Betrayed Democracy in Burma

    What is taking place in Burma right now is a military coup. There can be no other description for such an unwarranted action as the dismissal of the government by military decree and the imposition of Min Aung Hlaing, the Commander-in-Chief of the Army, as an unelected ruler.

    However, despite the endless talk about democratization, Burma was, in the years leading up to the coup, far from being a true democracy.

    Aung San Suu Kyi, leader of the country’s erstwhile ruling party, the National League for Democracy (NLD), has done very little to bring about meaningful change since she was designated State Counselor.

    Since her return to Rangoon in 1989 and placement under house arrest for many years, Suu Kyi was transformed from an activist making the case for democracy in her country, into a ‘democracy icon’ and, eventually, into an untouchable cult personality. The title, ‘State Counselor’, invented by NDL following the 2016 elections, was meant to place her authority above all others in government.

    The justification for this special status is that the military, which continued to have substantial sway over the government, would not allow Suu Kyi to serve as the Prime Minister, because her husband and children are British. But there is more to the story. On her relationship with her party, Richard C. Paddock recently wrote in the New York Times that Suu Kyi has controlled her party in a style that is similar to the previous military control of the country.

    “Critics began calling the party a cult of personality,” Paddock wrote, adding, “Often criticized for her stubbornness and imperious style, she has kept the party firmly under her command and is known to demand loyalty and obedience from her followers.”

    Those who have celebrated the ‘Lady’s’ legacy of yesteryear, were disappointed when the supposed human rights champion agreed to participate in the 2016 elections, despite the fact that millions of Burmese who belong to marginalized ethnic groups – like the country’s persecuted Rohingya – were excluded from the ballot box.

    Faint and bashful criticism was overpowered by the global celebration of Burma’s fledgling democracy. No sooner had Suu Kyi been made the de facto leader, although with direct alliance with the country’s former junta, than international conglomerates – mostly Western – rushed to Rangoon to capitalize on Burma’s largesse of natural resources, left unexploited because of economic sanctions imposed on the country.

    Many legitimate questions were brushed aside, so as not to blemish what was dubbed as a victory for democracy in Burma, miraculously won from a cruel military by a single woman who symbolized the determination and the decades-long struggle of her people. However, behind this carefully choreographed and romanticized veneer was a genocidal reality.

    The genocide of the Rohingya, a pogrom of murder, rape and ethnic cleansing, goes back many decades in Burma. When the Burmese junta carried out their ‘cleansing’ operations of Rohingya Muslims in the past, their violent campaigns were either entirely overlooked or conveniently classified under the encompassing discourse of human rights violations in that country.

    When the genocide intensified in 2016-17, and continued unabated, many legitimate questions arose about the culpability of Burma’s ruling NLD party and of Suu Kyi, personally.

    In the early months of the most recent episodes of the Rohingya genocide at the hands of government forces and local militias, Suu Kyi and her party behaved as if the country was gripped by mere communal violence and that, ultimately, blame was to be shared by all of those involved. That discourse proved unsustainable.

    Internationally, the Rohingya became a recurring theme in the media as hundreds of thousands of refugees were forced to flee, mostly into Bangladesh. The magnitude of their misery became daily and horrific headlines. Stories of rape and murder were documented by the United Nations and other international rights groups. As a result, thanks to efforts championed by a group of 57 Muslim countries, a landmark lawsuit, accusing Burma of genocide, was filed at the UN International Court of Justice in the Hague in 2019.

    For Suu Kyi and her party, ethnic allegiances and realpolitik superseded any platitudes about democracy and human rights, as she defiantly objected to international criticism and openly defended her government and military. In her testimony at the UN Court in December, Suu Kyi described the genocidal violence of the Rohingya as “cycles of inter-communal violence going back to the 1940s”.  Moreover, she harangued the ‘impatience’ of international investigators and human rights groups, blaming them for rushing to judgment.

    By dismissing what “many human rights experts have called some of the worst pogroms of this century,” Suu Kyi turned from “champion of human rights and democracy to apparent apologist for brutality,” NYT reported.

    Though we must insist that the return to rule by the military in Burma is unacceptable, we must equally demand that Burma embraces true democracy for all of its citizens, regardless of race, ethnicity or religion. A good start would be to disassociate Aung San Suu Kyi from any inclusive democratic movement in this country. The Lady of Burma had her opportunity but, sadly, failed.

    This article was posted on Sunday, February 28th, 2021 at 6:27pm and is filed under Aung San Suu Kyi, Authoritarianism, Burma, Coup, Crimes against Humanity, Democracy, Disinformation, Elections, Genocide, Human Rights, Hypocrisy, International Court of Justice, Militarism, Propaganda, Rohingya, Totalitarianism, Transparency/Secrecy, United Nations.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • The Vaccine (Dis)Information War

    by C.J. Hopkins / February 23rd, 2021

    So, good news, folks! It appears that GloboCap’s Genetic Modification Division has come up with a miracle vaccine for Covid! It’s an absolutely safe, non-experimental, messenger-RNA vaccine that teaches your cells to produce a protein that triggers an immune response, just like your body’s immune-system response, only better, because it’s made by corporations!

    OK, technically, it hasn’t been approved for use — that process normally takes several years — so I guess it’s slightly “experimental,” but the US Food and Drug Administration and the European Medicines Agency have issued “Emergency Use Authorizations,” and it has been “tested extensively for safety and effectiveness,” according to Facebook’s anonymous “fact checkers,” so there’s absolutely nothing to worry about.

    This non-experimental experimental vaccine is truly a historic development, because apart from saving the world from a virus that causes mild to moderate flu-like symptoms (or, more commonly, no symptoms whatsoever) in roughly 95% of those infected, and that over 99% of those infected survive, the possibilities for future applications of messenger-RNA technology, and the genetic modification of humans, generally, is virtually unlimited at this point.

    Imagine all the diseases we can cure, and all the genetic “mistakes” we can fix, now that we can reprogram people’s genes to do whatever we want … cancer, heart disease, dementia, blindness, not to mention the common cold! We could even cure psychiatric disorders, like “antisocial personality disorder,” “oppositional defiant disorder,” and other “conduct disorders” and “personality disorders.” Who knows? In another hundred years, we will probably be able to genetically cleanse the human species of age-old scourges, like racism, sexism, anti-Semitism, homophobia, transphobia, etcetera, by reprogramming everyone’s defective alleles, or implanting some kind of nanotechnological neurosynaptic chips into our brains. The only thing standing in our way is people’s totally irrational resistance to letting corporations redesign the human organism, which, clearly, was rather poorly designed, and thus is vulnerable to all these horrible diseases, and emotional and behavioral disorders.

    But I’m getting a little ahead of myself. The important thing at the moment is to defeat this common-flu-like pestilence that has no significant effect on age-adjusted death rates, and the mortality profile of which is more or less identical to the normal mortality profile, but which has nonetheless left the global corporatocracy no choice but to “lock down” the entire planet, plunge millions into desperate poverty, order everyone to wear medical-looking masks, unleash armed goon squads to raid people’s homes, and otherwise transform society into a pathologized-totalitarian nightmare. And, of course, the only way to do that (i.e., save humanity from a flu-like bug) is to coercively vaccinate every single human being on the planet Earth!

    OK, you’re probably thinking that doesn’t make much sense, this crusade to vaccinate the entire species against a relatively standard respiratory virus, but that’s just because you are still thinking critically. You really need to stop thinking like that. As The New York Times just pointed out, “critical thinking isn’t helping.” In fact, it might be symptomatic of one of those “disorders” I just mentioned above. Critical thinking leads to “vaccine hesitancy,” which is why corporations are working with governments to immediately censor any and all content that deviates from the official Covid-19 narrative and deplatform the authors of such content, or discredit them as “anti-vax disinformationists.”

    For example, Children’s Health Defense, which has been reporting on so-called “adverse events” and deaths in connection with the Covid vaccines, despite the fact that, according to the authorities, “there are no safety problems with the vaccines” and “there is no link between Covid-19 vaccines and those who die after receiving them.” In fact, according to the “fact-checkers” at Reuters, these purported “reports of adverse events” “may contain information that is incomplete, inaccurate, coincidental, or unverifiable!”

    Yes, you’re reading between the lines right. The corporate media can’t come right out and say it, but it appears the “anti-vax disinformationists” are fabricating “adverse events” out of whole cloth and hacking them into the VAERS database and other such systems around the world. Worse, they are somehow infiltrating these made-up stories into the mainstream media in order to lure people into “vaccine hesitancy” and stop us from vaccinating every man, woman, and child in the physical universe, repeatedly, on an ongoing basis, for as long as the “medical experts” deem necessary.

    Here are just a few examples of their handiwork …

    • In California, a 60-year-old X-ray technologist received a second dose of the Pfizer vaccine. A few hours later he had trouble breathing. He was hospitalized and died four days later. His widow says she’s not ready at this point to link her husband’s death to the vaccine. “I’m not putting any blame on Pfizer,” she said, “or on any other pharmaceutical company.” So, probably just another coincidence.
    • A 78-year-old woman in California died immediately after being vaccinated, but her death was not related to the vaccine, health officials assured the public. “(She) received an injection of the Covid-19 vaccine manufactured by Pfizer around noon. While seated in the observation area after the injection, [she] complained of feeling discomfort and while being evaluated by medical personnel she lost consciousness.” Despite the sudden death of his wife, her husband intends to receive a second dose.
    • Also in Michigan, a 90-year-old man died the day after receiving the vaccine, but, again, this was just a tragic coincidence. As Dr. David Gorski explained, “the baseline death rate of 90-year-olds is high because they’re 90 years old,” which makes perfect sense … unless, of course, they died of Covid, in which case their age and underlying conditions make absolutely no difference whatsoever.

    And then there are all the people on Facebook sharing their stories of loved ones who have died shortly after receiving the Covid vaccine, who the Facebook “fact checkers” are doing their utmost to discredit with their official-looking “fact-check notices.” For example …

    OK, I realize it’s uncomfortable to have to face things like that (i.e., global corporations like Facebook implying that these people are lying or are using the sudden deaths of their loved ones to discourage others from getting vaccinated), especially if you’re just trying to follow orders and parrot official propaganda … even the most fanatical Covidian Cultists probably still have a shred of human empathy buried deep in their cold little hearts. But there’s an information war on, folks! You’re either with the Corporatocracy or against it! This is no time to get squeamish, or, you know, publicly exhibit an ounce of compassion. What would your friends and colleagues think of you?!

    No, report these anti-vaxxers to the authorities, shout them down on social media, switch off your critical-thinking faculties, and get in line to get your vaccination! The fate of the human species depends on it! And, if you’re lucky, maybe GloboCap will even give you one of these nifty numerical Covid-vaccine tattoos for free!

    C. J. Hopkins is an award-winning American playwright, novelist and political satirist based in Berlin. His plays are published by Bloomsbury Publishing and Broadway Play Publishing, Inc. His dystopian novel, Zone 23, is published by Snoggsworthy, Swaine & Cormorant. Volume I of his Consent Factory Essays is published by Consent Factory Publishing, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Amalgamated Content, Inc. He can be reached at cjhopkins.com or consentfactory.org. Read other articles by C.J..

    This article was posted on Tuesday, February 23rd, 2021 at 12:26pm and is filed under COVID-19, Disinformation, Fearmongering, Global Capitalism, Health/Medical, Media, Pharmaceuticals, Propaganda, Seniors/Retirees, Social media, Vaccines.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • The Vaccine (Dis)Information War

    So, good news, folks! It appears that GloboCap’s Genetic Modification Division has come up with a miracle vaccine for Covid! It’s an absolutely safe, non-experimental, messenger-RNA vaccine that teaches your cells to produce a protein that triggers an immune response, just like your body’s immune-system response, only better, because it’s made by corporations!

    OK, technically, it hasn’t been approved for use — that process normally takes several years — so I guess it’s slightly “experimental,” but the US Food and Drug Administration and the European Medicines Agency have issued “Emergency Use Authorizations,” and it has been “tested extensively for safety and effectiveness,” according to Facebook’s anonymous “fact checkers,” so there’s absolutely nothing to worry about.

    This non-experimental experimental vaccine is truly a historic development, because apart from saving the world from a virus that causes mild to moderate flu-like symptoms (or, more commonly, no symptoms whatsoever) in roughly 95% of those infected, and that over 99% of those infected survive, the possibilities for future applications of messenger-RNA technology, and the genetic modification of humans, generally, is virtually unlimited at this point.

    Imagine all the diseases we can cure, and all the genetic “mistakes” we can fix, now that we can reprogram people’s genes to do whatever we want … cancer, heart disease, dementia, blindness, not to mention the common cold! We could even cure psychiatric disorders, like “antisocial personality disorder,” “oppositional defiant disorder,” and other “conduct disorders” and “personality disorders.” Who knows? In another hundred years, we will probably be able to genetically cleanse the human species of age-old scourges, like racism, sexism, anti-Semitism, homophobia, transphobia, etcetera, by reprogramming everyone’s defective alleles, or implanting some kind of nanotechnological neurosynaptic chips into our brains. The only thing standing in our way is people’s totally irrational resistance to letting corporations redesign the human organism, which, clearly, was rather poorly designed, and thus is vulnerable to all these horrible diseases, and emotional and behavioral disorders.

    But I’m getting a little ahead of myself. The important thing at the moment is to defeat this common-flu-like pestilence that has no significant effect on age-adjusted death rates, and the mortality profile of which is more or less identical to the normal mortality profile, but which has nonetheless left the global corporatocracy no choice but to “lock down” the entire planet, plunge millions into desperate poverty, order everyone to wear medical-looking masks, unleash armed goon squads to raid people’s homes, and otherwise transform society into a pathologized-totalitarian nightmare. And, of course, the only way to do that (i.e., save humanity from a flu-like bug) is to coercively vaccinate every single human being on the planet Earth!

    OK, you’re probably thinking that doesn’t make much sense, this crusade to vaccinate the entire species against a relatively standard respiratory virus, but that’s just because you are still thinking critically. You really need to stop thinking like that. As The New York Times just pointed out, “critical thinking isn’t helping.” In fact, it might be symptomatic of one of those “disorders” I just mentioned above. Critical thinking leads to “vaccine hesitancy,” which is why corporations are working with governments to immediately censor any and all content that deviates from the official Covid-19 narrative and deplatform the authors of such content, or discredit them as “anti-vax disinformationists.”

    For example, Children’s Health Defense, which has been reporting on so-called “adverse events” and deaths in connection with the Covid vaccines, despite the fact that, according to the authorities, “there are no safety problems with the vaccines” and “there is no link between Covid-19 vaccines and those who die after receiving them.” In fact, according to the “fact-checkers” at Reuters, these purported “reports of adverse events” “may contain information that is incomplete, inaccurate, coincidental, or unverifiable!”

    Yes, you’re reading between the lines right. The corporate media can’t come right out and say it, but it appears the “anti-vax disinformationists” are fabricating “adverse events” out of whole cloth and hacking them into the VAERS database and other such systems around the world. Worse, they are somehow infiltrating these made-up stories into the mainstream media in order to lure people into “vaccine hesitancy” and stop us from vaccinating every man, woman, and child in the physical universe, repeatedly, on an ongoing basis, for as long as the “medical experts” deem necessary.

    Here are just a few examples of their handiwork …

    • In California, a 60-year-old X-ray technologist received a second dose of the Pfizer vaccine. A few hours later he had trouble breathing. He was hospitalized and died four days later. His widow says she’s not ready at this point to link her husband’s death to the vaccine. “I’m not putting any blame on Pfizer,” she said, “or on any other pharmaceutical company.” So, probably just another coincidence.
    • A 78-year-old woman in California died immediately after being vaccinated, but her death was not related to the vaccine, health officials assured the public. “(She) received an injection of the Covid-19 vaccine manufactured by Pfizer around noon. While seated in the observation area after the injection, [she] complained of feeling discomfort and while being evaluated by medical personnel she lost consciousness.” Despite the sudden death of his wife, her husband intends to receive a second dose.
    • Also in Michigan, a 90-year-old man died the day after receiving the vaccine, but, again, this was just a tragic coincidence. As Dr. David Gorski explained, “the baseline death rate of 90-year-olds is high because they’re 90 years old,” which makes perfect sense … unless, of course, they died of Covid, in which case their age and underlying conditions make absolutely no difference whatsoever.

    And then there are all the people on Facebook sharing their stories of loved ones who have died shortly after receiving the Covid vaccine, who the Facebook “fact checkers” are doing their utmost to discredit with their official-looking “fact-check notices.” For example …

    OK, I realize it’s uncomfortable to have to face things like that (i.e., global corporations like Facebook implying that these people are lying or are using the sudden deaths of their loved ones to discourage others from getting vaccinated), especially if you’re just trying to follow orders and parrot official propaganda … even the most fanatical Covidian Cultists probably still have a shred of human empathy buried deep in their cold little hearts. But there’s an information war on, folks! You’re either with the Corporatocracy or against it! This is no time to get squeamish, or, you know, publicly exhibit an ounce of compassion. What would your friends and colleagues think of you?!

    No, report these anti-vaxxers to the authorities, shout them down on social media, switch off your critical-thinking faculties, and get in line to get your vaccination! The fate of the human species depends on it! And, if you’re lucky, maybe GloboCap will even give you one of these nifty numerical Covid-vaccine tattoos for free!

    The post The Vaccine (Dis)Information War first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The Failure of Trump’s “Coup”: A Victory for the US Empire

    The Democrats’ second trial of Trump ends like the first: the outcome known in advance, the entire process designed to sell to the anti-Trump masses that the Democrats were leading some progressive counter-attack. Both impeachments enabled these politicians to present a national diversion to avoid addressing real issues the US people suffer from: the pandemic, lack of vaccines, no national health care program, increasing homelessness, closed schools.

    The Democrats’ first impeachment over Trump’s phone call to Ukraine aimed to sully his name for the benefit of the 2020 Democratic presidential campaign.  They purposely did not address Trump’s actual crimes: his cruelty to Latino immigrants on the border, his indifference to  police abuse of Blacks and Latinos, his racist attacks on non-white US citizens and residents, his neglect of the threat of global warming, funding the genocidal war against Yemen, bombing other countries, such as Syria, illegal and cruel sanctions on Cuba and Venezuela.

    The second impeachment, for the vague charge of “incitement of insurrection” sought to permanently ban Trump from “holding any office,” removing him as an election opponent in 2024. The Democrats reduced themselves to presenting as “evidence” of inciting insurrection Trump’s statement “’if you don’t fight like hell you’re not going to have a country anymore.” However, this insubstantial statement could easily be used to indict any progressive social change movement, much as the Smith Act of 1940 had been used against leftists. The Democrats conveniently avoided mention that Trump in his January 6 speech explicitly told protesters to “peacefully march to the Capitol.”

    The second impeachment also charged Trump with refusing to accept the November 2020 election results. However, the Constitution states Congress must officially certify the Electoral College votes and the presidential victor, giving Trump the constitutional right to challenge these votes in Congress. The articles of impeachment concluded “Donald John Trump, by such conduct, has demonstrated that he will remain a threat to national security, democracy, and the Constitution”. Whatever our opinion of the man, this only continues the Democratic Party-national security state McCarthyite campaign against Trump begun in earnest in 2016. Trump’s second acquittal marked a setback for this McCarthyism the Democrats have been pushing.

    Trump’s “coup” and the Democrats’ “coup”

    Trump’s attempt on January 6 pales in comparison to the Democrats’ well-orchestrated lawfare coup operation set in motion in 2016. As Consortium News, The Grayzone, Stephen Cohen, Glenn Greenwald have documented,  by late 2015 the Democrats were working with national security state officials to paint Trump as beholden to Putin – including stories of Putin’s alleged ownership of “pee tapes” of Trump with prostitutes in Moscow hotels. The Democrats funded the Steele Dossier fabrication, beginning a years-long fact-free story of Trump collusion with Russia to steal the election.

    While Democrats charge Trump with propagating his Stop the Steal story, they have not renounced their own fake Trump-Putin collusion story. In fact, it set the stage for their first impeachment. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi even tweeted – after Congress certified the 2016 Electoral College vote “Our election was hijacked. There is no question. Congress has a duty to #ProtectOurDemocracy & #FollowTheFacts.”

    The continuous Democratic Party double standard and hypocrisy in relation to Trump explains a great deal of his supporters’ anger. As Scott Ritter noted, “For the supporters of Donald Trump, the events of Jan. 6 did not occur in a vacuum but were rather the culmination of what they believed to be a four-year campaign to undermine the legitimacy of the president they voted for and, by doing so, disenfranchising not only their vote, but by extension their role as citizens.”

    The second impeachment show intended to divert the 81 million Biden voters from their expectations and demands for progressive change, given the Democrats have won the presidency and both houses of Congress. It stifled any budding movement demanding the Democrats take action for a national health care program, a bailout for the people, a jobs program, a Green New Deal, etc. Their impeachment spectacle sought to vilify Trump and his supporters, as well as solidify what Glenn Greenwald describes as the new alliance of the national security state, Wall Street, Silicon Valley, Bush era neo-cons, and mainstream corporate media with the neoliberal Democratic Party.

    Who were the Trump voters

    Central to the Democratic Party – and even leftist – spin is that Trump supporters are racist, sexist white men, the “deplorables.” This prejudiced stereotype hardly explains why 9 million Obama voters switched to Trump in 2016. Nor explain why, after four years of hostile mainstream media coverage, he won 10.5 million more votes in 2020.  A look at the 2020 election voter breakdown contradicts their condescending stereotype.

    In 2016, Trump won the white women vote by a margin of 9%, even though his opponent would have been the first woman president. In 2020 this vote margin increased to an 11% margin. In 2016, Trump won 28% of the Latina vote; in 2020, 31%. In 2016, Trump won 5% of the Black women vote; in 2020, 9%, despite Kamala Harris being on the Democratic ticket.  In 2016, he won 13% of the Black male vote; in 2020 it rose to 19%. Overall, comparing 2016 and 2020, Trump’s vote share rose 4% with Blacks, 3% with Latinos, and 5% with Asian Americans. Of the LGBT community, Trump was said to have won 28% of the vote, double his 2016 percent. In sum, people of color, LGBTs  the very ones said to be central to the Democratic coalition, shifted toward Trump.

    The group where Trump lost vote share involved white men, even though he won 35% more of the white working class vote than Biden. In 2016, Trump won 65% of the white men vote; in 2020 it fell to 61%. This hardly squares with liberal and pro-Democrat mythology that a Trump supporter is a racist white man.

    The US leftist movement co-opted by the Democratic Party

    Despite the November election choice coming down to two corporate neoliberals disliked by the great majority of the US population, more than 159.6 million Americans turned out to vote. The corporate rulers’ effort to neutralize popular opposition to their two parties and lure in social movements was so successful that the election turnout marked the highest percent of  voter population in 120 years, 66.7%. Even leftist groups capitulated, dressing this up as “fighting fascism” as they climbed aboard the two corporate party bandwagon.

    Typically, every four years the liberal-left, in order to justify a vote for the corporate Democrat presidential candidate, tries to paint the Republican candidate as a herald of fascism. In Fascism? First Two Months in Power: Hitler vs. Trump, I wrote:

    Leftists recognize corporate America owns the two parties, yet many still vote Democrat. Every four years, we must first defeat the fascist, then build our movement. So is the story we are told. This has been an effective strategy to trap us in the Democratic Party. It has worked for generations. Not only does it reinforce our domination by corporate America, but it seriously miseducates people about fascism.

    Needless to say, so long as corporate America has the liberal-left tied to their two party system, they have no need for fascism. They need fascism only when their customary method of rule breaks down and they face a very direct threat of losing control to revolutionary forces. The historic function of fascism is to smash the radicalized working class and its allies, destroy their organizations, and shut down political liberties when the corporate rulers find themselves unable to govern through their charade of democracy.  No such problem here.

    This capitulation to the corporate Democrats, including by self-described leftist groups, was hard to imagine just earlier in 2020, with the massive Black Lives Matter protests and the anti-neoliberal Bernie Sanders movement.

    While the vast majority of voters for both parties voted for their version of the “lesser evil,” the record election turnout for this charade was a great victory for corporate America irrespective of who won.

    A successful Trump coup would be a worse outcome for the corporate rulers

    The Democratic Party, liberals and leftists claimed Trump was planning a coup, a fascist coup even, on January 6. We are supposed to be grateful this alleged fascist insurrection was put down. But to play along with this coup story, if it were successful, the result would ignite massive nationwide protests by anti-Trump voters. After Trump’s election in November 2016, there were large “Not My President” protests in over 20 cities and many universities around the country. In 2020 between 15-26 million are said to have mobilized in Black Lives Matter rallies. Between 3-5 million participated in the anti-Trump Women’s Marches in 2017. Trump and his supporters have also shown they can turn out their base not only in large rallies but in armed protests.

    Murders by individuals in both camps have already occurred in Charlottesville, Portland and Kenosha. Both anti-Trump and pro-Trump protesters firmly believe they are the ones defending US democracy and freedom against their opponents, that their own candidate legitimately won the presidential election. Right wing Trumpers fear socialists will take over the US, while the anti-Trump left fear fascists will.

    Nationwide confrontations and mobilizations by these opposing forces following a successful Trump coup could seriously damage the overall political stability of the US system for some time. This would weaken the US empire’s ability to sell its “freedom and democracy” image and political leadership role abroad. It would undermine US capacity to assert its military and world cop ideological power around the world.

    Consequently, the best result for the US empire would be for Trump to lose the election, his “coup” to fail, and he be banned from running for political office. The US rulers achieved almost all that agenda. US leftists, declared opponents of the empire, must ask themselves why this very agenda was also their own agenda.

    The post The Failure of Trump’s “Coup”: A Victory for the US Empire first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The Failure of Trump’s “Coup”: A Victory for the US Empire

    The Democrats’ second trial of Trump ends like the first: the outcome known in advance, the entire process designed to sell to the anti-Trump masses that the Democrats were leading some progressive counter-attack. Both impeachments enabled these politicians to present a national diversion to avoid addressing real issues the US people suffer from: the pandemic, lack of vaccines, no national health care program, increasing homelessness, closed schools.

    The Democrats’ first impeachment over Trump’s phone call to Ukraine aimed to sully his name for the benefit of the 2020 Democratic presidential campaign.  They purposely did not address Trump’s actual crimes: his cruelty to Latino immigrants on the border, his indifference to  police abuse of Blacks and Latinos, his racist attacks on non-white US citizens and residents, his neglect of the threat of global warming, funding the genocidal war against Yemen, bombing other countries, such as Syria, illegal and cruel sanctions on Cuba and Venezuela.

    The second impeachment, for the vague charge of “incitement of insurrection” sought to permanently ban Trump from “holding any office,” removing him as an election opponent in 2024. The Democrats reduced themselves to presenting as “evidence” of inciting insurrection Trump’s statement “’if you don’t fight like hell you’re not going to have a country anymore.” However, this insubstantial statement could easily be used to indict any progressive social change movement, much as the Smith Act of 1940 had been used against leftists. The Democrats conveniently avoided mention that Trump in his January 6 speech explicitly told protesters to “peacefully march to the Capitol.”

    The second impeachment also charged Trump with refusing to accept the November 2020 election results. However, the Constitution states Congress must officially certify the Electoral College votes and the presidential victor, giving Trump the constitutional right to challenge these votes in Congress. The articles of impeachment concluded “Donald John Trump, by such conduct, has demonstrated that he will remain a threat to national security, democracy, and the Constitution”. Whatever our opinion of the man, this only continues the Democratic Party-national security state McCarthyite campaign against Trump begun in earnest in 2016. Trump’s second acquittal marked a setback for this McCarthyism the Democrats have been pushing.

    Trump’s “coup” and the Democrats’ “coup”

    Trump’s attempt on January 6 pales in comparison to the Democrats’ well-orchestrated lawfare coup operation set in motion in 2016. As Consortium News, The Grayzone, Stephen Cohen, Glenn Greenwald have documented,  by late 2015 the Democrats were working with national security state officials to paint Trump as beholden to Putin – including stories of Putin’s alleged ownership of “pee tapes” of Trump with prostitutes in Moscow hotels. The Democrats funded the Steele Dossier fabrication, beginning a years-long fact-free story of Trump collusion with Russia to steal the election.

    While Democrats charge Trump with propagating his Stop the Steal story, they have not renounced their own fake Trump-Putin collusion story. In fact, it set the stage for their first impeachment. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi even tweeted – after Congress certified the 2016 Electoral College vote “Our election was hijacked. There is no question. Congress has a duty to #ProtectOurDemocracy & #FollowTheFacts.”

    The continuous Democratic Party double standard and hypocrisy in relation to Trump explains a great deal of his supporters’ anger. As Scott Ritter noted, “For the supporters of Donald Trump, the events of Jan. 6 did not occur in a vacuum but were rather the culmination of what they believed to be a four-year campaign to undermine the legitimacy of the president they voted for and, by doing so, disenfranchising not only their vote, but by extension their role as citizens.”

    The second impeachment show intended to divert the 81 million Biden voters from their expectations and demands for progressive change, given the Democrats have won the presidency and both houses of Congress. It stifled any budding movement demanding the Democrats take action for a national health care program, a bailout for the people, a jobs program, a Green New Deal, etc. Their impeachment spectacle sought to vilify Trump and his supporters, as well as solidify what Glenn Greenwald describes as the new alliance of the national security state, Wall Street, Silicon Valley, Bush era neo-cons, and mainstream corporate media with the neoliberal Democratic Party.

    Who were the Trump voters

    Central to the Democratic Party – and even leftist – spin is that Trump supporters are racist, sexist white men, the “deplorables.” This prejudiced stereotype hardly explains why 9 million Obama voters switched to Trump in 2016. Nor explain why, after four years of hostile mainstream media coverage, he won 10.5 million more votes in 2020.  A look at the 2020 election voter breakdown contradicts their condescending stereotype.

    In 2016, Trump won the white women vote by a margin of 9%, even though his opponent would have been the first woman president. In 2020 this vote margin increased to an 11% margin. In 2016, Trump won 28% of the Latina vote; in 2020, 31%. In 2016, Trump won 5% of the Black women vote; in 2020, 9%, despite Kamala Harris being on the Democratic ticket.  In 2016, he won 13% of the Black male vote; in 2020 it rose to 19%. Overall, comparing 2016 and 2020, Trump’s vote share rose 4% with Blacks, 3% with Latinos, and 5% with Asian Americans. Of the LGBT community, Trump was said to have won 28% of the vote, double his 2016 percent. In sum, people of color, LGBTs  the very ones said to be central to the Democratic coalition, shifted toward Trump.

    The group where Trump lost vote share involved white men, even though he won 35% more of the white working class vote than Biden. In 2016, Trump won 65% of the white men vote; in 2020 it fell to 61%. This hardly squares with liberal and pro-Democrat mythology that a Trump supporter is a racist white man.

    The US leftist movement co-opted by the Democratic Party

    Despite the November election choice coming down to two corporate neoliberals disliked by the great majority of the US population, more than 159.6 million Americans turned out to vote. The corporate rulers’ effort to neutralize popular opposition to their two parties and lure in social movements was so successful that the election turnout marked the highest percent of  voter population in 120 years, 66.7%. Even leftist groups capitulated, dressing this up as “fighting fascism” as they climbed aboard the two corporate party bandwagon.

    Typically, every four years the liberal-left, in order to justify a vote for the corporate Democrat presidential candidate, tries to paint the Republican candidate as a herald of fascism. In Fascism? First Two Months in Power: Hitler vs. Trump, I wrote:

    Leftists recognize corporate America owns the two parties, yet many still vote Democrat. Every four years, we must first defeat the fascist, then build our movement. So is the story we are told. This has been an effective strategy to trap us in the Democratic Party. It has worked for generations. Not only does it reinforce our domination by corporate America, but it seriously miseducates people about fascism.

    Needless to say, so long as corporate America has the liberal-left tied to their two party system, they have no need for fascism. They need fascism only when their customary method of rule breaks down and they face a very direct threat of losing control to revolutionary forces. The historic function of fascism is to smash the radicalized working class and its allies, destroy their organizations, and shut down political liberties when the corporate rulers find themselves unable to govern through their charade of democracy.  No such problem here.

    This capitulation to the corporate Democrats, including by self-described leftist groups, was hard to imagine just earlier in 2020, with the massive Black Lives Matter protests and the anti-neoliberal Bernie Sanders movement.

    While the vast majority of voters for both parties voted for their version of the “lesser evil,” the record election turnout for this charade was a great victory for corporate America irrespective of who won.

    A successful Trump coup would be a worse outcome for the corporate rulers

    The Democratic Party, liberals and leftists claimed Trump was planning a coup, a fascist coup even, on January 6. We are supposed to be grateful this alleged fascist insurrection was put down. But to play along with this coup story, if it were successful, the result would ignite massive nationwide protests by anti-Trump voters. After Trump’s election in November 2016, there were large “Not My President” protests in over 20 cities and many universities around the country. In 2020 between 15-26 million are said to have mobilized in Black Lives Matter rallies. Between 3-5 million participated in the anti-Trump Women’s Marches in 2017. Trump and his supporters have also shown they can turn out their base not only in large rallies but in armed protests.

    Murders by individuals in both camps have already occurred in Charlottesville, Portland and Kenosha. Both anti-Trump and pro-Trump protesters firmly believe they are the ones defending US democracy and freedom against their opponents, that their own candidate legitimately won the presidential election. Right wing Trumpers fear socialists will take over the US, while the anti-Trump left fear fascists will.

    Nationwide confrontations and mobilizations by these opposing forces following a successful Trump coup could seriously damage the overall political stability of the US system for some time. This would weaken the US empire’s ability to sell its “freedom and democracy” image and political leadership role abroad. It would undermine US capacity to assert its military and world cop ideological power around the world.

    Consequently, the best result for the US empire would be for Trump to lose the election, his “coup” to fail, and he be banned from running for political office. The US rulers achieved almost all that agenda. US leftists, declared opponents of the empire, must ask themselves why this very agenda was also their own agenda.

    Stansfield Smith, Chicago ALBA Solidarity, is a long time Latin America solidarity activist, and presently puts out the AFGJ Venezuela Weekly. He is also the Senior Research Fellow at the Council on Hemispheric Affairs. Read other articles by Stansfield.

    This article was posted on Monday, February 22nd, 2021 at 3:34pm and is filed under Coup, Democrats, Disinformation, Donald Trump, Elections, Electoral College, Hillary Clinton, Hypocrisy, Joe Biden, Lesser Evilism, Media, Neoliberalism, Politics, President Vladimir Putin, Propaganda, Protests, Racism, Republicans, Russia, The “Left”, US Congress, US Corporations, Vote.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Does the West Repeating Claims of China Committing Genocide in Xinjiang Reify It?

    The Jewish Virtual Library quotes Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels as having said: “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.”

    Yet that could be called a lie, or more kindly put, a misattribution. Wikiquotes provides the accurate quotation, albeit not as a Nazi stratagem: “The English follow the principle that when one lies, it should be a big lie, and one should stick to it. They keep up their lies, even at the risk of looking ridiculous.” It is sourced as: “Aus Churchills Lügenfabrik” (“Churchill’s Lie Factory”), 12 January 1941, Die Zeit ohne Beispiel (Munich: Zentralverlag der NSDAP, 1941), p. 364-369.

    There is an allegation that is being repeated ad nauseam about internment camps for Muslims in Xinjiang, China or even worse that a genocide is being perpetrated by Han Chinese against Uyghurs. The allegation has been denied and refuted over and over, the sources of the allegation have been discredited, but the allegation still has legs.

    Canadian Members of Parliament are preparing to vote on today Monday, 22 February, on a motion to declare China to be committing a genocide that was brought forward by far-right Conservative Party leader Erin O’Toole. Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau has said the matter requires more study. Others are less clear about the need for study.

    In an interview with CBC, Bob Rae, Canada’s ambassador to the United Nations, stated: “There is no question that there is aspects of what the Chinese are doing that fits into the definition of a genocide in the Genocide Convention.” Rae immediately followed by saying, “But that requires you to go through the process of gathering information and of making sure that we got the evidence that would support that kind of an allegation.

    This is confused and contorted speak. Rae began by stating that unquestionably a genocide is occurring in Xinjiang. Then the diplomat admitted information hasn’t been gathered yet to provide evidence of “that kind of allegation.” An allegation refers to a claim typically without proof. If there were proof, then it would be a fact. Yet, the Canadian diplomat stated, “There is no question… of a genocide.” Ergo, he claims to be stating a certainty — a seeming certainty since Rae acknowledges a requirement for evidence, which Rae says is in the process of being gathered.

    Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian hit back hard; he called Rae’s comments “ridiculous,” adding that Canada itself better fits the description of having perpetrated a genocide.

    CTV wrote, “Zhao on Monday used a number of select statistics that suggest China’s Uighur population is growing at a faster rate than Canada’s population to mock Rae’s suggestions that the Uighurs are being persecuted.”

    That the CTV reporting is disingenuous is obvious from the moving of the goalposts with the substitution of “persecution” for “genocide.” Clearly persecuting someone, however unpleasant, is absolutely and qualitatively different from killing someone. And since genocide refers to the destruction of a population, a rapidly growing population would seem to belie claims of one side committing a genocide. Moreover, what statistic is better to “select” to refute assertions of a genocide being perpetrated?

    Still, to claim one group is being persecuted requires evidence.

    A more pressing priority for the politicians throwing rocks from the Canadian greenhouse ought to be awareness of how rife Canada is with racism. One report reveals systemic anti-Black racism in Canada. In 2006, Canada apologized for the racist imposition of a Chinese Head Tax, but the COVID-19 pandemic hysteria has exposed lingering racism toward ethnic Chinese people. In Un-Canadian: Islamophobia in the True North, author Graeme Truelove details the discrimination and the racist attitudes held against Muslims by the federal government and Canadian monopoly media. Canada is also a partner in the US-Imposed Post-9/11 Muslim Holocaust & Muslim Genocide, as substantiated by Gideon Polya. First Nations fare no better in Canada, as adumbrated in a report issued by the United Nations on severe discrimination against Indigenous peoples.

    Despite this festering racism within Canada, foreign affairs minister Francois-Philippe Champagne saw fit for Canada to join 38 other countries in calling for the admission of experts to Xinjiang “to assess the situation and to report back.” As a rule, basic decency would require that one clean up one’s own yard (except in Canada’s case, the yard was stolen from its Indigenous peoples) before criticizing someone else’s yard.

    Nonetheless, the world must not be silent in the face of crimes against humanity, especially genocide. And China welcomes outside observers to Xinjiang. China has invited the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights to Xinjiang as well as representatives of the EU.

    Chinese media, Global Times, writes,

    China welcomes foreigners to visit Northwest China’s Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region and learn about the real Xinjiang, given that some anti-China politicians in the West are spreading lies about Xinjiang.

    So much for a cover-up.

    What is the real situation in Xinjiang? I will refer again to the extensive must-read report compiled by the Qiao Collective, an all-volunteer group comprised of ethnic Chinese people living abroad, on Xinjiang that warned of “politically motivated” western disinformation:

    The effectiveness of Western propaganda lies in its ability to render unthinkable any critique or alternative—to monopolize the production of knowledge and truth itself. In this context, it is important to note that the U.S. and its allies are in the minority when it comes to its critiques of Chinese policy in Xinjiang. At two separate convenings of the UN Human Rights Council in 2019 and 2020, letters condemning Chinese conduct in Xinjiang were outvoted, 22-50 and 27-46. Many of those standing in support of Chinese policy in Xinjiang are Muslim-majority nations and/or nations that have waged campaigns against extremism on their own soil, including Iraq, Palestine, Pakistan, and Nigeria. On the issue of Xinjiang, the clear break in consensus between the Global South and the U.S. bloc suggests that Western critiques of Xinjiang are primarily politically motivated.

    Are the ramblings of the self-confessed liar Mike Pompeo to be taken seriously about a Chinese-perpetrated genocide in Xinjiang (which has also been accepted by the Biden administration)? Are American administration words to be believed without severe scrutiny considering the myriad lies; for example, about phantom torpedo attack in the Gulf of Tonkin, Viet Nam; about yellow cake and WMD in Iraq; about soldiers being supplied with Viagra in Libya to facilitate mass rapes; about Syrian chemical weapon attacks, etc, etc.

    In all my years in China, I never once encountered any expression of Islamophobia. The following video by an ex pat living in China expresses a similar sentiment. Consider when hearing stories from sources living outside China, especially those with a penchant for twisting the truth, what such a source has to gain from repeating allegations without ironclad proof.

    This article was posted on Monday, February 22nd, 2021 at 1:00pm and is filed under Canada, China, Disinformation, Imperialism, Media, Racism.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Why Politicians and Doctors Keep Ignoring the Medical Research on Vitamin D and Covid

    It is probably not a good idea to write while in the grip of anger. But I am struggling to suppress my emotions about a wasted year, during which politicians and many doctors have ignored a growing body of evidence suggesting that Vitamin D can play a critically important role in the prevention and treatment of Covid-19.

    It is time to speak out forcefully now that a new, large-scale Spanish study demonstrates not a just a correlation but a causal relationship between high-dose Vitamin D treatment of hospitalised Covid patients and significantly improved outcomes for their health.

    The pre-print paper in the Lancet shows there was an 80 per cent reduction in admission to intensive care units among hospitalised patients who were treated with large doses of Vitamin D, and a 64 per cent reduction in death. The possibility of these being chance findings are infinitesimally small, note the researchers. And to boot, the study found no side-effects even when these mega-doses were given short term to the hospitalised patients.

    Those are astounding figures that deserve to be on front pages, especially at a time when politicians and doctors are uncertain whether they can ever find a single magic-bullet vaccine against Covid as new variants pop up like spring daffodils.

    If Vitamin D can approximate a cure for many of those hospitalised with Covid, one can infer that it should prove even more effective when used as a prophylactic. Most people in northern latitudes ought to be taking Vitamin D through much of the year in significant doses – well above the current, outdated 400IU recommended by governments like the UK’s.

    Knee-jerk dismissals

    This new study ought to finally silence the naysayers, though doubtless it won’t. So far it has attracted little media attention. What has been most troubling over the past year is that every time I and others have gently drawn attention to each new study that demonstrated the dramatic benefits of Vitamin D, we were greeted with knee-jerk dismissals that the studies showed only a correlation, not a causal link.

    That was a deeply irresponsible response, especially in the midst of a global pandemic for which effective treatments are urgently needed. The never-satisfied have engaged in the worst kind of blame-shifting, implicitly maligning medical researchers for the fact that they could only organise small-scale, improvised studies because governments were not supporting and funding the larger-scale research needed to prove conclusively whether Vitamin D was effective.

    Further, the naysayers wilfully ignored the fact that all the separate studies showed very similar correlations, as well as the fact that hospitalised patients were invariably deficient, or very deficient, in Vitamin D. The cumulative effect of those studies should have been persuasive in themselves. And more to the point, they should have led to a concerted campaign pressuring governments to fund the necessary research. Instead much of the medical community has wasted valuable time either ignoring the research or nitpicking it into oblivion.

    There should have come a point – especially when a treatment like Vitamin D is very cheap and almost entirely safe – at which the precautionary principle kicked in. It was not only foolhardy but criminally negligent to be demanding 100 per cent proof before approving the use of Vitamin D on seriously ill patients. There was no risk in treating them with Vitamin D, unlike most other proposed drugs, and potentially much to gain.

    Stuck in old paradigm

    Already the usual voices have dismissed the new Barcelona study, saying it has yet to be peer-reviewed. That ignores the fact that it is an expansion on, and confirmation of, an earlier, much smaller study in Cordoba that has been peer-reviewed and that similarly showed dramatic, beneficial outcomes for patients.

    In addition to the earlier studies and the new one showing a causal link, there is plenty of circumstantial evidence to bolster the case for using Vitamin D against Covid.

    For many years, limited studies – ones that Big Pharma showed no interest in expanding – had indicated that Vitamin D was useful both in warding off respiratory infections and in treating a wide variety of chronic auto-immune diseases such as diabetes and multiple sclerosis by damping down inflammatory responses of the kind that often overwhelm hospitalised Covid patients.

    But many doctors and politicians were stuck in an old paradigm – one rooted in the 1950s that viewed Vitamin D exclusively in terms of bone health.

    The role of Vitamin D – produced in the skin by sunlight – should have been at the forefront of medical research for Covid anyway, given that the prevalence of the disease, as with other respiratory infections, appears to slump through the sunny, summer months, and spikes in the winter.

    And while the media preferred to focus exclusively on poverty and racism as “correlative” explanations for the disproportionate number of deaths among BAME doctors and members of the public, Vitamin D seemed an equally, if not more plausible, candidate. Dark skins in cloud-covered northern latitudes make production of Vitamin D harder and deficiency more likely.

    Magic bullet preferred

    We should not be surprised that Big Pharma had no interest in promoting a vitamin freely available through much of the year and one they cannot license. They would, of course, rather patent an expensive magic bullet that offers the hope of enriching company directors and shareholders.

    But that is why we have governments, isn’t it? They could have stepped in to pick up the bill for the research after profit-motivated firms had refused to do so – if not to safeguard the health of their populations, at least to keep their health budgets under control. Most developed countries, even those with lots of sunshine, have large sections of their population that are Vitamin D deficient, especially among the elderly and housebound, the very groups most affected by Covid.

    But governments shirked their responsibility too. Most have not offered supplements beyond measly and largely useless 400IU tablets to the elderly, and they have failed to fortify foods. Those taking small doses are unlikely to significantly and quickly address any deficiency they have or maximise their resistance to Covid.

    To give a sense of what was potentially at stake, consider the findings of one of last year’s correlative studies, done by a team in Heidelberg. Their work implied that, had the UK ensured its population was not widely Vitamin D deficient, many tens of thousands of lives might have been saved.

    Science not ‘followed’

    There are lessons – ones we seem very reluctant to learn – from the catastrophic failures of the past year. And they aren’t just lessons for the politicians.

    If doctors and medical organisations had really been “following the science”, they would have led the clamour both for properly funded Vitamin D research and for its early use, if only on the precautionary principle. The reality is that very few did. In the UK it was left to MP David Davis, who trained as a molecular scientist, to take up the cause of Vitamin D and badger a government that has shown no inclination to listen.

    Instead, “follow the science” became a simple-minded mantra that allowed scientists to ignore the medical science when it did not lead them in the direction they had been trained to expect. “The science” told us to stay indoors, to minimise our contact with daylight, to limit our exposure to fresh air and exercise. We were required to abandon all traditional wisdom about our health.

    If one wants to understand at least some of the resistance to lockdowns, it might be worth examining that instinct and how deeply – and rightly – ingrained it is in us.

    Scientific arrogance

    If we learn anything from the past year it should be that the current, dominant, mechanistic view of medical science – one that too often disregards the natural world or even holds it in contempt – is deeply corrupting and dangerous.

    This is not intended as a rant against science. After all, the mass production of Vitamin D – in the absence of useful sunshine in northern latitudes for much of the year – depends on scientific procedures.

    Rather it is a rant against a blinkered science that has come to dominate western societies. Put simply, most experts – scientists and doctors – have not taken Vitamin D seriously, despite the growing evidence, because it is made in the mystical touch of sun on skin rather than by white-coated technicians in a laboratory.

    Just as most army generals are invested in war more than in peace because they would be out of job if we all chose to love one another, most scientists have been successfully trained to see the natural world as something to be interfered with, to be tamed, to be dissected, to be reassembled, to be improved. Like the rest of us, they have a need – a very unscientific one – to feel special, to believe that they are indispensable. But that arrogance comes at a cost.

    Unhealthy lifestyles

    The default assumption of many medical scientists was that any claim for Vitamin D – sunlight – having curative or protective properties against Covid-19 needed not urgent, further investigation but dismissal as quackery, as snake oil. How could nature possibly offer a Covid solution that scientists could not improve on?

    Unpopular as it may be to say it, that arrogance continues with the exclusive focus on vaccines. They will prove part of the way we emerge from the Covid winter. But we will be foolish indeed if we rely on them alone. We need to think about the way our societies are structured and the resulting unhealthy habits cultivated in us: the sedentary lifestyles many of us lead, the lack of exposure to nature and to sunshine, the gratuitous consumption on which our economies depend, and the advertiser-driven urge for instant gratification that has led to a plague of obesity.

    There is no vaccine for any of that yet.

    Already we are being forced into what are deeply troubling political debates – not scientific ones – around vaccines. Should vaccinations be made compulsory, or the vaccination-hesitant shamed into compliance? Should those who have received the vaccine be given special privileges through an immunity passport?

    The reality is that whenever we try to “defeat” nature, as if our scientists were military generals waging war on the natural world, we are forced on to new and difficult ethical terrain. As we seek to “improve on” the natural world, we must also remake our social worlds in ways that invariably move us further from lifestyles that we have evolved to need, both physically and emotionally.

    Magic of the stars

    This is not a call to ignore science or reject Covid emergency measures. But it is a call to show a lot more humility and caution as we ponder our place in the natural world – as well as our constant urge to “fix” what the rest of the planet does not regard as broken. A year of Covid has shown how disruptive our meddling can be and how fragile the systems of progress we think we have permanently created really are.

    When our politicians and regulators agitate for tough new restrictions on the public’s right to free speech, claiming fake news and misinformation about Covid, maybe they should remember that trust has to be earnt, not mandated through laws. A world in which profit and power rule is also one in which the likely response from those who are ruled is doubt, scepticism or cynicism.

    Maybe I should not have written this while I was so angry. Or maybe others ought to be angry too – angry about the fact that many, many lives were almost certainly lost unnecessarily, and may continue to be lost, because those who profit from disease have no incentive to protect health.

    We ought to be angry too about how in a better-ordered, more caring society, we might have found ways to avoid the worst excesses of lockdowns that have deprived our children of an education, of friendships, of play, of life in all its variety and excitement, and of sunshine. They lost all that while our politicians and their scientist enablers poured huge sums into labs, into test-tubes and into man-made magic bullets while contemptuously ignoring sunlight because it is free and everywhere and because it is a different kind of magic – the magic of the stars.

    UPDATE:

    There has been the expected social media backlash from some quarters against this post. I even appear to have angered the odd white-coated lab technician! Some doubtless did not actually read beyond the soundbite I offered on social media. But sadly, others seem to be highly invested in deflecting from the central argument I am making. So here it is in a nutshell:

    The only sane response to the Vitamin D medical studies showing dramatic benefits for those hospitalised with Covid is to demand urgent government funding of further research to test those findings and to use Vitamin D in hospitals in the meantime on the precautionary principle, given that it is very cheap and has proven to be completely safe.

    If you are trying to obscure that point, you should do so only if you are absolutely certain that these medical studies are wrong. Otherwise your behaviour is, on the best interpretation, shamefully irresponsible.

    This article was posted on Sunday, February 21st, 2021 at 7:04pm and is filed under COVID-19, Disinformation, Drug Research, Health/Medical, Medical Ethics, Narrative, Pandemics, Pharmaceuticals, Science/Technology, Spain, Vaccines.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Why Politicians and Doctors Keep Ignoring the Medical Research on Vitamin D and Covid

    It is probably not a good idea to write while in the grip of anger. But I am struggling to suppress my emotions about a wasted year, during which politicians and many doctors have ignored a growing body of evidence suggesting that Vitamin D can play a critically important role in the prevention and treatment of Covid-19.

    It is time to speak out forcefully now that a new, large-scale Spanish study demonstrates not a just a correlation but a causal relationship between high-dose Vitamin D treatment of hospitalised Covid patients and significantly improved outcomes for their health.

    The pre-print paper in the Lancet shows there was an 80 per cent reduction in admission to intensive care units among hospitalised patients who were treated with large doses of Vitamin D, and a 64 per cent reduction in death. The possibility of these being chance findings are infinitesimally small, note the researchers. And to boot, the study found no side-effects even when these mega-doses were given short term to the hospitalised patients.

    Those are astounding figures that deserve to be on front pages, especially at a time when politicians and doctors are uncertain whether they can ever find a single magic-bullet vaccine against Covid as new variants pop up like spring daffodils.

    If Vitamin D can approximate a cure for many of those hospitalised with Covid, one can infer that it should prove even more effective when used as a prophylactic. Most people in northern latitudes ought to be taking Vitamin D through much of the year in significant doses – well above the current, outdated 400IU recommended by governments like the UK’s.

    Knee-jerk dismissals

    This new study ought to finally silence the naysayers, though doubtless it won’t. So far it has attracted little media attention. What has been most troubling over the past year is that every time I and others have gently drawn attention to each new study that demonstrated the dramatic benefits of Vitamin D, we were greeted with knee-jerk dismissals that the studies showed only a correlation, not a causal link.

    That was a deeply irresponsible response, especially in the midst of a global pandemic for which effective treatments are urgently needed. The never-satisfied have engaged in the worst kind of blame-shifting, implicitly maligning medical researchers for the fact that they could only organise small-scale, improvised studies because governments were not supporting and funding the larger-scale research needed to prove conclusively whether Vitamin D was effective.

    Further, the naysayers wilfully ignored the fact that all the separate studies showed very similar correlations, as well as the fact that hospitalised patients were invariably deficient, or very deficient, in Vitamin D. The cumulative effect of those studies should have been persuasive in themselves. And more to the point, they should have led to a concerted campaign pressuring governments to fund the necessary research. Instead much of the medical community has wasted valuable time either ignoring the research or nitpicking it into oblivion.

    There should have come a point – especially when a treatment like Vitamin D is very cheap and almost entirely safe – at which the precautionary principle kicked in. It was not only foolhardy but criminally negligent to be demanding 100 per cent proof before approving the use of Vitamin D on seriously ill patients. There was no risk in treating them with Vitamin D, unlike most other proposed drugs, and potentially much to gain.

    Stuck in old paradigm

    Already the usual voices have dismissed the new Barcelona study, saying it has yet to be peer-reviewed. That ignores the fact that it is an expansion on, and confirmation of, an earlier, much smaller study in Cordoba that has been peer-reviewed and that similarly showed dramatic, beneficial outcomes for patients.

    In addition to the earlier studies and the new one showing a causal link, there is plenty of circumstantial evidence to bolster the case for using Vitamin D against Covid.

    For many years, limited studies – ones that Big Pharma showed no interest in expanding – had indicated that Vitamin D was useful both in warding off respiratory infections and in treating a wide variety of chronic auto-immune diseases such as diabetes and multiple sclerosis by damping down inflammatory responses of the kind that often overwhelm hospitalised Covid patients.

    But many doctors and politicians were stuck in an old paradigm – one rooted in the 1950s that viewed Vitamin D exclusively in terms of bone health.

    The role of Vitamin D – produced in the skin by sunlight – should have been at the forefront of medical research for Covid anyway, given that the prevalence of the disease, as with other respiratory infections, appears to slump through the sunny, summer months, and spikes in the winter.

    And while the media preferred to focus exclusively on poverty and racism as “correlative” explanations for the disproportionate number of deaths among BAME doctors and members of the public, Vitamin D seemed an equally, if not more plausible, candidate. Dark skins in cloud-covered northern latitudes make production of Vitamin D harder and deficiency more likely.

    Magic bullet preferred

    We should not be surprised that Big Pharma had no interest in promoting a vitamin freely available through much of the year and one they cannot license. They would, of course, rather patent an expensive magic bullet that offers the hope of enriching company directors and shareholders.

    But that is why we have governments, isn’t it? They could have stepped in to pick up the bill for the research after profit-motivated firms had refused to do so – if not to safeguard the health of their populations, at least to keep their health budgets under control. Most developed countries, even those with lots of sunshine, have large sections of their population that are Vitamin D deficient, especially among the elderly and housebound, the very groups most affected by Covid.

    But governments shirked their responsibility too. Most have not offered supplements beyond measly and largely useless 400IU tablets to the elderly, and they have failed to fortify foods. Those taking small doses are unlikely to significantly and quickly address any deficiency they have or maximise their resistance to Covid.

    To give a sense of what was potentially at stake, consider the findings of one of last year’s correlative studies, done by a team in Heidelberg. Their work implied that, had the UK ensured its population was not widely Vitamin D deficient, many tens of thousands of lives might have been saved.

    Science not ‘followed’

    There are lessons – ones we seem very reluctant to learn – from the catastrophic failures of the past year. And they aren’t just lessons for the politicians.

    If doctors and medical organisations had really been “following the science”, they would have led the clamour both for properly funded Vitamin D research and for its early use, if only on the precautionary principle. The reality is that very few did. In the UK it was left to MP David Davis, who trained as a molecular scientist, to take up the cause of Vitamin D and badger a government that has shown no inclination to listen.

    Instead, “follow the science” became a simple-minded mantra that allowed scientists to ignore the medical science when it did not lead them in the direction they had been trained to expect. “The science” told us to stay indoors, to minimise our contact with daylight, to limit our exposure to fresh air and exercise. We were required to abandon all traditional wisdom about our health.

    If one wants to understand at least some of the resistance to lockdowns, it might be worth examining that instinct and how deeply – and rightly – ingrained it is in us.

    Scientific arrogance

    If we learn anything from the past year it should be that the current, dominant, mechanistic view of medical science – one that too often disregards the natural world or even holds it in contempt – is deeply corrupting and dangerous.

    This is not intended as a rant against science. After all, the mass production of Vitamin D – in the absence of useful sunshine in northern latitudes for much of the year – depends on scientific procedures.

    Rather it is a rant against a blinkered science that has come to dominate western societies. Put simply, most experts – scientists and doctors – have not taken Vitamin D seriously, despite the growing evidence, because it is made in the mystical touch of sun on skin rather than by white-coated technicians in a laboratory.

    Just as most army generals are invested in war more than in peace because they would be out of job if we all chose to love one another, most scientists have been successfully trained to see the natural world as something to be interfered with, to be tamed, to be dissected, to be reassembled, to be improved. Like the rest of us, they have a need – a very unscientific one – to feel special, to believe that they are indispensable. But that arrogance comes at a cost.

    Unhealthy lifestyles

    The default assumption of many medical scientists was that any claim for Vitamin D – sunlight – having curative or protective properties against Covid-19 needed not urgent, further investigation but dismissal as quackery, as snake oil. How could nature possibly offer a Covid solution that scientists could not improve on?

    Unpopular as it may be to say it, that arrogance continues with the exclusive focus on vaccines. They will prove part of the way we emerge from the Covid winter. But we will be foolish indeed if we rely on them alone. We need to think about the way our societies are structured and the resulting unhealthy habits cultivated in us: the sedentary lifestyles many of us lead, the lack of exposure to nature and to sunshine, the gratuitous consumption on which our economies depend, and the advertiser-driven urge for instant gratification that has led to a plague of obesity.

    There is no vaccine for any of that yet.

    Already we are being forced into what are deeply troubling political debates – not scientific ones – around vaccines. Should vaccinations be made compulsory, or the vaccination-hesitant shamed into compliance? Should those who have received the vaccine be given special privileges through an immunity passport?

    The reality is that whenever we try to “defeat” nature, as if our scientists were military generals waging war on the natural world, we are forced on to new and difficult ethical terrain. As we seek to “improve on” the natural world, we must also remake our social worlds in ways that invariably move us further from lifestyles that we have evolved to need, both physically and emotionally.

    Magic of the stars

    This is not a call to ignore science or reject Covid emergency measures. But it is a call to show a lot more humility and caution as we ponder our place in the natural world – as well as our constant urge to “fix” what the rest of the planet does not regard as broken. A year of Covid has shown how disruptive our meddling can be and how fragile the systems of progress we think we have permanently created really are.

    When our politicians and regulators agitate for tough new restrictions on the public’s right to free speech, claiming fake news and misinformation about Covid, maybe they should remember that trust has to be earnt, not mandated through laws. A world in which profit and power rule is also one in which the likely response from those who are ruled is doubt, scepticism or cynicism.

    Maybe I should not have written this while I was so angry. Or maybe others ought to be angry too – angry about the fact that many, many lives were almost certainly lost unnecessarily, and may continue to be lost, because those who profit from disease have no incentive to protect health.

    We ought to be angry too about how in a better-ordered, more caring society, we might have found ways to avoid the worst excesses of lockdowns that have deprived our children of an education, of friendships, of play, of life in all its variety and excitement, and of sunshine. They lost all that while our politicians and their scientist enablers poured huge sums into labs, into test-tubes and into man-made magic bullets while contemptuously ignoring sunlight because it is free and everywhere and because it is a different kind of magic – the magic of the stars.

    UPDATE:

    There has been the expected social media backlash from some quarters against this post. I even appear to have angered the odd white-coated lab technician! Some doubtless did not actually read beyond the soundbite I offered on social media. But sadly, others seem to be highly invested in deflecting from the central argument I am making. So here it is in a nutshell:

    The only sane response to the Vitamin D medical studies showing dramatic benefits for those hospitalised with Covid is to demand urgent government funding of further research to test those findings and to use Vitamin D in hospitals in the meantime on the precautionary principle, given that it is very cheap and has proven to be completely safe.

    If you are trying to obscure that point, you should do so only if you are absolutely certain that these medical studies are wrong. Otherwise your behaviour is, on the best interpretation, shamefully irresponsible.

    The post Why Politicians and Doctors Keep Ignoring the Medical Research on Vitamin D and Covid first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Interview with Martin Jacques on BBC Coverage of China

    The Chinese Foreign Ministry has demanded an apology from the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) for its recent coverage of COVID-19, saying the BBC used a clip about an anti-terrorism exercise, claiming it was for pandemic control. The BBC responded: it will continue to uphold the “principle of justice”. For more on this, CGTN talked to Martin Jacques, a senior research fellow at the London School of Economics.

    The post Interview with Martin Jacques on BBC Coverage of China first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Interview with Martin Jacques on BBC Coverage of China

    by CGTN / February 6th, 2021

    The Chinese Foreign Ministry has demanded an apology from the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) for its recent coverage of COVID-19, saying the BBC used a clip about an anti-terrorism exercise, claiming it was for pandemic control. The BBC responded: it will continue to uphold the “principle of justice”. For more on this, CGTN talked to Martin Jacques, a senior research fellow at the London School of Economics.

    This article was posted on Saturday, February 6th, 2021 at 5:54am and is filed under COVID-19, Disinformation, Media, Video.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • A Classic Example of Biased Political Reporting

    The Sydney Morning Herald has always been regarded as a reasonably responsible newspaper. Although editorially it was generally a supporter of the misnamed Liberal Party, its opinion pieces generally try to pursue an open mind. Its editorial commentary of course generally favoured one side of the political divide rather than the other. The writers were generally frank about their perspective, favouring one side or the other. Many of their writers strove for a fundamentally neutral stance, overtly favouring neither one side of politics nor the other.

    One could always agree or disagree with a writer’s perspective. As the old adage had it, your interpretation is your own, the facts however are sacred. Thus, it was possible to read a column by a writer from a different political perspective, but except the thrust of their argument because the facts that were presenting led one to a particular conclusion.

    The Sydney Morning Herald has, however, moved away from the position of the facts being sacred, leaving their interpretation to be a matter of preference. The specific example which brought this vividly to mind was the recent article by the Herald international editor, Peter Hartcher.

    The article was entitled “Global threat from three strongmen” and appeared 19 January 2021. Most of the article is devoted to an unqualified attack upon Russia, and in particular its president Vladimir Putin. It commences by asserting that Putin is displaying “a new brazenness.” It was always obvious, Hartcher baldly states without a shred of evidence to support it, that Putin was “directing the assassinations and disappearances of his opponents.”

    Killing his opponents with radioactive isotopes and nerve agents were methods, Hartcher claims which “might go undetected in most circumstances”. Really? Where is the evidence for this extraordinary (and false) claim? The evidence does not exist because it is simply not true, either as to its alleged non-detectability, and to the perpetrator of such acts.

    Next comes a vague reference to the Soviet era Novichok which, we are solemnly assured, “can’t be bought at your local chemist or even on the dark web.” What is this vague allegation actually evidence of? When was Novichok used outside the fantastic and vague allegations surrounding former Russian spy Sergei Skripal who with his daughter is currently illegally held incommunicado by the British?

    Is Hartcher unaware that Novichok is a drug held by a number of western countries, and that if used will assuredly kill its victim within minutes? Hartcher then goes on to cite whom he calls the “hero of Russia’s opposition movement, the charismatic Alexei Navalny” who took ill on a flight from Tomsk to Moscow in August last year. Navalny may be a “hero” in Hartcher’s eyes. He is significantly less in the eyes of the Russian public, or whom 2% voted for him when he stood for office.

    Hartcher is not content with Navalny taking ill on his flight to Moscow. He had to have been the victim of a “suspicious poisoning”. That the plane was diverted so that Navalny could be rushed to hospital where the examining doctors found no evidence of “Novichok” or any other illicit substance is not mentioned.

    Neither does Hartcher mention the fact that the doctors voluntarily allowed Navalny to be flown to Berlin. He was not “wrested” from the hospital. It is absurd to suggest that the plane would have been allowed into Russian airspace and those on board allowed to “wrest” him from the hospital and be flown to Berlin. The idea is so fantastic it is difficult to believe that a senior writer could advance it is a serious idea.

    We are then treated to an alleged telephone call that Navalny is said to have made from Berlin, to an unsuspecting Federal Security Bureau officer who, according to Navalny, blurts out a fantastic story about a bungled assassination attempt, thereby exposing Putin’s “fearsome security apparatus as ineffective and worse, ridiculous.”

    This is the same security service that originally failed to kill Navalny, failed to finish the job whilst he was in hospital, and allowed him to be whisked away to expose to the world their incompetence. Are we seriously expected to believe this unadulterated rubbish?

    Hartcher then claims that Putin was “so afraid of Navalny, he barred him from standing for election in 2018.” Actually, Putin did no such thing. Navalny was barred from standing for election because of a criminal conviction, for which he received a suspended sentence. He breached the conditions of his release by staying in Germany, despite receiving a warning from the authorities that he was in breach of his sentence conditions. Hartcher fails to mention these inconvenient facts.

    Navalny voluntarily returned to Russia, despite having the certain knowledge he would be arrested. Moments before being arrested, Navalny utters the words we are told; “Putin fears me most. I am not afraid.”

    Hartcher goes on in the article to turn his attention to another “authoritarian leader to drop the pretence of any sort of restraint” when he writes a short piece on Chinese president Xi Jinping. But by now one knows what to expect from the mangled worldview of the international editor so I will leave the interested reader to read Hartcher’ blessedly short mangling of Chinese history. If they have the stomach for the continued distortion of history represented in this alleged journalist’s writing.

    This article was posted on Sunday, January 24th, 2021 at 8:20am and is filed under Australia, Disinformation, Media.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • “A Ghastly Future”? Israeli Apartheid, Biden, Starmer, Assange And Mass Extinction

    Back in 2017, before WikiLeaks co-founder Julian Assange was silenced by Twitter, he used the platform to highlight an immutable truth:

    ‘The overwhelming majority of information is classified to protect political security not national security.’

    Power hates being exposed. It hates having its inner machinations, its selfish priorities and ugly operations opened up to public scrutiny.

    The omission of inconvenient facts, and the silencing of inadmissible viewpoints, are core features of the so-called ‘mainstream’ news media. Thus, it should be obvious by now why we always put ‘mainstream’ in quotation marks. Because, as increasing numbers of the public surely now recognise, the major news media are not impartial, or fair, or balanced. Nor do they truly represent and reflect the concerns and priorities of the vast majority of the population. Instead, the major newspapers and broadcasters represent, defend and project the interests of powerful state and corporate elites. The state-corporate media will not, and cannot, undertake consistent and reliable public scrutiny of these elites. That would make no sense since the mass media is the propaganda operation of state-corporate power.

    Since we began Media Lens twenty years ago in 2001, we have amassed over 5,000 pages of media alerts detailing numerous examples of dangerous, power-friendly omissions, distortions and imbalances in UK state-corporate media. Rather than go for easy and obvious targets like the Sun, Express and Mail, we have focused on those media outlets the public is supposed to regard as the most fair, balanced, probing and challenging of governments and Big Business. ‘Thus far and no further’, as Noam Chomsky has described the most open or most liberal end of the narrow spectrum of establishment media.

    BBC News deserves particular scrutiny, not least because it regularly declares itself  ‘the world’s most trusted international news broadcaster’. That is not much of an accolade given that public trust in the media is crumbling; particularly in a country which has some of the worst ‘news’ media anywhere on the planet. The UK has an overwhelmingly right-wing and establishment press dominated by rich owners, and edited by compliant editors with the required ideologically-aligned views. As for the Guardian, which has always been a ‘liberal’ gatekeeper on behalf of power, investigative journalists Matt Kennard and Mark Curtis reported in 2019 that the paper has been:

    ‘successfully targeted by security agencies to neutralise its adversarial reporting of the “security state”, according to newly released documents and evidence from former and current Guardian journalists.’

    Moreover, other than a recent belated and mealy-mouthed defence, for many years the Guardian essentially abandoned and abused Julian Assange, along with the rest of the ‘mainstream’ media, after exploiting him and WikiLeaks.

    Couple all that with the fact that BBC News regularly follows the skewed, power-serving agenda set by UK press coverage, and it is no surprise that overall British public trust in the media is so low. As we noted last year, the extensive annual Eurobarometer survey across 33 countries revealed that the UK public’s trust in the press is rock bottom. Indeed, 2020 was the ninth year out of the past ten that the UK had come last.

    BBC Silence Over Israel As An Apartheid State

    One of the most egregious recent omissions by BBC News was last week’s groundbreaking report by leading Israeli human rights group B’Tselem naming Israel as ‘an apartheid state’ and ‘a regime of Jewish supremacy’:

    ‘In the entire area between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River, the Israeli regime implements laws, practices and state violence designed to cement the supremacy of one group – Jews – over another – Palestinians.’

    Apartheid in the Palestinian Territories has long been recognised. For example, in 2004, a prominent South African professor of international law, John Dugard, then UN special rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian territories, wrote that there is ‘an apartheid regime’ in the territories ‘worse than the one that existed in South Africa.’

    Noam Chomsky concurred:

    ‘In the Occupied Territories, what Israel is doing is much worse than apartheid. To call it apartheid is a gift to Israel, at least if by “apartheid” you mean South African-style apartheid.

    ‘What is happening in the Occupied Territories is much worse. There is a crucial difference. The South African Nationalists needed the black population. That was their workforce…

    ‘The Israeli relationship to the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories is totally different. They just do not want them. They want them out, or at least in prison.’

    All this was damning enough. But the publication of the new B’Tselem report was the first time that Israeli human rights and legal experts had publicly stated that apartheid exists not just in the Occupied Territories, but throughout the whole region that Israel claims for itself.

    As the Israel-based British journalist Jonathan Cook observed:

    ‘By calling Israel an apartheid state and a “regime of Jewish supremacy”, B’Tselem has given the lie to the Israel lobby’s claim – bolstered by a new definition promoted by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance – that it is antisemitic to suggest Israel is a “racist endeavour”.

    ‘B’Tselem, a veteran Israeli Jewish organisation with deep expertise in human rights and international law, has now explicitly declared that Israel is a racist state. Israel’s apologists will now face the much harder task of showing that B’Tselem is antisemitic, along with the Palestinian solidarity activists who cite its work.’

    As far as we are aware, there was no mention of the report on any of the flagship BBC News at 6 or 10 television programmes. Nor was there anything to be found on the BBC News website. Presumably, the BBC deemed it unworthy of the public’s attention. We challenged BBC foreign editor Andrew Roy, BBC world affairs editor John Simpson, BBC chief international correspondent Lyse Doucet and BBC digital news editor Stuart Millar for a response. Not one of them replied. It is perhaps significant that Millar moved to the BBC from the Guardian where, as deputy editor of Guardian US, he had scoffed at Julian Assange:

    ‘I like to think that #Assange chose the Ecuadorean embassy because it’s so convenient for Harrods’

    This is the archetypal sneering ‘mainstream’ journalist’s view of anyone who seriously exposes the truth and challenges power.

    As for B’Tselem’s landmark report detailing the reality of the Israeli state as an apartheid regime, it is possible that there were sporadic brief mentions in some outlying parts of the BBC. Longtime readers will recall that the BBC infamously buried revelations by Scott Ritter, a former chief UN weapons inspector, that Iraq had been fundamentally disarmed of any weapons of mass destruction, at 3am on the BBC World Service.

    In response to the B’Tselem report, John Pilger pointed out via Twitter:

    ‘Israel is top of the league for vaccinating its own people [against coronavirus]. The accolades say Israel is the “example”. False. Israel is denying the vaccine to Palestinians whose land and lives it controls. WHO has pleaded with Israel: to no avail. Apartheid in action.’

    Glossing Over Brutal Imperialism

    Here in the UK, the Tory government’s criminally incompetent response to the coronavirus pandemic has led to an appalling death toll – now the highest death rate of any country in the world – while ministers robotically repeat the mantra of ‘following the science’, with one U-turn after another. Meanwhile, many people are suffering tremendous hardship, losing their jobs or struggling to earn a living, or even unable to feed their children adequately.

    As Phil Miller, a staff writer for the excellent investigative journalism website Declassified UK, noted:

    ‘The UK now has over 100,000 covid deaths. That’s a result of government failure on a grand scale. The lack of calls for Johnson and ministers to resign is extraordinary’

    It is extraordinary. But, tragically, it is a natural consequence of how the state-corporate media represents and defends elite power, of which it is a key component. Any real dissent is smeared, swept to the margins or simply blanked. With the power of corporate media manifest in the demolition of Jeremy Corbyn’s prospects of becoming Prime Minister in 2019, it is entirely predictable that there is now no substantive political opposition to a destructive, elite-serving Tory government.

    Sir Keir Starmer, Labour’s lame Blairite successor, is a stalwart establishment figure who, at best, would only ever paper over a few cracks in the edifice of neoliberal economics. This is the corporate- and finance-driven system that is crushing the vast majority of the world’s population, destroying the natural environment and species at an alarming rate, and driving us all towards the precipice of climate breakdown. As we have noted before, and as we will see again below, no world leader anywhere is doing anything remotely sufficient to address this disaster.

    Starmer has actually called for the Labour party to emulate incoming US President Joe Biden’s ‘broad coalition’ to ‘see progressive values triumph over the forces of division and despair’. The stone-cold reality that Biden, set to be inaugurated today (20 January), represents huge financial interests and corporate power, and has an appalling record in supporting US imperialism and wars, appears to have escaped Starmer’s attention. But then, Starmer is also seemingly oblivious to the UK’s own imperial past and blood-soaked complicity in war crimes. How else could a Labour leader write:

    ‘We are at our best when the world knows we have the courage of our convictions and a clear moral purpose.’

    Wiping away the blood of countless US/UK atrocities across the globe, he continued:

    ‘For the United States of America and for Britain, this is the time to return to the world stage. This is the time for us to lead.’

    To gloss over Britain’s brutal past and present – to ignore the grievous crimes committed against Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya, to name a few – is an insult to the UK’s many victims. For a supposed ‘progressive’ to do so is surely absurd. It can only result from being blind to the propaganda system so cogently explained by Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky in ‘Manufacturing Consent’ (Vintage, 1988). In this system, we are immersed in a brainwashing environment of mass media in which even the more ‘reputable’ news outlets such as Associated Press regurgitate doctrinal statements such as:

    ‘For decades, the U.S. has been an advocate for democracy abroad, using diplomatic pressure and even direct military intervention in the name of spreading the principles of a pluralistic system with a free and fair vote for political leaders. These tactics have generated both allies and enemies, and this year’s presidential vote perhaps more than any other is testing the strength of the values it promotes around the world.’

    A safe pair of hands like Sir Keir would never recognise, far less, criticise such assertions for the dangerous, ideological and ahistorical nonsense that they are. Instead, Starmer is locked into an elite-friendly mindset apparent whenever he proclaims his establishment credentials, as here via Twitter:

    ‘This is also an important moment for the world. It is a chance to reassert America’s place as a force for good on the world stage. A nation that will work with Britain and other allies to defeat this pandemic and fight climate change.’

    The reply from Media Lens reader Ryan Moon was apt:

    ‘When, specifically, has the US (& UK) been a “force for good in the world”? Supporting Suharto & Pinochet maybe? In Yemen & Libya? In the Chagos Islands? Nicaragua might have a few choice words about that description, too. Grow a spine.’

    Biologist and science writer Richard Dawkins, like so many other prominent members of the liberal commentariat, once again revealed his deep ignorance of history and world affairs:

    ‘With few exceptions like Putin & Farage, the entire world welcomes President Biden and Vice-President Harris. After four years of lies, venal hypocrisy and vicious hostility to decency and humane values, America has taken a major step towards making America great again.’

    Historian Mark Curtis, co-founder of Declassified UK, responded:

    ‘The thing is, @RichardDawkins, while you’re right to welcome the demise of the contemptible Trump, as I do, the “lies, venal hypocrisy and vicious hostility to decency and humane values” are just routine features of every US presidency, especially in foreign policy.’

    Meanwhile, it was no surprise to see a senior Guardian journalist unleashing purple prose in praise of Biden. David Smith, the Guardian’s Washington DC bureau chief, declared that ‘with empathy and humility, Biden sets out to make America sane again’. The ideological rhetoric continued to gush out across Guardian column inches:

    ‘After the mental and moral exhaustion of the past four years, Biden made America sane again in 15 minutes. It was an exorcism of sorts, from American carnage to American renewal.’

    Readers with long memories will recall similar Guardian effusions of liberal ordure when Barack Obama was elected in 2008 to ‘rebrand America’ and serve as the eloquent ‘cool’ figurehead of US corporate and imperial might. That is the Guardian worldview in a nutshell.

    The harsh truth is that the corporate media, including BBC News and the Guardian, has a stranglehold on any prospect for changing society. The transfer of US power from Trump to Biden provided the briefest permissible glimpse of mild scepticism being broadcast from corporate newsrooms. This was most notable with Trump vociferously contesting the US presidential elections results, claiming election fraud on a grand scale. The repeated buzz phrase from journalists reporting Trump’s claims was ‘without offering evidence’. Thus, BBC news presenter Mishal Husain told the nation’s television audience on 8 November last year:

    ‘President Trump has been out on the golf course and made further claims of election fraud without offering evidence.’

    The point was emphasised in a news piece by BBC North America correspondent Nick Bryant:

    ‘the president took to the golf course this morning continuing to make unsubstantiated claims that the election was rigged.’

    This narrative was repeated across the ‘mainstream’ media.

    But those important caveats – ‘without further evidence’ and ‘unsubstantiated claims’ – are routinely missing when propaganda declarations are, or were, made by the US/UK about Iraq’s mythical ‘WMD’; or when the public is told that the West’s ‘security’ and military forces need to counter the ‘threat’ from Russia, China, Iran, North Korea or whoever the latest ‘enemy’ happens to be;  or that ‘we’ need to keep Saudi Arabia as an ‘ally’; that Israel only ever ‘retaliates’ in the face of Palestinian ‘provocation’, that the US is a neutral ‘peace broker’ in the Middle East; or that the US/UK defend freedom and human rights around the world. On and on flow the propaganda assertions, without serious challenge from a compliant media. Suddenly, when it really matters, the media’s supposed enthusiasm for ‘fact checking’ dries up.

    Julian Assange And Guardian Hypocrisy

    We have seen the ugly truth in the brutal, inhumane treatment of Julian Assange, arguably the most important Western dissident, journalist and publisher in recent years, by western ‘democracies’, the major news media, and a cruel system of court ‘justice’ operating in London. During a recent online conversation, acclaimed film director Ken Loach nailed the despicable role of the Guardian, in particular, in persecuting and undermining Assange:

    ‘It’s one of those cases that clarifies the role of the media […] there’s a collusion of silence. There doesn’t need to be an active conspiracy; they all understand the steps of the dance. “We’re going to keep quiet about this”. The Guardian did publish some [WikiLeaks] material, but then turned on Julian. And typical with the liberal press, there’s a degree of hypocrisy. They want to have a foot in both camps. They want to be both seen as part of the responsible establishment; they also want to speak truth to power. But they’re compromised on both fronts. And their attacks on Julian Assange were critical in undermining his presence as a journalist, and being seen as a journalist. And the scurrilous attacks on him, for year after year; [and their] failure to really campaign against the torture for ten years.’

    He added:

    ‘There could not be a clearer case of shoot the messenger, and let the scoundrel go free. I mean, here you have people – Bush, Blair, propagandists like Alastair Campbell – wheeled out on the BBC, like Newsnight. They have season tickets to the current affairs programmes that tell us what to think. They are responsible for – what – up to a million deaths, four, five, million people made homeless, destruction of Iraq; the most atrocious war crimes, in an illegal war – an illegal war, so every activity is illegal on account of that, war crimes – they should be indicted. The man who told us about those crimes is condemned to rot, at the very least, and is in danger of never seeing the light of day again, or of being executed, and we know some politicians in the States have called for precisely that. There could not be a more outrageous, a more egregious example of the messenger being crucified and the scoundrels, the villains, the criminals getting away with this.’

    As musician Brian Eno said during the discussion:

    ‘Julian is a threat [to power] because he exposes an illusion that we are generally being told to support. And that illusion is that we live in a democracy. So, the fundamental concept of democracy is that people make decisions about their future, and about the state they live in. And the fundamental assumption of democracy is that people have the information on which to make those decisions. So, clearly, for democracy to work we have to have good information, otherwise we’ll make bad decisions.’

    ‘The Gravity Of The Situation Requires Fundamental Changes To Global Capitalism’

    The most compelling evidence that there is no functioning democracy in capitalist societies is all around us: global environmental collapse and climate breakdown.

    A new scientific report this month warns that the planet is facing a ‘ghastly future of mass extinction, declining health and climate-disruption upheavals’ that threaten human survival. The study, published in ‘Frontiers in Conservation Science’ by a group of 17 experts, observes that:

    ‘The scale of the threats to the biosphere and all its lifeforms – including humanity – is in fact so great that it is difficult to grasp for even well-informed experts.’

    Somewhat couched in academic language, the urgency and starkness of the warning are nevertheless clear:

    ‘The gravity of the situation requires fundamental changes to global capitalism, education, and equality, which include inter alia the abolition of perpetual economic growth, properly pricing externalities, a rapid exit from fossil-fuel use, strict regulation of markets and property acquisition, reigning in corporate lobbying, and the empowerment of women.’

    They added:

    ‘the mainstream [sic] is having difficulty grasping the magnitude of this loss, despite the steady erosion of the fabric of human civilization.’

    Meanwhile, the climate crisis has been worsening, with 2020 declared by scientists as the joint hottest year ever recorded, despite the pandemic lockdowns. There were record Arctic wildfires and Atlantic tropical storms.

    The European Commission’s Matthias Petschke said:

    ‘The extraordinary climate events of 2020 […] show us that we have no time to lose. We must come together as a global community, to ensure a just transition to a net zero future. It will be difficult, but the cost of inaction is too great…’

    In the wake of the US presidential election last November, the BBC’s John Simpson had tweeted:

    ‘According to the New York Times, exit polls showed that 84% of people who voted for Trump thought that global warming wasn’t an important issue.’

    But, of course, if political leaders everywhere believed that climate breakdown is an important issue – the overriding issue facing humanity – they would be tackling it with the urgency that it requires now.

    As climate campaigner Greta Thunberg pointed out last week:

    ‘In 2010 our leaders signed “ambitious goals to protect wildlife and ecosystems”. By 2021 they’d failed on every single one. Each day they choose not to act. Instead they sign more “ambitious” non-binding future goals while passing policy locking in destructive business as usual.’

    This was her acerbic summary of political discussions at the One Planet Summit in Paris on 11 January:

    LIVE from #OnePlanetSummit in Paris:

    Bla bla nature

    Bla bla important

    Bla bla ambitious

    Bla bla green investments

    Bla bla great opportunity

    Bla bla green growth

    Bla bla net zero

    Bla bla step up our game

    Bla bla hope

    Bla bla bla…*

    *locking in decades of further destruction

    We have arrived at this terminal stage of capitalism because we are being held in a death-grip by a system of economics and exploitation that is coated with a veneer of ‘democracy’, ‘freedom’, ‘progress’ and other convenient ideological myths. The corporate media has sold the public those myths, perpetuating and deepening the various interlocking crises that threaten to wipe out homo sapiens, along with countless other species.

    We can still escape the worst if we face up to reality. As Gail Bradbrook and Jem Bendell, co-founder of Extinction Rebellion and founder of Deep Adaptation respectively, explain:

    ‘Our power comes from acting without escape from our pain.’

    They continue:

    ‘Paying attention fully to what is around us and in front of us, even though it hurts, is to be fully alive. […] Once we accept that anxiety and grief will be constant companions in this struggle, we can stay fully present to what is happening and respond accordingly. It means we do not grasp desperately at the latest idea of what might fix the climate and ecological emergency. Instead, we can help each other stay fully present to the difficult mess, so that we can try to reduce harm, save what we can and plant some seeds for what might come next.’

    A good start would be to reject the corporate media.

    This article was posted on Friday, January 22nd, 2021 at 9:28pm and is filed under Apartheid, Boris Johnson, Climate Change, COVID-19, Democrats, Disinformation, Donald Trump, Extinction, Israel, Joe Biden, Julian Assange, Militarism, Propaganda, UK Labour Party, UK Media, UK Politics, WikiLeaks.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • A Country in Turmoil: Why Netanyahu is a Symptom, Not Cause of Israel’s Political Crisis

    It is convenient to surmise that Israel’s current political crisis is consistent with the country’s unfailing trajectory of short-lived governments and fractious ruling coalitions. While this view is somewhat defensible, it is also hasty.

    Israel is currently at the cusp of a fourth general election in less than two years. Even by Israel’s political standards, this phenomenon is unprecedented, not only in terms of the frequency of how often Israelis vote, but also of the constant shifting in possible coalitions and seemingly strange alliances.

    It seems that the only constant in the process of forming coalitions following each election is that Arab parties must not, under any circumstances, be allowed into a future government. Decision-making in Israel has historically been reserved for the country’s Jewish elites. This is unlikely to change anytime soon.

    Even when the Arab parties’ coalition, the Joint List, imposed itself as a possible kingmaker following the September 2019 elections, the centrist Kahol Lavan (Blue and White) list refused to join forces with Arab politicians to oust Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. Kahol Lavan’s leader, Benny Gantz, preferred to go back to the polls on March 2 and eventually join forces with his arch-enemy, Netanyahu, than make a single concession to the Joint List.

    Gantz’s decision did not only expose how racism occupies a central role in Israeli politics, but also illustrated Gantz’s own foolishness. In rejecting the Joint List, he committed an act akin to political suicide. On the very day, March 26, that he joined a Netanyahu-led coalition, his own Blue and White alliance collapsed, with Yair Lapid of Yesh Atid and Moshe Ya’alon of Telem breaking away immediately from the once-dominant coalition.

    Worse, Gantz lost not just the respect of his own political constituency, but of the Israeli public as well. According to an opinion poll released by Israel’s Channel 12 News on December 15, if elections were to be held on that day, Gantz’s Blue and White would receive only 6 seats out of 120 seats available in the Israeli Knesset. Gantz’s former coalition partner, Yesh Atid, according to the same poll, would obtain an impressive 14 seats.

    While Netanyahu’s Likud Party will remain on top with 27 seats, Gideon Sa’ar’s “New Hope – Unity for Israel,” would come a close second with 21 seats. Sa’ar’s is a brand new party, which represents the first major split from the Likud since the late Israeli Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, formed the offshoot Kadima party in 2005.

    Netanyahu and Sa’ar have a long history of bad blood between them, and although anything is possible in the formation of Israel’s political alliances, a future right-wing coalition that brings them both together is a dim possibility. If Sa’ar has learned anything from Gantz’s act of political self-mutilation, it is that any coalition with Netanyahu is a grave and costly mistake.

    Ideological differences between Netanyahu and Sa’ar are quite minimal. In fact, both are fighting to obtain the vote of essentially the same constituency – although Sa’ar is hoping to extend his appeal to the disgruntled and betrayed Blue and White voters, who are eager to see someone – anyone – oust Netanyahu.

    Never in the history of Israel, spanning seven decades, had a single individual served as the focal point of the country’s many political currents. While beloved by some, Netanyahu is much loathed by many, to the extent that entire parties or whole coalitions are formed simply to remove him from politics. That in mind, the majority of Israelis agree that the man is corrupt, as he has been indicted in three separate criminal cases.

    However, if this is the case, how is a politically controversial and corrupt leader able to remain at the helm of Israeli politics for over 14 years? The typical answer often alludes to the man’s unmatched skills of manipulation and backdoor shady dealings. In the words of Yossi Verter, writing in the daily Haaretz, Netanyahu is “a first-class master swindler”.

    This analysis alone, however, is not enough to explain Netanyahu’s durability as the longest-serving Israeli Prime Minister. There is an alternative reading, however, one that is predicated on the fact that Israel has been, for quite some time, navigating uncharted political territories without a specific destination in mind.

    Prior to the inception of Israel on the ruins of historic Palestine in 1948, Israel’s Jewish political elites clashed quite often over the best way to colonize Palestine, how to deal with the British Mandate over the country, among other weighty subjects. These differences, however, largely faded away in 1948, when the newly-founded country unified under the banner of Mapai – the predecessor to Israel’s current Labor party – which dominated Israeli politics for decades.

    Mapai’s dominance received a major boost after the Israeli occupation of the remainder of Palestine in 1967. The building and expansion of more Jewish colonies in the newly-acquired territories breathed life into the mission of Israel’s founding fathers. It was as if Zionism, the founding ideology of Israel, was rediscovered once more.

    It was not until 1977 that the erstwhile negligible Israeli right formed a government for the first time in the country’s history. That date also ushered in a new age of political instability, which worsened with time. Still, Israeli politicians remained largely committed to three main causes in this specific order: the Zionist ideology, the party and the politicians’ own interests.

    The assassination of the Labor Party leader, Yitzhak Rabin, at the hands of a right-wing Israeli zealot in 1995, was a bloody manifestation of the new era of unprecedented fragmentation that followed. A decade later, when Sharon declared the ‘Disengagement from Gaza’ plan of 2005, he further upset a barely functioning political balance, leading to the formation of Kadima, which threatened to erase the Likud from the political map.

    Throughout these turbulent times, Netanyahu was always present, playing the same divisive role, as usual. He led the incitement against Rabin and, later, challenged Sharon over the leadership of the Likud. On the other hand, he was also responsible for resurrecting the Likud and he kept it alive notwithstanding its many ideological, political and leadership crises. The latter fact explains Likud’s loyalty to Netanyahu, despite his corruption, nepotism and dirty politics. They feel that, without Netanyahu’s leadership, the Likud could easily follow the same path of irrelevance or total demise as was the case with the Labor and Kadima parties, respectively.

    With none of Israel’s founding fathers alive or relevant in the political arena, it is hard to imagine what course Israel’s future politics will follow. Certainly, the love affair with the settlement enterprise, ‘security’ and war is likely to carry on unhindered, as they are the bread and butter of Israeli politics. Yet, without a clear ideology, especially when combined with the lack of a written Constitution, Israeli politics will remain hostage to the whims of politicians and their personal interests, if not that of Netanyahu, then of someone else.

    This article was posted on Wednesday, December 23rd, 2020 at 10:38pm and is filed under Annexation, Benjamin Netanyahu, Benny Gantz, Corruption, Disinformation, Elections, Gaza, Israel, Israel/Palestine, Language, Lies, Occupation, Politics, Power, The “Right”, The Joint List, Zionism.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Year Zero

    2020 was GloboCap Year Zero. The year when the global capitalist ruling classes did away with the illusion of democracy and reminded everyone who is actually in charge, and exactly what happens when anyone challenges them.

    In the relatively short span of the last ten months, societies throughout the world have been transformed beyond recognition. Constitutional rights have been suspended. Protest has been banned. Dissent is being censored. Government officials are issuing edicts restricting the most basic aspects of our lives … where we can go, when we can go there, how long we are allowed to spend there, how many friends we are allowed to meet there, whether and when we can spend time with our families, what we are allowed to say to each other, who we can have sex with, where we have to stand, how we are allowed to eat and drink, etc. The list goes on and on.

    The authorities have assumed control of the most intimate aspects of our daily lives. We are being managed like inmates in a prison, told when to eat, sleep, exercise, granted privileges for good behavior, punished for the slightest infractions of an ever-changing set of arbitrary rules, forced to wear identical, demeaning uniforms (albeit only on our faces), and otherwise relentlessly bullied, abused, and humiliated to keep us compliant.

    None of which is accidental, or has anything to do with any actual virus, or any other type of public health threat. Yes, before some of you go ballistic, I do believe there is an actual virus, which a number of people have actually died from, or which at least has contributed to their deaths … but there is absolutely no evidence whatsoever of any authentic public health threat that remotely justifies the totalitarian emergency measures we are being subjected to or the damage that is being done to society. Whatever you believe about the so-called “pandemic,” it really is as simple as that. Even if one accepts the official “science,” you do not transform the entire planet into a pathologized-totalitarian nightmare in response to a health threat of this nature.

    The notion is quite literally insane.

    GloboCap is not insane, however. They know exactly what they are doing … which is teaching us a lesson, a lesson about power. A lesson about who has it and who doesn’t. For students of history it’s a familiar lesson, a standard in the repertoire of empires, not to mention the repertoire of penal institutions.

    The name of the lesson is “Look What We Can Do to You Any Time We Fucking Want.” The point of the lesson is self-explanatory. The USA taught the world this lesson when it nuked Hiroshima and Nagasaki. GloboCap (and the US military) taught it again when they invaded Iraq and destabilized the entire Greater Middle East. It is regularly taught in penitentiaries when the prisoners start to get a little too unruly and remember that they outnumber the guards. That’s where the “lockdown” concept originated. It isn’t medical terminology. It is penal institution terminology.

    As we have been experiencing throughout 2020, the global capitalist ruling classes have no qualms about teaching us this lesson. It’s just that they would rather not have to unless it’s absolutely necessary. They would prefer that we believe we are living in “democracies,” governed by the “rule of law,” where everyone is “free,” and so on. It’s much more efficient and much less dangerous than having to repeatedly remind us that they can take away our “democratic rights” in a heartbeat, unleash armed goon squads to enforce their edicts, and otherwise control us with sheer brute force.

    People who have spent time in prison, or who have lived in openly totalitarian societies, are familiar with being ruled by brute force. Most Westerners are not, so it has come as a shock. The majority of them still can’t process it. They cannot see what is staring them in the face. They cannot see it because they can’t afford to see it. If they did, it would completely short-circuit their brains. They would suffer massive psychotic breakdowns, and become entirely unable to function, so their psyches will not allow them to see it.

    Others, who see it, can’t quite accept the simplicity of it (i.e., the lesson being taught), so they are proposing assorted complicated theories about what it is and who is behind it … the Great Reset, China, the Illuminati, Transhumanism, Satanism, Communism, whatever. Some of these theories are at least partially accurate. Others are utter bull-goose lunacy.

    They all obscure the basic point of the lesson.

    The point of the lesson is that GloboCap — the entire global-capitalist system acting as a single global entity — can, virtually any time it wants, suspend the Simulation of Democracy, and crack down on us with despotic force. It can (a) declare a “global pandemic” or some other type of “global emergency,” (b) cancel our so-called “rights,” (c) have the corporate media bombard us with lies and propaganda for months, (d) have the Internet companies censor any and all forms of dissent and evidence challenging said propaganda, (e) implement all kinds of new intrusive “safety” and “security” measures, including but not limited to the physical violation of our bodies … and so on. I think you get the picture. (The violation of our bodies is important, which is why they love “cavity searches” in prison, and why the torture-happy troops at Abu Ghraib were obsessed with sexually violating their victims.)

    And the “pandemic” is only one part of the lesson. The other part is being forced to watch (or permitted to watch, depending on your perspective) as GloboCap makes an example of Trump, as they made examples of Corbyn and Sanders, as they made examples of Saddam and Gaddafi, and other “uncooperative” foreign leaders, as they will make an example of any political figurehead that challenges their power. It does not matter to GloboCap that such political figureheads pose no real threat. The people who rally around them do. Nor does it make the slightest difference whether these figureheads or the folks who support them identify as “left” or “right.” GloboCap could not possibly care less. The figureheads are just the teaching materials in the lesson that they are teaching us.

    And now, here we are, at the end of the lesson … not the end of the War on Populism, just the end of this critical Trumpian part of it. Once the usurper has been driven out of office, the War on Populism will be folded back into the War on Terror, or the War on Extremism, or whatever GloboCap decides to call it … the name hardly matters. It is all the same war.

    Whatever they decide to call it, this is GloboCap Year Zero. It is time for reeducation, my friends. It is time for cultural revolution. No, not communist cultural revolution … global capitalist cultural revolution. It is time to flush the aberration of the last four years down the memory hole, and implement global “New Normal” Gleichschaltung, to make sure that this never happens again.

    Oh, yes, things are about to get “normal.” Extremely “normal.” Suffocatingly “normal.” Unimaginably oppressively “normal.” And I’m not just talking about the “Coronavirus measures.” This has been in the works for the last four years.

    Remember, back in 2016, when everyone was so concerned about “normality,” and how Trump was “not normal,” and must never be “normalized?” Well, here we are. This is it. This is the part where GloboCap restores “normality,” a “new normality,” a pathologized-totalitarian “normality,” a “normality” which tolerates no dissent and demands complete ideological conformity.

    From now on, when the GloboCap Intelligence Community and their mouthpieces in the corporate media tell you something happened, that thing will have happened, exactly as they say it happened, regardless of whether it actually happened, and anyone who says it didn’t will be labeled an “extremist,” a “conspiracy theorist,” a “denier,” or some other meaningless epithet. Such un-persons will be dealt with ruthlessly. They will be censored, deplatformed, demonetized, decertified, rendered unemployable, banned from traveling, socially ostracized, hospitalized, imprisoned, or otherwise erased from “normal” society.

    You will do what you are told. You will not ask questions. You will believe whatever they tell you to believe. You will believe it, not because it makes any sense, but simply because you have been ordered to believe it. They aren’t trying to trick or deceive anybody. They know their lies don’t make any sense. And they know that you know they don’t make any sense. They want you to know it. That is the point. They want you to know they are lying to you, manipulating you, openly mocking you, and that they can say and do anything they want to you, and you will go along with it, no matter how insane.

    If they order you to take a fucking vaccine, you will not ask what is in the vaccine, or start whining about the “potential side effects.” You will shut up and take the fucking vaccine. If they tell you to put a mask on your kid, you will put a fucking mask on your fucking kid. You will not go digging up Danish studies proving the pointlessness of putting masks on kids. If they tell you the Russians rigged the election, then the Russians rigged the fucking election. And, if, four years later, they turn around and tell you that rigging an election is impossible, then rigging an election is fucking impossible. It isn’t an invitation to debate. It is a GloboCap-verified fact-checked fact. You will stand (or kneel) in your designated, color-coded, social-distancing box and repeat this verified fact-checked fact, over and over, like a fucking parrot, or they will discover some new mutant variant of virus and put you back in fucking “lockdown.” They will do this until you get your mind right, or you can live the rest of your life on Zoom, or tweeting content that no one but the Internet censors will ever see into the digital void in your fucking pajamas. The choice is yours … it’s is all up to you!

    Or … I don’t know, this is just a crazy idea, you could turn off the fucking corporate media, do a little fucking research on your own, grow a backbone and some fucking guts, and join the rest of us “dangerous extremists” who are trying to fight back against the New Normal. Yes, it will cost you, and we probably won’t win, but you won’t have to torture your kids on airplanes, and you don’t even have to “deny” the virus!

    That’s it … my last column of 2020. Happy totalitarian holidays!

    The post Year Zero first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.