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Category: Lies

  • The U.S. Is Leading the World Into the Abyss

    A few years after WW I, the poet T.S. Eliot opened his famous poem “The Wasteland” with these words: “April is the cruelest month … “  I think he may be wrong, for this October may be the cruelest month of all, followed by November.  Unprecedented.  You can hear the clicking and grating of spades if your antennae are attuned.

    We are on the brink of ominous events created by the U.S. war against Russia.  Yet so many people prefer to turn away and swallow the lies that the U.S. wants peace and not war and is the aggrieved party in the crisis.

    A friend of mine, who is constantly charging me with having turned right-wing because of my writing that accuses many traditional liberal/leftists of buying the national security state’s propaganda on the JFK assassination, “9/11,” Syria, Ukraine, Covid-19, censorship, the “New” Cold War, etc., and whose go-to news sources are The Guardian, CNN, The New York Times, NPR, ABC, seems oblivious to the fact that right and left have become useless terms and that these media are all mouthpieces for the CIA and their intelligence allies in the new Cold War; that the so-called right and left are joined at the hip with their obsession with Pax Americana.

    There are no right and left anymore; there are only free and independent voices or those of the caged parrots repeating what they have been taught to say:

    “Polly wants a war!”  “Polly wants a war.”

    I am afraid that I will never convince this dear friend otherwise and I find that depressing.  Yet I know such views are shared by millions of others and that even if nuclear war breaks out their minds will not change.  Propaganda runs very, very deep into their psyches, and they desperately want to believe.  Hitler said it clearly in Mein Kampf:

    The masses … are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods.

    Hitler learned so much about “manufacturing consent” from his American teachers Edward Bernays, Walter Lippmann, et al., who accomplished so much brainwashing of the American people.  They were all masters of the lie and millions continue to believe their followers.

    If nuclear weapons are again used (and everyone knows the only country to have used them), these believers will blame their use on Russia, even though Russia has made it very clear that it would only resort to such weapons if the country’s existence were threatened, while the U.S. continues affirming its right to preemptively use nuclear weapons when it so chooses.

    And even if nuclear weapons are not used, the recent sabotage of the Nord Stream pipelines and the bombing of the Crimean Bridge, both clearly the work of U.S./NATO/Ukrainian forces, have raised the ante considerably.  The door to hell has just been opened wider, and I suspect not by accident, as the U.S. elections approach.

    In his recent television talk, Vladimir Putin made Russia’s nuclear position very clear, mentioning nuclear weapons only in the context of Western threats of using them, as Moon of Alabama reported.  Putin said:

    They [the U.S./NATO/Ukraine] have even resorted to the nuclear blackmail. I am referring not only to the Western-encouraged shelling of the Zaporozhye Nuclear Power Plant, which poses a threat of a nuclear disaster, but also to the statements made by some high-ranking representatives of the leading NATO countries on the possibility and admissibility of using weapons of mass destruction – nuclear weapons – against Russia.

    I would like to remind those who make such statements regarding Russia that our country has different types of weapons as well, and some of them are more modern than the weapons NATO countries have. In the event of a threat to the territorial integrity of our country and to defend Russia and our people, we will certainly make use of all weapon systems available to us. This is not a bluff.

    The citizens of Russia can rest assured that the territorial integrity of our Motherland, our independence and freedom will be defended – I repeat – by all the systems available to us. Those who are using nuclear blackmail against us should know that the wind rose can turn around.

    When the long-planned U.S. war against Russia, so obvious to anyone who sees past the propagandist headlines and studies the matter, soon explodes into full-scale open war for all to see in horror, as it will, these true believers will dig in their heels even more.  They will find new reasons to justify their faith, and it is akin to religious faith.  The infamous Rand Corporation’s 2019 report cited above, “Overextending and Unbalancing Russia,” cites the following as part of the war process, as summarized in the Strategic Culture article, but it will have no impact on the faithful believers:

    • Providing lethal military aid to Ukraine
    • Mobilizing European NATO members
    • Imposing deeper trade and economic sanctions
    • Increasing U.S. energy production for export to Europe
    • Expanding Europe’s import infrastructure to receive U.S. liquefied natural gas (LNG) supplies

    I keep thinking of the U.S. false flag Gulf of Tonkin “incident” in 1964 and how effective that was in convincing the gullible population and the complicit U.S. Congress – by a vote of 88 to 2 in the Senate and 414 to 0 in the House of Representatives (try to imagine such criminals) – that U.S. destroyers were innocently attacked by the North Vietnamese and that Lyndon Johnson should be given the authority to respond to repel “communist aggression,” which, of course, he did by bombing North Vietnam and sending 500,000 troops to savagely destroy Vietnam and Vietnamese nearly 9,000 miles from the United States.  Johnson simply lied to wage war and Biden is doing the same today.  But far too many people love their leaders’ lies because it allows them to secretly feel justified in the lies they themselves tell in personal matters.  And what may be true of the distant past, can’t be true today.

    In 1965, the folk singer Tom Paxton put Johnson’s lies to music with “Lyndon Johnson Told the Nation“.  In those days, art was used as a weapon against U.S. propaganda.

    Today we can ask: Where have all the artists gone?

    We know that the U.S. has, for the time being, abandoned sending hundreds of thousands of troops into another country; now it is drones, air warfare, special forces, the CIA, mercenaries, terrorists, and intermediaries such as the Ukrainian conscripts, Azov Nazis, and NATO surrogates.  Such was the lesson of Vietnam when the draft led to massive protests and resistance.  Now war is waged less obviously and the propaganda is more extensive and constant as a result of digital media.

    There are many such examples of U.S. treachery, most notably the attacks of September 11, 2001, but such history is only open to those who take it upon themselves to investigate.

    Now there is the corrupt Ukrainian U.S. puppet government, which is nearly 6,000 miles from the United States, and must be defended from Russian “aggression,” just like the corrupt South Vietnamese U.S. puppet government was.

    To those who buy the mass media propaganda, I ask: Why is the U.S.A. always fighting to kill people so far from its shores?  Doesn’t it sound a bit odd that our wonderful leaders destroyed Libya, Vietnam, Serbia, the Philippines, Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, etc., countries so far away, and now that Russia defends itself from U.S./NATO encroachment a few miles from its borders, it is accused of being the evil aggressors and Vladimir Putin called another Hitler like all the leaders of the countries we attacked?  Have you completely lost your ability to think?  Or do you, like little children, actually believe the disembodied newsreaders who deliver your prepackaged television propaganda?

    If I ask such an obvious question, does that make me a “right-winger”?

    If I state two facts: that Donald Trump – whom I consider despicable and part of the divide and conquer game as Biden’s flip side, and have said so – did not start a war against Russia and that Russia-gate was a Democratic propaganda stunt and is false, does that make me a right-winger?  My friend would say so. Do telling facts define your political allegiances, whether they be facts about Republicans or Democrats?

    No.  I will tell you what it makes me: A disgusted human being sickened by all the lies and people’s gullibility after decades of evidence that should have awakened them to the truth about all these politicians and the war against Russia underway.  I have lost patience with it.  For decades I have been writing about such propaganda to no avail.  Yes, those who tended to agree with me might have moved a little closer to my arguments, but the vast majority have not budged an iota.

    I wish it were different. It is my desire. Eduardo Galeano, the Uruguayan sage of the Americas, who knew what was up and what was down when he wrote Upside Down: A Primer for the Looking-Glass World in 1998, said this about Desire:

    A man found Aladdin’s lamp lying around. Since he was a big reader, the man recognized it and rubbed it right away. The genie appeared, bowed deeply, and said, ‘At your service master. Your wish is my command. But there will be only one wish.

    Since he was a good boy, the man said, ‘I wish for my dead mother to be brought back.’

    The genie made a face. ‘I’m sorry, master, but that wish is impossible. Make another.’

    Since he was a nice guy, the man said, ‘I wish the world would stop spending money to kill people.’

    The genie swallowed. ‘Uhh … What did you say your mother’s name was?’

    The desire for peace and security is a universal dream.  Sometimes it is hidden in people’s hearts because they have swallowed the lies of the evil ones who wish to wage war against those who insist on security for their country, as Russians are demanding today.

    It is very frustrating to try to wake people out of their manufactured consent and the insouciance that follows as we are being led into the abyss.

    But I will not stop trying.  Galeano did not.  He left us these words of universal resistance:

    We shall be compatriots and contemporaries of all who have a yearning for justice and beauty, no matter where they were born or when they lived, because the borders of geography and time shall cease to exist.

    We must save the world before it is too late.

    The post The U.S. Is Leading the World Into the Abyss first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Fake Reporting on Blown-up Pipelines and Russia’s “Annexation” of Donbass: Open Letter to the NYT

    Dear Editor of the once-upon-a-time Famous-for-truth New York Times,

    With headlines like this:

    Sabotaged Pipelines and a Mystery.  Who did it?  (Was it Russia?)

    even suggesting that Russia may have blown up its own pipeline, the NYT is killing its last vestige of credibility.

    You know exactly this is a lie.

    The only force that has a vital interest in doing so is the US/NATO conglomerate — to make sure there is no way Germany could change its mind and go back on its decision to let its people freeze to death this winter, and to economically destroy Germany, THE economic force and leader of Europe.

    You, and your analysts know that.

    Unfortunately, there is no common people’s influence on our reporting. There are stronger forces that have bought into your mind-bending journalism.

    Still, once a supporter of the NYT, I feel I want to tell you.

    The same with this reporting:

    Russian Proxies in Ukraine Push Moscow to Annex Occupied Regions

    and

    Vladimir Putin will sign agreements on Friday to take over four Ukrainian regions, the Kremlin said, after votes widely denounced as a sham

    Here too, these are not “proxy” Russians who signed a “sham petition” to be annexed to Russia. You know it very well.

    These are real Russians, living in the far Eastern part of Ukraine, the Donbass area, mostly who have been discriminated against ever since the US-instigated Maidan coup on 22 February 2014 when a neo-Nazi government was installed that let the Nazi Asov Battalions literally slaughter Ukraine’s own people in Donbass — at least 14,000 were reported killed about half of them children — in the eight years since the “Victoria Nuland” (“Fuck Europe”) coup.

    We are talking about the same Asov Battalions that helped Hitler during WWII fight against the Soviet Union.

    Already in 2014/2015 the Donbass districts wanted to join Russia. President Putin did not allow it because at that time he still believed in the Minsk Agreements, sponsored by France and Germany.

    These agreements were principally meant to protect the Donbass people as well as to demilitarize – de-Nazify – Ukraine, and to keep NATO out of Ukraine. None of the conditions of the Minsk Agreements (September 2014 and April 2015) were ever adhered to.

    If truth-seeking geopolitical analysts around the globe know the real background, you, Editor-in-chief of the NYT, and your journalists, know the real story too. Still, you report lies and half-truths to further influence and promote people’s opinion against Russia.

    The New York Times has become weaponized against Russia and China by your mere reporting.

    Don’t you think that this will eventually backfire?

    The post Fake Reporting on Blown-up Pipelines and Russia’s “Annexation” of Donbass: Open Letter to the NYT first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • British “watchdog” journalists unmasked as lap dogs for the security state

    Events of the past few days suggest British journalism – the so-called Fourth Estate – is not what it purports to be: a watchdog monitoring the centers of state power. It is quite the opposite.

    The pretensions of the establishment media took a severe battering this month as the defamation trial of Guardian columnist Carole Cadwalladr reached its conclusion and the hacked emails of Paul Mason, a long-time stalwart of the BBC, Channel 4 and the Guardian, were published online.

    Both of these celebrated journalists have found themselves outed as recruits – in their differing ways – to a covert information war being waged by Western intelligence agencies.

    Had they been honest about it, that collusion might not matter so much. After all, few journalists are as neutral or as dispassionate as the profession likes to pretend. But along with many of their colleagues, Cadwalladr and Mason have broken what should be a core principle of journalism: transparency.

    The role of serious journalists is to bring matters of import into the public space for debate and scrutiny. Journalists thinking critically aspire to hold those who wield power – primarily state agencies – to account on the principle that, without scrutiny, power quickly corrupts.

    The purpose of real journalism – as opposed to the gossip, entertainment and national-security stenography that usually passes for journalism – is to hit up, not down.

    And yet, both of these journalists, we now know, were actively colluding, or seeking to collude, with state actors who prefer to operate in the shadows, out of sight. Both journalists were coopted to advance the aims of the intelligence services.

    And worse, each of them either sought to become a conduit for, or actively assist in, covert smear campaigns run by Western intelligence services against other journalists.

    What they were doing – along with so many other establishment journalists – is the very antithesis of journalism. They were helping to conceal the operation of power to make it harder to scrutinize. And not only that. In the process, they were trying to weaken already marginalized journalists fighting to hold state power to account.

    Russian collusion?

    Cadwalladr’s cooperation with the intelligence services has been highlighted only because of a court case. She was sued for defamation by Arron Banks, a businessman and major donor to the successful Brexit campaign for Britain to leave the European Union.

    In a kind of transatlantic extension of the Russiagate hysteria in the United States following Donald Trump’s election as president in 2016, Cadwalladr accused Banks of lying about his ties to the Russian state. According to the court, she also suggested he broke election funding laws by receiving Russian money in the run-up to the Brexit vote, also in 2016.

    That year serves as a kind of ground zero for liberals fearful about the future of “Western democracy” – supposedly under threat from modern “barbarians at the gate,” such as Russia and China – and about the ability of Western states to defend their primacy through neo-colonial wars of aggression around the globe.

    The implication is Russia masterminded a double subversion in 2016: on one side of the Atlantic, Trump was elected US president; and, on the other, Britons were gulled into shooting themselves in the foot – and undermining Europe – by voting to leave the EU.

    Faced with the court case, Cadwalladr could not support her allegations against Banks as true. Nonetheless, the judge ruled against Banks’ libel action, on the basis that the claims had not sufficiently harmed his reputation.

    The judge also decided, perversely in a British defamation action, that Cadwalladr had “reasonable grounds” to publish claims that Banks received “sweetheart deals” from Russia, even though “she had seen no evidence he had entered into any such deals.” An investigation by the National Crime Agency ultimately found no evidence either.

    So given those circumstances, what was the basis for her accusations against Banks?

    Cadwalladr’s journalistic modus operandi, in her long-running efforts to suggest widespread Russian meddling in British politics, is highlighted in her witness statement to the court.

    In it, she refers to another of her Russiagate-style stories: one from 2017 that tried to connect the Kremlin with Nigel Farage, a former pro-Brexit politician with the UKIP Party and close associate of Banks, and WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who has been a political prisoner in the UK for more than a decade.

    At that time, Assange was confined to a single room in the Ecuadorian Embassy after its government offered him political asylum. He had sought sanctuary there, fearing he would be extradited to the US following publication by WikiLeaks of revelations that the US and UK had committed war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan.

    WikiLeaks had also deeply embarrassed the CIA by following up with the publication of leaked documents, known as Vault 7, exposing the agency’s own crimes.

    Last week the UK’s Home Secretary, Priti Patel, approved the very extradition to the US that Assange feared and that drove him into the Ecuadorian embassy. Once in the US, he faces up to 175 years in complete isolation in a supermax jail.

    Assassination plot

    We now know, courtesy of a Yahoo News investigation, that through 2017 the CIA hatched various schemes either to assassinate Assange or to kidnap him in one of its illegal “extraordinary rendition” operations, so he could be permanently locked up in the US, out of public view.

    We can surmise that the CIA also believed it needed to prepare the ground for such a rogue operation by bringing the public on board. According to Yahoo’s investigation, the CIA believed Assange’s seizure might require a gun battle on the streets of London.

    It was at this point, it seems, that Cadwalladr and the Guardian were encouraged to add their own weight to the cause of further turning public opinion against Assange.

    According to her witness statement, “a confidential source in [the] US” suggested – at the very time the CIA was mulling over these various plots – that she write about a supposed visit by Farage to Assange in the embassy. The story ran in the Guardian under the headline “When Nigel Farage met Julian Assange.”

    In the article, Cadwalladr offers a strong hint as to who had been treating her as a confidant: the one source mentioned in the piece is “a highly placed contact with links to US intelligence”. In other words, the CIA almost certainly fed her the agency’s angle on the story.

    In the piece, Cadwalladr threads together her and the CIA’s claims of “a political alignment between WikiLeaks’ ideology, UKIP’s ideology and Trump’s ideology”. Behind the scenes, she suggests, was the hidden hand of the Kremlin, guiding them all in a malign plot to fatally undermine British democracy.

    She quotes her “highly placed contact” claiming that Farage and Assange’s alleged face-to-face meeting was necessary to pass information of their nefarious plot “in ways and places that cannot be monitored”.

    Except of course, as her “highly placed contact” knew – and as we now know, thanks to exposes by the Grayzone website – that was a lie. In tandem with its plot to kill or kidnap Assange, the CIA illegally installed cameras inside, as well as outside, the embassy. His every move in the embassy was monitored – even in the toilet block.

    The reality was that the CIA was bugging and videoing Assange’s every conversation in the embassy, even the face-to-face ones. If the CIA actually had a recording of Assange and Farage meeting and discussing a Kremlin-inspired plot, it would have found a way to make it public by now.

    Far more plausible is what Farage and WikiLeaks say: that such a meeting never happened. Farage visited the embassy to try to interview Assange for his LBC radio show but was denied access. That can be easily confirmed because by then the Ecuadorian embassy was allying with the US and refusing Assange any contact with visitors apart from his lawyers.

    Nonetheless, Cadwalladr concludes: “In the perfect storm of fake news, disinformation and social media in which we now live, WikiLeaks is, in many ways, the swirling vortex at the centre of everything.”

    ‘Swirling vortex’

    The Farage-Assange meeting story shows how the CIA and Cadwalladr’s agendas perfectly coincided in their very own “swirling vortex” of fake news and disinformation.

    She wanted to tie the Brexit campaign to Russia and suggest that anyone who wished to challenge the liberal pieties that provide cover for the crimes committed by Western states must necessarily belong to a network of conspirators, on the left and the right, masterminded from Moscow.

    The CIA and other Western intelligence agencies, meanwhile, wanted to deepen the public’s impression that Assange was a Kremlin agent – and that WikiLeaks’ exposure of the crimes committed by those same agencies was not in the public interest but actually an assault on Western democracy.

    Assange’s character assassination had already been largely achieved with the American public in the Russiagate campaign in the US. The intelligence services, along with the Democratic Party leadership, had crafted a narrative designed to obscure WikiLeaks’ revelations of election-fixing by Hillary Clinton’s camp in 2016 to prevent Bernie Sanders from winning the party’s presidential nomination. Instead they refocused the public’s attention on evidence-free claims that Russia had “hacked” the emails.

    For Cadwalladr and the CIA, the fake-news story of Farage meeting Assange could be spun as further proof that both the “far left” and “far right” were colluding with Russia. Their message was clear: only centrists – and the national security state – could be trusted to defend democracy.

    Fabricated story

    Cadwalladr’s smearing of Assange is entirely of a piece with the vilification campaign of WikiLeaks led by liberal media outlets to which she belongs. Her paper, the Guardian, has had Assange in its sights since its falling out with him over their joint publication of the Iraq and Afghanistan war logs in 2010.

    A year after Cadwalladr’s smear piece, the Guardian would continue its cooperation with the intelligence services’ demonization of Assange by running an equally fabricated story – this time about a senior aide of Trump’s, Paul Manafort, and various unidentified “Russians” secretly meeting Assange in the embassy.

    The story was so improbable it was ridiculed even at the time of publication. Again, the CIA’s illegal spying operation inside and outside the embassy meant there was no way Manafort or any “Russians” could have secretly visited Assange without those meetings being recorded. Nonetheless, the Guardian has never retracted the smear.

    One of the authors of the article, Luke Harding, has been at the forefront of both the Guardian’s Russiagate claims and its efforts to defame Assange. In doing so, he appears to have relied heavily on Western intelligence services for his stories and has proven incapable of defending them when challenged.

    Harding, like the Guardian, has an added investment in discrediting Assange. He and a Guardian colleague, David Leigh, published a Guardian-imprint book that included a secret password to a WikiLeaks’ cache of leaked documents, thereby providing security services around the world with access to the material.

    The CIA’s claim that the release of those documents endangered its informants – a claim that even US officials have been forced to concede is not true – has been laid at Assange’s door to vilify him and justify his imprisonment. But if anyone is to blame, it is not Assange but Harding, Leigh and the Guardian.

    Effort to deplatform

    The case of Paul Mason, who worked for many years as a senior BBC journalist, is even more revealing. Emails passed to the Grayzone website show the veteran, self-described “left-wing” journalist secretly conspiring with figures aligned with British intelligence services to build a network of journalists and academics to smear and censor independent media outlets that challenge the narratives of the Western intelligence agencies.

    Mason’s concerns about left-wing influence on public opinion have intensified the more he has faced criticism from the left over his demands for fervent, uncritical support of NATO and as he has lobbied for greater Western interference in Ukraine. Both are aims he shares with Western intelligence services.

    Along with the establishment media, Mason has called for sending advanced weaponry to Kyiv, likely to raise the death toll on both sides of the war and risk a nuclear confrontation between the West and Russia.

    In the published emails, Mason suggests the harming and “relentless deplatforming” of independent investigative media sites – such as the Grayzone, Consortium News and Mint Press – that host non-establishment journalists. He and his correspondents also debate whether to include Declassified UK and OpenDemocracy. One of his co-conspirators suggests a “full nuclear legal to squeeze them financially.”

    Mason himself proposes starving these websites of income by secretly pressuring Paypal to stop readers from being able to make donations to support their work.

    It should be noted that, in the wake of Mason’s correspondence,  PayPal did indeed launch just such a crackdown, including against Consortium News and MintPress, after earlier targeting WikiLeaks.

    Mason’s email correspondents include two figures intimately tied to British intelligence: Amil Khan is described by the Grayzone as “a shadowy intelligence contractor” with ties to the UK’s National Security Council. He founded Valent Projects, establishing his credentials in a dirty propaganda war in support of head-chopping jihadist groups trying to bring down the Russian-supported Syrian government.

    Clandestine ‘clusters’

    The other intelligence operative is someone Mason refers to as a “friend”: Andy Pryce, the head of the Foreign Office’s shadowy Counter Disinformation and Media Development (CDMD) unit, founded in 2016 to “counter-strike against Russian propaganda”. Mason and Pryce spend much of their correspondence discussing when to meet up in London pubs for a drink, according to the Grayzone.

    The Foreign Office managed to keep the CDMD unit’s existence secret for two years. The UK government has refused to disclose basic information about the CDMD on grounds of national security, although it is now known that it is overseen by the National Security Council.

    The CDMD’s existence came to light because of leaks about another covert information warfare operation, the Integrity Initiative.

    Notably, the Integrity Initiative was run on the basis of clandestine “clusters,” in North America and Europe, of journalists, academics, politicians and security officials advancing narratives shared with Western intelligence agencies to discredit Russia, China, Julian Assange, and Jeremy Corbyn, the former, left-wing leader of the Labor Party.

    Cadwalladr was named in the British cluster, along with other prominent journalists: David Aaronovitch and Dominic Kennedy of the Times; the Guardian’s Natalie Nougayrede and Paul Canning; Jonathan Marcus of the BBC; the Financial Times’ Neil Buckley; the Economist’s Edward Lucas; and Sky News’ Deborah Haynes.

    In his emails, Mason appears to want to renew this type of work but to direct its energies more specifically at damaging independent, dissident media – with his number one target the Grayzone, which played a critical role in exposing the Integrity Initiative.

    Mason’s “friend” – the CDMD’s head, Andy Pryce – “featured prominently” in documents relating to the Integrity Initiative, the Grayzone observes.

    This background is not lost on Mason. He notes in his correspondence the danger that his plot to “deplatform” independent media could “end up with the same problem as Statecraft” – a reference to the Institute of Statecraft, the Integrity Initiative’s parent charity, which the Grayzone and others exposed. He cautions: “The opposition are not stupid, they can spot an info op – so the more this is designed to be organic the better.”

    Pryce and Mason discuss creating an astroturf civil-society organization that would lead their “information war” as part of an operation they brand the “International Information Brigade”.

    Mason suggests the suspension of the libel laws for what he calls “foreign agents” – presumably meaning that the Information Brigade would be able to defame independent journalists as Russian agents, echoing the establishment media’s treatment of Assange, without fear of legal action that would show these were evidence-free smears.

    ‘Putin infosphere’

    Another correspondent, Emma Briant, an academic who claims to specialize in Russian disinformation, offers an insight into how she defines the presumed enemy within: those “close to WikiLeaks,” anyone “trolling Carole [Cadwalladr],” and outlets “discouraging people from reading the Guardian.”

    Mason himself produces an eye-popping, self-drawn, spider’s web chart of the supposedly “pro-Putin infosphere” in the UK, embracing much of the left, including Corbyn, the Stop the War movement, as well as the Black and Muslim communities. Several media sites are mentioned, including Mint Press and Novara Media, an independent British website sympathetic to Corbyn.

    Khan and Mason consider how they can help trigger a British government investigation of independent outlets so that they can be labeled as “Russian-state affiliated media” to further remove them from visibility on social media.

    Mason states that the goal is to prevent the emergence of a “left anti-imperialist identity,” which, he fears, “will be attractive because liberalism doesn’t know how to counter it” – a telling admission that he believes genuine left-wing critiques of Western foreign policy cannot be dealt with through public refutation but only through secret disinformation campaigns.

    He urges efforts to crack down not only on independent media and “rogue” academics but on left-wing political activism. He identifies as a particular threat Corbyn, who was earlier harmed through a series of disinformation campaigns, including entirely evidence-free claims that the Labour Party during his tenure became a hotbed of antisemitism.

    Mason fears Corbyn might set up a new, independent left-wing party. It is important, Mason notes, to “quarantine” and “stigmatize” any such ideology.

    In short, rather than use journalism to win the argument and the battle for public opinion, Mason wishes to use the dark arts of the security state to damage independent media, as well as dissident academics and left-wing political activism. He wants no influences on the public that are not tightly aligned with the core foreign policy goals of the national security state.

    Mason’s correspondence hints at the reality behind Cadwalladr’s claim that Assange was the “swirling vortex at the centre of everything.”

    Assange symbolizes that “swirling vortex” to intelligence-aligned establishment journalists only because WikiLeaks has published plenty of insider information that exposes Western claims to global moral leadership as a complete charade – and the journalists who amplify those claims as utter charlatans.

    In part two, we will examine why journalists like Mason and Cadwalladr prosper in the establishment media; the long history of collusion between Western intelligence agencies and the establishment media; and how that mutually beneficial collusion is becoming ever more important to each of them.

    • First published in Mint Press

    The post British “watchdog” journalists unmasked as lap dogs for the security state first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • People Who Defend Empire Narratives Are Really Just Defending Their Worldview From Destruction

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    If you’ve publicly challenged the official narratives of the western political/media class about any major issue, you’ve probably noticed that people can get pretty upset about it.

    Like, actually upset. Not mildly annoyed like you might get at someone who is saying something that is obviously false and stupid, but burning hot emotional like you’d get if you heard someone insulting your loved one. Or like someone insulting you personally.

    That’s the most surprising thing, when you first start speaking about this stuff. Not that people don’t believe you or don’t agree with you; that’s to be expected when every screen in their lives is telling them one thing and you’re telling them something else. But that people actually get deeply emotionally invested in it.

    That’s your first clue that there’s something else going on beneath the surface apart from what you’re being presented with. You’re not just arguing about Ukraine or China or Syria or whatever, you’re touching on a psychological third rail that’s being ferociously protected.

    Many of the people you’ll run into online or in person who defend imperial narratives from your criticisms aren’t doing so because they believe the US-centralized empire is awesome and great, they’re doing so because it’s much more comfortable than confronting the possibility that their entire worldview is made of lies.

    There’s a great comic by The Oatmeal which explains the psychological defense mechanisms humans have in place to protect their worldview from information that could destabilize it. Because of our tendency to select for cognitive ease over cognitive challenge in order to conserve mental energy, we tend to be heavily biased against consciously helping new worldview-disrupting information get past those psychological defense mechanisms.

    And it doesn’t get more worldview-disrupting than questioning mainstream consensus reality. Because on the other side of that investigation is the realization that pretty much everything you’ve been trained to believe about your society, your nation, your government and your world, is a lie.

    This is often what people are really pushing back against when they get upset at someone who is being critical of official empire narratives. It’s not actually super important to them that everyone believe the correct things about their government or someone else’s government, it’s super important to them that the world as they know it not come to a crashing halt.

    Because that’s what it is, as far as their experience and perception is concerned. A lucid seeing that their entire worldview is based on lies would feel like the end of their world, because in their experience it would be the end of the world they know.

    Having your entire understanding of the world and how it works torn asunder is a kind of a death, because it’s the end of your secure knowing of what’s real. In a sense it’s the end of you, too. It’s the end of the person you were. It’s all illusory of course, but that’s the way it feels.

    If you ask someone to consider the possibility that they’re being lied to in some way about Ukraine, for example, you’re not just asking them to unravel one small belief about one specific conflict. You’re asking them to ask questions that open up other questions, the answers to which could very easily end up unravelling their entire understanding of their whole world.

    Think about it. If you consider the possibility that the news media and their government are lying about Ukraine, you must necessarily consider the possibility that they’re lying about other things, too. And if they’re lying about all that, it would mean you were taught lies in school, too. And if you’ve been consuming lies from the very beginning of your education, that means your entire understanding of how everything works is built on lies, which means your political ideology and many opinions you hold probably are, too.

    If you really think about what this kind of confrontation means for the individual, is it any wonder that most people fight tooth and claw against the suggestion that they should even begin to enter that investigative rabbit hole?

    I mean, think about how it was for you. If you’re reading this, odds are you went through the ordeal of worldview dissolution yourself at some point. Can you honestly say it was easy? Or entirely pleasant?

    This is not easy to do. You cast aside the comforts of knowledge and understanding, and then after you’ve gone through that whole ordeal you’re still not out of the woods, because until you’ve gotten your bearings you can find yourself in a kind of epistemological no-man’s land where anything might be true. In that space people can get mixed up and latch onto new worldviews that are no more truth-based than the one they abandoned, like QAnon or fuzzbrained notions about Jews ruling the world. It’s not until you pass through the process of abandoning all the falsehoods and the process of learning what’s really true that you begin to regain any semblance of stability.

    If you think that’s an easy thing to do, it’s probably because you haven’t gone through it yourself.

    Can you really blame people for intuitively pushing away from that?

    It’s actually much, much easier to go from being a die-hard Democrat to a die-hard Republican or vice-versa than it is to fully relinquish the mainstream consensus reality, because those partisan narratives both exist within the mainstream consensus reality. The entire conceptual infrastructure by which they exist is the same: a world where the US and its allies are acting in good faith against tyrannical regimes in nations like Russia and China, where capitalism is totally working, where democracy is real, and where you can turn on a TV news station and see someone saying something trustworthy about these things. You’re still playing the same game, you just switched teams.

    To really see through all the lies is for the floor to fall out from the game altogether and for the roof to be ripped off the stadium. It’s to see the entire conceptual infrastructure upon which mainstream politics plays out crumble to dust, to see the lights switched on and the puppet theater reduced to atoms, leaving only the puppeteers waving their stupid toys and talking in silly voices.

    Depending on how attached you are to the feeling of security your worldview gives you and how resistant you are to letting it go, really confronting the lies our society is woven from can be one of the most difficult things you ever do. It’s a long, deep process of untangling which, if followed all the way through, eventually leads to the dissolution of entire belief systems, and ultimately even entire identity structures. Followed all the way through, it can lead to the very end of who you take yourself to be and your experience of what you are.

    So have patience if people don’t see what you see. They’re just afraid. They’re not there yet. An acorn is not a defective oak tree. An egg is not a defective chicken. We’re all waking up together, and some of us have had to be the first to lead the charge out of the darkness and into the light. This is just what it looks like as life on this planet moves toward increased levels of complexity and consciousness.

    ______________

    My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my American husband Tim Foley.

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    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • Russia-Ukraine war: George Bush’s admission of his crimes in Iraq was no “gaffe”

    It was apparently a “gaffe” of the kind we had forgotten since George W Bush stepped down from the US presidency in early 2009. During a speech in Dallas last week, he momentarily confused Russian President Vladimir Putin’s current war of aggression against Ukraine and his own war of aggression against Iraq in 2003.

    Bush observed that a lack of checks and balances in Russia had allowed “one man to launch a wholly unjustified and brutal invasion of Iraq… I mean, Ukraine. Iraq too. Anyway… I’m 75.”

    It sounded like another “Bushism” – a verbal slip-up – for which the 43rd president was famous. Just like the time he boasted that people “misunderestimated” him, or when he warned that America’s enemies “never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people – and neither do we”.

    Maybe that explains why his audience laughed. Or maybe not, given how uncomfortable the laughter sounded.

    Bush certainly wanted his mistake to be seen as yet another slip-up, which is why he hurriedly blamed it on his age. The senility defence doubtless sounds a lot more plausible at a time when the incumbent president, Joe Biden, regularly loses track of what he is saying and even where he is.

    The western media, in so far as it has bothered to report Bush’s speech, has laughed along nervously too. It has milked the incident largely for comic effect: “Look, we can laugh at ourselves – unlike that narcissist Russian monster, Putin.”

    The BBC accorded Bush’s comment status as a down-page brief news item. Those that gave it more attention preferred to term it a “gaffe” or an amusing “Freudian slip”.

    ‘Putin apologists’

    But the focus on the humour of the moment is actually part of the media’s continuing war on our understanding of recent history. It is intended to deflect us, the audience, from thinking about the real significance of Bush’s “gaffe”.

    The only reason the media is now so belatedly connecting – if very indirectly – “a wholly unjustified and brutal invasion” of Ukraine and what happened in Iraq is because of Bush’s mistake.

    Had it not happened, the establishment media would have continued to ignore any such comparison. And those trying to raise it would continue to be dismissed as conspiracy theorists or as apologists for Putin.

    The implication of what Bush said – even for those mockingly characterising it in Freudian terms – is that he and his co-conspirator, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, are war criminals and that they should be on trial at the Hague for invading and occupying Iraq.

    Everything the current US administration is saying against Putin, and every punishment meted out on Russia and ordinary Russians, can be turned around and directed at the United States and Britain.

    Should the US not be under severe economic sanctions from the “civilised world” for what it did to Iraq? Should its sportspeople not be banned from international events? Should its billionaires not be hunted down and stripped of their assets? And should the works of its long-dead writers, artists and composers not be shunned by polite society?

    And yet, the western establishment media are proposing none of the above. They are not calling for Blair and Bush to be tried for war crimes. Meanwhile, they echo western leaders in labelling what Russia is doing in Ukraine as genocide and labelling Putin as an evil madman.

    The western media are as uncomfortable taking Bush’s speech at face value as his audience was. And for good reason.

    That is because the media are equally implicated in US and UK crimes in Iraq. They never seriously questioned the ludicrous “weapons of mass destruction” justification for the invasion. They never debated whether the “Shock and Awe” bombing campaign of Baghdad was genocidal.

    And, of course, they never described either Bush or Blair as madmen and megalomaniacs and never accused them of waging a war of imperialism – or one for oil – in invading Iraq. In fact, both continue to be treated by the media as respected elder statesmen.

    During Trump’s presidency, leading journalists waxed nostalgic for the days of Bush, apparently unconcerned that he had used his own presidency to launch a war of aggression – the “supreme international crime”.

    And Blair continues to be sought out by the British and US media for his opinions on domestic and world affairs. He is even listened to deferentially when he opines on Ukraine.

    Pre-emption excuse

    But this is not simply about a failure to acknowledge the recent historical record. Bush’s invasion of Iraq is deeply tied to Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. And for that reason, if no other, the western media ought to have been driving home from the outset the parallels between the two – as Bush has now done in error.

    That would have provided the geopolitical context for understanding – without necessarily justifying – Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the West’s role in provoking it. Which is precisely why the media have worked so hard to ignore those parallels.

    In invading Iraq, Bush and Blair created a precedent that powerful states could redefine their attack on another state as “pre-emptive” – as defensive rather than aggressive – and thereby justify the military invasion in violation of the laws of war.

    Bush and Blair falsely claimed both that Iraq threatened the West with weapons of mass destruction and that its secular leader, Saddam Hussein, had cultivated ties with the extreme Islamists of al-Qaeda that carried out the 9/11 attacks on the US. These pretexts ranged from the entirely unsubstantiated to the downright preposterous.

    Putin has argued – more plausibly – that Russia had to take pre-emptive action against covert efforts by a US-led Nato to expand its military sphere of influence right up to Russia’s borders. Russia feared that, left unchecked, the US and Nato were preparing to absorb Ukraine by stealth.

    But how does that qualify Russia’s invasion as defensive? The Kremlin’s fears were chiefly twofold.

    First, it could have paved the way for Nato stationing missiles minutes away from Moscow, eroding any principle of mutual deterrence.

    And second, Nato’s incorporation of Ukraine would have drawn the western military alliance directly into Ukraine’s civil war in the eastern Donbass region. That is where Ukrainian forces, including neo-Nazi elements like the Azov Brigade, have been pitted in a bloody fight against ethnic Russian communities.

    In this view, absent a Russian invasion, Nato could have become an active participant in propping up Ukrainian ultra-nationalists killing ethnic Russians – as the West is now effectively doing through its arming of Ukraine to the tune of more than $40bn.

    Even if one discounts Russia’s concerns, Moscow clearly has a greater strategic interest invested in what its neighbour Ukraine is doing on their shared border than Washington ever had in Iraq, many thousands of miles away.

    Proxy wars

    Even more relevant, given the West’s failure to acknowledge, let alone address, Bush and Blair’s crimes committed in Iraq, is Russia’s suspicion that US foreign policy is unchanged two decades on. On what basis would Moscow believe that Washington is any less aggressive or power-hungry than it was when it launched its invasion of Iraq?

    The western media continue to refer to the US attack on Iraq, and the subsequent bloody years of occupation, as variously a “mistake”, a “misadventure” and a “blunder”. But surely it does not look that way to Moscow, all the more so given that Washington followed its invasion of Iraq with a series of proxy wars against other Middle Eastern and North African states such as Libya, Syria and Yemen.

    To Russia, the attack on Iraq looks more like a stepping stone in a continuum of wars the US has waged over decades for “full-spectrum dominance” and to eradicate competitors for control of the planet’s resources.

    With that as the context, Moscow might have reasonably imagined that the US and its Nato allies were eager for yet another proxy war, this time using Ukraine as the battlefield. Recent comments from Biden administration officials, such as Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin, noting that Washington’s tens of billions of dollars in military aid to Kyiv is intended to “weaken Russia”, can only accentuate such fears.

    Back in March, Leon Panetta, a former US secretary of defence and the CIA director under Barack Obama, who is in a position to speak more freely than serving officials, observed that Washington was waging “a proxy war with Russia, whether we say so or not”.

    He predicted where US policy would head next, noting that the aim would be “to provide as much military aid as necessary”. Diplomacy has been a glaringly low priority for Washington.

    Barely concealed from public view is a desire in the US and its allies for another regime change operation – this time in Russia – rather than end the war and the suffering of Ukrainians.

    Butcher versus blunderer

    Last week, the New York Times very belatedly turned down the war rhetoric a notch and called on the Biden administration to advance negotiations. Even so, its assessment of where the blame lay for Ukraine’s destruction was unambiguous: “Mr Putin will go down in history as a butcher.”

    But have Bush or Blair gone down in history as butchers? They most certainly haven’t. And the reason is that the western media have been complicit in rehabilitating their images, presenting them as statesmen who “blundered” – with the implication that good people blunder when they fail to take account of how entrenched the evil of everyone else in the world is.

    A butcher versus a pair of blunderers.

    This false distinction means western leaders and western publics continue to evade responsibility for western crimes in Iraq and elsewhere.

    That was why in late February – in reference to Ukraine – a TV journalist could suggest to Condoleezza Rice, who was one of the architects of the illegal war of aggression on Iraq as Bush’s national security adviser: “When you invade a sovereign nation, that is a war crime.” The journalist apparently did not consider for a moment that it was not just Putin who was a war criminal but the very woman she was sitting opposite.

    It was also why Rice could nod solemnly and agree with a straight face that Putin’s invasion of Ukraine was “against every principle of international law and international order – and that’s why throwing the book at them [Russia] now in terms of economic sanctions and punishments is a part of it”.

    But a West that has refused to come to terms with its role in committing the “supreme international crime” of invading Iraq, and has been supporting systematic crimes against the sovereignty of other states such as Yemen, Libya and Syria, cannot sit in judgment on Russia. And further, it should not be trying to take the high ground by meddling in the war in Ukraine.

    If we took the implications of Bush’s comment seriously, rather than treating it as a “gaffe” and viewing the Iraq invasion as a “blunder”, we might be in a position to speak with moral authority instead of flaunting – once again – our hypocrisy.

    • First published in Middle East Eye

    The post Russia-Ukraine war: George Bush’s admission of his crimes in Iraq was no “gaffe” first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The Subtleties of Anti-Russia Leftist Rhetoric

    While the so-called liberal and conservative corporate mainstream media – all stenographers for the intelligence agencies – pour forth the most blatant propaganda about Russia and Ukraine that is so conspicuous that it is comedic if it weren’t so dangerous, the self-depicted cognoscenti also ingest subtler messages, often from the alternative media.

    A woman I know, and who knows my sociological analyses of propaganda, contacted me to tell me there was an excellent article about the war in Ukraine at The Intercept, an on-line publication funded by billionaire Pierre Omidyar I have long considered a leading example of much deceptive reporting wherein truth is mixed with falsehoods to convey a “liberal” narrative that fundamentally supports the ruling elites while seeming to oppose them.  This, of course, is nothing new since it’s been the modus operandi of all corporate media in their own ideological and disingenuous ways, such as The New York Times, CBS, the Washington Post, the New York Daily News, Fox News, CNN, NBC, etc. for a very long time.

    Nevertheless, out of respect for her judgment and knowing how deeply she feels for all suffering people, I read the article.  Written by Alice Speri, its title sounded ambiguous – “The Left in Europe Confronts NATO’s Resurgence After Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine” – until I saw the subtitle that begins with these words: “Russia’s brutal invasion complicates…”  But I read on.  By the fourth paragraph, it became clear where this article was going.  Speri writes that “In Ukraine, by contrast [with Iraq], it was Russia that had staged an illegal, unprovoked invasion, and U.S.-led support to Ukraine was understood by many as crucial to stave off even worse atrocities than those the Russian military had already committed.” [my emphasis]

    While ostensibly about European anti-war and anti-NATO activists caught on the horns of a dilemma, the piece goes on to assert that although US/NATO was guilty of wrongful expansion over many years, Russia has been an aggressor in Ukraine and Georgia and is guilty of terrible war crimes, etc.

    There is not a word about the U.S. engineered coup in 2014, the CIA and Pentagon backed mercenaries in Ukraine, or its support for the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion and Ukraine’s years of attacks on the Donbass where many thousands have been killed.  It is assumed these actions are not criminal or provocative.  And there is this:

    The uncertain response of Europe’s peace activists is both a reflection of a brutal, unprovoked invasion that stunned the world and of an anti-war movement that has grown smaller and more marginalized over the years. The left in both Europe and the U.S. have struggled to respond to a wave of support for Ukraine that is at cross purposes with a decades long effort to untangle Europe from a U.S.-led military alliance. [my emphasis]

    In other words, the article, couched in anti-war rhetoric, was anti-Russia propaganda.  When I told my friend my analysis, she refused to discuss it and got angry with me, as if I therefore were a proponent of war  I have found this is a common response.

    This got me thinking again about why people so often miss the untruths lying within articles that are in many parts truthful and accurate.  I notice this constantly.  They are like little seeds slipped in as if no one will notice; they work their magic nearly unconsciously.  Few do notice them, for they are often imperceptible.  But they have their effects and are cumulative and are far more powerful over time than blatant statements that will turn people off, especially those who think propaganda doesn’t work on them.  This is the power of successful propaganda, whether purposeful  or not.  It particularly works well on “intellectual” and highly schooled people.

    For example, in a recent printed  interview, Noam Chomsky, after being introduced as a modern day Galileo, Newton, and Descartes rolled into one, talks about propaganda, its history, Edward Bernays, Walter Lippman, etc.  What he says is historically accurate and informative for anyone not knowing this history.  He speaks wisely of U.S. media propaganda concerning its unprovoked war against Iraq and he accurately calls the war in Ukraine “provoked.”  And then, concerning the war in Ukraine, he drops this startling statement:

    I don’t think there are ‘significant lies’ in war reporting. The U.S. media are generally doing a highly creditable job in reporting Russian crimes in Ukraine. That’s valuable, just as it’s valuable that international investigations are underway in preparation for possible war crimes trials.

    In the blink of an eye, Chomsky says something so incredibly untrue that unless one thinks of him as a modern day Galileo, which many do, it may pass as true and you will smoothly move on to the next paragraph.  Yet it is a statement so false as to be laughable.  The media propaganda concerning events in Ukraine has been so blatantly false and ridiculous that a careful reader will stop suddenly and think: Did he just say that?

    So now Chomsky views the media, such as The New York Times and its ilk, that he has correctly castigated for propagandizing for the U.S. in Iraq and East Timor, to use two examples, is doing “a highly creditable job in reporting Russian crimes in Ukraine,” as if suddenly they were no longer spokespeople for the CIA and U.S. disinformation.  And he says this when we are in the midst of the greatest propaganda blitz since WW I, with its censorship, Disinformation Governance Board, de-platforming of dissidents, etc., that border on a parody of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. 

    Even slicker is his casual assertion that the media are doing a good job reporting Russia’s war crimes after he earlier has said this about propaganda:

    So it continues. Particularly in the more free societies, where means of state violence have been constrained by popular activism, it is of great importance to devise methods of manufacturing consent, and to ensure that they are internalized, becoming as invisible as the air we breathe, particularly in articulate educated circles. Imposing war-myths is a regular feature of these enterprises.

    This is simply masterful.  Explain what propaganda is at its best and how you oppose it and then drop a soupçon of it into your analysis.  And while he is at it, Chomsky makes sure to praise Chris Hedges, one of his followers, who has himself recently wrote an article – The Age of Self-Delusion – that also contains valid points appealing to those sick of wars, but which also contains the following words:

    Putin’s revanchism is matched by our own.

    The disorganization, ineptitude, and low morale of the Russian army conscripts, along with the repeated intelligence failures by the Russian high command, apparently convinced Russia would roll over Ukraine in a few days, exposes the lie that Russia is a global menace.

    ‘The Russian bear has effectively defanged itself,’ historian Andrew Bacevich writes.

    But this is not a truth the war makers impart to the public. Russia must be inflated to become a global menace, despite nine weeks of humiliating military failures. [my emphasis]

    Russia’s revanchism?  Where?  Revanchism?  What lost territory has the U.S. ever waged war to recover?  Iraq, Syria, Cuba, Vietnam, Yugoslavia, etc.?  The U.S.’s history is a history not of revanchism but of imperial conquest, of seizing or controlling territory, while Russia’s war in Ukraine is clearly an act of self-defense after years of U.S./NATO/Ukraine provocations and threats, which Hedges recognizes.  “Nine weeks of humiliating military failures”? – when they control a large section of eastern and southern Ukraine, including the Donbass.  But his false message is subtly woven, like Chomsky’s, into sentences that are true.

    “But this is not a truth the war makers impart to the public.”  No, it is exactly what the media spokespeople for the war makers – i.e. The New York Times (Hedges former employer, which he never fails to mention and for whom he covered the Clinton administration’s savage destruction of Yugoslavia), CNN, Fox News, The Washington Post, the New York Post, etc. impart to the public every day for their masters.  Headlines that read how Russia, while allegedly committing daily war crimes, is failing in its war aims and that the mythic hero Zelensky is leading Ukrainians to victory.  Words to the effect that “The Russian bear has effectively defanged itself” presented as fact.

    Yes, they do inflate the Russian monster myth, only to then puncture it with the myth of David defeating Goliath.

    But being in the business of mind games (too much consistency leads to clarity and gives the game away), one can expect them to scramble their messages on an ongoing basis to serve the U.S. agenda in Ukraine and further NATO expansion in the undeclared war with Russia, for which the Ukrainian people will be sacrificed.

    Orwell called it “doublethink”:

    Doublethink lies at the very heart of Ingsoc, since the essential act of the Party is to use conscious deception while retaining the firmness of purpose that goes with complete honesty.To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality one denies – all this is indispensably necessary….with the lie always one step ahead of the truth.

    Revealing while concealing and interjecting inoculating shots of untruths that will only get cursory attention from their readers, the writers mentioned here and others have great appeal for the left intelligentsia.  For people who basically worship those they have imbued with infallibility and genius, it is very hard to read all sentences carefully and smell a skunk.  The subterfuge is often very adroit and appeals to readers’ sense of outrage at what happened in the past – e.g. the George W. Bush administration’s lies about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

    Chomsky, of course, is the leader of the pack, and his followers are legion, including Hedges.  For decades they have been either avoiding or supporting the official versions of the assassinations of JFK and RFK, the attacks of September 11, 2001 that led directly to the war on terror and so many wars of aggression,and the recent Covid-19 propaganda with its devastating lockdowns and crackdowns on civil liberties.  They are far from historical amnesiacs, of course, but obviously consider these foundational events of no importance, for otherwise they would have addressed them.  If you expect them to explain, you will be waiting a long time.

    In a recent article – How the organized Left got Covid wrong, learned to love lockdowns and lost its mind: an autopsy – Christian Parenti writes this about Chomsky:

    Almost the entire left intelligentsia has remained psychically stuck in March 2020. Its members have applauded the new biosecurity repression and calumniated as liars, grifters, and fascists any and all who dissented. Typically, they did so without even engaging evidence and while shirking public debate. Among the most visible in this has been Noam Chomsky, the self-described anarcho-syndicalist who called for the unvaccinated to “remove themselves from society,” and suggested that they should be allowed to go hungry if they refuse to submit.

    Parenti’s critique of the left’s response (not just Chomsky’s and Hedges’) to Covid also applies to those foundational events mentioned above, which raises deeper questions about the CIA’s and NSA’s penetration  of the media in general, a subject beyond the scope of this analysis.

    For those, like the liberal woman who referred me to The Intercept article, who would no doubt say of what I have written here: Why are you picking on leftists? my reply is quite simple.

    The right-wing and the neocons are obvious in their pernicious agendas; nothing is really hidden; therefore they can and should be opposed. But many leftists serve two masters and are far subtler. Ostensibly on the side of regular people and opposed to imperialism and the predations of the elites at home and abroad, they are often tricksters of beguiling rhetoric that their followers miss. Rhetoric that indirectly fuels the wars they say they oppose.

    Smelling skunks is not as obvious as it might seem.  Being nocturnal, they come forth when most are sleeping.

    The post The Subtleties of Anti-Russia Leftist Rhetoric first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The persecution of Julian Assange

    The British home secretary, Priti Patel, will decide this month whether Julian Assange is to be extradited to the United States, where he faces a sentence of up to 175 years – served most likely in strict, 24-hour isolation in a US super-max jail.

    He has already spent three years in similarly harsh conditions in London’s high-security Belmarsh prison.

    The 18 charges laid against Assange in the US relate to the publication by WikiLeaks in 2010 of leaked official documents, many of them showing that the US and UK were responsible for war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan. No one has been brought to justice for those crimes.

    Instead, the US has defined Assange’s journalism as espionage – and by implication asserted a right to seize any journalist in the world who takes on the US national security state – and in a series of extradition hearings, the British courts have given their blessing.

    The lengthy proceedings against Assange have been carried out in courtrooms with tightly restricted access and in circumstances that have repeatedly denied journalists the ability to cover the case properly.

    Despite the grave implications for a free press and democratic accountability, however, Assange’s plight has provoked little more than a flicker of concern from much of the western media.

    Few observers appear to be in any doubt that Patel will sign off on the US extradition order – least of all Nils Melzer, a law professor, and a United Nations’ special rapporteur.

    In his role as the UN’s expert on torture, Melzer has made it his job since 2019 to scrutinise not only Assange’s treatment during his 12 years of increasing confinement – overseen by the UK courts – but also the extent to which due process and the rule of law have been followed in pursuing the WikiLeaks founder.

    Melzer has distilled his detailed research into a new book, The Trial of Julian Assange, that provides a shocking account of rampant lawlessness by the main states involved – Britain, Sweden, the US, and Ecuador. It also documents a sophisticated campaign of misinformation and character assassination to obscure those misdeeds.

    The result, Melzer concludes, has been a relentless assault not only on Assange’s fundamental rights but his physical, mental, and emotional wellbeing that Melzer classifies as psychological torture.

    The UN rapporteur argues that the UK has invested far too much money and muscle in securing Assange’s prosecution on behalf of the US, and has too pressing a need itself to deter others from following Assange’s path in exposing western crimes, to risk letting Assange walk free.

    It has instead participated in a wide-ranging legal charade to obscure the political nature of Assange’s incarceration. And in doing so, it has systematically ridden roughshod over the rule of law.

    Melzer believes Assange’s case is so important because it sets a precedent to erode the most basic liberties the rest of us take for granted. He opens the book with a quote from Otto Gritschneder, a German lawyer who observed up close the rise of the Nazis, “those who sleep in a democracy will wake up in a dictatorship”.

    Back to the wall

    Melzer has raised his voice because he believes that in the Assange case any residual institutional checks and balances on state power, especially those of the US, have been subdued.

    He points out that even the prominent human rights group Amnesty International has avoided characterising Assange as a “prisoner of conscience”, despite his meeting all the criteria, with the group apparently fearful of a backlash from funders (p. 81).

    He notes too that, aside from the UN’s Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, comprising expert law professors, the UN itself has largely ignored the abuses of Assange’s rights (p. 3). In large part, that is because even states like Russia and China are reluctant to turn Assange’s political persecution into a stick with which to beat the West – as might otherwise have been expected.

    The reason, Melzer observes, is that WikiLeaks’ model of journalism demands greater accountability and transparency from all states. With Ecuador’s belated abandonment of Assange, he appears to be utterly at the mercy of the world’s main superpower.

    Instead, Melzer argues, Britain and the US have cleared the way to vilify Assange and incrementally disappear him under the pretense of a series of legal proceedings. That has been made possible only because of complicity from prosecutors and the judiciary, who are pursuing the path of least resistance in silencing Assange and the cause he represents.

    It is what Melzer terms an official “policy of small compromises” – with dramatic consequences (pp. 250-1).

    His 330-page book is so packed with examples of abuses of due process – at the legal, prosecutorial, and judicial levels – that it is impossible to summarise even a tiny fraction of them.

    However, the UN rapporteur refuses to label this as a conspiracy – if only because to do so would be to indict himself as part of it. He admits that when Assange’s lawyers first contacted him for help in 2018, arguing that the conditions of Assange’s incarceration amounted to torture, he ignored their pleas.

    As he now recognises, he too had been influenced by the demonisation of Assange, despite his long professional and academic training to recognise techniques of perception management and political persecution.

    “To me, like most people around the world, he was just a rapist, hacker, spy, and narcissist,” he says (p. 10).

    It was only later when Melzer finally agreed to examine the effects of Assange’s long-term confinement on his health – and found the British authorities obstructing his investigation at every turn and openly deceiving him – that he probed deeper. When he started to pick at the legal narratives around Assange, the threads quickly unravelled.

    He points to the risks of speaking up – a price he has experienced firsthand – that have kept others silent.

    “With my uncompromising stance, I put not only my credibility at risk, but also my career and, potentially, even my personal safety… Now, I suddenly found myself with my back to the wall, defending human rights and the rule of law against the very democracies which I had always considered to be my closest allies in the fight against torture. It was a steep and painful learning curve” (p. 97).

    He adds regretfully: “I had inadvertently become a dissident within the system itself” (p. 269).

    Subversion of law

    The web of complex cases that have ensnared the WikiLeaks founder – and kept him incarcerated – have included an entirely unproductive, decade-long sexual assault investigation by Sweden; an extended detention over a bail infraction that occurred after Assange was granted asylum by Ecuador from political extradition to the US; and the secret convening of a grand jury in the US, followed by endless hearings and appeals in the UK to extradite him as part of the very political persecution he warned of.

    The goal throughout, says Melzer, has not been to expedite Assange’s prosecution – that would have risked exposing the absence of evidence against him in both the Swedish and US cases. Rather it has been to trap Assange in an interminable process of non-prosecution while he is imprisoned in ever-more draconian conditions and the public turned against him.

    What appeared – at least to onlookers – to be the upholding of the law in Sweden, Britain and the US was the exact reverse: its repeated subversion. The failure to follow basic legal procedures was so consistent, argues Melzer, that it cannot be viewed as simply a series of unfortunate mistakes.

    It aims at the “systematic persecution, silencing and destruction of an inconvenient political dissident” (p. 93).

    Assange, in Melzer’s view, is not just a political prisoner. He is one whose life is being put in severe danger from relentless abuses that accord with the definition of psychological torture.

    Such torture depends on its victim being intimidated, isolated, humiliated, and subjected to arbitrary decisions (p. 74). Melzer clarifies that the consequences of such torture not only break down the mental and emotional coping mechanisms of victims but over time have very tangible physical consequences too.

    Melzer explains the so-called “Mandela Rules” – named after the long-jailed black resistance leader Nelson Mandela, who helped bring down South African apartheid – that limit the use of extreme forms of solitary confinement.

    In Assange’s case, however, “this form of ill-treatment very quickly became the status quo” in Belmarsh, even though Assange was a “non-violent inmate posing no threat to anyone”. As his health deteriorated, prison authorities isolated him further, professedly for his own safety. As a result, Melzer concludes, Assange’s “silencing and abuse could be perpetuated indefinitely, all under the guise of concern for his health” (pp. 88-9).

    The rapporteur observes that he would not be fulfilling his UN mandate if he failed to protest not only Assange’s torture but the fact that he is being tortured to protect those who committed torture and other war crimes exposed in the Iraq and Afghanistan logs published by WikiLeaks. They continue to escape justice with the active connivance of the same state authorities seeking to destroy Assange (p. 95).

    With his long experience of handling torture cases around the world, Melzer suggests that Assange has great reserves of inner strength that have kept him alive, if increasingly frail and physically ill. Assange has lost a great deal of weight, is regularly confused and disorientated, and has suffered a minor stroke in Belmarsh.

    Many of the rest of us, the reader is left to infer, might well have succumbed by now to a lethal heart attack or stroke, or have committed suicide.

    A further troubling implication hangs over the book: that this is the ultimate ambition of those persecuting him. The current extradition hearings can be spun out indefinitely, with appeals right up to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, keeping Assange out of view all that time, further damaging his health, and providing a stronger deterrent effect on whistleblowers and other journalists.

    This is a win-win, notes Melzer. If Assange’s mental health breaks down entirely, he can be locked away in a psychiatric institution. And if he dies, that would finally solve the inconvenience of sustaining the legal charade that has been needed to keep him silenced and out of view for so long (p. 322).

    Sweden’s charade

    Melzer spends much of the book reconstructing the 2010 accusations of sexual assault against Assange in Sweden. He does this not to discredit the two women involved – in fact, he argues that the Swedish legal system failed them as much as it did Assange – but because that case set the stage for the campaign to paint Assange as a rapist, narcissist, and fugitive from justice.

    The US might never have been able to launch its overtly political persecution of Assange had he not already been turned into a popular hate figure over the Sweden case. His demonisation was needed – as well as his disappearance from view – to smooth the path to redefining national security journalism as espionage.

    Melzer’s meticulous examination of the case – assisted by his fluency in Swedish – reveals something that the mainstream media coverage has ignored: Swedish prosecutors never had the semblance of a case against Assange, and apparently never the slightest intention to move the investigation beyond the initial taking of witness statements.

    Nonetheless, as Melzer observes, it became “the longest ‘preliminary investigation’ in Swedish history” (p. 103).

    The first prosecutor to examine the case, in 2010, immediately dropped the investigation, saying, “there is no suspicion of a crime” (p. 133).

    When the case was finally wrapped up in 2019, many months before the statute of limitations was reached, a third prosecutor observed simply that “it cannot be assumed that further inquiries will change the evidential situation in any significant manner” (p. 261).

    Couched in lawyerly language, that was an admission that interviewing Assange would not lead to any charges. The preceding nine years had been a legal charade.

    But in those intervening years, the illusion of a credible case was so well sustained that major newspapers, including Britain’s The Guardian newspaper, repeatedly referred to “rape charges” against Assange, even though he had never been charged with anything.

    More significantly, as Melzer keeps pointing out, the allegations against Assange were so clearly unsustainable that the Swedish authorities never sought to seriously investigate them. To do so would have instantly exposed their futility.

    Instead, Assange was trapped. For the seven years that he was given asylum in Ecuador’s London embassy, Swedish prosecutors refused to follow normal procedures and interview him where he was, in person or via computer, to resolve the case. But the same prosecutors also refused to issue standard reassurances that he would not be extradited onwards to the US, which would have made his asylum in the embassy unnecessary.

    In this way, Melzer argues “the rape suspect narrative could be perpetuated indefinitely without ever coming before a court. Publicly, this deliberately manufactured outcome could conveniently be blamed on Assange, by accusing him of having evaded justice” (p. 254).

    Neutrality dropped

    Ultimately, the success of the Swedish case in vilifying Assange derived from the fact that it was driven by a narrative almost impossible to question without appearing to belittle the two women at its centre.

    But the rape narrative was not the women’s. It was effectively imposed on the case – and on them – by elements within the Swedish establishment, echoed by the Swedish media. Melzer hazards a guess as to why the chance to discredit Assange was seized on so aggressively.

    After the fall of the Soviet Union, Swedish leaders dropped the country’s historic position of neutrality and threw their hand in with the US and the global “war on terror”. Stockholm was quickly integrated into the western security and intelligence community (p. 102).

    All of that was put in jeopardy as Assange began eyeing Sweden as a new base for WikiLeaks, attracted by its constitutional protections for publishers.

    In fact, he was in Sweden for precisely that reason in the run-up to WikiLeaks’ publication of the Iraq and Afghanistan war logs. It must have been only too obvious to the Swedish establishment that any move to headquarter WikiLeaks there risked setting Stockholm on a collision course with Washington (p. 159).

    This, Melzer argues, is the context that helps to explain an astonishingly hasty decision by the police to notify the public prosecutor of a rape investigation against Assange minutes after a woman referred to only as “S” first spoke to a police officer in a central Stockholm station.

    In fact, S and another woman, “A”, had not intended to make any allegation against Assange. After learning he had had sex with them in quick succession, they wanted him to take an HIV test. They thought approaching the police would force his hand (p. 115). The police had other ideas.

    The irregularities in the handling of the case are so numerous, Melzer spends the best part of 100 pages documenting them. The women’s testimonies were not recorded, transcribed verbatim, or witnessed by a second officer. They were summarised.

    The same, deeply flawed procedure – one that made it impossible to tell whether leading questions influenced their testimony or whether significant information was excluded – was employed during the interviews of witnesses friendly to the women. Assange’s interview and those of his allies, by contrast, were recorded and transcribed verbatim (p. 132).

    The reason for the women making their statements – the desire to get an HIV test from Assange – was not mentioned in the police summaries.

    In the case of S, her testimony was later altered without her knowledge, in highly dubious circumstances that have never been explained (pp. 139-41). The original text is redacted so it is impossible to know what was altered.

    Stranger still, a criminal report of rape was logged against Assange on the police computer system at 4.11pm, 11 minutes after the initial meeting with S and 10 minutes before a senior officer had begun interviewing S – and two and half hours before that interview would finish (pp. 119-20).

    In another sign of the astounding speed of developments, Sweden’s public prosecutor had received two criminal reports against Assange from the police by 5pm, long before the interview with S had been completed. The prosecutor then immediately issued an arrest warrant against Assange before the police summary was written and without taking into account that S did not agree to sign it (p. 121).

    Almost immediately, the information was leaked to the Swedish media, and within an hour of receiving the criminal reports the public prosecutor had broken protocol by confirming the details to the Swedish media (p. 126).

    Secret amendments

    The constant lack of transparency in the treatment of Assange by Swedish, British, US, and Ecuadorian authorities becomes a theme in Melzer’s book. Evidence is not made available under freedom of information laws, or, if it is, it is heavily redacted or only some parts are released – presumably those that do not risk undermining the official narrative.

    For four years, Assange’s lawyers were denied any copies of the text messages the two Swedish women sent – on the grounds they were “classified”. The messages were also denied to the Swedish courts, even when they were deliberating on whether to extend an arrest warrant for Assange (p. 124).

    It was not until nine years later those messages were made public, though Melzer notes that the index numbers show many continue to be withheld. Most notably, 12 messages sent by S from the police station – when she is known to have been unhappy at the police narrative being imposed on her – are missing. They would likely have been crucial to Assange’s defence (p. 125).

    Similarly, much of the later correspondence between British and Swedish prosecutors that kept Assange trapped in the Ecuadorian embassy for years was destroyed – even while the Swedish preliminary investigation was supposedly still being pursued (p. 106).

    The text messages from the women that have been released, however, suggest strongly that they felt they were being railroaded into a version of events they had not agreed to.

    Slowly they relented, the texts suggest, as the juggernaut of the official narrative bore down on them, with the implied threat that if they disputed it they risked prosecution themselves for providing false testimony (p. 130).

    Moments after S entered the police station, she texted a friend to say that “the police officer appears to like the idea of getting him [Assange]” (p. 117).

    In a later message, she writes that it was “the police who made up the charges” (p. 129). And when the state assigns her a high-profile lawyer, she observes only that she hopes he will get her “out of this shit” (p. 136).

    In a further text, she says: “I didn’t want to be part of it [the case against Assange], but now I have no choice” (p. 137).

    It was on the basis of the secret amendments made to S’s testimony by the police that the first prosecutor’s decision to drop the case against Assange was overturned, and the investigation reopened (p. 141). As Melzer notes, the faint hope of launching a prosecution of Assange essentially rested on one word: whether S was “asleep”, “half-asleep” or “sleepy” when they had sex.

    Melzer write that “as long as the Swedish authorities are allowed to hide behind the convenient veil of secrecy, the truth about this dubious episode may never come to light” (p. 141).

    No ordinary extradition’

    These and many, many other glaring irregularities in the Swedish preliminary investigation documented by Melzer are vital to decoding what comes next. Or as Melzer concludes “the authorities were not pursuing justice in this case but a completely different, purely political agenda” (p. 147).

    With the investigation hanging over his head, Assange struggled to build on the momentum of the Iraq and Afghanistan logs revealing systematic war crimes committed by the US and UK.

    “The involved governments had successfully snatched the spotlight directed at them by WikiLeaks, turned it around, and pointed it at Assange,” Melzer observes.

    They have been doing the same ever since.

    Assange was given permission to leave Sweden after the new prosecutor assigned to the case repeatedly declined to interview him a second time (pp. 153-4).

    But as soon as Assange departed for London, an Interpol Red Notice was issued, another extraordinary development given its use for serious international crimes, setting the stage for the fugitive-from-justice narrative (p. 167).

    A European Arrest Warrant was approved by the UK courts soon afterwards – but, again exceptionally, after the judges had reversed the express will of the British parliament that such warrants could only be issued by a “judicial authority” in the country seeking extradition not the police or a prosecutor (pp. 177- 9).

    A law was passed shortly after the ruling to close that loophole and make sure no one else would suffer Assange’s fate (p. 180).

    As the noose tightened around the neck not only of Assange but WikiLeaks too – the group was denied server capacity, its bank accounts were blocked, credit companies refused to process payments (p. 172) – Assange had little choice but to accept that the US was the moving force behind the scenes.

    He hurried into the Ecuadorean embassy after being offered political asylum. A new chapter of the same story was about to begin.

    British officials in the Crown Prosecution Service, as the few surviving emails show, were the ones bullying their Swedish counterparts to keep going with the case as Swedish interest flagged. The UK, supposedly a disinterested party, insisted behind the scenes that Assange must be required to leave the embassy – and his asylum – to be interviewed in Stockholm (p. 174).

    A CPS lawyer told Swedish counterparts “don’t you dare get cold feet!” (p. 186).

    As Christmas neared, the Swedish prosecutor joked about Assange being a present, “I am OK without… In fact, it would be a shock to get that one!” (p. 187).

    When she discussed with the CPS Swedish doubts about continuing the case, she apologised for “ruining your weekend” (p. 188).

    In yet another email, a British CPS lawyer advised “please do not think that the case is being dealt with as just another extradition request” (p. 176).

    Embassy spying operation

    That may explain why William Hague, the UK’s foreign secretary at the time, risked a major diplomatic incident by threatening to violate Ecuadorean sovereignty and invade the embassy to arrest Assange (p. 184).

    And why Sir Alan Duncan, a UK government minister, made regular entries in his diary, later published as a book, on how he was working aggressively behind the scenes to get Assange out of the embassy (pp. 200, 209, 273, 313).

    And why the British police were ready to spend £16 million of public money besieging the embassy for seven years to enforce an extradition Swedish prosecutors seemed entirely uninterested in advancing (p. 188).

    Ecuador, the only country ready to offer Assange sanctuary, rapidly changed course once its popular left-wing president Rafael Correa stepped down in 2017. His successor, Lenin Moreno, came under enormous diplomatic pressure from Washington and was offered significant financial incentives to give up Assange (p. 212).

    At first, this appears to have chiefly involved depriving Assange of almost all contact with the outside world, including access to the internet, and telephone and launching a media demonisation campaign that portrayed him as abusing his cat and smearing faeces on the wall (pp. 207-9).

    At the same time, the CIA worked with the embassy’s security firm to launch a sophisticated, covert spying operation of Assange and all his visitors, including his doctors and lawyers (p. 200). We now know that the CIA was also considering plans to kidnap or assassinate Assange (p. 218).

    Finally in April 2019, having stripped Assange of his citizenship and asylum – in flagrant violation of international and Ecuadorean law – Quito let the British police seize him (p. 213).

    He was dragged into the daylight, his first public appearance in many months, looking unshaven and unkempt – a “demented looking gnome“, as a long-time Guardian columnist called him.

    In fact, Assange’s image had been carefully managed to alienate the watching world. Embassy staff had confiscated his shaving and grooming kit months earlier.

    Meanwhile, Assange’s personal belongings, his computer, and documents were seized and transferred not to his family or lawyers, or even the British authorities, but to the US – the real author of this drama (p. 214).

    That move, and the fact that the CIA had spied on Assange’s conversations with his lawyers inside the embassy, should have sufficiently polluted any legal proceedings against Assange to require that he walk free.

    But the rule of law, as Melzer keeps noting, has never seemed to matter in Assange’s case.

    Quite the reverse, in fact. Assange was immediately taken to a London police station where a new arrest warrant was issued for his extradition to the US.

    The same afternoon Assange appeared before a court for half an hour, with no time to prepare a defence, to be tried for a seven-year-old bail violation over his being granted asylum in the embassy (p. 48).

    He was sentenced to 50 weeks – almost the maximum possible – in Belmarsh high-security prison, where he has been ever since.

    Apparently, it occurred neither to the British courts nor to the media that the reason Assange had violated his bail conditions was precisely to avoid the political extradition to the US he was faced with as soon as he was forced out of the embassy.

    ‘Living in a tyranny’

    Much of the rest of Melzer’s book documents in disturbing detail what he calls the current “Anglo-American show trial”: the endless procedural abuses Assange has faced over the past three years as British judges have failed to prevent what Melzer argues should be seen as not just one but a raft of glaring miscarriages of justice.

    Not least, extradition on political grounds is expressly forbidden under Britain’s extradition treaty with the US (pp. 178-80, 294-5). But yet again the law counts for nothing when it applies to Assange.

    The decision on extradition now rests with Patel, the hawkish home secretary who previously had to resign from the government for secret dealings with a foreign power, Israel, and is behind the government’s current draconian plan to ship asylum seekers to Rwanda, almost certainly in violation of the UN Refugee Convention.

    Melzer has repeatedly complained to the UK, the US, Sweden, and Ecuador about the many procedural abuses in Assange’s case, as well as the psychological torture he has been subjected to. All four, the UN rapporteur points out, have either stonewalled or treated his inquiries with open contempt (pp. 235-44).

    Assange can never hope to get a fair trial in the US, Melzer notes. First, politicians from across the spectrum, including the last two US presidents, have publicly damned Assange as a spy, terrorist, or traitor and many have suggested he deserves death (p. 216-7).

    And, second, because he would be tried in the notorious “espionage court” in Alexandria, Virginia, located in the heart of the US intelligence and security establishment, without public or press access (pp. 220-2).

    No jury there would be sympathetic to what Assange did in exposing their community’s crimes. Or as Melzer observes: “Assange would get a secret state-security trial very similar to those conducted in dictatorships” (p. 223).

    And once in the US, Assange would likely never be seen again, under “special administrative measures” (SAMs) that would keep him in total isolation 24-hours-a-day (pp. 227-9). Melzer calls SAMs “another fraudulent label for torture”.

    Melzer’s book is not just a documentation of the persecution of one dissident. He notes that Washington has been meting out abuses on all dissidents, including most famously the whistleblowers Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden.

    Assange’s case is so important, Melzer argues, because it marks the moment when western states not only target those working within the system who blow the whistle that breaks their confidentiality contracts, but those outside it too – those like journalists and publishers whose very role in a democratic society is to act as a watchdog on power.

    If we do nothing, Melzer’s book warns, we will wake up to find the world transformed. Or as he concludes: “Once telling the truth has become a crime, we will all be living in a tyranny” (p. 331).

    The Trial of Julian Assange by Nils Melzer is published by Verso.

    • First published by Middle East Eye

    The post The persecution of Julian Assange first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • US/NATO Wants War With Russia

    Here is a speech Vladimir Putin DID NOT make — at least in this specific language — to the Russian people just before initiating the special military operations in Ukraine:

    “It is my responsibility as the president to warn our citizens of secret, swift, and extraordinary buildup of US/NATO missiles — in an area well known to have a special and historical relationship to Russia and the nations of our hemisphere, in violation of American assurances, and in defiance of treaties and our own policies — this sudden, clandestine decision to station strategic weapons on our borders — is a deliberately provocative and unjustified change in the status quo which cannot be accepted by this country.”

    Does this have a familiar feel to it?

    Here is the speech which President John F. Kennedy DID MAKE to the American people on October 22, 1962, when he warned of:

    … a secret, swift, and extraordinary buildup of Communist missiles — in an area well known to have a special and historical relationship to the United States and the nations of the Western Hemisphere, in violation of Soviet assurances, and in defiance of American and hemispheric policy — this sudden, clandestine decision to station strategic weapons for the first time outside of Soviet soil — is a deliberately provocative and unjustified change in the status quo which cannot be accepted by this country.

    The Cuban Missile Crisis which resulted from the discovery of this military escalation by the Soviets, almost resulted in a world war and nuclear annihilation.

    The tables have rotated 180º. Now it is the US which is putting the survival of humankind at risk, escalating the conflict in Ukraine by dumping more and more weapons into the conflict zone, demonizing Putin and everything Russian, apparently urging the Ukrainians to avoid a negotiated peace and to fight to the bitter end.

    Do not for a moment forget . . .

    There were solutions in place to prevent the entire Ukrainian situation from evolving into the terrifying mess we now see. First, there was the Minsk II Agreement of February 12, 2015, signed by Ukraine, guaranteed by France, Germany and Russia. It was ignored by Ukraine, never implemented. There is speculation that it was the US which prompted the stonewalling. Then, December of 2020, Russia itself proposed very concrete steps, as draft treaties, that could be taken to defuse the tensions and guarantee greater security for all of Europe and the world. These were formally submitted to both the US and NATO in writing. They were dismissed. Now with the conflict in full swing, Russia has repeatedly made clear its current position on ending this. What the Russians is demand is no different than what Kennedy demanded of the USSR. This has also been flatly rejected.

    From the outset of the crisis, Russia has been maligned, vilified, rejected, canceled, viciously attacked at every opportunity for merely wanting the assurances and concrete reductions to the threat posed by NATO and the US on its borders, just as JFK laid out subsequent to his announcement of Soviet missiles in Cuba.

    (As a revealing aside, the comprehensive scale of the vilification and attempted isolation of Russia across the planet, even in spheres completely unrelated to politics — dance, sports, art, music, cultural exchange programs, space exploration, pet shows — could not have been spontaneous. Any multi-layered attack of this scale had to have been in the works for some time. At least, that’s how I see it.)

    So . . .

    What conclusion can we draw from all of this? What message are we actually hearing from Biden, Blinken, Stoltenberg, Johnson, Scholz, Macron, and the rest of the US puppets around the world?

    I can see only one: US/NATO wants war with Russia. Which frankly, hardly comes as a surprise. From documents, white papers, policy statements, speeches by officials in the State Department and various administrations along the way, all easily accessed by just looking, the dismemberment of Russia and looting its vast and varied natural resources has been on the agenda for at least three decades.

    Yes, folks . . .

    It’s war. Not liberation. Not freedom and democracy. It’s war.

    Please correct me if I’m wrong.

    The post US/NATO Wants War With Russia first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • Russia, Ukraine, and the USA: Trapped in a Cultural Script

    Compassion for Ukrainians victimized by Russia’s violence demonstrates that human hearts care. However, beneath the visible current of compassion there’s an alarming, dangerous dynamic at play.

    What’s hair-raising about this crisis is not only the violence but the fact that US political leaders and media makers are not recognizing positive and negative motivations on both sides of conflict. Instead, they’re deliberately creating an inaccurate good vs. evil storyline, a storyline that ignites unwarranted, dangerous feelings of self-righteous hatred against Russia.

    The US perpetually perceives its role in conflict as that of a heroic rescuer or innocent victim upholding humanity and freedom against evil persecutors. However, 245 years of US history reveal that this perception is fiction, a psychological construct. Psychological analysts Muriel James and Dorothy Jongeward called the persecutor, victim, and rescuer scenario a “cultural script.”

    Examination of 245 years of US history reveals that the perception of always being a good guy fighting evil is fiction, a psychological construct. In fact, good and bad, truths and lies invariably exist on both sides of conflict.

    Nonetheless, to deceive others and perhaps themselves, US policymakers’ pattern of relentlessly legitimating their violence, deadly sanctions, and foreign coups by denying the validity of enemy grievances, hiding their own greed and aggressive motives, refusing to cooperatively negotiate, concealing enemy negotiation offers, fabricating lies, omitting significant facts, using false pretexts, and overlooking the disastrous results of a pseudo-religious faith in the problem-solving magic of weapons is so predictable that it’s hard to decide whether it’s more enraging, pathetic, boring, or nauseating.

    Consider one persecutor-victim-hero drama that began in 1979. President Jimmy Carter, livid over the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, claimed it was “the greatest threat to peace since the Second World War.” Actually, Afghanistan’s Marxist government, which had been trying to reform the extreme, unjust inequalities of wealth and land ownership in Afghanistan, had requested Soviet assistance against insurgents, but the USSR, the “evil persecutor,” didn’t want to send troops. When the Soviets finally complied, they explained it was because of secret US involvement in Afghanistan. The world called the Soviets liars.

    Two decades later US National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski admitted that Carter had begun aiding the insurgent mujahideen—the “heroes”—six months prior to the entry of the persecutors, the Soviets. A delighted Brzezinski knew this could provoke the Soviets to invade and get mired in their own “Vietnam.” Convinced of Soviet evil and mujahideen goodness, US policymakers ignored that the mujahideen skinned Soviet POWs alive.

    And now we’re to believe that weapon shipments and sanctions are needed for the US to help rescue Ukraine from “evil” Russia.

    The first step in convincing the world to believe the script’s good vs. evil dynamics is to depict Russia as the persecutor who’s motivated, not by fear, but by evil. No problem! Simply label Putin as paranoid and discount Russian fears as ludicrous: NATO’s expansion into Slavic lands, NATO—Ukraine military collaboration, US missile bases in eastern Europe, anti-Russian policies and prejudice in Ukraine, neo-Nazi violence in Ukraine, neo-Nazis and ultranationalists in Ukraine’s police, military, and government, the manipulation of Ukraine by Western profit-seekers, and Western economic and political conquest—likely of Russia itself.

    The next step is to paint the US as a heroic rescuer motivated purely by integrity and compassion. Simple! Muffle up all greed-related motives for antagonizing Russia: US weapon industry profits, NATO’s agenda for bases on the Black Sea, IMF goals, ExxonMobil’s coveting Black Sea fossil fuel deposits, and Biden’s connections with Ukraine’s largest natural gas corporation. Then, conceal US hopes to dominate the global energy trade, maintain the dollar as the international energy trade currency, displace Russia from Europe’s gas market, shut down Nord Stream 2, and export fracked liquefied natural gas to Europe via Ukraine.

    Also ignored are the biases and aims of those social and business circles who are forever dictating US foreign policy according to their pecuniary priorities and uncooperative, control-oriented habits of international relations. President Biden’s administration, for example, includes many members of the Alliance for Securing Democracy—with an advisory board that combines neoconservatives with liberal hawks, Albright Stonebridge Group—with its interest in Russian business acquisitions, and the Center for a New American Security (CNAS).

    CNAS, whose donors include multiple weapon corporations, the European Union, US Department of Defense, Finland’s Defense Ministry, Amazon, Google, and ExxonMobil, was formerly led by President Biden’s current Undersecretary of State Victoria Nuland, whose husband, Robert Kagan, co-founded the conquest-seeking neoconservative Project for the New American Century. Yet we’re to assume that donors’ priorities aren’t skewing foreign policy in dysfunctional ways.

    With Russia’s fears dismissed and US greed disguised, the good vs. evil script is further strengthened by permitting only shallow public analysis. For example, how do we know that Russia wasn’t deliberately provoked so that the ulterior goals of certain American social circles could be advanced under the guise of nobly responding to Russia’s aggression? The topic isn’t permitted into discussion.

    Another topic given quarter-inch deep analysis is Biden’s seemingly fair-minded declaration that each nation has the right to choose alliances. It’s an unusual statement coming from a “you’re with us or against us” nation that has punished or ousted national leaders who refused to sever alliances with the USSR or Cuba.

    Nuland’s leaked tapes from 2014 (which mention Biden and National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan) and a US record of instigating coups indicate that Americans were likely involved in promoting the bloody 2014 coup of Ukraine’s pro-Russian President Yanukovich to install anti-Russian leadership agreeable to European Union and NATO ties. So does Biden’s “right to choose alliances” proclamation apply to nations before a US-approved coup or only afterwards?

    Another enraging example of shallow analysis is the opinion falsely parroted by US “experts” that Putin’s 2021 essay, “On the Historical Unity of Russia and Ukraine,” lays bare Putin’s imperialist vision for Ukraine and his lack of recognition of Ukraine’s sovereignty and borders. Whether the experts are deliberately lying or lack reading comprehension skills, their claim is false and, given the self-righteous hatred their claim generates, utterly irresponsible.

    Nowhere in the essay does Putin speak of conquering Ukraine or refusing to recognize Ukraine’s sovereignty. Putin specifically describes the relationship between the US and Canada as the type of relationship Russia seeks with Ukraine. When he speaks of “unity,” he’s not speaking of dissolving Ukraine’s political sovereignty. He’s speaking of cultural and historical ties between the two nations.

    Putin’s description of the Bolsheviks’ creation of borders never suggests that he’s doing away with them. It’s possible he’s implying that Donetsk, Lugansk, and certainly Crimea have large Russian populations and do not necessarily belong in Ukraine, especially if Ukraine’s post-coup government is harboring neo-Nazism and installing language and indigenous people policies of a deliberate anti-Russian nature. Note that Ukraine and the US are the only two nations in the UN to vote against the recent resolution to condemn the glorification of Nazism.

    Of course, US policymakers are not uncomfortable with Nazism and, following WWII, employed one thousand Nazis to spy on Russia. And it was US banks and companies such as Ford, General Motors, and du Pont that opportunistically helped fund Hitler’s war arsenal. Even in 1973, the US worked with pro-Nazi collaborators and US corporate funds to plant protests, propaganda, economic sabotage, and violence that climaxed in the CIA’ s horrific 9/11/73 coup of Chile’s Salvador Allende. It’s not surprising that in 2014, Russian news sources claimed that US private military contractors were training right-wing Ukrainian extremists.

    In his essay, Putin clearly states his wish to negotiate with Ukraine, but not with Ukrainian leaders who are mere representatives of Western profiteers eager to use Ukraine’s land and resources for their own benefit. But, of course, US commentators either ignore the statement or, forgetting US history, discount Putin’s fears of Western profiteering as conspiracy theory.

    Double standards also fortify the script. Russia’s invasions are motivated by belligerence, never legitimate fears, while US invasions are motivated by legitimate fears, never belligerence. Same behavior, different judgment.

    Headlines scream of savage Russian war crimes. TV reporters interview sobbing Ukrainians. Yet US, NATO, and Ukrainian war crimes are barely publicized, their victims ignored. Same actions, different judgment. To learn about US war crimes and Afghan and Iraqi suffering, you’ve got to read investigative reporters’ books.

    American groupthink, inflated by its self-righteous role in the script, and seeming to borrow from middle-school social dynamics, jeers and smears President Putin’s every word as absurd and staged. But we’re to trust Biden as honest, unstaged, unconcealing. No proof is needed. Just faith in the script.

    Putin’s wish to protect Donetsk and Lugansk, self-declared republics since 2014, and end Kiev’s 8-year war that has killed 14,000 is automatically mocked as false pretext for conquest. Yet US wishes to protect Ukraine from Russia are trusted as caring, without ulterior design. The role of private military contractors, NATO, and the US in escalating civil war and provoking Russia by arming Ukraine with billions in weapons since 2014 rather than committing to non-violently resolve Ukraine’s internal conflict remains shamefully unassessed.

    The consequences of belief in this drama? The US habitually uses exaggerated fears of evil enemies as false justification for colossal military budgets, NATO expansion, more military bases, troops, weapons, and nukes—all of which pour gasoline on the world tinderbox of tension, drain desperately-needed funding, and fail to resolve conflict.

    If evil is equated with enemies, it becomes deceptively simple for “heroes” to champion goodness: bomb enemies into submission, impose deadly sanctions, strangulate funding, send weapons, engineer coups. But none of these methods nurture goodness. The truth is, those convinced they’re fighting evil are frequently blinded to the immorality and injustice of their own actions against people who aren’t so evil after all.

    The good vs. evil script is also unjust because it enables the “innocent” to get away with all they’ve done to exacerbate conflict. The script can even enable the “innocent,” including Biden administration neoconservatives and liberal hawks, to slickly seize power, resources, and markets from those deemed evil.

    US leaders’ promotion of this good vs. evil storyline appears compassionate, but it isn’t against killing. It isn’t about justice. It’s about pushing a script that provides pretext on the part of those proclaiming their own goodness to inflict injustice and violence against Russia and Putin, already verbally crucified by a mob of liars. It’s about solidifying our allegiance to US policymakers’ decisions about whom we should kill and whom we should cry for. Yet policymakers step beyond Constitutional grounds when they use their power to turn our hearts on and off, to bait us to hate some and love others to serve their greed for Mid-Eastern, Ukrainian, and Russian wealth.

    We’ve got to scrap the script and view conflict impartially. We deserve accurate, sophisticated information about conflict, not propaganda that teaches us to hate. We need full truth to help us ground irrational fears of bad guys, cure the sickness of greed, and offer caring and friendship, not just for those falsely deemed innocent and heroic, but for all of us, with 360◦ of empathy, all the way around the world.

    • View all six videos here:  https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCuNEw9-1OIk-CwU-5vAElcg

    • Read the entire essay at Countercurrents

    • This article was first published at TRANSCEND Media Service

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  • Oliver Stone Documents the Past to Illuminate the Present

    The timing of the March 2022 release of this digital streaming documentary could not be more auspicious.  For anyone wanting to understand how we arrived at a new Cold War with the second Irish-Catholic Democratic president in U.S. history, Joseph Biden, spewing belligerent absurdities about Ukraine, Russia, and Vladimir Putin, and leading a charge toward a World War III that could easily turn nuclear, the aggregated factual details in this series of why President John F. Kennedy was assassinated by the CIA and its minions is essential history that illuminates current events.

    While Kennedy was the last U.S. president to genuinely seek peace at the cost of his life, his successors have all been lackeys in love with war and in full awareness  that the promotion of war and the military industrial complex were at the top of their job description.  They have gladly served the god of war and ravaged countries around the world with the glee of sadists and madmen.  Pusillanimous in the extreme, they have sought the presidency knowing they would never oppose the gunmen in the shadows who demanded their obedience.  They heard the message from the streets of Dallas loud and clear and followed orders as required.

    Their long history of provocations against Russia in Eastern Europe and Ukraine that has resulted in the current Russian attack on Ukraine is a most frightening case in point.  While Kennedy embraced dialogue and negotiations that recognized the humanity and validity of other countries leaders’ viewpoints – e.g. Nikita Khrushchev, Fidel Castro, et al. – and was cognizant, as he said, that genuine peace had to exclude a Pax Americana, his replacements have demanded U.S. dominance and the growth of empire.

    It is therefore essential to understand why JFK was assassinated by the U.S. national security state; it is a fundamental requisite for piercing the miasma of lies that have been used over the decades to conceal the true nature of U.S. foreign policy and intense anti-Russia hatred.

    JFK: Destiny Betrayed, a four-hour, four-part follow-up to Oliver Stone’s two hour feature film JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass (11/22/21), does precisely that.  While JFK Revisited is by the nature of its shorter and undivided length a better film as film, JFK: Destiny Betrayed is the deeper history lesson because of its more extensive documentation.  It is largely based on the scriptwriter, James DiEugenio’s masterful book, Destiny Betrayed: JFK, Cuba, and the Garrison Case, which draws on hundreds of thousands of documents released by the Assassination Records Review Board, which was formed as a result of Oliver Stone’s 1991 film, JFK.  As such, the book, and the new film, hoist the U.S. government by its own petard, and thus the film’s powerful indictment can only be dismissed by ignoramuses, propagandists, or sensibilities too tender to accept factual truth.  At an Orwellian time when “fictionalized documentaries” are being promoted, and the difference between fact and fiction is being scrambled to scramble brains, that, regrettably, may be many people.  But for anyone who takes history and facts seriously, this is a dazzling and deeply disturbing film whose implications are enormous.

    It is divided into four parts, each approximately an hour.  This allows the viewer to space out their viewing to allow each section to sink in.  I think this is a good idea, for there is much to comprehend, especially for one not well-versed in this history.

    Chapter One opens with an emphatic point: Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. tells how his father immediately suspected that the CIA was involved in the murder of President Kennedy and that when the Warren Commission Report (WC) was released he didn’t believe it.  The WC had been pushed by people such as Eugene Rostow, Joseph Alsop, et al., no friends to Kennedy; was controlled by Allen Dulles, the CIA Director whom Kennedy had fired following the Bay of Pigs treachery; and was promoted by The New York Times upon its release with the claim that the commission’s conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald killed the president was supported by all its documents when, in fact, those documents were not released for many months following.  Thus the N.Y. Times lied to serve the coverup as it has done ever since. This was typical of mainstream media then and now.

    The first part of the documentary informs the viewer of many such lies of commission and omission:

    • That the CIA lied to Kennedy about the Bay of Pigs.
    • That Allen Dulles never told the Warren Commission that the CIA had tried repeatedly to kill Fidel Castro.
    • That the CIA lied to JFK about its attempts to assassinate French President Charles De Gaulle.
    • That the CIA lied to him about the assassination of the Congolese Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba, another Kennedy ally.
    • That the CIA lied to Robert Kennedy when he learned of its attempts to assassinate Castro by telling him they had stopped when they had not.

    Lies piled upon lies on every side.

    Sandwiched between, in a deft placement that says “try to lie about this,” is the Zapruder film that graphically refutes the lie that the president was not shot from the front; it confirms witness testimony that the kill shot came from the right front and a large back portion of the back of his head was blown out by a gunman who wasn’t Oswald.  Presto: a conspiracy.

    And then the viewer learns how years later the Church Committee Hearings uncovered many more lies.  How Jack Ruby, who killed Oswald, was a confidential FBI informer; how, contrary to press lies, JFK never authorized the plots to assassinate Castro, etc.

    And when the lies became more known, The House Select Committee on Assassinations (1979) sealed half-a-million records until 2029, many of which were only released due to Oliver Stone’s 1991 film.  Still, in 2022 records are still being held back against the law.

    Chapter Two opens with the absurd deceptions involving Kennedy’s autopsy.  Brief but powerful and a preliminary introduction to an extensive analysis in Chapter 3, this section presents evidence that doctors were pressured to lie about the frontal wounds, that Captain James Humes, the doctor in charge of the autopsy, had never done a gunshot autopsy and was part of the coverup – literally with JFK’s head, that the president’s personal doctor, George Burkley, disappeared crucial evidence, etc.

    Then, in a creative switch used throughout the four parts, we learn some more of why Kennedy was killed.  How as a young U.S. Representatives in 1951 he went to Vietnam with his brother Robert and became convinced that the French war there was wrong and also unwinnable, and that Vietnam should be free of colonial domination.  How years later as a Senator he spoke out against Secretary of State John Foster Dulles’ advice to use nuclear weapons at Diên Bên Phù to help the beleaguered French (one of many times he opposed the use of nuclear weapons).  How he gave a famous Senate speech in 1957 opposing colonialism and was attacked by both parties for it.  How he supported the non-aligned nations movement, including Sukarno in Indonesia and many leaders throughout Africa.

    Then we are returned to Dallas and the assassination where we learn about the conflicting number of shots, the “magic bullet that allegedly and comically was claimed to have created seven wounds in Kennedy and Gov. John Connally, the failure of the chain of custody for the bullets, and the various anomalies associated with Oswald’s alleged rifle that are revealed with multiple photos.  A viewer’s ears would no doubt particularly perk up when learning that the rifle the government says Oswald used that he ordered through mail order under the alias A. Hidell and was sent to his post office box registered under the name Lee Oswald, could not be picked up by Oswald since it was sent to the name Hidell.  And so… ?

    Before moving on to the third section, I would like to note the book-like quality of this streaming film documentary.  The sections are called chapters and its title and much of its contents are taken from DiEugenio’s book.  So you could say it is similar to a novel that is converted into a screenplay, but in this case it is a carefully sourced and researched non-fiction (I prefer the word “fact”) book with fifty-four pages of notes.  Watching it is like reading a book in that the viewer needs to slowly evaluate not only the narrative drive of the presentation but also the quality of the filmed notes that buttress the telling from beginning to end.  As one who has read the book very carefully two times, always noting sources, and as one who has researched, written about, and taught university courses on the JFK and other political assassinations, I can attest to the solidity of the film’s sources.  I can think of none that are not accurate.  Like the earlier JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass, the collaboration between Stone, a filmmaker of genius, and DiEugenio, a supremely talented researcher, has produced two remarkable films, slightly different in style and substance, but achieving the same clarification of purpose: Factual truth about who killed President Kennedy and why, and why it matters today.

    Chapter Three is perhaps the most devastating of the four.  Much of it is spent on showing the evil treachery involved in the autopsy of the president at Bethesda Naval Hospital that is central to the coverup of the truth. This coverup was carried out within the higher reaches of the government, and its only purpose could be to protect the killers within that government.  It is very hard to stomach such truth, but it is necessary.

    Only one person was present both at Parkland Hospital in Dallas and at the autopsy: Dr. George Burkley, JFK’s White House physician.  Deeply involved in the coverup, Burkley changed his statements from inadvertent truth to falsehoods like a jumping bean, finally firmly supporting the lies of Dr. Humes, who performed the autopsy under the direction of military/intelligence higher-ups and then incredibly destroyed his notes.  Burkley also backed the lies of those others involved in replacing Kennedy’s brain with another, and then patching up the back of his head to conceal his large wound in order to deny the fatal head shot came from the front.  He supported Robert Knudsen, the White House photographer who took photos of JFK’s fraudulently repaired head. All these men conspired to cover up the truth by literally covering up of the hole in the back of the president’s head.  This was betrayal of the highest order.  Treachery close to home.

    Yet to learn in detail that Kennedy’s brain was replaced and that his badly damaged brain is missing is matched in depravity with learning that JFK’s arch-enemy, General Curtis LeMay, made sure to quickly return from Canada to attend the autopsy where he sat with others in bleachers, puffing a cigar as Kennedy was cut up and patched like a show piece.  As Kennedy’s most belligerent foe and the real life Dr. Strangelove, one who hated the president and who advocated dropping nuclear weapons on Cuba, Vietnam, the Soviet Union, and using terrorism against the American people to blame on Cuba (Operation Northwoods) – all emphatically repudiated by JFK who thought such suggestions insane and evil – the image of the sadistic LeMay in the autopsy room is haunting.

    This chapter also tells us of a National Security Meeting on July 20, 1961 when Allen Dulles and the military urged Kennedy to do a first-strike nuclear attack on the Soviet Union, one of many such attempts that the president rebuffed without hesitation.  Watching this, one cannot help thinking of what is taking place with President Biden, unlike Kennedy, a lifetime war hawk and clearly not in his right mind.  We have been warned.

    The concluding chapter is “Fingerprints of Intelligence” and confirms what the first three parts make obvious: that the CIA and its minions killed their own president to prevent him from seeking peace and reconciliation in a world on the edge of nuclear destruction.  We learn all about the CIA’s running of Oswald as a false defector to the Soviet Union and a patsy in JFK’s murder.  We learn how the agency lied repeatedly about its connections to him.  We learn about parallel plots to assassinate Kennedy in Chicago and Tampa with fall guys similar to Oswald waiting in the wings.  We learn how Lyndon Johnson changed Kennedy’s policies in Vietnam, Indonesia, the Congo, etc. immediately after his death and how the military industrial complex won the day.

    Oliver Stone tells us this.  And he tells us JFK’s ghost won’t rest.

    This documentary makes that clear, but ghosts only have a way of sometimes disturbing consciences when they also know the facts.  JFK: Destiny Betrayed has all the facts one needs to rile one’s conscience, if one watches it, and if one can see through today’s repetition of history as the old Cold War has become the new old Cold War and betrayal rules the day as the CIA has been rehabilitated through insidious propaganda, as if nothing happened in 1963, or it doesn’t matter.

    Yet nothing could be more untrue.

    Ukraine is no anomaly; it fits the propaganda neatly. President Biden’s 813 billion dollar military budget request does likewise.  As the film makes clear, President John F. Kennedy was killed by the national security state for seeking peace, while our leaders are seeking war.  It’s still the same old story.  The warfare state rules.  That has not changed from the day John Kennedy died.

    The only thing that can possibly change is people’s knowledge of the truth and how that can change their consciences to oppose the war promoters.  This film can do the former.  As for the latter, only time will tell.

    JFK: Destiny Betrayed is a powerful corrective to the historical amnesia that has settled over the United States.  It is an incandescent example of how the marriage of film and scholarship can produce popular history at its best.  For anyone who wants to understand the new Cold War that is verging on going nuclear, this film is  essential viewing.

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  • War Crimes, Mental Molestation and Language Rape

    The incredible market for human slaughter called war existed thousands of years ago but it was a corner grocery store compared to the multi-trillion dollar moral sewer that represents modern mass murder. Part of what enables imperial and even lesser powers to slaughter at will is a rule book drawn up long ago when there might have been a possibility to just have military personnel chopping one another to bits while leaving the general populace out of the bloodletting. That certainly ended before the 20th century but what has transpired since then and up to the present is, to cite a couple of over-used therefore recognizable labels, a genocidal holocaust that has burned, bombed, shot, stabbed, smothered and shattered bodies, reducing humans to unrecognizable bloody pulp by the hundreds of millions.

    The hideous reality of war and its public relations and adverting departments that allegedly inform us about it has people accepting its horror as some sort of natural occurrence like sunset, tides, weather, rather than seeing it as caused by ruling powers battling over their wealth struggles which reduce humanity to commit mass murder under the pretense of it being the natural order of things. Further, rules have been drawn by upper class educated folks with doctoral degrees legalizing mass murder who teach us just what is the proper way to bash in skulls, burn people to death and rape and murder in a supposedly civilized way.

    The alleged morality of humans accepting one form of insanely hysterical murder as long as it adheres to a guidebook on the proper form of slaughter should make us all grateful there is no judgmental, vindictive old testament deity or we’d all have been destroyed after the second world war let alone after our profitable feasts of death since then when we’ve murdered even more.

    This closely guarded secret that humanity suffers in wars but only when rationalizations of bloody filth called “war crimes” are committed is currently being used and abused in a form of language, thought and moral degeneracy that may finally end when human consciousness, especially American, rejects the degenerate advertising and public relations blitz posing as reporting to blame Russians for what is called by language perverts their “war crime” against the Ukrainian government. Said government is a product of a U.S. financed insurrection that dumped an elected president who favored Russia for a western political pimp favoring market forces, which include some modern Nazis.

    While he has become a celebrity among morals free political employees of ruling power by informing everyone to send him weapons so that there can be more bloodshed of the loving, violence free western kind, the western world has increased military spending to record breaking figures. Our rulers, media employee shepherds, see to it that our population is reduced to sheep as much of the world is angrier than ever at the machinations of the warfare business though you’d never know it if all you had was the western media called a free press. They create mentally brutalized souls into paying hundreds of dollars for taco-pizza-burgers and calling it free food.

    While Ukrainians have been dying by the thousands for the past eight years, subject to a US/NATO financed and controlled assault, Americans and the west have known absolutely nothing of what was going on and not until Russian retaliation have we heard repeated use of words like brutal, savage, slaughter and worse, to condemn what under normal American circumstances would be called a form of legal police action to purify the world and see to it that peace, love and tranquility would prevail as we slaughtered. Maybe after everyone was dead?

    A nation that leads all others in conducting wars against weaker countries and murdering hundreds of thousands, at the least, and millions, at the worst, is not only bellowing murderous nonsense but manipulating good, well meaning people into swallowing editorial garbage that has some decent folks almost ready to pawn their pets to send money to suffering Ukrainians. Even worse, some perverted by venomous outpourings of what would be called vicious hate speech if conducted by anyone else, are ready to accept the potential of nuclear war in order to stop the horrible slaughter which mostly exists between the ears and comes out of the mouths of our thought police working overtime for our ruling powers.

    A recent story headlined a murderous, bloody, brutal assault by Russians, which had killed two people at the time the story was filed. Sadly but horrendously over-stated in a nation which kills 4-5 Americans every hour in our private transport system of undeclared road wars to get us to work, shop, school, and conduct other freedom loving democratic economic action. This while the sanctions against Russia are causing serious economic pain the world over, including to Americans, while military spending and the mass murder business that is the backbone of our incredibly gross national product is growing faster and more dangerously and fossil fuel interests profit more than ever as environmental destruction proceeds at a more menacing pace.

    This assault on reason, combined with the rape of language and the reduction of public consciousness to the level of a nation of insects, is really only an update of what has been going on for more than 100 years concerning Russia. The assault on that nation began in 1917 when the Russian revolution threatened capitalism, its global center then as now in the United States. America immediately invaded along with a group of its future lapdogs which eventually became NATO after the Second World War. The idea of a return to humanity’s roots by building a society based on communal cooperation rather than competitive actions which created wonderful benefits for some but only by reducing others to dreadful lives was too much for fanatics of the fundamentalist church of capital.

    Our primitive communistic survival in the days before we destroyed hunter-gatherer people meant that when the hunt was successful, everyone ate meat and when it wasn’t, everyone ate what was gathered. This was thousands of years before vegan diets and anti-meat worship among good people who comfortably house 136 million pets in a nation where more than 500,000 humans are without shelter. The pet business was good for more than 104 billion in 2020, a mass of economic clout but still chump change compared to the 778 billion for war, which involves 750 American bases in 80 foreign countries for something calling itself “defense”. This protected folks like George Floyd from the brutal, savage, bloodthirsty fiend Putin, but was totally helpless to defend him from a few Americans with badges.

    A communist ideal which held that a thousand people and a thousand loaves of bread should mean a loaf of bread for everyone sickened rich capitalists who insisted that some should get ten loaves each and the rest be damned, which is the gross foundation dressed in economic jargon that would make a house of prostitution a citadel of love. Capital said that just as sex workers made a decent living by using their private parts to make private profits for their pimps, workers of all kinds could live comfortably if they just did their jobs and didn’t ask any questions. Their media saw to it that unquestioners became everyday people.

    The social seeds planted by people like Marx and Engels in the 19th century came to fruition early in the 20th in Russia, and the vicious assault on that nation began, then as now, from its headquarters in America. After 70 years of continuous physical and mental assault finally helped cause a breakdown of the Soviet Union and a return to capitalism, that was still not enough and the U.S. and its imperial lackeys kept up the war and its present experience which threatens the worst outcome for humanity. This will hopefully not only bring China and Russia closer but the people of the USA and global humanity together to transcend the danger by helping to end the degeneracy of warfare and create peace via the end of an imperial crusade to further enrich billionaires and their upper class servants while increasing mass poverty and the environmental threat to us all.

    With daily by the minute assaults on consciousness reducing other wise good people to hateful idiocy demanding death for the savage Putin and evil Russians, there is glee among the perverted political economic leadership of the war business. They number a tiny group with power supposedly democratic while they brainwash people into believing autocracy – a term most hardly understand – is in charge everywhere but where it exists; in what we have been taught to believe is the free world. Benign (?) America billionaires become malevolently evil (ominous background music) Russian oligarchs, according to our mind shapers who neglect to point out they keep their wealth in the same banks – mostly American or at least using American dollars – to perform as charming space travelers or deranged killers, depending on national origin.

    This perverse market freedom continues to mean imperial abuse by one nation, ours, while taxpayers absorb a debt of 30 trillion dollars paying for the empire which is bringing us all closer to a point at which we will have little time left as a human race. We need to begin acting like one very soon. That means far more than waving a Ukrainian flag and sending paychecks to the pimps of war, but no longer accepting their crimes against nature and beginning to act like what we are: a human race badly in need of global democracy to stop all wars, not just those we are told are the wrong way to butcher humans, and begin life. That calls for the end of the post World War II domination of the American empire and this present horror is hopefully a sign that it will be so. We need to turn off the anti-social media that insure further private profit and ultimate public loss and turn on humanity’s original instinct for cooperation. And hurry.

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  • President Joe Biden seeks to Destroy Russia and Punish the Russian People

    Who, really, is the War Criminal?

    So what does President Joe Biden want the sanctions imposed on Russia to do? Think back to the 1990s and what the US-NATO imposed no-fly zone and sanctions did to the people of Iraq?  The results were almost 1 million Iraqis dead, according to the website GlobalIssues.org.

    Over at truthout.org, Jake Batinga reported that President Joe Biden strongly supported those sanctions as a US Senator and recently has turned a blind eye to the humanitarian crisis unfolding in Afghanistan:

    Senator Biden strongly supported the sanctions and advocated for even more aggressive policies toward Iraq. Biden was not then, and is not now, known for his humanitarian impulses or dovish foreign policy stances.

    Batinga also notes that:

    More Afghans are poised to die from US sanctions over the next few months alone than have died at the hands of the Taliban and US military forces over the last 20 years combined — by a significant margin. Yet, as journalist Murtaza Hussain recently wrote, US establishment politicians and intellectuals who decried the humanitarian crisis during the fall of Kabul are seemingly unbothered by imminent mass starvation, imposed by us.

    The Biden administration — which routinely laments human rights violations perpetrated by China, Iran, Russia, and other adversaries — is ignoring desperate pleas from humanitarian organizations and UN human rights bodies, choosing instead to maintain policies virtually guaranteed to cause mass starvation and death of civilians, especially children. Yet it is important to note, and remember, that as a matter of policy, this is not particularly new; the US has often imposed harsh economic sanctions, causing mass civilian death. A previous imposition of sanctions resulted in one of the worst humanitarian catastrophes, one largely forgotten in mainstream historical memory.

    In 1990, the US imposed sanctions on Iraq through the UN following the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. These sanctions continued for more than a decade after Iraq withdrew from Kuwait, and had horrific humanitarian consequences eerily similar to the imminent mass starvation of Afghan civilians. The sanctions regime against Iraq — which began under President George H.W. Bush but was primarily administered by President Bill Clinton’s administration — froze Iraq’s foreign assets, virtually banned trade, and sharply limited imports. These sanctions crashed the Iraqi economy and blocked the import of humanitarian supplies, medicine, food, and other basic necessities, killing scores of civilians.

    BRIC’s Made of Straw

    The BRIC nations, Brazil, Russia, India and China have been in the news lately and for good reason. There is talk, and talk is cheap, of course, of China and Russia creating an alternative payment system to the US dollar dominated international payments system SWIFT.

    Already Russia has joined China’s Cross Border Interbank Payment System as an alternative to SWIFT, along with joining China’s UnionPay credit card system which serves as an alternative to Visa and Master Card who, along with dozens of other Western country businesses (Europe, USA plus Japan and South Korea), bolted Russia’s marketplace after its military operation got started in Ukraine in late February.

    India apparently is trading with Russia in a rupee, ruble swap but that seems ad hoc, at best. And there is news of Saudi Arabia cutting a deal with China to use the yuan as an exchange currency. Brazil has enough internal problems to deal with: crime, disease, Amazon deforestation.

    Chinese leaders must realize that if Russia falters in Ukraine which means it is unable to liberate the Republics of Luhansk and Donetsk, gain international recognition of Crimea—and maintain territorial gains made on the coast of the Black and Azov Seas—and/or President Putin is removed from office and Russia destabilizes, the United States will chop up Russia into separate republics, steal its resources and cancel the billions in deals signed with China for oil, gas, and grains

    The United States will bring the NATO military alliance to China’s doorstep and likely put on show trials in the International Criminal Court arguing that Putin and his general staff are war criminals, which would be utter nonsense given US policies and actions in Iraq, Afghanistan and Yemen.

    China is trying to placate the US because it still fears US economic and military power. Its party officials probably figure that they can keep building up the People’s Liberation Army, Navy, Air Force and Strategic nuclear capability and when there is enough firepower, will be able to challenge US dominance in the Pacific. But how?

    The PLA forces have no modern combat experience to speak of and their plan seems to be; well, no plan at all. They are faced with the combined forces of the USA that are building new aircraft carriers, submarines and long distance B-21 bombers, along with upgrading all three legs of its nuclear TRIAD.

    Which brings us back to Russia and the economic support it needs so that Biden’s sanctions don’t end up killing a million Russians. Because that is what Biden intends and his track record on supporting sanctions is disturbingly clear. When China looks at what the USA-NATO have done to the Russian economy, they are looking at their own future.

    Hypocrisy

    Joe Scalice at the World Socialist Website notes the hypocrisy of the USA-NATO and the compliant MSM Western media:

    The wars of aggression of Clinton, Bush, Obama and Trump contained the accumulated evil of the torture in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, the drone bombing of children at play, villages leveled by precision missiles and refugees drowned in the Mediterranean. Baghdad crumbled beneath the shock and awe of unstinting US bombing; Fallujah burned with white phosphorus.

    The American mass media is complicit in these crimes. They never challenged the government’s assertions, but trumpeted its pretexts. They whipped up a war-frenzy in the public. Pundits who now denounce Putin were ferocious in demanding that the United States bomb civilians.

    Thomas Friedman wrote in the New York Times in 1999 of the bombing of Serbia under Clinton, “It should be lights out in Belgrade: every power grid, water pipe, bridge, road and war-related factory has to be targeted… [W]e will set your country back by pulverizing you. You want 1950? We can do 1950. You want 1389? We can do 1389 too.” [Biden supported bombing Belgrade]

    Biden labels Putin a war criminal in the midst of a new media hysteria. Never referring to the actions of the United States, never pausing for breath, the media pumps out the fuel for an ever-expanding war. Hubris and hypocrisy stamp every statement from Washington with an audacity perhaps unique in world history. Its hands bathed in blood up to the elbows, US empire gestures at its enemies and cries war crimes.

    Tactics

    Indeed, the media has capitulated to the war propaganda narrative of the Biden Administration. The US MSM relies almost exclusively on Ukrainian sources for its error filled reporting. If you are reading the New York Times or the Washington Post, you aren’t getting the full story. Pro-Russia sites like Southfront, Newsfront, War Gonzo and others tell a different story. For example, the Retroville Mall destruction on March 21 was reported in the West as a wanton and random attack on a shopping place. In fact, the below-building parking lot was home to Ukrainian military vehicles clearly shown by a set of photos that appeared on Newsfront. Residential buildings are clearly being used by the Ukrainian forces to hide their weapons or launch anti-tank attacks from apartment building roofs or top floor apartments. That’s a tactic that makes sense. The Russians know that.

    You’ve got to look at all the news sources, even the ones you don’t want to view, in order to be informed about this conflict.

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  • The Crisis in Ukraine is a Planetary Crisis Provoked by the U.S. that Threatens Nuclear War

    Let us begin a conversation in response to what currently qualifies as the most profound question, the one that needs most urgently to be addressed if we are to have any chance of understanding what we conveniently refer to as the “Ukraine crisis.” This is, more accurately, a planetary crisis—close in magnitude to the near-certainty of species extinction within the next century, but in some ways ahead of secondary catastrophes such as the obscene, raging inequality between peoples and nations unleashed by President Ronald Reagan and UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in the early 1980s, and the global conglomerations of immense corporate and plutocratic power.

    Why is it, then, that the three most important power alliances of the Western and Eurasian worlds—North America, led by the United States alongside its “Trudeauesque” poodle and with the problematic connivance of Mexico’s López Obrador; the European Union and post-Brexit UK; and the Russian Federation, in wobbly alliance with China—consider it worthwhile to suffer intensification of the risks of nuclear annihilation? This, in the face of an abundance of routes available for peaceful settlement, given a minimum of goodwill and genuine humanitarian concern?

    In the case of Russia, we know very well what these reasons are because Russia has told us—clearly, consistently, loudly, and transparently—for more than 15 years. First and foremost, Russia resents the West’s violation of its unmistakable and supremely important pledge to President Gorbachev in 1990 that the power of NATO would not move one further inch eastward. Secretary of State James Baker gave this commitment at least three times on February 9 that year. This was in return for Russian acquiescence to the tragic error of German reunification, paving the way for an accelerating renaissance of an aggressively militarized and potentially neo-Nazi European hegemon.

    President George H. W. Bush (left) with the Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, and U.S. Secretary of State James Baker (right) in 1989. (Credit: theguardian.com)

    Yet in place of the 16 members of NATO that existed in 1990, we today have 30, and Ukraine is more and more desperately knocking on the door, conceivably to be followed by Georgia, Finland and Sweden. Current U.S. President Joe Biden, whose son enjoyed a senior place on the board of Ukraine energy giant Burisma, played a key role in that process of enlargement. The U.S. and Russia possess more than 90% of the world’s nuclear weapons, around 4,000 each.

    But the United States has deployed its weapons far closer to Russia than Russia has deployed weapons close to the U.S. (each power also has fleets of nuclear submarines: in 2018 the U.S. had 14, against Russia’s 12). The United States has positioned nuclear defense/offense capabilities close to Russian borders in countries such as Poland and Romania. There are between 160 and 240 U.S. atomic bombs in NATO countries, of which 50 to 90 are stored in Turkey, a NATO member. Britain (225) and France (300) have their own sizeable nuclear arsenals.

    (Source: atlanticcouncil.org)

    Although it is commonly presumed that a nuclear exchange would quickly move from incremental (if there is any moderation at all) to massive, assessments as to how a nuclear war would actually pan out are extremely complicated for both technological and geopolitical reasons. It is not beyond comprehension that a conflict might be confined to so-called low-yield nuclear bombs or mini-nukes. Nor is it at all certain that nuclear weapons will all work as they are supposed to (in fact, it is reasonable to presume they will not). Many uncertainties attend the newest generation of hypersonic missiles. And the functionality of so-called missile defense systems is perhaps most of all in question.

    In addition, there is the issue of the weaponization of nuclear reactors, which is to say their conversion into weapons by missile or other form of strike, whether intentional or otherwise. There are 15 reactors in Ukraine, and another 123 in Europe. The U.S. has 93, Russia 38. Not least is the danger of nuclear accident, which almost certainly increases in the context of accelerating tensions between countries at least one of which possesses nuclear weapons or countries that can strike the nuclear facilities or reactors of other countries. There have been at least a dozen or so near misses since the U.S. dropped nuclear weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.

    Although their deliberate use by the United States that year is the only time that nuclear weapons have actually been fired in conflict, there have been many instances in which the use of nuclear weapons has been seriously considered. Peter Kuznick and Oliver Stone, in their book The Untold History of the United States, relate several instances in which U.S. presidents have given serious consideration to their use. This featured in Winston Churchill’s Operation Unthinkable, formulated within weeks of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It contemplated a nuclear strike against Soviet Russia.

    The Pentagon developed at least nine such first-strike nuclear war plans before the Soviets tested their first atomic bomb in 1949. The 1949 Dropshot plan envisaged 300 nuclear bombs and 20,000 tons of conventional bombs on 200 targets in 100 urban areas, including Moscow and Leningrad (St. Petersburg). Fortunately, the U.S. did not have sufficient weaponry for the purpose at that time.

    (Source: express.co.uk)

    In the United States and its allies, Russia confronts an adversary which is the only country ever to have used nuclear weapons on another, although this made little concrete difference to the outcome of the Second World War. This is also an adversary which has many times since considered using nuclear weapons again, which tolerates the acquisition of nuclear weapons by its closest allies (e.g., Britain, France, Israel) and bitterly opposes even the faintest possibility of their acquisition by its opponents (e.g., North Korea and Iran).

    It is an adversary which fails to keep even its most important promises (e.g., about not allowing NATO to expand), a country which abrogates important treaties (as did Bush in abrogating the ABM treaty in 2002), and which has crowned itself as the rightful hegemon, entitled to crush any power, global or regional, that would dare challenge its hegemonic status (as in the “Wolfowitz doctrine” 1992, progenitor of the Bush doctrine in 2002 by which the U.S. entitles itself to preemptive war).

    Paul Wolfowitz (Source: geopoliticsca.ru)

    The U.S.’s credibility in international relations is profoundly undermined by: a long history of invasions and occupations of other powers—most egregiously, perhaps, in the case of Afghanistan 2001-2021, or that of Iraq (2003-2021), which can be counted along with many dozens of other instances since World War Two; overt and covert military interventions, with or without the consent of legitimate authorities, often reckless and cruel; fomenting of regime-change “color revolutions” as in Ukraine 2004 and 2014; and universal meddling with elections and political processes as in the activities of organizations such as Cambridge Analytica, and its parent Strategic Communications Limited, and the National Endowment for Democracy.

    Not least is its equally long-established history of lying, just about everything, but particularly in matters of war. The Pentagon Papers, exposed by Daniel Ellsberg in 1971 with respect to the Vietnam War, or the so-called Afghanistan Papers, gathered into book form by Craig Whitlock in 2021, should be sufficient cause for considerable alarm in this respect.

    There is a context here of a profound U.S.-led, multi-media and multi-targeted anti-Russia propaganda campaign that dates to the accession to the Russian presidency of Vladimir Putin in 1999-2000. It builds on previous relentless Cold War propaganda against the Soviet Union (which had us all thinking this titanic struggle was all about capitalism versus communism when it was really just about who could steal the most from the developing world), and on an even more distant anti-Russian campaign stretching back at least as far as the Crimean War of 1853-56—all chronicled by Gerald Sussmann, among others, in 2020.

    (Source: Russia-now.com)

    To this must now be added recent unfounded or presumptive anti-Russian harassment regarding an incessant and unlikely litany of all manner of accusations. These include the shooting down of MH17 in 2014; the attempted assassination of Sergei Skripal in 2018; purported collusion with Syrian President Assad over the use of chemical weapons; and, the most dramatic fable of all, alleged Russian hacking of DNC/DCCC servers and interference in the 2016 U.S. elections.

    Russia has had every reason for deep distrust of the United States and its NATO and European allies. In addition, as I have chronicled elsewhere, we must take account of US/EU/NATO abetment to the illegal Euromaidan coup d’état of 2014 that was staged against a democratically elected president in 2014, just months away from scheduled elections, and whose muscle was provided by long-established Ukrainian neo-Nazi movements implicated in the assassinations of hundreds of protestors in Kiev and Odessa. To secure “legitimacy” and to stuff the coup legislature with their own people, the new leaders were obliged to ban the country’s major political parties, including the Party of the Regions and the Communist Party.

    Scene from the 2014 Euromaidan coup. (Source: inquiriesjournal.com)

    Terrified by the anti-Russian threats of the coup leaders, the largely pro-Russian population of Crimea (including Sebastopol, Russia’s major Black Sea port, held on long-lease from Ukraine and where Russia was entitled to maintain thousands of soldiers) voted to secede from Ukraine and to seek annexation by Russia.

    In the significantly pro-Russian Donbass, citizens established the independent republics of Donetsk and Luhansk. Kiev has never deigned to negotiate directly with the republics, with its own citizens, but has instead, having lost the initial war, violently subjected residents to extensive shelling (with most of the casualties taking place in the republics) and spitefully withdrawn all social security protections.

    Workers bury the dead in Slovyansk in Eastern Ukraine where mass graves were found (Source: hrw.org)

    The republics did not seek annexation by Russia, nor did Russia entertain annexation. Instead, Russia negotiated the Minsk agreements through the “Normandy Round” in 2015-2016. This sought and agreed to greater autonomy for Donetsk and Luhansk within Ukraine. Unwilling or unable to combat its neo-Nazi extremists, Kiev proved unable to implement Minsk, nor did the international community, other than Russia, exert pressure on Kiev to make it happen.

    It would have taken unusual credulity and naivety on the part of Russian leaders not to have concluded by 2022 that the U.S. and, with some exceptions, its NATO and EU allies, were resolutely and unforgivingly hostile to Russia.

    Russia, having explored the possibility of accession to NATO in the 1990s and been rejected, resigned to the provocative continuation of NATO not just beyond the collapse of the Soviet Union—the very reason for NATO’s existence—but even beyond the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact in 1991. It has been targeted close to its borders by U.S./NATO nuclear weapons that are mockingly and ludicrously described as defenses against Iran’s (non-existent) nuclear missiles, and routinely humiliated and threatened by massive annual NATO military exercises along its borders and the Black Sea.

    Members of the U.S. Marine Corps perform military exercise in (now Russian-occupied) Kherson on July 28, 2021 (Source: reuters.com)

    Further, it has to listen to Ukrainian President and former clown Volodymyr Zelensky plead for speedier access of Ukraine to NATO membership (extending just days ago to a demand for the placement of nuclear weapons in Ukraine) and for a no-fly zone.

    As such it could have had no reasonable hope ever to be freed of the scourge of U.S./EU/NATO salivation for the break-up of the Russian Federation and unregulated freedom for Western capital, as prelude to the Western world’s ultimate confrontation with China.

    Whether Russian military exercises on the Russian side of the border with Ukraine from the end of 2021 were intended from the beginning as a platform for invasion is not clear. The invasion may have been provoked by the intensification of Ukrainian army assaults against the Donbass.

    Incessant, even hysterical, U.S. warnings of a Russian invasion may themselves have provoked exactly that outcome if it seemed to Russia that the United States was determined to stage any kind of provocation that would have made it impossible for Russia to resist.

    Presuming, surely correctly, that the U.S./NATO has long expected and salivated for a conflict that would provide sufficient pretext for the extermination of the Russian Federation, Russia decided on a measure of preemptive advantage at a singular moment when Russia possibly enjoys nuclear superiority over the West because of its further advance (at budgets a small fraction of those enjoyed by its adversary, whose military procurement practices are rife with corruption) of hypersonic missiles and a developing alliance with China.

    Putin has indicated willingness to keep moving until Russia conquers the entire territory of Ukraine. The more he can acquire, the more he can negotiate with. At the time of writing the areas under control resemble the buffer zone created by Turkey along its border with northwestern Syria and by the U.S. along Syria’s northeastern border. This seizure of the land of a sovereign nation to add to Turkish security from what it regards as the Kurdish threat, and which it is using to hold the most extremist jihadist groups that the West and others have exploited in their efforts to destabilize the Syrian government, did not occasion the squeals of indignation from Western media that we now hear from them with regard to Ukraine.

    Russian-controlled territory in Ukraine as of March 1, 2022 (Source: bbc.com)

    Nor did the U.S. grab for Syria’s oil fields, and for its most fertile agricultural land, under proxy Kurdish control. And when the refugees from the U.S. wars of choice in Iraq, Syria and Libya reached the gates of Europe they were inhumanely humiliated and turned away (even allowing for a surprising measure of German generosity). Unlike whiter refugees from Ukraine into Poland and other neighbors. The oozing hypocrisy of Western self-righteousness is merely par for the course.

    These considerations therefore help us to understand Russian preparedness to risk nuclear conflict. Indeed, it is possible that for Russia there is now no going back on the path to potential Armageddon. The decision to avert catastrophe has been thrown resolutely into the Western court. But what about the U.S. and its European allies? They are not in too great a hurry for the ultimate wet dream of Russian dissolution, although sooner would likely be more gratifying than later. For the moment, the conflict is well worth it, for as long as it is only Ukrainians who pay the ultimate price. Zelensky’s greatest folly has been to recklessly offer his country and its people as ground zero for World War Three.

    Volodymyr Zelensky (Source: marca.com)

    Short-term benefits for the West include a potential fillip to Joe Biden’s otherwise steep decline in domestic popularity. War has been the eternal answer to internal instability. It is too soon to say that the Ukraine crisis will help bridge the gulf between Democrats and Republicans, but there is a chance of some measure of healing, perhaps just enough to weaken the hold of the pro-Trump wing of the Republican Party.

    This in turn could be deeply reassuring to the military-industrial complex (or, as Ray McGovern calls it, the MICIMATT—the military-industrial-congressional-intelligence-media-academic-think tank complex) whose distrust for Trump’s wavering on Putin provided fertile ground for the success of the Clinton campaign’s fabrication of the Russiagate saga.

    Although Biden followed up on a shockingly incompetent withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021—alongside signs of a final exit from Iraq and from Syria—with a multi-billion dollar increase in the military budget, he has since advocated a further increase of 8% in 2022-2023.

    Since this is close to the rate of inflation, the weapons lobby will doubtless require another 4% or so, if they are being modest (unlikely), and a sharp increase in European tension will not only boost their cause for a further budget increase but will greatly incentivize the demand for weapons for years to come.

    The bloated U.S. 17-agency Intelligence community and its underworld of private contractors will be delighted that, for the first time in a generation, their intelligence (on the Russian invasion, at least) has been perceived by many to be correct, and that, for the first time in a generation, it is not a U.S. war of choice that must be lied about. Such a glorious moment of self-righteousness will go far in the propaganda business. So long as Intelligence can manipulate and coopt corporate, plutocratic, mainstream media, the extent and depth of previous U.S. evils need never prove an obstacle to beating the drums for perpetual war. The mainstream media can be relied upon to foreshorten the narrative, pull in the context, focus on only one side, demonize and personalize. Intelligence will always help with fabrication of what counts as “real.”

    The Ukraine crisis upends the energy markets in a way that puts even broader smiles on the faces of fossil-fuel bosses. The forced closure of Russia’s Nord Stream 2 natural gas pipeline from Russia to the rest of Europe will create an involuntary European appetite for (more expensive) U.S. LNG exports.

    (Source: nationalworld.com)

    The brunt of energy price increases will be suffered more by Europe than by the United States. Combined with growing European dependence on the U.S., the impoverishment of Europe is to the U.S.’s advantage, under the scope of the Wolfowitz doctrine, and sustains the buffer between Russia and the continental U.S. Pressure on the U.S. to return to a policy of self-sufficiency in energy will reinvigorate public tolerance for fracking and drilling, for pipelines and spills and fires (if the world is going to end in any case.).

    On the downside, from a U.S. perspective, higher energy prices will boost the Russian economy and sustain its servicing of Chinese and other Asian markets, provided they can work around U.S. sanctions (they will).

    Ukraine is a test of Chinese resolve in its move toward Russia, reminding it of the economic threats to Chinese interests from U.S. sanctions in countries of the Belt and Road initiative. But this will not be sufficient to shift China from what must surely be its conclusion that the United States is irredeemably wedded to the vision of a perpetually unipolar U.S. world.

    In Europe, the crisis will help Conservative Prime Minister Boris Johnson escape decapitation over the embarrassment of the “Partygate” scandal. It has already enhanced President Macron’s bid to appear statesmanlike in the face of upcoming elections in April, and his ability to ward off threats from the extreme right. But mainly, the crisis will benefit Germany which, in recent years, has broken free of its punitive post-war chains not only to burnish its long-established economic primacy but to rebuild and modernize its military, and to send arms to Ukraine. The sleazy proto-fascist governments of several new East European and former Soviet Union governments will feel similarly enabled and justified.

    But all these short-term outcomes notwithstanding, nobody should discount the possibility, short of a robust peace agreement, of nuclear war. If not a nuclear war, then prepare for a protracted global recession, if not depression.

    The sorrowful-but-gritty public faces of Europe’s equivalent to MICIMATT—Europe’s financial, plutocratic, military and intelligence elites—are President of the European Union Ursula von der Leyen, and NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg. Along with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, and French President Emmanuel Macron, it will be their faces we need to first scrutinize for a heads-up as to whether, finally, there is to be a public climb-down in the face of Russia’s nuclear checkmate. For that, indeed, is what it appears to be.

    • First published in CovertAction Magazine

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  • What Imaginary Incubators Can Teach Us About Ukraine

    (my book from 2004)

    When I write or post about the blatant propaganda swirling around the situation in Ukraine, some people get angry… at me. They don’t want to accept the truth so they take my highly-researched analysis personally. In turn, some will even attack me personally. I’ve been doing this a long time so I’m used to it and it will not deter me. With such programming in mind, I’ll once again offer one of the many, many examples of what passes for “normal” in the Home of the Brave™. 

    After being invaded by Iraq on Aug. 2, 1990, the government of Kuwait funded as many as 20 public relations, law, and lobby firms to marshal world opinion in its favor. One such firm was NYC-based Hill & Knowlton (H&K), which was paid at least $12 million to conspire with the Kuwaiti government.

    As part of this effort, H&K conducted a study to discern the most effective method for garnering widespread U.S. support in the defense of Kuwait. Put more bluntly: They were hired to find the quickest-acting propaganda. In no time, the answer was clear: emphasize the atrocities (real or imagined) committed by Iraqi soldiers. Enter “Nurse Nayirah” from Kuwait (see above photo).

    On Oct. 10, 1990 — without her background ever being vetted — Nayirah gave testimony to the Congressional Human Rights Caucus of the U.S. Congress. She tearfully described witnessing Iraqi troops stealing incubators from a hospital, leaving 312 babies “on the cold floor to die.” (watch below video)

    In reality, “Nurse Nayirah” was the 15-year-old daughter of Saud Al-Sabah, the Kuwaiti ambassador to the United States. She was an aspiring actress and the story was an elaborate hoax. Nayirah’s false testimony was part of H&K’s well-funded conspiracy of deception.

    All this came out too late to prevent mass slaughter — with no complaint from U.S. government officials, of course. For example, Brent Scowcroft, President Bush’s national security adviser at the time, claimed ignorance about the plot but admitted: “It was useful in mobilizing public opinion.”

    President George H.W. Bush repeated Nayirah’s fabrication multiple times as he rounded up Congressional support for his war plans in the months following her testimony. By way of justifying their “aye” votes, 7 U.S. senators also quoted Nayirah in their own speeches. The resolution passed on Jan. 14, 1991. Two days later (after months of deadly sanctions), the coalition bombing commenced.

    To accurately document the human cost in Iraq since Nayirah’s performance would require another full article. For now, I’ll leave you with findings from the London School of Economics in 2006: Between 1991 and 1998, there were an estimated 380,000 and 480,000 excess child deaths in Iraq due to the U.S.-led military actions and economic sanctions.

    The cruel irony is that deceitful testimony about murdered Kuwaiti children — as part of a well-orchestrated conspiracy — directly led to innumerable Iraqi children losing their lives over the next three decades.

    When attempting to unravel the behaviors of today’s ruling class, it helps to understand their actions in the past. Rather than getting angry at those who dash your red, white, and blue delusions about the US of A, do a little homework, educate yourself, and accept reality. It’s the only way anything will ever change.

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  • Today’s Emergencies Act, and Anti-Russian False Flags Echo the Gouzenko Hoax That Unleashed the Cold War

    Today, a new coordinated psychological operation has been sprung to convince every living patriot across the Five Eyes sphere of influence that the enemy of the free world who lurks behind every conspiracy to overthrow governments, and western values are Russia and China.

    Over the past months, slanderous, and often conjectural stories of Chinese and Russian subversion have repeatedly been fed to a gullible western audience desperate for an enemy image to attach to their realization that an obvious long-term conspiracy has been unleashed to destroy their lives. While the left has been fed with propaganda designed to convince them that this enemy has taken the form of the Kremlin, the conservative consumers of media have been fed with the narrative that the enemy is China.

    The reality is that both Russia and China together have a bond of principled survival upon which the entire multipolar order is based. It is this alliance which the actual controllers of today’s empire wish to both destroy and ensure no western nation joins… especially not the USA.

    Every day we read that secret lists of millions of Chinese communist party members have infiltrated western national governments or that espionage honey pots have targeted politicians, or Russia is subverting western democracies, and preparing false flags to invade its neighbors.

    In all cases, the stories pumped out by mainstream media rags reek of 1) Five Eyes propaganda psy-op techniques, and often unverified accusations, while 2) deflecting from the actually verifiable British Intelligence tentacles caught repeatedly shaping world events, regime change, infiltration, assassination and conspiracies for over a century including the push to overthrow Trump under a color revolution.

    Among the most destructive of these conspiracies orchestrated by British Intelligence during the past century was the artificial creation of the Cold War which destroyed the hopes for a multipolar world of win-win collaboration guided by a U.S.-China-Russia alliance as envisioned by FDR and Henry Wallace.

    When reviewing how this perversion of history was manufactured, it is important to hold firmly in mind the parallels to the current anti-China/anti-Russian operations now underway.

    Cold War Battle Lines are Drawn

    Historians widely acknowledge that the actual catalyst for the Cold War occurred not on March 5, 1946, but rather on September 5, 1945. It was at this moment that a 26-year-old cipher clerk left the Soviet Embassy in Ottawa with a list of code names for supposed spies planted within the British, Canadian and American governments controlled by the Kremlin. In total this young defector took telegram notes attributed to his boss Colonel Zabotin and 108 other strategic documents that supposedly proved the existence of this Soviet conspiracy to the world for the first time.

    The young clerk’s name was Igor Gouzenko, and the scandal that emerged from his defection not only created one of the greatest abuses of civil liberties in Canadian history, but a sham trial based on little more than hearsay and conjecture. In fact, when the six microfilms of evidence were finally declassified in 1985, not a single document turned out be worthy of the name (more to be said on that below).

    The outcome of the Gouzenko Affair resulted in the collapse of all U.S.-Canada-Russia alliances that had been fostered during fires of anti-fascist combat of WWII.

    Voices like Henry Wallace (former Vice-President under FDR) watched the collapse of potential amidst the anti-Communist hysteria and sounded the alarm loudly saying:

    Fascism in the postwar inevitably will push steadily for Anglo-Saxon imperialism and eventually for war with Russia. Already American fascists are talking and writing about this conflict and using it as an excuse for their internal hatreds and intolerances toward certain races, creeds and classes.

    In “Soviet Mission Asia,” Wallace revealed the true agenda for the conspiracy that would infiltrate nation states of the west and orchestrate the next 75 years of history saying:

    Before the blood of our boys is scarcely dry on the field of battle, these enemies of peace try to lay the foundation for World War III. These people must not succeed in their foul enterprise. We must offset their poison by following the policies of Roosevelt in cultivating the friendship of Russia in peace as well as in war.

    This fight against those actual top-down controllers of fascism whom Wallace had bravely put into the spotlight would sadly not prove successful. Between 1945 and the collapse of Wallace’s Progressive Party USA presidential bid in 1948, those strongest anti-Cold War voices both in the USA and in Canada were promptly labelled “Russian agents” and saw their reputations, careers and freedoms destroyed under the CIA-FBI managed spectre of the Red Scare and later McCarthyism. In Canada, Wallace’s Progressive Party co-thinkers took the form of the Labor Progressive Party (LPP) then led by Member of Parliament Fred Rose, LPP leader Tim Buck and LPP National Organizer Sam Carr — all three would represent the anti-Cold War fight to save FDR’s vision in Canada and all of whom would figure prominently in the story of Igor Gouzenko.

    The Gouzenko Hoax Kicks Off

    When Prime Minister King heard those claims made by Gouzenko, he knew that it threatened the post war hopes for global reconstruction and for this reason was very hesitant to make the unverifiable claims public for many months or even offer the defector sanctuary for that matter.

    After the story was eventually strategically leaked to American media, anti-communist hysteria skyrocketed forcing King to establish the Gouzenko Espionage Royal Commission on February 5, 1946 under Privy Council Order 411. Earlier Privy Council Order 6444 had already been passed extending the War Measures Act beyond the end of the war and permitting for detention incommunicado, psychological torture and removing Habeus Corpus of all those who would be accused of espionage.

    By February 15, 1946 the first 15 targets were arrested and held for weeks in isolation in Ottawa’s Rockliffe Military Barracks without access to family or legal counsel. All those arrested without charge suffered weeks of psychological torture, sleep deprivation and were put on suicide watch with no communication with anyone but inquisitors from the Royal Commission. Both Judges who presided over the show trial were rewarded with Orders of Canada and were made Supreme Court Justices in the wake of the affair.

    With a complete disregard for any notion of civil liberties (Canada still had no Bill of Rights), lead counsel E.K. Williams blatantly argued for the creation of the Royal Commission “because it need not be bound by the ordinary rules of evidence if it considers it desirable to disregard them. It need not permit counsel to appear for those to be interrogated by or before it”.

    During the show trial, none of the defendants were allowed to see any evidence being used against them and everyone involved including RCMP officers were threatened with 5 years imprisonment for speaking about the trial publicly. The only person who could speak and write boundlessly to the media was the figure of Igor Gouzenko himself. Whenever appearing on TV or in court, Gouzenko who was to charge over $1000 for some interviews and received generous book deals, and government pensions for life, always appeared masked in a paper bag on his head. Even though this cipher clerk never actually met any of the figures standing trial, his testimony against them was treated like gold.

    By June 27, 1946 the Royal Commission released its final 733 page report which, along with Gouzenko’s own books, became the sole unquestionable gospel used and re-used by journalists, politicians and historians for the next decades as proof of the vast Russian plot to undermine western values and steal atomic secrets. There was, in fact, nowhere else to go for a very long time if a researcher wished to figure out what actually occurred.

    As it so happened, all trial records were either destroyed or “lost” in the days after the commission disbanded, and if people wanted to look at the actual evidence they would have to wait 40 years when it was finally declassified.

    The result of the trials?

    By the end of the whole sordid affair, 10 of the 26 arrested were convicted and imprisoned for anywhere from 3-7 years. While these convictions are themselves often cited as “proof” that the Gouzenko evidence must have been valid, on closer inspection we find that this is merely the effect of a game of smoke and mirrors.

    It must first be noted that of the 10 found guilty, not one indictment or conviction of espionage was found. Instead, five defendants were found guilty of assisting in the acquisition of fake passports during the 1930s which were used by Canadian volunteers to fight with the MacKenzie-Papineau Battalions in the Spanish Civil War against Franco’s fascist coup while the other five were convicted of violating Canada’s Official Secrets Act during WWII entirely on Gouzenko’s testimony. The other 16 targets were released without ever having been charged of a crime. The two leaders of the supposed spy ring that received the longest sentences were Labor Progressive Party leaders Fred Rose and Sam Carr who had been the loudest advocates of FDR’s international New Deal and the exposure of the financial sponsors of fascism that aimed at world empire (more to be said on this in an upcoming report).

    When the Gouzenko evidence was finally declassified in 1985, Canadian journalist William Reuben wrote a fascinating analysis called “The Documents that Weren’t There” where he noted the absence of anything one could reasonably call “evidence” among the thousands of items.

    After spending weeks investigating the six reels of declassified microfilm, Reuben found only what could be described as “a hodgepodge, reminiscent of one of Professor Irwin Corey’s double talk monologues”.

    Listing the vast array of telephone directories from 1943, RCMP profiles, lists of travel expense vouchers and passport applications, Reuben asked:

    What is one to make of this jumble? With no indication as to when any of the exhibits were obtained by the RCMP, how they related to espionage or any wrongdoing and for the most part, no indication of when they were placed in evidence at the hearings it is impossible to determine their significance, authenticity or relationship to other evidence.

    In short, not a single piece of actual evidence could be found.

    Additionally when reviewing the 8 handwritten telegrams of Russian notes outlining the spy code names and instructions from the Kremlin which Gouzenko originally took from his embassy in 1945, no forensic evidence was ever attempted to match the handwriting with Colonel Zubatov to whom it was attributed and who always denied the accusation.

    Reuben goes further to ask where are the 108 secret documents that Gouzenko famously stole and upon which the entire case against the accused spies was based? These documents were not part of the declassified microfilms, and so he noted: “as with the eight telegrams, there is no physical evidence to prove that the originals existed or came from the Soviet Embassy”.

    He also asked the valid question why it was only on March 2, 1946 (six months after Gouzenko’s defection) that any mention was made of the 108 documents?

    Could the lack of evidence and the long gap in time be related to Gouzenko’s five and a half month stay at Ottawa’s Camp X spy compound under the control of Sir William Stephenson before his defection was made public? Could those apparent 108 documents used by Gouzenko’s dodgy dossier have anything to do with the Camp X Laboratory which specialized in forging letters and other official documents?

    If you find yourself thinking about the parallels of this story to the more recent case of the Brookings Institute’s Igor Danchenko who was found to be the “source” of the dodgy dossiers used to create RussiaGate by MI6’s Christopher Steele, Richard Dearlove and Rhodes Scholar Strobe Talbott, then don’t be shocked. It means you are using your brain.

    What was Camp X?

    Camp X was the name given to the clandestine operations training center in the outskirts of Ottawa Canada on December 6, 1941.

    It was created by the British Security Cooperation (BSC) headed by Sir William Stephenson- a spymaster who worked closely with Winston Churchill. BSC was created in New York in 1940 as a covert operation set up by the British Secret Service and MI6 to interface with American intelligence. Since the USA was still neutral in the war, Camp X was used to train the Special Operations Executive, as well as agents from FBI’s Division 5 and OSS in the arts of psychological warfare, assassination, espionage, counter-intelligence, forgeries and other forms of covert action.

    The leadership cadre that was to survive the purge of OSS in October 1945 and go on to lead the new CIA when it was formed in 1947 were all trained in Camp X.

    In his book Camp X: OSS, Intrepid and the Allies’ North American Training Camp for Secret Agents, historian David Stafford notes that Gouzenko’s attempts to contact media and government offices on the night of September 5, 1945 were met with cold shoulders and even Prime Minister William Lyon MacKenzie King himself wanted nothing to do with the man, writing in his diary: “if suicide took place let the city police take charge and secure whatever there was in the way of documents, but on no account for us to take the initiative.”

    It was only due to the combined direct intervention of Stephenson and Norman Robertson (head of External Affairs and leading Rhodes Scholar) after an emergency meeting, that King was persuaded to give Gouzenko sanctuary. King had not even known about Camp X’s purpose at the time.

    While King wished to defend FDR’s vision for a post-war world of cooperation with Russia, Stafford notes:

    Stephenson vigorously opposed King’s view. Like SIS headquarters in London, BSC (British Security Cooperation) for most of the war had operated a counter espionage section to keep an eye on Communist subversion… he was convinced, even before the Gouzenko affair, that BSC could provide the nucleus of a post-war intelligence organization in the Western Hemisphere. The cipher clerk’s defection provided him a golden opportunity. 1

    Canadian Journalist Ian Adams had reported that Gouzenko’s “defection came at a wonderful time when there was tremendous resistance from the scientists involved in developing the atomic bomb. They wanted to see an open book on the development of nuclear power with everybody collaborating so that it wouldn’t become the ungodly arms race that it did become and is today. So if Gouzenko hadn’t fallen into the western intelligence services’ lap, they would have had to invent somebody like him.”

    A Final Word on the Real Infiltration of Western Governments

    As Henry Wallace and FDR understood all too well, the real subversive threat to world peace was not the Soviet Union, or China… but rather the supranational financial-intelligence-military architecture that represented the globally extended British Empire that had orchestrated the dismemberment of Russia during the Crimean War, the USA during the Civil War and China during two Opium Wars. This was and is the enemy of the Labour Progressive Party of Canada that took the form of the Fabian Society CCF run by 6 Rhodes Scholars and it was this Rhodes Scholar/Round Table agency that was resisted by Canadian nationalists O.D. Skelton and Ernest Lapointe, and which fully took over Canada’s foreign ministry with their deaths in 1941.

    This story was told in my Origins of the Deep State in North America.

    This same hive of Rhodes Scholars and Fabians increasingly took control of American foreign policy with the death of Franklin Roosevelt, the ouster of Wallace and the rise of the new Anglo-American Special Relationship manufactured by Churchill, Stephenson and their lackies in the USA. This is the beast that infiltrated and undermined labor unions across the Five Eyes during the Cold War and ensured that pesky patriots like Paul Robeson, John Kennedy, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, and many others who resisted, would not be long for this world.

    This is the structure whose hands have shown themselves time and again behind the dodgy dossiers that started the Iraq War, to the false intelligence used to justify wars in Libya, and Syria. It is the same structure which has been caught managing the regime change in the USA since 2016 with its assets cooking up dodgy dossiers accusing Russia of putting their puppet into the White House, to orchestrating mass vote fraud in the elections of 2020.

    This is the same operation which has always aimed at dismembering the USA, Russia, China and every other nation state who may at any time utilize the power of their sovereignty to declare political and economic independence from this supranational parasite and choose to work together to establish a world of win-win cooperation rather than tolerate a new technocratic feudal dark age.

    • First published in Matt Ehret’s Insights

    1. Stephenson immediately flew two of his top SIS officials in from the BSC HQ in New York to manage the Gouzenko affair for the next 8 months: Peter Dwyer (head of counter-espionage for BSC) and Jean-Paul Evans. Evans is an interesting figure whose SIS successor was none other than triple agent Kim Philby who replaced him when he left his post as British liaison to the FBI and CIA in 1949. Evans himself went onto work with leading Round Table controller and soon Governor General Vincent Massey in the creation of a new system of promoting the arts in Canada pouring millions of dollars into modernist/abstract art, music and drama under the Canada Council which grew out of the Massey-Levesque Royal Commission for the Arts in Canada. This body founded in 1957 took over the reins of control from the CIA and Rockefeller Foundations who had formerly enjoyed a near monopoly sponsoring such things as part of the post-WWII cultural war against communism. Stafford notes that “the man who impressed Ottawa with his love of the arts had also played an important part in the history of Anglo-Canadian secret intelligence.”
    The post Today’s Emergencies Act, and Anti-Russian False Flags Echo the Gouzenko Hoax That Unleashed the Cold War first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Shotgun Science and Bio-Colonialism

    Introduction

    As an Ottawa resident and an anarchist, it seems to me that an ultra-leftist analysis at ground zero of this thing is fundamentally necessary, specifically concerning the Canadian Government’s draconian get vaxxed or get fired policy. Having walked the congested downtown of Ottawa, it’s clear that this is an issue that transcends the political spectrum between the left and the right, since all walks of life and political stripes can be found in the downtown these days, contra the mainstream media’s coverage. And the exact point where the left and right sides of the political spectrum meet is upon the Government’s authoritarian application of its get vaxxed or get fired policy.

    In short, to throw people out of work during a pandemic is insane and a serious error in judgment and governance. It is a total failure of leadership, policy, bureaucracy, and any form of decent human conduct during a global crisis when people are seriously struggling, both on the left and the right.  It is on this point, and this point alone, that any ultra-leftist analysis must revolve, and I dare say align with the other side of the political aisle. In my estimation, there is no significant issue for the ultra left pertaining to masks, social distancing, and lockdown policies since, from personal experience, it seems these innocuous practices have, to a certain extent, mitigated Covid-19 numbers, especially in my region. After all, people’s health must come before the economy.

    However, upon the dreaded get vaxxed or get fired policy, there can be no compromise, no retreat or surrender. The Government is coercively enacting a fascist policy straight out of the 1930’s fascist playbook in order to construct a scapegoat, a lightening rod capable of diverting attention away from the Government’s own major failures during the pandemic. In sum, the Government is attempting to whip the population into a fascist hysterical frenzy of hate and retribution against a small minority of the population so as to absolve the Government of the fact that it has seriously fucked up in a lot of ways. And its get vaxxed or get fired policy (a major Government fuck up) is the mechanism by which the State is ducking its own liabilities, misgivings, and responsibilities. And, from any ultra-left perspective, such draconian State authoritarianism must be met with the unbridled force of anti-authoritarianism, namely, anti-fascism by any means necessary.

    I

    At the moment, society is in the full-throes of shotgun science, shotgun science being a  State form of one-sided medical science administered by means of coercion, hysteria, and mandated totalitarian threats, rather than any notion of sound reasoned scientific argument and scientific study. In brief, shotgun science is a perversion of the principles of genuine scientific inquiry in service of political power and profit. It is the acceleration of scientific inquiry and scientific study haphazardly in service of political power and profit via the removal of safeguards, as well as an expedited product roll-out coupled with authoritarian mandates, or more specifically, one serious fascist mandate that overrides human rights, liberty, and/or autonomy. Shotgun sciences come into existence when the State arbitrarily installs itself as the great arbiter of scientific truth and falsehood, and shuts down debate and scientific inquiry, thus, fast-forwarding and accelerating the implementation of an inadequate science in and across socio-economic existence regardless of the immediate and long-term consequences.

    In short, shotgun science is a one-sided seemingly unanimous science, celebrated and buttressed by the repressive and ideological apparatuses of the State, which silence any and all dissenting voices by means of an underlying sense of terror and coercion, both mental and physical. To quote Paul Feyerabend, a shotgun science may be defined as a “monster Science that speaks with a single voice, [in the sense that it] is a paste job constructed by [a set of State-approved]  propagandists” for political and economic purposes.1 For Feyerabend, the real sciences never speak with a single voice because the real “sciences are full of conflict”.2 As a result, according to Feyerabend, any State-sanctioned shotgun “science cannot stand diverging opinions. [As a result,] it calls them [conspiratorial] lies” and, through the powers of the State apparatus, it strives to silence these diverging opinions and their scientific research permanently. In fact, any shotgun science paints itself to be an “alleged friend of reason, [but] it distorts it [in order] to make [reason fit its political and economic] intentions”.3

    In  sum, shotgun science is political anti-science and an exercise in an anti-scientific rationality, despite portraying itself to be the embodiment of the pure spirit of scientific study and scientific rationality. In a word, it is a grotesque distortion of real science in service of profit and a nefarious political agenda. It is the one-sided bias politicization of a science.  And, out of the logic of these shotgun sciences, the Government’s get vaxxed or get fired policy arose and flourished like a poison weed in the brains of our centrist politicians. Whereby, the State squarely places a sawed-off shotgun in the people’s back and declared with its usual smug righteousness, to quote Jean-Francois Lyotard, “adapt [yourself] to our ends—or else”.4

    II

    As a Métis aboriginal, when the liberal governments of the world saw fit to mandate vaccines and vaccine passports under pain of duress, it was clear the government was no longer in support of democracy or rights, but instead preferred the capitalist authoritarianism of big business and big pharma. And not unfamiliar with these types of coercive mandates, aboriginals have a long history of dealing with a State government, drunk on power and a sense of righteousness, who decrees authoritarian mandates, willy-nilly. That is a set of micro-fascist mandates whereby a segment of the population must cough up its children under pain of duress since the government has deemed itself the great arbiter of what is true and what is best for each and all. To note, fascists are the great historical proponents of authoritarian mandates. And like the fascists before them, the liberal governments of the world are rummaging through the fascist playbook for despotic policies in the sense that vaccine mandates and vaccine passports are akin to all those fascist decrees that littered the 1930s. In the liberal Government’s case it is to identify and ban the unvaccinated from employment and from participating in public life. Like the fascists of old, the Government’s get vaxxed or get fired policy is an attempt to exclude and discriminate against a segment of the population simply because they are exercising caution or the individual rights to abstain. And like the fascists of old, the Government is defending its draconian policy in the name of Nationalism, absolute power, and the (health) purity of the people, specifically, those people who support the Government’s political agenda, unconditionally.

    The injection mandate and passports discriminate against people’s right to choose, to move freely, and most importantly, to make a living. For example, abortion rights have given women the right to choose what they do with their bodies, pertaining to a specific medical procedure. And the same should apply with vaccines. People must be given the right to choose what they do with their bodies pertaining to a specific medical procedure regardless of consequences. This is what democracy and human rights are all about. You cannot pick and choose which rights you will champion on a given issue and which rights you will stomp on because it suits your myopic political agenda.

    Imagine an employer or the State giving women the ultimatum: you either get an abortion or you get fired, this is our business policy. You must submit to the specific medical treatment of our work establishment or you starve on the unemployment line, either/or. In the sense that to work for us, you must resign your bodily autonomy to us, to do with as we please, medically. Like Doctor Mengele, who medically experimented with prisoners of the German State against their bodily autonomy and will, the Liberal Government is flirting with the same fascist modus operandi. Although, not as extreme, the same logic applies with mandatory vaccination and passports, get vaxxed or get fired. And clearly, being fired is the labor market equivalent of facing a fascist firing squad.

    III

    Ultimately, the State is ill-equiped and too ideologically partisan to be able to make any type of informed decision as to what people should put in their bodies pertaining to a specific medical treatment. We would call any government, who attempts to impose a ban on abortion, fascist.

    And, in all honesty, it is our democratic duty at the moment to categorize the current liberal government and all its obedient media lackeys as fascists for supporting these get vaxxed or get fired policies. Because that is what they are — when these authoritarians and totalitarians attempt to arbitrarily remove rights from a segment of the population because this segment does not buy into the State-manufactured ideological tripe paraded before our eyes.

    Abortion rights and vaccine injection rights are the same thing. You cannot champion abortion rights for one segment of the population, allowing them to make an informed decision about their own bodies, while denying the same rights to others when it comes to a different medical treatment. This is what Systemic Discrimination is, People!

    It is giving leeway and rights to one segment of the population through State policies while denying another segment of the population the same rights, through another set of State policies. And both abortion rights and vaccine refusal rights work according to the same logic. That is, people must have bodily autonomy and bodily governance over their own bodies pertaining to their own personal decisions concerning various types of medical procedures. Whether it is abortion rights or the right to refuse a shitty vaccine, choice must fall with the individual and never with the State! In the sense that the State is too political, too partisan, too heavy-handed, clunky, bureaucratic, and mediocre to fully grasp the plethora of nuances, varieties, and differences found throughout the general-population. The State’s only job is to offer safe medical options and never to coercively impose by force one option upon the general-population, by means of terror, the terror of unemployment, a shotgun in people’s faces.

    IV

    History repeats itself, but, history repeats itself in a different form every time, hence its cunning and its ability to dupe the gullible over and over again. And like the authoritarian residential school mandates applied to aboriginals, once again we are faced with a totalitarian coercive mandate against our will and under pain of duress by a government who has lost its mind, but nonetheless, once again, has the gerrymandered support for its vile authoritarian State decrees, which are anti-democratic and straight out of the fascist playbook. Sunny ways have degenerated into an authoritarian State nightmare.

    As a result, there is a strong likelihood that our future descendants, one hundred years from now or sooner, after endless denials, white-washing, and the smothering of facts by the State and its media propagandists, will be privy to another flurry of half-hearted apologies by another set of mediocre State-officials, bemoaning another State tragedy that could have been avoided if cooler and smarter heads had prevailed. And this time around, the teary-eyed apologies will be about the handling of Covid-19 and the implementation of the authoritarian State injection mandate and passports. Aboriginals know these half-hearted apologies all too well and have been their recipients all too often.

    To have doubt; i.e., healthy doubts, is the cornerstone of any real science. To quote Paul Feyerabend, “science is not one thing, it is many. Science…[is] a wide variety of [opinions and] products held together, rather artificially (or should I say artistically) by a single name”.5  Science is never completely unanimous. It is never totalitarian. It is messy with many diverging verities. As Feyerabend states, “science is full of lacunae and contradictions”.5  Science does not speak in a single voice and does not offer a single coherent viewpoint, no matter how hard the State tries to pass off its shotgun science as unified, safe, and without side effects. Indeed, there are many undocumented side effects, not including the State-manufactured trauma of having to face unemployment head-on, due to a set of State-approved, authoritarian micro-fascist injection mandate. From an aboriginal perspective, the get vaxxed or get fired policy raises the spectre of colonialism all over again in a new guise, that is, the guise of bio-colonialism, bio-colonialism being the forceful application of State coercion via the medical community upon a racial minority who refuse to abide by a shoddy ineffective science.

    Ultimately, doubt and plurality are central features of science, scientific rationality, and scientific inquiry. They are the double-helix at the center of science, by which science oscillates, and slowly, carefully, and rationally advances. And when the State shuts down dissenting voices and freedom of choice, it turns science into a grotesque monstrosity. It turns science against scientific rationality and/or logical-reason, that is, the pivot upon which any genuine science is founded and developed. In fact, the State transforms science into a totalitarian, I dare say, fascist-like Frankenstein monster, one that goose-steps across the globe with ear plugs in and blinkers on, regardless of the collateral damage it causes.  In short, science only becomes totalitarian when it is super-charged by a State-manufactured army of submissive centrist extremists, who saturate and populate the offices and cubicles of the State apparatus, as well as the talking slots of the mainstream media, spewing the State talking points on cue, devoid of critique and/or critical thinking.

    In fact, a good rule of thumb is that whenever any State-approved scientist talks to you about the unanimous authoritarian nature of a specific science, you are in the presence of a quack, peddling another shotgun science. A quack is, by definition, a medical stool pigeon, who quacks on cue the latest platitudes presented to him or her by the State. A quack is a person with medical credentials who, being quite mediocre in the general practice of medicine and the general research of science and, broadly speaking, the philosophy and inherent ethics of science, finds refuge upstairs in the corridors of State power, that is, in the special administrative channels of scientific institutions as an obedient government lackey and spoke-person, namely, a quack on demand.  To reiterate Feyerabend, “there is not a single science”.6 Thus, whenever, you hear State officials or State-approved scientists speak in absolutes, you are in all likelihood being forced-fed a soup of verbal diarrhea by a government lackey, a quack at the beck and call of the higher-ups in the Medical-Darwinian hierarchical pyramid.

    V

    All things considered, there is nothing abnormal or conspiratorial about having serious doubts about a fast-food, shotgun type of government science, which is being rammed down the throats of citizens, a double-barrel shotgun pressed tight against the curve of their backs, care of the State and our profit-driven capitalist employers. In the short-term, these shotgun sciences are shoddy and full of questions and untested hypotheses. And most shotgun sciences lead to catastrophes in the long run, akin to the authoritarian mandated horror show that was John A. Macdonald’s State-approved residential school genocidal program.  In fact, any shotgun science works best under the heavy blanket of ideology and hysteria since shotgun science is political and economic, first and foremost. And the liberals, whether federal or municipal, have showered the National airwaves with gallons upon gallons of mass hysteria. One only needs to examine the news coverage of the Freedom Convoy’s first weekend in Ottawa to see an endless parade of Government lackeys, hysterical politicians, propagandists, and State-partisan news journalists, hysterically attempting to manufacture large-scale public hysteria against the convoy and in favor of drastic forms of State-repression (Goebbels would be so proud of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s dreadful one-sided coverage that initial weekend).

    Notwithstanding, this is the operationa mechanics of shotgun science, namely, how it functions and operates on the ground; how it uses a mainstream media monolgue, devoid of critique and/or dissent, to drown out any and all opposing viewpoints to its own State-manufactured, distorted, alternate pseudo reality. Shotgun science conceals its own scientific inadequacies by pounding a State-manufactured scapegoat, politically, ideologically, and economically, that is,  a scapegoat of the State’s own design. In the sense that all shotgun sciences are foremost concerned with profit and the submission of the general population to the State. Shotgun science is about political, ideological, and economic profitability at the expense of a State-manufactured scapegoat. It is about the health of the State and its State power before the health of the citizenry.

    Like the despot John A. Macdonald before, the federal government and its provincial and municipal underlings, have returned to John A.’s preferred mode of State terror so as to ram through another set of dubious State policies, namely, another round of dubious authoritarian John A. State mandates, namely, the get vaxxed or get fired State-policy. However, this time around, the State-imposed colonialism is biological in nature. It is bio-colonialism. That is, the coercive enforcement of a State-mandated medical treatment against the free will and autonomy of indigenous persons and/or the general-population. Like abortion rights for women, medical rights apply to all people. Everyone has the right to choose what they put into their own bodies, what treatment they will subject themselves to.

    Yet, the average vaccine-marinaded citizen is giving full-fledged support to our government’s bio-colonialist John A. authoritarian mandate, oblivious to the financial consequences of such flagrant despotism. In the sense that most citizens are spellbound by the government’s vox populi, bellowing loudly and incessantly from the government’s bull-horn, namely, the State-gospel according to the CBC, the Canadian Brainwashing Corporation.

    Therefore, at this exact moment in history, to refuse shoddy vaccination is one of the most courageous and heroic things a person can do right-now, especially as an ultra-leftist. Any State that partakes in authoritarian shotgun science must be resisted since all forms of authoritarianism must be resisted, at whatever the cost.  And, as an anarchist and an aboriginal, I will not submit to another State-approved authoritarian mandate like the ones imposed upon my indigenous ancestors. To exercise caution and patience, when it comes to these fast-food shotgun sciences, is good practice. No one should take the Government at its word without doing his or her due diligence.

    Due to the fact that when the State and a shoddy science make a covenant, science is no longer benign and neutral. Indeed, science becomes a political and economic force, a highly partisan politico-economic force, whose notion of consensus becomes like that of the State, namely, that consensus is subjugation. In the sense that, according to the State, a consensus is reached when all dissenting voices are silenced, ignored, and/or marginalized into acquiescence, due to the fact that, for the State apparatus, consensus and subjugation are one and the same thing. One implies the other. Subjugation is consensus and consensus is subjugation, according to the State.

    In a nutshell, the State builds consensus by silencing all dissenting voices, and, according to the State, a dissenting voice not heard is a consenting voice, nodding jubilantly in approval. Thereby, the fundamental values of real science; i.e., inquiry, debate, counter-argument, doubt, rationality, independent research etc., are usurped and made inoperative when, by covenant, the State absorbs a science into its partisan authoritarian agenda.  And, at that moment, scientific inquiry is corrupted by the State. It becomes an ideological tool of statecraft. It becomes a shotgun science, a degenerate version of its former self, whereby the verity of scientific facts, scientific rationality, and the efficacy of scientific treatments are in the end determined by the partisan political agenda of the State and, more importantly, capitalist profit. The motto of any shotgun science backed by the State, is: “a patient cured is a customer lost”.  As Feyerabend states, when science is subjugated to the State, scientific “research in large institutes is [no longer] guided by Truth and Reason, but by the most rewarding [element of the economy, namely,]…money”.7   And  the authoritarian vaccine mandate and passports are a sure way for the State to make sure that Big Pharma gets the large sums of money and big profits it so desperately desires and has forcefully imposed upon the Liberal Governments of the world.

    Thus, regardless of the consequences, authoritarianism in all its forms, medical or otherwise, must be resisted by any means necessary if need be. And indeed, I am willing to put my money where my mouth is, willing to sacrifice my employment (or worse) for the most basic founding principle of any open-participatory democracy, ANTI-AUTHORITARIANISM! Better to die, principles intact, with a breathing machine stuffed-down my throat than to submit to a set of duplicitous State officials who are currently dabbling in fascist John A. mandates and a new State form of hard-line paternalistic authoritarianism.

    And no-one should want to live in a world where the State exercises blatant forms of State-sanctioned fascist decrees at the expense of democracy and democratic human rights. It is better to give one’s life for anti-authoritarianism and cherished human rights than to live under the fascist thumb of a set of centrist liberal fanatics and their degenerate Statecraft experiments in hard-line totalitarian despotism!

    Bottom-line, the spirit of any real science is never despotic.  It only becomes so when the capitalist State apparatus subjugates it for its own political and economic ends. Because, as Feyerabend states, “science [is comprised of] many different [scientific] areas…which are run by people with different interests and, [thus], produce widely differing results”.8  Real science does not require a State-sanctioned shotgun in one’s face in order to be accepted as fact as the grounding factuality of any real science invariably converts rational people to its basic scientific facts over an extended period of time without the threat of unemployment and/or any hard-line anti-democratic mandate or passport.

    Only by means of the State and its zombie army of State-approved medical quacks can the creative spirit of scientific study be extinguished and turned into something authoritarian, that is, the tyranny of science over scientific rationality, scientific inquiry, and sound ethics. To quote Feyerabend, it is “by irrational means such as propaganda, emotion,… [that] a blind faith [in any shotgun]…science [becomes]…sound knowledge”.9 In short, as the saying goes, a well-crafted State falsehood has the chance to go half-way around the world before the truth can even get its pants on. Or more apropos, a shoddy shotgun science has the chance to go into the blood-stream of half the world’s population before genuine scientific research can even get its syringe filled and ready to counter the government’s own credentialized snake oil peddlers, namely, the snake oil peddlers of these dubious State-sanctioned shotgun sciences.

    All in all, according to Feyerabend, the shotgun sciences are nowadays first and foremost “business enterprises run on business principles”, backed by the power of the State.10  And, when it comes to any shotgun science, the ethics and principles of real science are muted in favor of the profit imperative and the political agenda of the State, which are the central pillars of any shotgun science. The point is power and profit. The point is to manufacture ideological hysteria in service of greater profits and more draconian powers.

    Unfortunately, the liberal-centrist State has descended into a form of radical centrist extremism with its injection mandate, passport, and these shotgun sciences. The fact of the matter is we the people are being ideologically massaged by the State and its media outlets daily, so they can change the narrative and cover up their errors, failures, and mishaps through their very own creative statistical experimentations.

    VI

    In the meantime, by State mandate, the vast majority of the global citizenry line up on the global treadmill of these assembly-line shotgun sciences like Christian parishioners looking for absolution by syringe; i.e., 1 shot, 2 shots, 3 shots, 4 shots etc., endlessly into the future, year after year, with no end in sight, cash registers ringing with sweet delight. Indeed, not until the citizenry is aptly marinaded by the revelry of State ideology and the periodic unexplained fevers and strokes of these new shotgun sciences run-amok can the citizenry be deemed fit for work, fit for public service, and fit for democracy, according to these John A. authoritarian neo-liberals.

    Norms about truth and falsehood are based upon ethical decisions. Ethics is the basis that drives real science and real scientific inquiry, and when the ethics are corrupt, duplicitous, and down-right authoritarian, shotgun science is the result. Thus, when any shotgun science, backed by the overwhelming power of the State, is put into practice, it is inevitable that there will be collateral damage; i.e., accidents, accidents conveniently buried by government statistics and propaganda.

    In fact, as if by magic, the grim reality of these vaccine accidents will be massaged by the State. They will be given a thorough rubdown by the State. Whereas any damning visible facts will be downplayed by the soothing digital touch of creative statistical massages, care of the mind-numbing propagandists of the State. To quote Feyerabend, “scientific ideas [and empirical data] can be modified in many ways, [since, empirical data]…can be interpreted in a strict way and in more lenient ways. [Ultimately, State] models are [never] direct pictures of reality”, no matter how much the zombie army of State medical quacks repeat this State-sanctioned talking point on cue with ardent religious regularity. There will always be more than one way to fry an egg.11

    In the final analysis, any hard-edge scientific facts against the State’s partisan agenda are to be polished clean, care of the many docile, obedient, and hopelessly servile State officials and/or medical professionals looking for a little morsel of media recognition. As a result, any hard-edge scientific facts will be concealed from public view and public scrutiny, hidden conveniently inside the broad general data sets, numbers, and numeric models, paraded before our screens by the functions and operations of State-manicured modeling, devoid of critique and/or dissent because dissent and critique have been outlawed by the State and its partisan media outlets. Like residential schools statistics, the numbers will be massaged in favor of the State and its civil servants. To quote Feyerabend, “empirical evidence is [always] sifted and str’amlined in accordance with [a State-approved] criteria that were [ultimately] developed in a [government] office” so as to serve the State’s partisan agenda rather than the principles of rigorous scientific inquiry. 12

    In the end, the State must preserve its purity, sanctity, legitimacy, and supremacy first and foremost, even when it is wrong and/or makes a slew of significant errors along the way. It must always be perceived to be empathetic and on the right side of history, even when it is not. And to do this, the State must have the final say on what constitutes scientific truth. Therefore, according to Feyerabend, “power over minds and institutions [plays an] important…role in [any State] science”, despite the fact that “questions of [scientific] reality are too important to be left [solely] to [the State’s zombie-army of politically pliable] scientists”.13

    In truth, the individual must be given reasonable room and freedom to rationally decide what constitutes scientific verity for him or herself without State-sanctioned consequences. Thus, when the State takes an authoritarian paternalistic stance against freedom of choice by outlawing the freedom of choice of individuals, the State shows its true colors. That is, the State shows it is inherently totalitarian, nothing but a mechanism of subjugation, working on behalf of a small aristocracy; i.e., the 1 percent and Big Pharma, against the general-population, namely, the 99 percent, which the State seeks to keep docile, ignorant, and in the dark about the real scientific facts. For Feyerabend, “every [science] has opponents”.14  And when, these opponents are censored, bullied, and/or prevented from freely sharing and freely choosing to abstain, scientific advancement and scientific rationality are short-circuited. They are short-circuited in service of super profits and State ideology. Whereby scientific advancement and scientific rationality are distorted beyond recognition in service of State propaganda, State ideology, and the instant profitability of these weaponized shotgun sciences. For the aboriginal community, this is means a new and improved form of State-sanctioned, John A. bio-colonialism, whereupon, aboriginals and the general-population must donate their bodies, including those of their children, in service of the State, which, like its past, the State denied aboriginals their human rights, not to mention the rights of the general-population.

    Conclusion

    As the residential school catastrophe has shown, regardless of the immediate costs, the State will never admit wrongdoing or immediate errors in judgment, until generations upon generations have passed on and the initial State-sanctioned trauma has been significantly dulled in people’s minds. Then, and only then, after many decades, with overflowing crocodile tears, akin to the crocodile tears pouring out of any well seasoned actor or actress, the State will offer up a plethora of empty apologies, worthy of a Shakespearean melodrama since its supremacy is now secured and no longer threatened by the obvious ineptitude of its own State-personnel.

    Ultimately, whenever the State resorts to totalitarian mechanisms such as shotgun science, vaccine passports, and a get vaxxed or get fired policy, it does so foremost in order “to keep the capitalist production machine going”, in the sense that keeping the capitalist production machine going is the prime objective of the State, not the lives of people, per se.15  The health of people is only a distraction and/or a secondary consideration to corporate interests.

    Thus, by forcefully injecting the public with doses upon doses of a shoddy shotgun science, including a constant stream of State-propaganda, according to Feyerabend, it “only shows how little objectivity there is in [these so-called shotgun] scientific arguments”, peddled to us daily by the State’s zombie-army of medical quacks/lackeys.15

    It is true, as Feyerabend argues, that  State “science…seems [to be] an irresistible force,…but only if you…give into the PR of the [State] science mafia”, since, in actuality, as Feyerabend articulates, “different sciences have vastly different [voices and] ideologies”.16 In the sense that genuine science is never authoritarian and/or unified. Real science is a plurality. It is open-ended and full of scientific deviations and mutations. To quote Feyerabend, real “science is…complex and heterogeneous”.17 Or more specifically, “there are many different kinds of scientists [and] there are [many] different [ kinds of scientific] opinions”, nothing is truly settled or unanimous in the real sciences, once and for all.18 Real science is always evolving and rewriting its paradigms. It is only the shotgun sciences that are truly unanimous, unitary, and static once and for all, but they are only unanimous, unitary, and static by means of State terror; i.e., the forceful acquiescence of the general-population to a shoddy ineffective science by means of State coercion, namely, by way of the shotgun; i.e., by way of an authoritarian mandate and passport.

    When all is said and done, to quote Feyerabend, “the sciences are [never] the last authority” and, even more so, when it concerns the validity of any shotgun science.13  The final authority is always the individual. And to deny and forcefully subjugate the individual to the State is the historical definition of fascism. And, if the barbarism of the residential schools has taught us anything, it is that any fascist-like tyranny, like mandatory injections, must be opposed with every fibre of one’s being no matter the cost, especially if this fascism stems from the authoritarian paternalism of the State. And no matter how benevolent the State and its submissive lackeys paint themselves out to be in the biased mainstream media, the fact of the matter is John A. authoritarian mandates are despotic and piss all over indigenous rights to self-governance and the personal bodily autonomy of the general-population. In essence, the State apparatus is riven with incompetence and mediocrity, as the best and brightest are blocked from the upper echelons of the State apparatus due to the fact that they do not subscribe heart and soul to the dominant State ideology and the religious centrist fanaticism of its State officials, who have lost all scruples to the grand spectacle of bio-colonialism and these shotgun sciences.

    All told, true science is conflict. It is a plurality of miniature power struggles in and across a litany of micro-fronts, concerning what is true and what is false, what is ethical and what is not whereby the freedom of the individual always has the final say. To violently repress individual freedom and coercively impose another form of State-sanctioned colonialism; i.e., bio-colonialism, upon aboriginals, or anyone for that matter, is to castrate democracy and  transform all indigenous rights, and all human rights into a joke, a falsity without consistency in its application.

    Overall, real science is one of the most important theaters of power struggle, that is, the power struggle in between the 1 percent and the 99 percent. And the pandemic has only intensified these power struggles, having clearly demonstrated that the State invariably sides with the 1 percent and the economy against the 99 percent and its bodily autonomy.  In the age of totalitarian capitalism, the State delivers its health services and recovery benefits by means of terror, that is, by means of a sawed-off shotgun, the sawed-off shotgun of State-sanctioned unemployment and the terror of financial ruin.

    My Body! My Land! My Governance!

    Postscript

    The most vile aspects of history tend to repeat themselves in new disguises, and like John A. Macdonald before, we the people are witness once again to a State government stomping on aboriginal rights and people’s rights to self-governance and bodily autonomy. The State is attempting to purge non-compliant people from employment, so as to reassert its power against a segment of the population it seeks to utterly destroy financially. Thus, we must break the ideological spell of the State, its despotism, and its latest doctored platitudes that seem to indicate that the vast majority of people are devoid of critical thinking and lack any adequate understanding of what actually constitutes human rights!

    Any time the State resorts to John A. authoritarian mandates, whether it is mandated residential school attendance or mandated vaccinations, the State is partaking in an excessive use of force against a minority, a minority of the population, which the State sees fit to exterminate and humiliate so as to safeguard and enlarge its power and supremacy into the future. The State has learnt nothing from the mandated atrocities it has sanctioned in the past! Thus, it is doomed to repeat another set of discriminatory acts, because, once again, it puts its faith in John A. authoritarian mandates against a minority, a specific segment of the general-population it seeks to crush into acquiescence.

    All told, having sufficiently learnt the lessons of my residential school ancestors, there will be no reconciliation here! I will not submit to another anti-aboriginal John A. authoritarian mandate, imposed by a government out of control and out of its mind, whatever the cost! Due to the fact that the State and its government lackeys are clearly high on liberal ideology and fascist bio-accelerations. And now, the State is functioning and operating beyond the pale of reasonable restraint and any decent human conduct. Sunny ways have devolved into an authoritarian nightmare! And if the State does not return from the brink of authoritarian catastrophe, it will have to be forcefully demolished, one way or another.

    Because  I will not be marinaded ad nauseam by any type of State-sanctioned fast food shotgun science! I will not be another guinea pig, another faceless numeric bar code on a cell phone, another compliant pin cushion of a failed State, attempting to line the pockets of Big Pharma; i.e., those corporate aristocrats who are really calling the shots inside those so-called liberal governments of the world!

    All in all, we are faced with an anti-democratic, authoritarian-paternalist State right now. And it has learnt nothing from John A. Macdonald and his degenerate daddy-knows-best, authoritarian genocidal fascism, that is, the unmitigated terror of his authoritarian residential school mandates! Therefore, faced with the Government’s get vaxxed or get fired policy, I can only raise my fists to the sky and yell out with certain conviction, resolve, and an inflexible iron will:

    BY ANY MEANS NECESSARY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

    1. Paul Feyerabend, The Tyranny Of Science, ed. Eric Oberheim (Malden, MA, USA: Polity Press, 1996)  p. 56.
    2. Ibid, p. 56.
    3. Ibid, p. 74.
    4. Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, trans. Brian Massumi, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999, p. 64.
    5. Paul Feyerabend, Against Method, (London, England: Verso, 2010) p. 204.
    6. Ibid, p. 203.
    7. Paul Feyerabend, The Tyranny of Science, ed. Eric Oberheim (Malden, MA, USA: Polity Press, 1996) pp. 73-74.
    8. Ibid. p. 9.
    9. Paul Feyerabend, Against Method, (London, England: Verso, 2010) p. 113.
    10. Paul Feyerabend, The Tyranny of Science, ed. Eric Oberheim (Malden, MA, USA: Polity Press, 1996) p. 73.
    11. Ibid, p. 50.
    12. Ibid, p. 47.
    13. Ibid, p. 51.
    14. Ibid, p. 66.
    15. Ibid, p. 53.
    16. Ibid, p. 55.
    17. Paul Feyerabend, Against Method, (London, England: Verso, 2010) p. 105.
    18. Paul Feyerabend, The Tyranny of Science, ed. Eric Oberheim (Malden, MA, USA: Polity Press, 1996) p. 57.
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  • The Fear Not to Be

    This year marks the seventieth anniversary of the theologian Paul Tillich’s famous book, The Courage to Be.  Widely read in the days when an educated public read books, it is long forgotten.  In it, Tillich surveys the history of anxiety and fear and their relation to courage, religious faith, and the meaning of life.  His closing sentence – “The courage to be is rooted in the God who appears when God has disappeared in the anxiety of doubt” – became acclaimed as an astute description of the existential need to find a foundation for faith and courage when their foundations were shaking.

    His writing profoundly influenced many, even when they didn’t wholly agree with him.  This included Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who, commenting on Tillich’s death in 1965, said, “His Christian existentialism gave us a system of meaning and purpose for our lives in an age when war and doubt seriously threatened all that we had come to hold dear.”

    I mention The Courage to Be not to engage in a recondite theological and philosophical analysis, which is the last thing we now need, but to contrast his call for spiritual courage with what we have been experiencing pouring forth from the mass corporate media for years  There is a drumbeat of fear-mongering so intense and constant that it is almost comical if it weren’t so effective in reducing people to quaking, frightened children.

    Primarily about Covid and the need to obey the authorities and submit to being jabbed with mRNA Covid “Vaccines” – the idolatrous religion of bio-security – this  religion of fear goes much further and much deeper.  Scenarios of fear have been rehearsed and produced for decades by the intelligence/IT/media giants on a multitude of issues, large and small.  They are rooted in a spiritually nihilistic political propaganda campaign that is exponentially increasing fear, anxiety, and despondency on a vast scale, which is its intent.  Fearful people are easily cowered and controlled.  The elites know that regular people throughout the world are fed up with being subjected to violence and abuse in multiple forms, and if courage triumphs over their fears, they might join in worldwide solidarity and revolt, as they have been doing in various places recently. To prevent this, the authorities must use terror tactics to divide and conquer them. If people dare to rise up and even question the propaganda, they have been and will be called terrorists for doing so.  Dissent is now equated with terrorism and thus it must be censored.

    All this fear-mongering draws on people’s normal fears of “not to be,” meaning dead. It is, of course, understandable not wanting to be dead, but living in constant fear is a living death.  Tillich, who suffered deep trauma as a chaplain in the trenches of WW I and was later dismissed from his teaching position in Germany when Hitler came to power, wrote that courage is rooted in the spiritual acceptance that underlying our individual lives is the power of Being, by which he meant God, and that fear and anxiety about our fates can be confronted only through the courage to accept in faith this foundational reality.

    I think it is self-evident to anyone who glances at the mainstream media that fear is their staple.  In just the last week or so, I have seen The New York Times, an official organ of propaganda if there ever were one but known historically as the Grey Lady for understatement, tell its readers in a hyperventilating style that anxiety about climate change has spawned a growing field of therapeutic treatment for sufferers, how deer in your back yard are infected with Omicron, how the Russians are coming, etc.  This is the typical fear promoting propaganda that headlines all the media sites every day and has been doing so for years.  Any casual observer can list them on a daily basis, from major to minor matters to fear.

    Yet despite this constant, blatant propaganda, governments flip the truth and warn that anyone who questions this are conspiracy theorists intent on causing trouble and therefore must be watched and refuted. Just the other day the U.S. Department of Homeland Security issued a “Summary of Terrorism Threat to the U.S. Homeland,” saying:

    The United States remains in a heightened threat environment fueled by several factors, including an online environment filled with false or misleading narratives and conspiracy theories, and other forms of mis- dis- and mal-information (MDM) introduced and/or amplified by foreign and domestic threat actors.

    After twenty years of such obvious propaganda, you would think these people would be embarrassed, but they obviously are not and intend to propagate this bullshit for years to come.  They and their media accomplices have taken their lingo lessons straight from Nineteen Eighty-Four.

    On the bio-security religious front alone, Kit Knightly of Off-Guardian has recently reported that the authorities have warned us that there is a vast underdiagnosis of heart disease that may stealthily be coming to get us (not from “vaccines,” of course) and that HIV testing and vaccines look to be the next big push, for there is now the claim that a new variant of HIV is spreading in Europe.  President Biden declared in December 2021 that his administration was aiming to “end the HIV/Aids epidemic by 2030.”  While Covid restrictions may be easing, the mRNA “vaccine push” is not, and their promoters will only find different germs to defeat with “vaccines” and tests to ease the fears of the propagandized public, so many of whom have been turned into hypochondriacs.

    The promulgation of the fear of germs and disease and foreign and domestic “threat actors” is permanent.  For anyone naively thinking that there will be an easing of this elite war of lies, I would suggest they rethink that assumption.  The state of siege that is the Covid crisis will be followed by many more, and this germ warfare includes a vast array of foreign variants, led by Russia and China.  We are in a permanent crisis and emergency engineered by the ruling classes to maintain their control.

    This elite war against regular people has no end in sight.  The elites know that people get worn down over time and lose hope; thus, they plan for the long haul and keep hammering away.  Paul Tillich’s book is important because of its stress on the need for courage in the face of the fear-mongering.  Without a spiritual foundation to sustain one for the long haul, depression will lead to despair or surrender.  History should teach us this. The evil ones often win, at least in the short run, and each of us doesn’t have a long run.  Our time is brief.

    The great dissenters and rebels of the past, even when not overtly religious, kept faith with their comrades and causes because they felt a deep, unbreakable, invincible connection.  It is called different names or none at all.  Maybe faith is the best word.  Faith in what?  Some call it God, as I do. Words can’t explain it; I feel it. Others say nothing and just carry on, sustained by the invisible. Some call it faith in human solidarity.  The names don’t matter.  It is not about naming but experiencing. The poet D.H. Lawrence said wisely that we are transmitters of life, “and when we fail to transmit life, life fails to flow through us.”  And he added in his inimitable style: “It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.  But it is a much more fearful thing to fall out of them.”  It is not easy, but fear helps us fall out.

    There were those who called Tillich an atheist because his philosophical explanation sounded too abstruse, which is true.  But he made a fundamental point about how as human beings we participate in Being, which is the ground of our existence.  We are part of something that is far larger than our puny selves –  beings in the sea of Being.  Who can deny that?  His call to courage hit a resonant cord with believers, agnostics, and atheists alike.  Not a poet but a German trained immigrant scholar who emigrated to the U.S.A., his language was steeped in heavy philosophical verbiage, yet it found a wide audience in its analysis of fear, anxiety, and especially courage because it was about fundamental truths.  Courage is fundamental, as is faith.

    The Spanish poet Antonio Machado put it less philosophically and more elegantly:

    I talk always to the man who walks along with me;
    – men who talk to themselves hope to talk to God
    Someday –
    My soliloquies amount to discussions with this friend,
    Who taught me the secret of loving human beings.
    ….
    And when the day arrives for the last leaving of all,
    And the ship that never returns to port is ready to go,
    You’ll find me on board, light, with few belongings,
    Almost naked like the children of the sea.

    We are children of the sea and courage keeps us afloat.

    Humor also helps, for we are funny creatures.

    It is not often that one escapes an unintended assassination attempt.  I am glad to say that I have.

    This is an example of the power of fear. Where I live, the winter has been quite cold and there was a recent ice storm with thick ice everywhere on top of snow.  My wife was fearful of falling and so had bought hiking poles for herself and me as Christmas gifts.  I said I didn’t want them and wouldn’t use them; that I wasn’t afraid, that I had faith in my ability to sustain myself.  So I didn’t use them, which angered her.  One day when the ice in the driveway and on the car was inches thick, she cajoled me into using the sticks to reach the car.  She set them for me with their clips at the proper height, since they are adjustable.  We toddled down the pathway to the car, setting one pole out ahead of the other in turn.  I exaggerated my need for them, bending far over as if I were in great need of the crutches.  Approaching the driveway, I extended my right hand pole out in front and it collapsed because the clips weren’t set tight and I went flying face forward onto the ice.  She looked at me in fear, not sure if I was dead or hurt or if her fear had made her into an accidental assassin.  She needn’t worry.  It was funny.

    We all fall eventually, but in the meantime, worrying about it is self-defeating.  It is a reaction to fear.  Worrying is a form of preying on oneself (etymology: to seize by the throat with one’s teeth and kill), and it can be induced – and is – by the campaigns of fear that we are being subjected to.

    The courage to be was Tillich’s way of saying that we are upheld by far more than we know.  Call it Being, Tao, the Great Spirit, or God.  Courage is contagious and will carry us on.  It is what we need to resist the fear-mongers who are at our throats.

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  • Biden’s Big Fail… the Russian Invasion Fantasy

    © Andrew Harnik

    US President Joe Biden accused Russian leader Vladimir Putin of “wanting things he cannot get”. He was referring to Moscow’s security demands in Europe with regard to the US-led NATO military alliance.

    Looks like the man in the White House is inadvertently doing a bit of self-projection. It’s Biden who seems to want things that he can’t get.

    Top of that wish-list is for Russia to invade Ukraine. If that sounds a bit illogical, then why is Biden so obsessed about predicting an imminent military move by Russia against its western neighbor?

    The American president and his administration have been warning that Moscow could order an assault on Ukraine “any day”. Well, days and indeed weeks go by and there is no outcome as touted.

    Biden has also predicted that Putin doesn’t want to pursue diplomacy and that the Russian leader is driven to make war. Then a few days later, Putin hosted French President Emmanuel Macron in Moscow for marathon talks about resolving tensions.

    Russia has repeatedly rubbished the invasion claims – that have largely emanated from the United States – as baseless hysteria. President Putin said this week he has no intention of escalating the tensions over Ukraine.

    Moscow says that troops marshaled within Russia’s borders are not a threat to any neighboring state. The premise of American accusations about internal Russia’s military maneuvers is absurd. The precedent for interference it would establish is an affront to any nation’s sovereignty.

    Even the Ukrainian government and security officials have pushed back against the American claims of an imminent Russian invasion.

    Nevertheless, in spite of the lack of evidence and rationale, and in spite of a United Nations’ rebuke to desist from such inflammatory rhetoric, Washington keeps insisting on making its bogus predictions of Russian aggression.

    So, when is this gargantuan hoax going to be held to account? This contemporary version of “crying wolf” should have political and legal consequences for the hoaxers.

    Arguably, the Biden administration’s media campaign regarding Ukraine is a cynical exercise in manipulating public perception and manufacturing a crisis. Washington wants Russia to invade Ukraine in order to justify a US policy of division and conflict. American imperial ambitions for hegemony must rely on inciting tensions and ultimately conflict within Europe and towards Russia.

    A specific objective for American global ambitions is to sabotage the strategic energy trade between the European Union and Russia.  The problem for the US is that its charade of Russian aggression is simply not working. That’s because Moscow has no intention of starting a war with Ukraine or anyone else for that matter.

    Sure enough, Russia has put down red lines regarding its national security. They include no further eastward expansion of the NATO bloc and the exclusion of offensive American strike weapons from near Russia’s borders. To most reasonable observers, those demands are hardly signs of “aggression”. In fact, they sound like a plausible basis for discussing a new security framework for Europe.

    It seems that because the Biden administration can’t get what it wants – that is, a Russian invasion of Ukraine – it is hellbent on forcing or fabricating one.

    While European leaders this week anxiously appeal for more diplomacy to avert confrontation, it is salient and damnable that Washington is desperately militarizing the tensions. Biden has ordered more troops to deploy in Eastern Europe provocatively under the pretext of “defending allies from Russian aggression”. His administration is airlifting plane-loads of lethal weaponry to Ukraine which has the seeming intended effect of undermining any chance of finding a peaceful settlement to the Ukrainian civil war that has been simmering since the CIA-backed coup in Kiev in 2014.

    It is significant that Washington and London are the most hawkish advocates for trying to impose harsher economic sanctions against Russia. This is while the United States and Britain are taking the lead in militarizing Eastern Europe and talking up belligerence towards Moscow. The combined Anglo-American stance appears to be one of goading Russia into an armed conflict which can then be used as a pretext for sabotaging Europe’s energy relations with Russia.

    The danger is that the longer this American charade continues and the fantasy over Russia’s alleged invasion becomes more and more apparent, the risk increases of the US forcing a provocation for war. Perhaps not intended as a direct war, more likely as a proxy war using Ukraine.

    President Biden and his administration, as well as the entire US corporate media, are at risk of being exposed in the eyes of the world as war hoaxers. Included in that list of criminal warmongers is Britain.

    This portends Biden’s biggest foreign policy failure which, hard to believe, exceeds even the historic US defeat in Afghanistan.

    • First published in Sputnik International

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  • From Tantura to Naqab: Israel’s Long Hidden Truths are Finally Revealed

    A succession of events in recent weeks all point to the inescapable fact that nearly 75 years of Israel’s painstaking efforts aimed at hiding the truth about its origins and its current racially-driven apartheid regime are failing miserably. The world is finally waking up, and Israel is losing ground quicker than its ability to gain new supporters, or to whitewash its past or ongoing crimes.

    First, there was Tantura, a peaceful Palestinian village whose inhabitants were mostly exterminated by Israel’s Alexandroni Brigade on May 23, 1948. Like many other massacres committed against unarmed Palestinians throughout the years, the massacre of Tantura was mostly remembered by the village’s survivors, by ordinary Palestinians and by Palestinian historians. The mere attempt in 1998 by an Israeli graduate student, Theodore Katz, to shed light on that bloody event ignited a legal, media and academic war, forcing him to retract his findings.

    In a recent social media post, Israeli Professor Ilan Pappé revealed why, in 2007, he had to resign his position at Haifa University. “One of my ‘crimes’,” Pappé wrote, “was insisting that there was a massacre in the village of Tantura in 1948 as was exposed by MA student, Teddy Katz.”

    Now, some Alexandroni Brigade veterans have finally decided to confess to the crimes in Tantura.

    “They silenced it. It mustn’t be told, it could cause a whole scandal. I don’t want to talk about it, but it happened.” These were the words of Moshe Diamant, a former member of the Alexandroni Brigade who, with other veterans, revealed in the documentary ‘Tantura’ by Alon Schwarz the gory details and the horrific crimes that transpired in the Palestinian village.

    An officer “killed one Arab after another” with his pistol, Micha Vitkon, a former soldier, said.

    “They put them into a barrel and shot them in the barrel. I remember the blood in the barrel,” another explained.

    “I was a murderer. I didn’t take prisoners,” Amitzur Cohen admitted.

    Hundreds of Palestinians were killed in Tantura in cold blood. They were buried in mass graves, the largest of which is believed to be under a parking lot at the Dor beach, flocked by Israeli families daily.

    The Tantura massacre and its aftermath is arguably the most glaring representation of Israeli criminality. However, this is not the story of Tantura alone. The latter is a representation of something much bigger, of mass-scale ethnic cleansing, forceful evictions and mass killing. Thankfully, much truth is being unearthed.

    In 1951, the Israeli army launched a full-scale military operation that ethnically cleansed Palestinian Bedouins from the Naqab. The tragic scenes of entire communities being uprooted from their ancestral homes were justified by Israel with the usual cliché that the terrible deed was carried out for “security reasons”.

    In 1953, Israel passed the so-called Land Acquisition Law, which allowed the Israeli state to seize the land of the Palestinians who were forced out of their homes. By then, Israel had unlawfully expropriated 247,000 dunums in the Naqab, with 66,000 remaining ‘unutilized’. The remaining land is currently the epicenter of an ongoing saga involving Palestinian Bedouin communities in Israel and the Isreali government, which falsely claims that the land is “essential” for Israel’s “development needs”.

    Recently revealed documents, uncovered by extensive research conducted by Professor Gadi Algazi, point towards Israel’s version of the truth in Naqab being a complete fabrication. According to numerous uncovered documents, Moshe Dayan, then the head of the Israeli army Southern Command, was central to an Israeli government and military ploy to evict the Bedouin population and to “revoke their rights as landowners”, per the conveniently created Israeli law, which allowed the government to ‘lease’ the land as if its own.

    “There was an organized transfer of Bedouin citizens from the north-western Negev eastward to barren areas, with the goal of taking over their lands. They carried out this operation using a mix of threats, violence, bribery and fraud,” Algazi told the Israeli newspaper Haaretz.

    The entire scheme was organized in such a way as to facilitate the claim that the Palestinians had moved ‘voluntarily’, despite their legendary resistance and “the stubbornness with which they tried to hold onto their land, even at the cost of hunger and thirst, not to mention the army’s threats and violence”.

    Furthermore, a newly-released volume by French historian, Vincent Lemire, has entirely dismissed Israel’s official version of how the Moroccan Quarters of Jerusalem were demolished in June 1967. Though Palestinian and Arab historians have long argued that the destruction of the neighborhood – 135 homes, two mosques and more – was done per the order of the Israeli government through the then-Jewish mayor of Jerusalem, Teddy Kollek, Israel has long denied that version. According to the official Israeli account, the demolition of the neighborhood was carried out by “15 private Jewish contractors (who) destroyed the neighborhood to make space for the Western Wall plaza”.

    In an interview with Agence France-Presse (AFP), Lemire stated that his book offers “definitive, written proof on the pre-meditation, planning and coordination of this operation,” and that includes official meetings between Kollek, the commander of the Israeli army, and other top government officials.

    The story continues; more heartbreaking revelations and a well-integrated version of the truth are exposing long-hidden or denied facts. The days of Israel getting away with these crimes seem to be behind us. An example is Amnesty International’s recent report, “Israel’s Apartheid against Palestinians: A Look into Decades of Oppression and Domination”.

    Amnesty’s 280 pages of damning evidence of Israel’s racism and apartheid did not shy away from connecting Israel’s violent present with its equally bloody past. It did not borrow from Israel’s deceptive language and self-serving division of Palestinians into disconnected communities, each with a different claim and a different status. For Amnesty, as was the case with Human Rights Watch’s report in April 2021, Israeli injustices against the Palestinians must be recognized and duly condemned in their entirety.

    “Since its establishment in 1948, Israel has pursued an explicit policy of establishing and maintaining a Jewish demographic hegemony .. while minimizing the number of Palestinians and restricting their rights,” the report stated. This could only happen through mass killing, ethnic cleansing and genocide, from Tantura to the Naqab, to the Moroccan Quarters, to Gaza and Sheikh Jarrah.

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  • Didn’t those enraged at Boris Johnson’s ‘smears’ of Starmer defame Corbyn at every turn?

    “Why is Boris Johnson making false claims about Starmer and Savile?” runs a headline in the news pages of the Guardian. It is just one of a barrage of indignant recent stories in the British media, rushing to the defence of the opposition leader, Sir Keir Starmer.

    The reason? Last week the British prime minister, Boris Johnson, blamed Starmer, now the Labour party leader, for failing to prosecute Jimmy Savile, a TV presenter and serial child abuser, when his case came under police review in 2009. Between 2008 and 2013, Starmer was head of the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS). Savile died in 2011 before he could face justice.

    Johnson accused Starmer, who at the time was Director of Public Prosecutions, of wasting “his time prosecuting journalists and failing to prosecute Jimmy Savile”.

    The sudden chorus of outrage at Johnson impugning Starmer’s reputation is strange in many different ways. It is not as though Johnson has a record of good behaviour. His whole political persona is built on the idea of his being a rascal, a clown, a chancer.

    He is also a well-documented liar. Few, least of all in the media, cared much about his pattern of lying until now. Indeed, most observers have long pointed out that his popularity was based on his mischief-making and his populist guise as an anti-establishment politician. No one, apart from his political opponents, seemed too bothered.

    And it is also not as though there are not lots of other, more critically important things relating to Johnson to be far more enraged about, even before we consider his catastrophic handling of the pandemic, and his raiding of the public coffers to enrich his crony friends and party donors.

    Jumping ship

    Johnson is currently embroiled in the so-called “partygate” scandal. He  attended – and his closest officials appear to have organised – several gatherings at his residence in Downing Street in 2020 and 2021 at a time when the rest of the country was under strict lockdown. For the first time the public mood has shifted against Johnson.

    But it was Johnson’s criticisms of Starmer, not partygate, that led several of his senior advisers last week to resign their posts. One can at least suspect that in their case – given how quickly the Johnson brand is sinking, and the repercussions they may face from a police investigation into the partygate scandal – that finding an honorable pretext for jumping ship may have been the wisest move.

    But there is something deeply strange about Johnson’s own Conservative MPs and the British media lining up to express their indignation at Johnson’s attack on Starmer, a not particularly liked or likable opposition leader, and then turning it into the reason to bring down a prime minister whose other flaws are only too visible.

    What makes the situation even weirder is that Johnson’s so-called “smears” of Starmer may not actually be smears at all. They look like rare examples of Johnson alluding to – admittedly in his own clumsy and self-interested way – genuinely problematic behaviour by Starmer.

    One would never know this from the coverage, of course.

    Here is the Guardian supposedly fact-checking Johnson’s attack on Starmer under the apparently neutral question: “Is there any evidence that Starmer was involved in any decision not to prosecute Savile?”

    The Guardian’s answer is decisive:

    No. The CPS has confirmed that there is no reference to any involvement from Starmer in the decision-making within an official report examining the case.

    Surrey police consulted the CPS for advice about the allegations after interviewing Savile’s victims, according to a 2013 CPS statement made by Starmer as DPP.

    The official report, written by Alison Levitt QC, found that in October 2009 the CPS lawyer responsible for the cases – who was not Starmer – advised that no prosecution could be brought on the grounds that none of the complainants were ‘prepared to support any police action’.

    That’s a pretty definite “No”, then. Not “No, according to Starmer”. Or “No, according to the CPS”. Or “No, according to an official report” – and doubtless a determinedly face-saving one at that – into the Savile scandal.

    Just “No”.

    Here is the Guardian’s political correspondent Peter Walker echoing how cut and dried the corporate media’s assessment is: “[Starmer] had no connection to decisions over the case, and the idea he did emerged later in conspiracy theories mainly shared among the far right.”

    So it’s just a far-right conspiracy theory. Case against Starmer closed.

    But not so fast.

    Given Savile’s tight ties to the establishment – from royalty and prime ministers down – and the establishment’s role in providing, however inadvertently, cover for Savile’s paedophilia for decades, it should hardly surprise us that the blame for the failure to prosecute him has been placed squarely on the shoulders of a low-level lawyer in the Crown Prosecution Service. How it could be otherwise? If we started unpicking the thorny Savile knot, who knows how the threads might unravel?

    Sacrificial victim

    Former ambassador Craig Murray has made an interesting observation about Johnson’s remark on Starmer. Murray, let us remember, has been a first-hand observer and chronicler of the dark arts of the establishment in protecting itself from exposure, after he himself was made a sacrificial victim for revealing the British government’s illegal involvement in torture and extraordinary rendition.

    As Murray notes:

    Of course the Director of Public Prosecutions does not handle the individual cases, which are assigned to lawyers under them. But the Director most certainly is then consulted on the decisions in the high profile and important cases.

    That is why they are there. It is unthinkable that Starmer was not consulted on the decision to shelve the Savile case – what do they expect us to believe his role was, as head of the office, ordering the paperclips?

    And of the official inquiry into Starmer’s role that cleared him of any wrongdoing, the one that so impresses the Guardian and everyone else, Murray adds:

    When the public outcry reached a peak in 2012, Starmer played the go-to trick in the Establishment book. He commissioned an “independent” lawyer he knew to write a report exonerating him. Mistakes have been made at lower levels, lessons will be learnt… you know what it says. Mishcon de Reya, money launderers to the oligarchs, provided the lawyer to do the whitewash. Once he retired from the post of DPP, Starmer went to work at, umm,…

    Yes, Mischon de Reya.

    Starmer and Assange

    Murray also notes that MPs and the British media have resolutely focused attention on Starmer’s alleged non-role in the Savile decision – where an “official report” provides them with cover – rather than an additional, and far more embarrassing, point made by Johnson about Starmer’s behaviour as Director of Public Prosecutions.

    The prime minister mentioned Starmer using his time to “prosecute journalists”. Johnson and the media have no interest in clarifying that reference. Anyway, Johnson only made it for effect: as a contrast to the way Starmer treated Savile, as a way to highlight that, when he chose to, Starmer was quite capable of advancing a prosecution.

    But this second point is potentially far more revealing both of Starmer’s misconduct as Director of Public Prosecutions and about the services he rendered to the establishment – the likely reason why he was knighted at a relatively young age, becoming “Sir” Keir.

    The journalist referenced by Johnson was presumably Julian Assange, currently locked up in Belmarsh high-security prison in London as lawyers try to get him extradited to the United States for his exposure of US war crimes in Afghanistan and Iraq.

    At an early stage of Assange’s persecution, the Crown Prosecution Service under Starmer worked overtime – despite Britain’s official position of neutrality in the case – to ensure he was extradited to Sweden. Assange sought political asylum in the Ecuadorean embassy in London in 2012, when Starmer was still head of the Crown Prosecution Service. Assange did so because he got wind of efforts by the Americans to extradite him onwards from Sweden to the US. He feared the UK would collude in that process.

    Assange, it turns out, was not wrong. With the Swedish investigation dropped long ago, the British courts are now, nearly a decade on, close to agreeing to the Biden administration’s demand that Assange be extradited to the US – both to silence him and to intimidate any other journalists who might try to throw a light on US war crimes.

    The Italian journalist Stefania Maurizi has been pursuing a lengthy legal battle to have the CPS emails from Starmer’s time released under a Freedom of Information request. She has been opposed by the British establishment every step of the way. We know that many of the email chains relating to Assange were destroyed by the Crown Prosecution Service – apparently illegally. Those would doubtless have shone a much clearer light on Starmer’s role in the case – possibly the reason they were destroyed.

    The small number of emails that have been retrieved show that the Crown Prosecution Service under Starmer micro-managed the Swedish investigation of Assange, even bullying Swedish prosecutors to pursue the case when they had started to lose interest for lack of evidence. In one email from 2012, a CPS lawyer warned his Swedish counterpart: “Don’t you dare get cold feet!!!”. In another from 2011, the CPS lawyer writes: “Please do not think this case is being dealt with as just another extradition.”

    Prosecutors arm-twisted

    Again, the idea that Starmer was not intimately involved in the decision to arm-twist Swedish prosecutors into persecuting a journalist – a case that the UK should formally have had no direct interest in, unless it was covertly advancing US interests to silence Assange – beggars belief.

    Despite the media’s lack of interest in Assange’s plight, the energy expended by the US to get Assange behind bars in the US and redefine national security journalism as espionage shows how politically and diplomatically important this case has always been to the US – and by extension, the British establishment. There is absolutely no way the deliberations were handled by a single lawyer. Starmer would have closely overseen his staff’s dealings with Swedish prosecutors and authorised what was in practice a political decision, not legal one, to persecute Assange – or as United Nations experts defined it, “arbitrarily detain” him.

    Neither Murray nor I have unique, Sherlock-type powers of deduction that allow us to join the dots in ways no one else can manage. All of this information is in the public realm, and all of it is known to the editors of the British media. They are not only choosing to avoid mentioning it in the context of the current row, but they are actively fulminating against Boris Johnson for having done so.

    The prime minister’s crime isn’t that he has “smeared” Starmer. It is that – out of desperate self-preservation – he has exposed the dark underbelly of the establishment. He has broken the elite’s omerta, its vow of silence. He has made the unpardonable sin of grassing up the establishment to which he belongs. He has potentially given ammunition to the great unwashed to expose the establishment’s misdeeds, to blow apart its cover story. That is why the anger is far more palpable and decisive about Johnson smearing Starmer than it ever was when Johnson smeared the rest of us by partying on through the lockdowns.

    Scorched-earth tactic?

    Look at this headline on Jonathan Freedland’s latest column for the Guardian, visibly aquiver with anger at the way Johnson has defamed Starmer: “Johnson’s Savile smear was the scorched-earth tactic of a desperate, dangerous man”.

    A prime minister attacking the opposition leader – something we would normally think of as a largely unexceptional turn of political events, and all the more so under Johnson – has been transformed by Freedland into a dangerous, scorched-earth tactic.

    Quite how preposterous, and hypocritical, this claim is should not need underscoring. Who really needs to be reminded of how Freedland and the rest of media class – but especially Freedland – treated Stramer’s predecessor, Jeremy Corbyn? That really was a scorched-earth approach. There was barely a day in his five years leading the Labour party when the media did not fabricate the most outrageous lies about Corbyn and his party. He was shabby and unstatesmanlike (unlike the smartly attired Johnson!), sexist, a traitor, a threat to national security, an anti-semite, and much more.

    Anyone like Freedland who actively participated in the five-year campaign of demonisation of Corbyn has no credibility whatsoever either complaining about the supposed mistreatment of Starmer (a pale shadow of what Corbyn suffered) or decrying Johnson’s lowering of standards in public life.

    We have the right-wing populist Johnson in power precisely because Freedland and the rest of the media relentlessly smeared the democratic socialist alternative. In the 2017 election, let us recall, Corbyn was only 2,000 votes from winning. The concerted campaign of smears from across the entire corporate media – and the resulting manipulation of the public mood – was the difference between Corbyn winning and the Tories holding on to power.

    Corbyn was destroyed – had to be destroyed – because he threatened establishment interests. He challenged the interests of the rich, of the corporations, of the war industries, of the Israel lobby. That was why an anonymous military general warned in the pages of the establishment’s newspaper, The Times, that there would be a mutiny if Corbyn ever reached 10 Downing Street. That was why soldiers were filmed using an image of Corbyn as target practice on a firing range in Afghanistan.

    Johnson’s desperate “smears” aside, none of this will ever happen to Starmer. There will be no threats of mutiny and his image will never used for target practice by the army. Sir Keir won’t be defamed by the billionaire-owned media. Rather, they have demonstrated that they have his back. They will even promote him over an alumnus of the Bullingdon Club, when the blokey toff’s shine starts to wear off.

    And that, it should hardly need pointing out, is because Sir Keir Starmer is there to protect not the public’s interests but the interests of the establishment, just as he did so conscientiously when he was Director of Public Prosecutions.

    The post Didn’t those enraged at Boris Johnson’s ‘smears’ of Starmer defame Corbyn at every turn? first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • An Inconvenient Truth:  The Peasant Food Web Feeds the World

    In October 2020, CropLife International said that its new strategic partnership with the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) would contribute to sustainable food systems. It added that it was a first for the industry and the FAO and demonstrates the determination of the plant science sector to work constructively in a partnership where common goals are shared.

    A powerful trade and lobby association, CropLife International counts among its members the world’s largest agricultural biotechnology and pesticide businesses: Bayer, BASF, Syngenta, FMC, Corteva and Sumitoma Chemical. Under the guise of promoting plant science technology, the association first and foremost looks after the interests (bottom line) of its member corporations.

    Not long after the CropLife-FAO partnership was announced, PAN (Pesticide Action Network) Asia Pacific along with 350 organisations wrote a letter to FAO Director-General Qu Dongyu urging him to stop the collaboration and for good reason.

    A 2020 joint investigation by Unearthed (Greenpeace) and Public Eye (a human rights NGO) revealed that BASF, Corteva, Bayer, FMC and Syngenta bring in billions of dollars by selling toxic chemicals found by regulatory authorities to pose serious health hazards.

    It also found more than a billion dollars of their sales came from chemicals – some now banned in European markets – that are highly toxic to bees. Over two thirds of these sales were made in low- and middle-income countries like Brazil and India.

    The Political Declaration of the People’s Autonomous Response to the UN Food Systems Summit in 2021 stated that global corporations are increasingly infiltrating multilateral spaces to co-opt the narrative of sustainability to secure further industrialisation, the extraction of wealth and labour from rural communities and the concentration of corporate power.

    With this in mind, a major concern is that CropLife International will now seek to derail the FAO’s commitment to agroecology and push for the further corporate colonisation of food systems.

    The July 2019 UN FAO High Level Panel of Experts Report concluded that agroecology provides greatly improved food security and nutritional, gender, environmental and yield benefits compared to industrial agriculture. This report formed part of the FAO’s ongoing commitment to agroecology.

    But agroecology represents a direct challenge to the interests of CropLife members. With the emphasis on localisation and on-farm inputs, agroecology does not require dependency on proprietary chemicals, seeds and knowledge nor the long-line global supply chains dominated by transnational agrifood corporations.

    There does now appear to be an ideological assault from within the FAO on alternative development and agrifood models that threaten CropLife International’s member interests.

    In the report ‘Who Will Feed Us? The Industrial Food Chain vs the Peasant Food Web (ETC Group, 2017), it was shown that a diverse network of small-scale producers (the peasant food web) actually feeds 70% of the world, including the most hungry and marginalised.

    The flagship report indicated that only 24% of the food produced by the industrial food chain actually reaches people. Furthermore, it was shown that industrial food costs us more: for every dollar spent on industrial food, it costs another two dollars to clean up the mess.

    However, two prominent papers have since claimed that small farms feed only 35% of the global population.

    One of the papers is ‘How much of our world’s food do smallholders produce?’ (Ricciardi et al, 2018).

    The other is an FAO report, ‘Which farms feed the world and has farmland become more concentrated? (Lowder et al, 2021).

    Eight key organisations have just written to the FAO sharply criticising the Lowder paper which reverses a number of well-established positions held by the organisation. The letter is signed by the Oakland Institute, Landworkers Alliance, ETC Group, A Growing Culture, Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa, GRAIN, Groundswell International and the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy.

    The open letter calls on the FAO to reaffirm that peasants (including small farmers, artisanal fishers, pastoralists, hunters and gatherers and urban producers) provide more food with fewer resources and are the primary source of nourishment for at least 70% of the world population.

    ETC Group has also published the 16-page report ‘Small-scale Farmers and Peasants Still Feed the World‘ in response to the two papers, indicating how the authors indulged in methodological and conceptual gymnastics and certain important omissions to arrive at the 35% figure – not least by changing the definition of ‘family farmer’ and by defining a ‘small farm’ as less than 2 ha. This contradicts the FAO’s own decision in 2018 to reject a universal land area threshold for describing small farms in favour of more sensitive country-specific definitions.

    The Lowder et al paper also contradicts recent FAO and other reports that state peasant farms produce more food and more nutritious food per hectare than large farms. It maintains that policy makers are wrongly focused on peasant production and should give greater attention to larger production units.

    The signatories of the open letter to the FAO strongly disagree with the Lowder study’s assumption that food production is a proxy for food consumption and that the commercial value of food in the marketplace can be equated with the nutritional value of the food consumed.

    The paper feeds into an agribusiness narrative that attempts to undermine the effectiveness of peasant production in order to promote its proprietary technologies and agrifood model.

    Smallholder peasant farming is regarded by these conglomerates as an impediment. Their vision is fixated on a narrow yield-output paradigm based on the bulk production of commodities that is unwilling to grasp an integrated social-cultural-economic-agronomic systems approach that accounts for the likes of food sovereignty and diverse nutrition production per acre.

    This systems approach also serves to boost rural and regional development based on thriving, self-sustaining local communities rather than eradicating them and subordinating whoever remains to the needs of global supply chains and global markets. Industry lobbyists like to promote the latter as ‘responding to the needs of modern agriculture’ rather than calling it for what it is: corporate imperialism.

    The FAO paper concludes that the world small farms only produce 35% of the world’s food using 12% of agricultural land. But ETC Group says that by working with the FAO’s normal or comparable databases, it is apparent that peasants nourish at least 70% of the world’s people with less than one third of the agricultural land and resources.

    But even if 35% of food is produced on 12% of land, does that not suggest we should be investing in small, family and peasant farming rather than large-scale chemical-intensive agriculture?

    While not all small farms might be practising agroecology or chemical-free agriculture, they are more likely to be integral to local markets and networks, short supply chains, food sovereignty, more diverse cropping systems and healthier diets. And they tend to serve the food requirements of communities rather than those of external business interests, institutional investors and shareholders half a world away.

    When the corporate capture of a body occurs, too often the first casualty is truth.

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  • Anti-China Canadian MPs claim Sovereignty over Argentine Mine

    The anti-China panic sweeping Canadian politics has descended from tragedy into farce.

    A month ago I mocked Globe and Mail Report on Business columnist Eric Reguly for complaining about China-based Zijin Mining purchasing Neo Lithium. The nominally Canadian firm extracts lithium in Argentina.

    Reguly succeeded in stirring a national security scare about minerals extracted 10,000 kilometres from Canada. Since he published “The West is asleep while China hoards key minerals” on December 18 the opposition parties have repeatedly criticized the Liberals for failing to conduct a “national security review” of the Neo Lithium sale. Conservative leader Erin O’Toole called it “critical” to review the purchase of Argentinian resources by a Chinese firm while NDP MP Charlie Angus tweeted, “How is it possible that Ottawa gave the thumbs up to a Chinese takeover of Neo Lithium? This is a critical metal for the renewable economy. There is a major geopolitical fight for control of these minerals and Canada is being left on the sidelines.”

    Opposition MPs forced Innovation, Science and Industry minister François-Philippe Champagne to explain the lack of review before a federal committee. At the industry and technology committee meeting a senior fellow with the Macdonald-Laurier Institute demanded a review of the sale. In all seriousness Jeff Kucharski claimed, “our national security interests don’t end at our borders. The mere fact that the lithium mine is in Argentina, and not in Canada is really irrelevant.” But Kucharski is calling for a Canadian, not Argentinian, government national security review.

    In an article on Neo Lithium Kucharski wrote, “Resource firms should be considered as contributors to advancing Canada’s national security interests, irrespective of where their activities and assets are located.” With Canadian-based or listed mining firms operating thousands of international projects, Kucharski’s logic would grant Ottawa remarkable leverage over the global mineral supply and (probably) threaten Canadian companies’ vast profits. Right-wing, pro-corporate, voices don’t generally argue for measures that undermine Canadian mining firms (Why would a government allow a Canadian company into their country if it meant foreign sovereignty over their resources?). But, the ‘threat’ of China’s rise elicits all manner of double standards and absurdities.

    Another China double standard is the discussion of Canada creating a foreign agents’ registry. Last week the Globe and Mail quoted a spokesperson for Canadian Friends of Hong Kong saying that “Canada needs a foreign agents registration act like those in Australia or the United States, as well as a centralized reporting centre for victims of intimidation by the Chinese government.” In the following sentence of the article Ian Bailey and Steven Chase quote “Mehmet Tohti, executive director of the Uyghur Rights Advocacy Project” (URAP). But URAP ought to be listed on any foreign agent registry worth its salt. URAP’s website says it “is funded by the Washington-based National Endowment Fund for Democracy for its Advocacy work in Canada.” The NED was established in 1983 to work alongside the CIA. In 1991 Allen Weinstein, a founding member and president, told the Washington Post, “a lot of what we [NED] do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.”

    In a recent expose The Canada Files noted that Tohti has “far deeper connections to the NED than those stemming only from URAP. In 2004, Tohti was a co-founder of the NED-funded World Uyghur Congress. He was a ‘Special Representative’ of the WUC to the European Parliament between 2010 to 2012, and even served as Vice-President of the World Uyghur Congress for two separate terms.”

    Tohti and URAP played an important role in pushing Parliament’s subcommittee on human rights to adopt a resolution calling China’s treatment of Uighurs a genocide. The House of Commons subsequently followed suit, which has pushed the Trudeau government towards more conflictual relations with Beijing.

    The Globe and Mail’s senior parliamentary reporter, Steven Chase, has quoted Tohti in a half dozen articles over the past two years. Chase has also written numerous articles about the need for a foreign agents’ registry. I did not find any article in which he mentions that Tohti’s group is funded by a CIA cut-out organization.

    An important force pushing for a foreign agent registry is Kucharski’s MacDonald Laurier Institute. Its fellows have published recent op-eds titled “Canada needs a foreign agent registry to help it tackle China’s influence” and “The persistent threat of foreign interference in Canada’s democracy”. As part of their supposed concern with foreign governments interfering in Canadian politics, the MacDonald Laurier Institute established DisinfoWatch.org. In December it published “Influence Operation Targeting Canadian 2021 Federal Election”. The report noted, “The Chinese government has repeatedly demonstrated its readiness to advance its interest in Canada by directly manipulating Canadian political debate and policy through the use of disinformation, threats, intimidation, and influence operations directed at Canadian diaspora groups.”

    Well, surprise, surprise, DisinfoWatch is also funded by the US government. The bottom of its initiating statement notes that “Development of the DisinfoWatch platform is funded by the United States Department of State’s Global Engagement Center and the US Embassy in Ottawa with support from Journalists for Human Rights.” And to move from hypocrisy into the realm of farce, the MacDonald Laurier Institute has received significant sums from the governments of Taiwan and Latvia.

    Those calling for a foreign agents’ registry are not principally concerned with foreign influence in Canadian politics. They are obsessed with stopping the world’s most populous country from someday transplanting the US to become its most powerful.

    • On February 4 China Canada Focus will be hosting a free webinar with Noam Chomsky on Canada’s growing conflict with China.

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  • The Big Lie Liar

    Perhaps you’ve seen it up-close: a parent, an uncle, or maybe a boss with an almost visceral tendency to lie. The lie and the need for affirmation is never a one-off occurrence; you’ve seen its dynamic play out many times: “If validated, I will be happy; if not, I will be angry.” You know that he knows he is lying, and he probably knows that you know he is lying, but none of that is actually important. It’s not the affirmation of truth being sought; it’s the confirmation of power. The dynamic in play is a tacit agreement between you and the liar. Acceptance of the lie confers amity to you, and control to the liar.

    If you’ve not seen it up-close, you’ve had plenty of opportunity to view it from afar. Our former president put it out there for all to see on a daily basis. David Markowitz (Forbes) tabulated 18,000 lies told by Trump, while a Washington Post team credited him with more than 30,000. That kind of momentum doesn’t end suddenly (unless death is involved) so it’s not surprising to see it continue beyond his presidency. His mother of all lies, the one they call The Big Lie, came upon his losing bid for a second term in office. The Big Lie, of course, is that Trump didn’t lose; the election was a fraud, a fraud perpetrated by evil Democrats that cheated patriotic Americans out of the blessings of his rightful second tour of duty.

    For some strange reason, we’re often moved to doubt an obvious liar’s culpability, as if it’s unbelievable that he’s willfully unbelievable. Early on, even before his presidency, it was often asked, “Does Trump know when he is lying?” Peter Warski cited one early and obvious lie, but was uncertain of Trump’s mindfulness. An LA Times editorialist posited that Trump’s memory cells had a one-day capacity, rendering his lies to be inadvertent. Others, like Billy Bush, were quite certain of his self-awareness. Bush shared the infamous Access Hollywood bus ride with Trump and recalled his words: “Billy, look, you just tell them and they believe it. That’s it; you just tell them and they believe. They just do.”

    Billy Bush had an up-close opportunity to hear the essence of lying explained by an “honest” liar. Lying isn’t an accidental misstatement of facts. It’s a conscious (however fleeting) effort to control the perception and/or behavior of others. To presume a liar is unaware of his purpose is a haughty and dangerous condescension. The presumption grants the liar a near pardon, and blinds the recipient(s) to the dynamic in play. The lie is not inadvertent. At inception, the liar is fully aware of his intent, even if masked by a sense of entitlement. He says what he says to control others. Never mind that he genuinely appears to “believe” the lie. Indeed, he must appear so; it’s a necessary part of the dynamic.

    Let’s bypass about 30,000 lies and go to the big one, The Big Lie that’s still current. The seed for the lie was consciously planted before the 2020 votes were cast. Ahead of the balloting, Trump said, “Make sure, because the only way we’re going to lose this election is if the election is rigged. Remember that. It’s the only way we’re going to lose the election.” That was foreplay for the lie, providing premeditated lubricant for insertion of the Big Lie. More than a year later, it’s still embraced by a majority of Republicans. Save for Fox News, the media seems fully on top of Trump’s voting fraud claim. It’s been shown over and over, even verified by Republican officials, that no meaningful fraud took place. But the lie lives on, bigger and louder than ever.

    So, who believes the Big Lie? Actually, nobody; no one really believes it. Well, almost no one — if you’re shirtless and wearing a furry headdress with horns, maybe you do believe it, but you’re an exception. And if you’re among the 66% of Republican Party members (with shirts) who purport to believe the lie? Well, you probably don’t; you don’t really believe it. You like the Big Lie, you might even live the Big Lie, but you don’t really believe it. You have fooled a lot of people though. Much of the media “credits” you with being duped into believing it. It’s condescension, much like the doubt once given to Trump’s cognition. It means you’re seen as gullibly naïve, as suckers to a con man. It’s also a dangerous misjudgment; it means you’re not seen for what you’re capable of. But then again, maybe you don’t see what you’re capable of either.

    The dynamic of lying to yourself is similar to that of lying to someone else, and just as easy. A paraphrase of Trump’s revelation to Billy Bush sums it up: “You just tell yourself and you believe it; you just do.” It’s done for empowerment and the pursuit something blameworthy in a blameless sort of way. You lie to yourself and then pretend to believe it for inner harmony’s sake. Pretending to believe provides an ethical veil for the part of you that’s lying, and a pardon for the part of you that accepts it.

    But donning a lie is not the same as believing a lie. The Republican 66% Big Lie proponents are not illiterate victims. They’re not country bumpkins deceived by an urban huckster. They’re mindful people willing to wear the Big Lie for the same reason Trump chose to fabricate it: for control. It’s what they do; it’s what all liars do to get what they want. The 66% accept the Big Lie because they like what Trump promised, and what he still offers. They profess the Big Lie because it justifies wanting more of him and suspends culpability.

    The Big Lie is consciously adopted because it provides a facade of integrity to what’s already been done and justification for what’s yet to transpire. It’s currently being used as an excuse to usurp political representation from vast portions of the populace. All across our nation, the Party of Trump is actively working to impede meaningful suffrage and to control elections through gerrymandering, voter suppression, and Electoral College manipulation. Trump’s Big Lie gambit is an authoritarian attempt to circumvent the will of the people, an effort that likely, has only just begun.

    What does it matter; who cares whether it’s belief or justification? Why quibble over semantics? It’s for this reason: Belief is tied to a fixed perception of reality; justification allows an open-ended course of action. The 66% have clearly embarked on a course of action: the pursuit of Trumpism. It first requires the reelection or installation of Donald Trump as president (or a willing protégé). It won’t stop there; the pursuit is open-ended. When the Big Lie becomes obsolete, another justification will take its place. In for a penny, in for a pound; one lie leads to another.

    The 66% are not guileless victims of deception. They know what they want and who offers it. They clearly know that the Big Lie is its vehicle. It’s not so clear however, that they know its final terminus.

    There are little lies and big lies. The biggest lie is the one we tell ourselves, the one that justifies what shouldn’t be done. It’s never all done.

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  • America Is Reaping What It Sowed in Ukraine

    U.S. allies in Ukraine, with NATO, Azov Battalion and neo-Nazi flags. Photo by russia-insider.com

    So what are Americans to believe about the rising tensions over Ukraine? The United States and Russia both claim their escalations are defensive, responding to threats and escalations by the other side, but the resulting spiral of escalation can only make war more likely. Ukrainian President Zelensky is warning that “panic” by U.S. and Western leaders is already causing economic destabilization in Ukraine.

    U.S. allies do not all support the current U.S. policy. Germany is wisely refusing to funnel more weapons into Ukraine, in keeping with its long-standing policy of not sending weapons into conflict zones. Ralf Stegner, a senior Member of Parliament for Germany’s ruling Social Democrats, told the BBC on January 25th that the Minsk-Normandy process agreed to by France, Germany, Russia and Ukraine in 2015 is still the right framework for ending the civil war.

    “The Minsk Agreement hasn’t been applied by both sides,” Stegner explained, “and it just doesn’t make any sense to think that forcing up the military possibilities would make it better. Rather, I think it’s the hour of diplomacy.”

    By contrast, most American politicians and corporate media have fallen in line with a one-sided narrative that paints Russia as the aggressor in Ukraine, and support sending more and more weapons to Ukrainian government forces. After decades of U.S. military disasters based on such one-sided narratives, Americans should know better by now. But what is it that our leaders and the corporate media are not telling us this time?

    The most critical events that have been airbrushed out of the West’s political narrative are the violation of agreements Western leaders made at the end of the Cold War not to expand NATO into Eastern Europe, and the U.S.-backed coup in Ukraine in February 2014.

    Western mainstream media accounts date the crisis in Ukraine back to Russia’s 2014 reintegration of Crimea, and the decision by ethnic Russians in Eastern Ukraine to secede from Ukraine as the Luhansk and Donetsk People’s Republics.

    But these were not unprovoked actions. They were responses to the U.S.-backed coup, in which an armed mob led by the neo-Nazi Right Sector militia stormed the Ukrainian parliament, forcing the elected President Yanukovich and members of his party to flee for their lives. After the events of January 6, 2021, in Washington, that should now be easier for Americans to understand.

    The remaining members of parliament voted to form a new government, subverting the political transition and plans for a new election that Yanukovich had publicly agreed to the day before, after meetings with the foreign ministers of France, Germany and Poland.

    The U.S. role in managing the coup was exposed by a leaked 2014 audio recording of Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland and U.S. Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt working on their plans, which included sidelining the European Union (“Fuck the EU,” as Nuland put it) and shoehorning in U.S. protege Arseniy Yatsenyuk (“Yats”) as Prime Minister.

    At the end of the call, Ambassador Pyatt told Nuland, “…we want to try to get somebody with an international personality to come out here and help to midwife this thing.”

    Nuland replied (verbatim), “So on that piece Geoff, when I wrote the note, [Biden’s National Security Advisor Jake] Sullivan’s come back to me VFR [very quickly?], saying you need [Vice President] Biden and I said probably tomorrow for an atta-boy and to get the deets [details?] to stick. So Biden’s willing.”

    It has never been explained why two senior State Department officials who were plotting a regime change in Ukraine looked to Vice President Biden to “midwife this thing,” instead of to their own boss, Secretary of State John Kerry.

    Now that the crisis over Ukraine has blown up with a vengeance during Biden’s first year as president, such unanswered questions about his role in the 2014 coup have become more urgent and troubling. And why did President Biden appoint Nuland to the # 4 position at the State Department, despite (or was it because of?) her critical role in triggering the disintegration of Ukraine and an eight-year-long civil war that has so far killed at least 14,000 people?

    Both of Nuland’s hand-picked puppets in Ukraine, Prime Minister Yatsenyuk and President Poroshenko, were soon mired in corruption scandals. Yatsenyuk was forced to resign after two years and Poroshenko was outed in a tax evasion scandal revealed in the Panama Papers. Post-coup, war-torn Ukraine remains the poorest country in Europe, and one of the most corrupt.

    The Ukrainian military had little enthusiasm for a civil war against its own people in Eastern Ukraine, so the post-coup government formed new “National Guard” units to assault the separatist People’s Republics. The infamous Azov Battalion drew its first recruits from the Right Sector militia and openly displays neo-Nazi symbols, yet it has kept receiving U.S. arms and training, even after Congress explicitly cut off its U.S. funding in the FY2018 Defense Appropriation bill.

    In 2015, the Minsk and Normandy negotiations led to a ceasefire and the withdrawal of heavy weapons from a buffer zone around the separatist-held areas. Ukraine agreed to grant greater autonomy to Donetsk, Luhansk and other ethnically Russian areas of Ukraine, but it has failed to follow through on that.

    A federal system, with some powers devolved to individual provinces or regions, could help to resolve the all-or-nothing power struggle between Ukrainian nationalists and Ukraine’s traditional ties to Russia that has dogged its politics since independence in 1991.

    But the U.S. and NATO’s interest in Ukraine is not really about resolving its regional differences, but about something else altogether. The U.S. coup was calculated to put Russia in an impossible position. If Russia did nothing, post-coup Ukraine would sooner or later join NATO, as NATO members already agreed to in principle in 2008. NATO forces would advance right up to Russia’s border and Russia’s important naval base at Sevastopol in the Crimea would fall under NATO control.

    On the other hand, if Russia had responded to the coup by invading Ukraine, there would have been no turning back from a disastrous new Cold War with the West. To Washington’s frustration, Russia found a middle path out of this dilemma, by accepting the result of Crimea’s referendum to rejoin Russia, but only giving covert support to the separatists in the East.

    In 2021, with Nuland once again installed in a corner office at the State Department, the Biden administration quickly cooked up a plan to put Russia in a new pickle. The United States had already given Ukraine $2 billion in military aid since 2014, and Biden has added another $650 million to that, along with deployments of U.S. and NATO military trainers.

    Ukraine has still not implemented the constitutional changes called for in the Minsk agreements, and the unconditional military support the United States and NATO have provided has encouraged Ukraine’s leaders to effectively abandon the Minsk-Normandy process and simply reassert sovereignty over all of Ukraine’s territory, including Crimea.

    In practice, Ukraine could only recover those territories by a major escalation of the civil war, and that was exactly what Ukraine and its NATO backers appeared to be preparing for in March 2021. But that prompted Russia to begin moving troops and conducting military exercises, within its own territory (including Crimea), but close enough to Ukraine to deter a new offensive by Ukrainian government forces.

    In October, Ukraine launched new attacks in Donbass. Russia, which still had about 100,000 troops stationed near Ukraine, responded with new troop movements and military exercises. U.S. officials launched an information warfare campaign to frame Russia’s troop movements as an unprovoked threat to invade Ukraine, concealing their own role in fueling the threatened Ukrainian escalation that Russia is responding to. U.S. propaganda has gone so far as to preemptively dismiss any actual new Ukrainian assault in the East as a Russian false-flag operation.

    Underlying all these tensions is NATO’s expansion through Eastern Europe to the borders of Russia, in violation of commitments Western officials made at the end of the Cold War. The U.S. and NATO’s refusal to acknowledge that they have violated those commitments or to negotiate a diplomatic resolution with the Russians is a central factor in the breakdown of U.S.-Russian relations.

    While U.S. officials and corporate media are scaring the pants off Americans and Europeans with tales of an impending Russian invasion of Ukraine, Russian officials are warning that U.S.-Russian relations are close to the breaking point. If the United States and NATO are not prepared to negotiate new disarmament treaties, remove U.S. missiles from countries bordering Russia and dial back NATO expansion, Russian officials say they will have no option but to respond with “appropriate military-technical reciprocal measures.”

    This expression may not refer to an invasion of Ukraine, as most Western commentators have assumed, but to a broader strategy that could include actions that hit much closer to home for Western leaders.

    For example, Russia could place short-range nuclear missiles in Kaliningrad (between Lithuania and Poland), within range of European capitals; it could establish military bases in Iran, Cuba, Venezuela and other friendly countries; and it could deploy submarines armed with hypersonic nuclear missiles to the Western Atlantic, from where they could destroy Washington, D.C. in a matter of minutes.

    It has long been a common refrain among American activists to point to the 800 or so U.S. military bases all over the world and ask, “How would Americans like it if Russia or China built military bases in Mexico or Cuba?” Well, we may be about to find out.

    Hypersonic nuclear missiles off the U.S. East Coast would put the United States in a similar position to that in which NATO has placed the Russians. China could adopt a similar strategy in the Pacific to respond to U.S. military bases and deployments around its coast.

    So the revived Cold War that U.S. officials and corporate media hacks have been mindlessly cheering on could very quickly turn into one in which the United States would find itself just as encircled and endangered as its enemies.

    Will the prospect of such a 21st Century Cuban Missile Crisis be enough to bring America’s irresponsible leaders to their senses and back to the negotiating table, to start unwinding the suicidal mess they have blundered into? We certainly hope so.

    The post America Is Reaping What It Sowed in Ukraine first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • Ukraine: The West Has Paved the Road to War with Lies

    The Three Big Lies Pertaining to Ukraine:

    1. The West’s leaders never promised Mikhail Gorbachev and his foreign minister Eduard Shevardnadze not to expand NATO eastward. They also did not state that they would take serious Soviet/Russian security interests around its borders. And therefore, each of the former Warsaw Pact countries has a right to join NATO if they decide to freely.
    2. The Ukraine conflict started by Putin’s out-of-the-blue aggression on Ukraine and then annexation of Crimea.
    3. NATO always has an open door to new members. It never tries to invite or drag them in, doesn’t seek expansion. It just happens because East European countries since 1989-90 have wanted to join without any pressure from NATO’s side. That also applies to Ukraine.

    Lie # 1 – The West never promised Gorbachev not to expand NATO

    Concerning the first lie, listen to or read US Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, here on January 7, 2022.

    Here he presents a series of accusations and empirical lies about Russian politics and behaviours, predictably omitting every mention of the simple fact that it takes two to have a conflict and defying Eric Clapton’s wise advice that “before you accuse me, take a look at yourself.” His body language and submachine gun stumbling way of speaking reveal that he is perfectly aware that he is lying. Note in passing that the journalists present ask only “understanding” questions. The whole thing smacks the Soviet Union shortly before its collapse.

    Why is it so evident that he lies?

    TFF has reproduced two essential pieces from the National Security Archive at George Washington University with irrefutable documentation that Gorbachev indeed was given such assurances – “cascades” of them! as is stated in the articles – by all the most influential Western leaders at the end of 1989 and into 1990:

    “NATO Expansion: What Gorbachev heard” – and

    “NATO Expansion: The Budapest Blow Up 1994”

    Read them, and you will be shocked.

    You’ll find that they have lots of notes and, in sum, no less than 48 original historical documents. For instance, here is just one of the 48 informing us about then NATO Secretary-General Manfred Woerner’s view and statement:

    Woerner had given a well-regarded speech in Brussels in May 1990 in which he argued: “The principal task of the next decade will be to build a new European security structure, to include the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact nations. The Soviet Union will have an important role to play in the construction of such a system. If you consider the current predicament of the Soviet Union, which has practically no allies left, then you can understand its justified wish not to be forced out of Europe.”

    Now in mid-1991, Woerner responds to the Russians by stating that he personally and the NATO Council are both against expansion – “13 out of 16 NATO members share this point of view” – and that he will speak against Poland’s and Romania’s membership in NATO to those countries’ leaders as he has already done with leaders of Hungary and Czechoslovakia. Woerner emphasizes that “We should not allow […] the isolation of the USSR from the European community.

    This is just one of the “cascades” of statements and assurances given to the Russians at the time. Over 30 years ago, 13 out of 16 members were against NATO expansion because they respected Russia’s crisis and legitimate security interests! Today – 2022 – NATO has 30 members!

    Is the U.S. Secretary of State, his advisors and speechwriters unaware of the next-door National Security Archives? Are we really to believe that they have no clue about the conditions and dialogues at the end of the first Cold War? If so, they ought to resign or be fired for their unbelievable incompetence.

    If not so – if they know the content of these historical documents – Mr Blinken, his advisors and speechwriters know that they lie.

    Lie # 2 – It all started with Putin snatching Crimea

    The second lie is a lie by omission. Antony Blinken and almost all Western politicians, including the NATO S-G, and mainstream media simply omit that the West attempted a regime change in Kyiv in 2014 and that Putin’s reacted to it by annexing Crimea.

    The Maidan riots took place in February 2014, the sniper fire on February 20. Russia formally annexed – or accepted self-determination – of Crimea on March 18. The complex Western-instigated and -financed turmoil was orchestrated by the EU, US and NATO leadership, as you can read in articles or books by people who know such as Gordon M Hahn and Richard Sakaw (“Frontline Ukraine: Crisis in the Borderlands”), Stephen Cohen, Henry Kissinger and many more here.

    To put it crudely, the conflict issue was the Western attempt at getting Ukraine to side not with Russia but with Western institutions, the EU and, later, NATO. One problem would be Russian-speaking minorities, the opinion polls concerning NATO membership which were not in favour and, more strongly, that Russia would a) never accept Ukraine in NATO – but very well as a neutral state between – and neither that Russia’s extensive military base in Crimea, on lease for 30+ years ahead, should end up being located in a NATO country.

    This entire regime-change policy under the Obama administration was one big insensitive and plain foolish idea also in the light of the old promises given to Gorbachev.

    But of course, that cannot be admitted today, eight years later. To cover it up, the US/NATO must blame the present situation on Russia, on Russia only. Russia annexed Crimea for no good reason; nothing “we” did preceded that move or could explain it.

    Like with the lie about promises never given to Gorbachev and this omission of Western regime change in Ukraine, one must ask: Are they really so desperate and so politically naive that they believe that we neither remember nor can put 2 + 2 together?

    Lie # 3 – NATO doesn’t seek expansion, it merely has an open door to all potential new members who qualify.

    Now to the third lie. It’s stated repeatedly and in a larger context by NATO’s Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg here:

    NATO as an alliance has enormous resources to influence opinions in potential member states. Contrary to his open door talk, NATO’s Charter speaks only about inviting new members, not about holding a door open for anyone who might want to join.

    It should be well-known by now – but isn’t – that in the late 1990s, Vladimir Putin asked to join NATO – but it didn’t happen, did it, Mr Stoltenberg? And why not? Because Putin – Russia – wanted to be invited as an equal partner and not sit and wait till Montenegro had become a member, to put it bluntly. NATO decided to close the door at Putin’s request.

    This – fantastic – story is told by a former NATO Secretary-General, George Robertson; there is no reason to assume that is not credible or just a rumour. Or, for that matter, that Putin was not serious.

    And what an exciting thought: Russia in NATO! Who would Mr Stoltenberg and Mr Blinken – and all the rest of the Military-Industrial-Media-Academic Complex, MIMAC – then have to put all the blame on? How then legitimate NATO’s permanent armament and its 12 times higher military expenditures than Russia’s?

    Mr Stoltenberg must know that he lies when saying NATO has an open door. It doesn’t for Russia. It doesn’t even have open ears for Russia’s legitimate security concerns. But it knows how it would never accept what it requires Russia to accept. Here is a quotation from January 14, 2022, documenting the double-standard, the exceptionalist self-understanding of the US:

    “US will act ‘decisively’ if Russia deploys military to Cuba or Venezuela.” – The White House

    United States National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan called the idea “bluster in the public commentary” and noted that the deployment of Russian military infrastructure to Latin America was not a point of discussion at the recent Russia-US Strategic Stability Dialogue in Geneva.

    “If Russia were to move in that direction, we would deal with it decisively,” he said, responding to a question from a journalist.

    The US opposition to Russian troop placement in the Americas may raise some eyebrows in Moscow, which has repeatedly complained about US armed forces being located near Russia’s western frontier.” (Russia Today, January 14, 2022)

    Finally, Mr Stoltenberg is very proud of NATO’s generous training and assistance to potential NATO members. Before they are admitted, they must go through all kinds of reforms and accept practical, military and political support. And what is the real purpose of all that training and generous help? Stoltenberg says it in the video:

    “…It also makes the societies of Ukraine and Georgia stronger. So resilient, well-functioning societies are also less vulnerable from interference from Russia.”

    In plain Realpolitik language: the goal is to disconnect countries from Russia’s influence, program them for NATO membership and then they decide in complete freedom to ask to become members.

    Remember, NATO never drags in members. NATO set up its office in Kyiv in 1994. And here you’ll see how Olga Stefanishyna, Ukraine’s deputy prime minister, standing at NATO’s HQ with Stoltenberg, consistently talking about NATO as Ukraine’s “allies,” expecting all kinds of guarantees and – in Foreign Policy of course – argues that Ukraine Needs a Clear Path to NATO Membership in the face of Russian aggression.

    Accumulate expectations and add a series of lies when Reality emerges as a train coming against you in a dark tunnel. And you have the perfect recipe for war – Cold or Warm. Or both.

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  • The State’s Celebration of Lies and Punishment of Truth

    Julian Assange once said that if wars can be started by lies, they can be stopped by truth. Assange suffered immeasurably, with Britain and America taking him away for revealing facts about US war crimes in Iraq, while notorious Iraq War liar Tony Blair was knighted.

    “Sir” Tony Blair may now be paraded around as a model citizen of the United Kingdom and the West, an appropriate display of the “values” our civilization now represents. Be a spreader of lies and violence like this goblin, and you will be honored. Happen upon evidence of a war crime by the state, or even by a foreign regime the UK has allied itself to, and you will be punished.

    Of course, the greatest victims of Tony Blair’s knighting are the British state’s eroded and discredited reputation for veracity and each individual who was made a knight by the state and now has to bear the dishonor of sharing that with Blair. By sending the message that they support and stand by a liar, British MPs are telling their constituents that they are also liars and that all the UK’s government departments are staffed by liars. Although it is hardly true, sending this message complicates their ability to elicit trust from many in their attempts to inform the public.

    If we find ourselves asking why a new generation of paranoid people and conspiracy theorists is emerging in the UK in the next decade, we need look no further than the resolute commitment of the state and the media to honor a known liar. For many, that will be the final nail in the coffin of the state as a source of information.

    At the same time that they celebrate and idolize a liar, British politicians wonder why so many people don’t believe them. They can only conclude that certain mischief-makers must be spreading disinformation, rather than that normal people tend to notice liars and eventually stop believing them.

    The terror of British MPs under the gaze of the people is greater than ever before, yet they are unable to accept that they created this situation. MPs may, in fact, be more violently hated by paranoid random citizens than ever before in history.

    The murders of MPs Jo Cox and Sir David Amess by random citizens as they tried to do their jobs were undeserved and tragic, and even Tony Blair deserves no such thing. However, these acts, like the crazy burning of 5G towers by paranoid citizens, are the result of disbelief in all authority. It is the result of British MPs often regarding citizens as mere fools they are allowed to deceive.

    The Assange saga shows that such politicians are much more frustrated at the inconvenient truth than they are at deception on any scale. As far as they are concerned, the ends are all that matter, and the means are not to be looked at. It doesn’t matter how many people are lied to or killed if the personal wishes of British MPs and officials are served – what they would call the “national interest” but is, in fact, their interest at the expense of the nation. If the truth hurts them, the truth is to be abhorred for being against the national interest, as Assange’s truth is. If lies help the politicians, the lies are good and ought to be rewarded and the deceiver praised for being an “outstanding statesman and performer“, to use the words Michael Gove recently used in Blair’s defense. No sense of morality is permitted, only a sense of what most favors those individuals who manage the country.

    In rewarding liars and punishing the innocent, Britain as a state has shown itself to be blind and deaf to the warning signs before it. It sets itself on course to being believed by no-one and securing the loyalty of no-one. The terror in the heart of the state at what its own citizens might do next will increase, as MPs will know they deserve contempt.

    The sirs of Britain could give up their titles to avoid being associated with predators and psychopaths. From Prince Andrew to Jimmy Savile, the most honored figures in Britain have a history of often being, or at least coddling, the vilest people imaginable. No honorable person will be found among them, if they are willing to be associated with monsters.

    British politicians seem to live in polite, isolated bubbles from which they take a tone of moral superiority and lecture the population, taking no mandate from them. They do not comprehend the gravity of what could happen to them if there was a complete collapse of all trust in authority, and seem to have no belief in such a scenario at all.

    British political authority oozes festering snobbery, privilege and immunity because British rulers miraculously never succumbed to revolution, never paid the price for abusing the sovereign nation, and never learned to serve the country faithfully. The result is self-serving “sirs” who believe their purpose is to lord over others once they get past the inconvenient trifle of pandering for votes. Democracy exists, but what we get is not democratic.

    Boris Johnson’s resistance to resigning over his lockdown-defying parties, against the demands of MPs, shows that the priority of rulers even under the present democracy is hardly ever the wellbeing of the public but their own positions. It also shows how politicians draw a distinction between how they conduct themselves and how they expect members of the public to behave. The opposition Labour Party offers little better, though, being guilty of the same thing, despite their efforts to capitalize on the scandal.

    Although radical change cannot take place in the UK, owing to the deeply reactionary nature of the overall society and wise caution exercised by many, the state can be expected to eventually change its ways, bending under the wind of change. It is doubtful that Tony Blair’s knighthood will be reversed in his lifetime, but society will eventually recognize him for what he was. As with Jimmy Savile, the divorce of the society from him will politely take place after he is gone.

    The UK does not undergo radical change, but it does become kinder with time, and that should be expected in the way it handles political prisoners like Assange and the way it chooses to engage in future conflicts. It is only unfortunate that we, as a society, seem to still be too dragged down by the self-serving governing elite to save Assange in time.

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  • “Honest mistakes”: How the US and Israel justify the targeting and killing of civilians

    An “honest mistake” is buying your partner the wrong perfume or copying someone into an email chain by accident. It is not firing a drone missile at a car, killing 10 civilians – and doing so when a small child was clearly visible moments earlier.

    And yet, a supposedly “independent” Pentagon inquiry this month claimed just such a good-faith mistake after US commanders authorised a drone strike in late August that killed an Afghan family, including seven children. A US air force general concluded that there was no negligence or misconduct, and that no disciplinary action should be taken.

    At the weekend, the Pentagon exonerated itself again. It called a 2019 air strike on Baghuz in Syria that killed dozens of women and children “justified”. It did so even after an investigation by the New York Times showed that the group of civilians who were bombed had already been identified as fleeing fighting between US-backed militias and the Islamic State group.

    A US military lawyer, Dean Korsak, flagged the incident at the time as a potential war crime but the Pentagon never carried out an investigation. It came to public attention only because Korsak sent details to a Senate oversight committee.

    In announcing the conclusions of its Afghanistan inquiry, the Pentagon made clear what its true priorities are in the wake of its hurried, Saigon-style exit from Afghanistan following two decades of failed occupation. It cares about image management, not accountability.

    Contrast its refusal to take action against the drone operators and commanders who fired on a civilian vehicle with the Pentagon’s immediate crackdown on one of its soldiers who criticised the handling of the withdrawal. Veteran marine Stuart Scheller was court-martialled last month after he used social media to publicly berate his bosses.

    Which of the two – Scheller’s comment or the impunity of those who killed an innocent family – is likely to do more to discredit the role of the US military, in Afghanistan or in other theatres around the globe in which it operates?

    Colonial narrative

    The Pentagon is far from alone in expecting to be exempted from scrutiny for its war crimes.

    The “honest mistake” is a continuing colonial narrative western nations tell themselves, and the rest of us, when they kill civilians. When western troops invade and occupy other people’s lands – and maybe help themselves to some of the resources they find along the way – it is done in the name of bringing security or spreading democracy. We are always the Good Guys, they are the Evil Ones. We make mistakes, they commit crimes.

    This self-righteousness is the source of western indignation at any suggestion that the International Criminal Court at The Hague should investigate, let alone prosecute, US, European and Israeli commanders or politicians for carrying out or overseeing war crimes.

    It is only African leaders or enemies of Nato who need to be dragged before tribunals and made to pay a price. But nothing in the latest Pentagon inquiry confirms the narrative of an “honest mistake”, despite indulgent coverage in western media referring to the drone strike as “botched”.

    Even the establishment of the inquiry was not honest. How is it “independent” for a Pentagon general to investigate an incident involving US troops?

    The drone operators who killed the family of Zemerai Ahmadi, an employee of a US aid organisation, were authorised to do so because his white Toyota Corolla was mistaken for a similar vehicle reported as belonging to the local franchise of Islamic State. But that make is one of the most common vehicles in Afghanistan.

    The head of the aid organisation where he worked told reporters pointedly: “I do not understand how the most powerful military in the world could follow [Mr Ahmadi], an aid worker, in a commonly used car for eight hours, and not figure out who he was, and why he was at a US aid organisation’s headquarters.”

    The decision was, at best, recklessly indifferent as to whether Ahmadi was a genuine target and whether children would die as a result. But more likely, when it attacked Ahmadi’s vehicle, the entire US military system was in the grip of a blinding thirst for revenge. Three days earlier, 13 American soldiers and 169 Afghan civilians had been killed when a bomb exploded close to Kabul airport, as Afghans massed there in the hope of gaining a place on one of the last evacuation flights.

    That airport explosion was the final military humiliation – this one inflicted by Islamic State – after the Taliban effectively chased American troops out of Afghanistan. Revenge – even when it is dressed up as restoring “deterrence” or “military honour” – is not an “honest mistake”.

    Pattern of behaviour

    But there is an even deeper reason to be sceptical of the Pentagon inquiry. There is no “honest mistake” defence when the same mistakes keep happening. “Honest mistakes” can’t be a pattern of behaviour.

    And yet the long years of US occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq, and meddling in Syria, have been pockmarked with air strikes that obliterated families or slammed into wedding parties. That information rarely makes headlines, eclipsed by the Pentagon’s earlier, faulty claims of the successful “neutralisation of terrorists”.

    But just such “mistakes” were the reason why the US occupation of Afghanistan ultimately imploded. The Pentagon’s scatter-gun killing of Afghans created so many enemies among the local population that US-backed local rulers lost all legitimacy.

    Something similar happened during the US and UK’s occupation of Iraq. Anyone who believes the Pentagon commits “honest mistakes” when it kills civilians needs to watch the video, Collateral Murder, issued by WikiLeaks in 2012.

    It shows the aerial view of helicopter pilots in 2007 as they discuss with a mix of technical indifference and gruesome glee their missile strikes on a crowd of Iraqis, including two Reuters journalists, moving about on the streets of Baghdad below.

    When a passing van tries to come to the aid of one of wounded, the pilots fire again, even though a child is visible in the front seat. In fact, two children were found inside the van. US soldiers arriving at the scene made the decision to deny both treatment from US physicians.

    As the pilots were told of the casualties, one commented: “Well, it’s their fault for bringing their kids into a battle.” The other responded: “That’s right.”

    Before the video was leaked, the military claimed that the civilians killed that day had been caught in the crossfire of a gun battle. “There is no question that coalition forces were clearly engaged in combat operations against a hostile force,” a statement read.

    The video, however, shows that there was nothing honest or mistaken about the way those Iraqis died, even if there was no specific intention to kill civilians. They were killed because US commanders were uninterested in the safety of those it occupied, because they were indifferent to whether Iraqis, even Iraqi children, lived or died.

    Killing innocents

    The states that cry loudest that they kill innocents “by accident” or “unintentionally” or because “the terrorists shield behind them” are also the ones that keep killing innocents.

    Israel’s version of this is the “tragic mistake” – the excuse it used in 2014 when its navy fired two precision missiles at a beach in Gaza at exactly the spot where four boys were playing football. They were killed instantly. In seven weeks of pummelling Gaza in 2014, Israel killed more than 500 Palestinian children and more than 850 adult civilians. And yet all were apparently “honest mistakes” because no soldiers, commanders or politicians were ever held to account for those deaths.

    Palestinian civilians keep dying year after year, decade after decade, and yet they are always killed by an “honest mistake”. Israel’s excuses are entirely unconvincing for the same reason the Pentagon’s carry no weight.

    Both have committed their crimes in another people’s territory to which they have not been invited. Both militaries rule over those people without good cause, treating the local population as “hostiles”. And both act in the knowledge that their soldiers enjoy absolute impunity.

    In reaching its decision on the killing of the Afghan family this month, the Pentagon stated that it had not “broken the law“. That verdict too is not honest. What the US military means is that it did not break its own self-serving rules of engagement, rules that permit anything the US military decides it wants to do. It behaves as if no laws apply to it when it invades others’ lands, not even the laws of the territories it occupies.

    That argument is dishonest too. There are the laws of war and the laws of occupation. There is international law. The US has broken those laws over and over again in Afghanistan and Iraq, as has Israel in ruling over the Palestinians for more than five decades and blockading parts of their territory.

    The problem is that there is no appetite to enforce international law against the planet’s sole military superpower and its allies. Instead it is allowed to claim the role of benevolent global policeman.

    No scrutiny

    Both the US and Israel declined to ratify the Rome Statute, which established the International Criminal Court (ICC) that judges war crimes. That refusal was no “honest mistake” either. Each expected to avoid the court’s scrutiny.

    US and Israeli leaders know their soldiers commit war crimes, and that they themselves commit war crimes by approving either the wars of aggression these soldiers are expected to wage or the messy, long-term belligerent occupations they are supposed to enforce.  But whatever they hope, the failure to ratify the statute does not serve as a stay-out-of-jail card. US and Israeli leaders still risk falling under the ICC’s jurisdiction if the countries they invade or occupy have ratified the statute, as is the case with Afghanistan and Palestine.

    The catch is that the Hague court can be used only as a last resort – in other words, it has to be shown first that any country accused of war crimes failed to seriously investigate those crimes itself.

    The chorus from the US and Israel of “honest mistake” every time they kill civilians is just such proof. It demonstrates that the US and Israeli legal systems are entirely incapable of upholding the laws of war, or holding their own political and military officials to account. That must be the job of the ICC instead.

    But the court is fearful. The Trump administration launched a mafia-style campaign against it last year to stop its officials investigating US war crimes in Afghanistan. The assets of the court’s officials were blocked and they were denied the right to enter the US.

    That is the reason why the court keeps failing to stand up for the victims of western war crimes like Zemerai Ahmadi and his children. The ICC had spent 15 years dragging its feet before it finally announced last year that it would investigate allegations of US war crimes in Afghanistan. That resolve quickly dissolved under the subsequent campaign of pressure.

    In September, shortly after Ahmadi’s family was killed by US drone operators, the court’s chief prosecutor declared that investigations into US actions in Afghanistan, including widespread claims of torture of Afghans, would be “deprioritised.” The investigation would focus instead on the Taliban and Islamic State.

    Once again, enemies of the US, but not the US itself, will be called to account. That too is no “honest mistake”.

    • First published in Middle East Eye

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  • Lying in Public Life: The Scott Morrison Formula

    He has some gall.  Australia’s Prime Minister Scott Morrison, a person who finds the truth a creature best beaten, shunned and ignored, is now moving into what looks like campaign mode.  At COP26 in Glasgow, he sold the world a climate change model that kept company with countries where fumes linger stubbornly, and the fossil fuels burn bravely.  He made sure to do it the “Australian Way“, ensuring that emission reduction targets would not so much be met as thoroughly “beaten” without the need for taxes.  He spoke of technology unproven and made assumptions unfounded.

    Prior to heading to Glasgow, Morrison, having done his bit of crossdressing on the climate change front, was coy.  He refused to reveal the modelling that went into the fabulous predictions of net-neutral utopia.  But on his return, and after any sense of jet lag had been overcome, he was happy to promote the scanty details of an enterprise verging on a hoax.

    Such efforts have become the stock and trade of a man habitually committed to the advertising message.  At best, it is simple dissimulation; at worse – and here, we find ourselves on difficult territory – it is mendacious.  Little wonder, then, that critics have been coming out of late with a sort of adamant righteousness against the Australian prime minister’s relationship with lying.

    French President Emmanuel Macron has led the pack, letting the world know that he did not think Morrison was a liar; he knew he was.  Deceived about Australia’s intentions regarding the now rescinded AU$90 billion submarine contract between the Naval Group and Canberra, Macron singled out Morrison in an impromptu interview with Australian journalists at the G20 summit in Rome.  The conduct of the Australian government had been “detrimental to the reputation of your country and your Prime Minister.”

    Showing that this was not secret men’s business, former Australian Prime Minister and victim of a palace coup that saw Morrison come to power, suggested much the same thing.  Australia’s incumbent, claimed Malcolm Turnbull, had a reputation for being habitually dishonest.  His conduct regarding the submarine deal with France had enhanced “his reputation for being untrustworthy.”

    Morrison’s response has been all shrugs.  It’s politics, and in the political jungle, the thin skinned will not outlast those with thick hides.  “People take sledges at me all the time.”  This gave him ample opportunity to lie about ever having told a lie. “Have you ever told a lie in public life? inquired Melbourne radio host Neil Mitchell.  “I don’t believe I have no, no,” came the reply.

    Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce, as is often the case, preferred to be honest about such instances of mendacity.  “If you ask me a personal question about my life, I don’t have to give you a straight answer.  If you ask me something that’s none of your business, I’m going to tell you what you want to hear to get out of my face.”

    Fairness and due process for a figure such as Morrison demands an understanding about the role of lies in politics.  The recent fixation about his less than fond association with the truth is a reminder of the effort by the Washington Post to count the fibs of US President Donald Trump.  In January 2021, its “fact checker” unit found no less than 30,573 “false or misleading claims” over the course of four years.  “On Nov. 2 alone, the day before the 2020 vote, Trump made 503 false or misleading claims as he barnstormed across the country in a desperate effort to win reelection.”  Can the frail truth survive in a thriving economy of lies?

    Devotees of the anti-lie cult have taken a near fundamentalist line on the issue.  The great sixteenth century French essayist Michel de Montaigne regarded lying as “an accursed vice.  We are men, and we have relations with one another only by speech.”  Lying and obstinacy were those faults that needed correction in a child. “They grow with a child’s growth, and once the tongue has got the knack of lying, it is difficult to imagine how impossible it is to correct it.”

    Lying in politics is much a statement of fact as rising obesity levels in industrialised states.  As that keen student of totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt, pondered, factual truth is ever at the mercy of the lie made in the name of political power.  “Facts and events are infinitely more fragile things than axioms, discoveries, theories, which are produced by the human mind.”   In his unsurpassed essay “Politics and the English Language”, George Orwell also reminds us with severity that political language itself “is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”

    Such conduct is inherent between political leaders, so much so that international relations theorist John Mearsheimer found little literature in his field on it.  His own contribution was to come up with seven different types of lying, including fear mongering, inter-state lies, nationalist myths and strategic cover-ups.  Ever contrarian, Mearsheimer sees instances of lying – notably between the leaders of countries – as less frequent than commonly assumed.  Leaders are more likely to lie to their constituents than their counterparts, which is hardly reassuring to fans of Montaigne.

    The standard of politics and public life is low and finding distinguished figures who fail to deceive their electorates is a task doomed.  Political endeavour remains the feather bed of mendacious undertakings.  But to make such a fuss about being a liar in politics is exactly the sort of thing that is unlikely to affect Morrison.  He is seemingly immune, his armour a prophylactic against veracity.

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    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Nicaragua Has a Public Relations Problem, Not a Democracy Problem

    US President Joe Biden hectored Nicaragua about their November 7 elections accusing them of “a pantomime election that was neither free nor fair, and most certainly not democratic.” Three days earlier, the US lavished a $650mil arms deal on Saudi Arabia, a monarchy where they don’t even pretend to have elections for higher office. Clearly more than democracy is at issue with the US offensive against Nicaragua.

    At issue is what Biden described as “the arbitrary imprisonment of nearly 40 opposition figures since May, including seven potential presidential candidates.” An objective investigation reveals: (1) the motivation for the arrests had nothing to do with the election and (2) the effects of the arrests had no impact on the election.

    The US government, along with its political allies and corporate media, have spun the arrests into a public relations nightmare for the ruling Sandinista government of President Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua. The arrests are being used as a pretext for a concerted operation to delegitimize the genuinely democratic elections of a government seeking to be independent of Washington. This is part of a larger regime-change campaign against the left-leaning governments of Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua; what former US National Security Adviser John Bolton called the “Troika of Tyranny.”

    The seven presidential “pre-candidates”

    The corporate press, hostile to the elected Nicaraguan government, dubbed seven of those arrested as “pre-candidates.” However, none of them were associated with the ballot-qualified political parties in Nicaragua, and not one of them had a popular following outside the Washington Beltway. In short, they were not seriously running for presidential office and, if they had been, none would have mounted a serious challenge to the ruling Sandinistas.

    Even if the “pre-candidates” were legitimate presidential hopefuls, the fact that there were seven of them demonstrates that the US was unable to unify the opposition around a single candidate. Had the seven “hopefuls” run, they would have further split the opposition vote. The notion that the Sandinistas arrested the seven to ensure they would win is a fiction.

    The violent opposition has been in disarray ever since their 2018 coup attempt fizzled and a tidal wave of public opinion turned against them. The US had spent tens of millions of dollars generating the opposition but was unable to get the fractious parties to coordinate amongst themselves.

    Nicaragua’s electoral oversight body, the Supreme Electoral Council (CSE), is an independent branch of the government. Both Sandinista and opposition party representatives are on it. Rather than suppressing the opposition, the CSE extended the deadline for parties to register to run in the November elections to encourage a diversity of voter choices. However, one far-right grouping, headed by a former Somoza general, did not get their paperwork in order on time and was therefore not certified.

    The seven “presidential hopefuls” plus 30 others were arrested for another reason. Following the 2018 coup attempt, Nicaragua passed two laws that criminalized promoting foreign interference in Nicaragua’s internal affairs, seeking foreign military intervention, organizing acts of terrorism, and promoting coercive economic measures against their country. They were arrested for these illegal activities; activities, it should be noted, that are similarly prohibited by the US’s own FARA Act, after which the Nicaraguan laws were modeled.

    US has never supported democracy in Nicaragua

    Biden castigated Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega for being “no different from the Somoza family.” Perhaps Biden forgot that the US installed and supported the Somoza dictatorship, while the US regime-change campaign is trying to do exactly the opposite with the current Sandinista leadership.

    If Daniel Ortega were truly “no different from the Somoza family,” the US would be supporting the Nicaraguan government rather than trying to overthrow it. In fact, an examination of the historical record indicates that the US has never supported democracy in Nicaragua.

    The US Marines landed in 1912 and occupied the Central American country on and off until the Somoza dynasty dictatorship replaced direct US control. When the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) overthrew the dictator in 1979, the US resurrected remnants of Anastasio Somoza’s national guard, the contras, that brutally terrorized the fledgling republic.

    To this day, the US has opposed the Sandinistas. Empires like that of the US do not support democratic self-determination of vassal states. Dating back to the 1823 Monroe Doctrine, Latin America and the Caribbean are regarded as the empire’s “backyard.”

    Popularity of the Sandinistas

    Biden carped that the democratically elected Nicaraguan leadership is “long unpopular.” However, Biden’s own plunging approval rating of 42.8% isn’t anything to envy. In contrast, a reliable pre-election poll indicated 73.1% approval for President Ortega. More to the point, the popularity of a country’s politicians is an internal matter and not the business of the US.

    It is noteworthy to understand why the current Nicaraguan “regime” enjoys considerable popular support. Fundamental to this understanding is a long and concerted history of grassroots organizing by the Sandinistas. They led a successful revolution and today continue deep organizing in poor urban barrios and rural areas, especially among the youth, Indigenous and Afro-descendent Nicaraguans, and women.

    Second, the “regime” enjoys popularity beyond the Sandinista base as an embodiment of national sovereignty, unity, and peace in reaction to the long and lamentable history of US intervention. This is especially the case after the US-instigated coup attempt of 2018. Although this is anecdotal, just about everyone I spoke to in Nicaragua had a horror story of the recent violence.

    More than other elections, this November 7th sparked celebrations lasting through the night and into the early morning on the streets of popular neighborhoods throughout the country.  It marked, in the popular consciousness, an official “end to the terrible nightmare and the return to a peaceful process of nation building,” in the words of Abigail Espinosa, a small farmer from Masaya.

    Third, the “regime” has achieved so much with few resources. As Nan McCurdy, a United Methodist missionary who lived in Nicaragua for over 30 years, reports:

    Since 2007 [when the Sandinistas returned to power] poverty has been cut in half, maternal mortality has dropped by 70%, infant mortality by 61% with a 66% reduction in chronic malnutrition in children 6 to 12 years old. With a high percentage of small and medium-scale farmers and much government investment in training and loans, they have achieved 90% food sufficiency.

    Given this record, the current Sandinista election victory by a 76% margin, following 72.5% in 2016, 62% in 2011, and 38% in 2006 are indications of growing popular support and not of dictatorship.

    The parallel reality of follow-the-flag journalists

    The corporate press has been savage in its treatment of Nicaragua, echoing and embellishing the distortions of the US State Department. If Nicaragua is indeed “a slow-motion horror movie” or “a hell,” as described by the follow-the-flag journalists, at least the sinners have universal free education and health care. What these State Department scribes fail to ask is, if the second poorest country in the hemisphere can afford these social welfare measures – really human rights – why can’t the richest?

    It was striking how much the corporate press accounts of the election differed from what happened on the ground in Nicaragua. The Times, gleefully spun: “The streets of the capital, Managua, were also quiet, with little to show that a significant election was underway.” That is, the newspaper of record failed to acknowledge that the election was proceeding peacefully, and the usual Sunday afternoon calm prevailed. But the literally hundreds of thousands of celebrants spontaneously taking to the streets in Nicaragua after the polls closed got no coverage. Meanwhile the corporate press reveled about a few contras demonstrating in Costa Rica.

    Yes, as the New York Times reported, the government “banned large campaign events.” The ban, which applied to all political parties, was due to the COVID emergency and not to suppress political expression. No, as the Times implied, “the only candidate is Daniel Ortega.” Six candidates stood for the presidency.

    After its initial report, the Times had to retract their falsehood – they called it an imprecision – that there were only Sandinista party campaign advertisements in Managua. By my count, banners for the Partido Liberal Constitucionalista (PLC) were most prevalent.

    Nicaragua exercises electoral sovereignty

    Months before the elections, Biden had already pronounced the vote a fraud because he anticipated that the majority of Nicaraguans would vote their choice rather than Washington’s. The US imperiously implored the Nicaraguans to boycott their own elections, which was ignored by a respectable 65% of the electorate; a turnout similar to the vote that landed Biden in office, which was touted in the US media as a “record turnout.”

    On election day, Biden, acting like a schoolyard bully, then threatened to use “all diplomatic and economic tools at our disposal” to punish Nicaragua for exercising its national sovereignty. This was no idle threat.

    Nicaragua is already suffering from illegal US sanctions. The NICA Act of 2018, under the Trump administration, imposed sanctions, including blocking loans from international financial institutions controlled by the US. In August 2020, the Responsive Assistance in Nicaragua (RAIN) plan was revealed, which was a multi-faceted coup strategy by which the US contracted corporations to overthrow the Nicaraguan government. RAIN called for a “sudden, unanticipated transition” government to forestall what they admitted would otherwise be a Sandinista victory in a free election.

    In a seamless handoff from the administrations of Trump to Biden, the RENACER Act, which passed Congress just days before the election and was signed into law immediately following, will visit even more misery on the people of Nicaragua. The Organization of American States, the European Union, and individual state “partners” of the US imperial project such as the UK and Canada have or are in the process of imposing additional hardships on the Nicaraguans.

    Such is the price for holding what the Nicaraguans called their eclecciones soberanas, sovereign elections. Those who deny this right, disallow the Nicaraguan’s imperative to fight back against the imperialist assault.

    All election  bodies had by law equal numbers of men and women

    Elderly voter enters polling station

    Voter with special needs is directed to his voting station

    Voters proudly show their inked thumbs, indicating they had voted

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  • Conservation or Land Grab? The Financialization of Nature

    Just in time for the UN’s policy push for “30 x 30” – 30% of the earth to be “conserved” by 2030 – a new Wall Street asset class puts up for sale the processes underpinning all life.

    A month before the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference (known as COP26) kicked off in Scotland, a new asset class was launched by the New York Stock Exchange that will “open up a new feeding ground for predatory Wall Street banks and financial institutions that will allow them to dominate not just the human economy, but the entire natural world.” So writes Whitney Webb in an article titled “Wall Street’s Takeover of Nature Advances with Launch of New Asset Class”:

    Called a natural asset company, or NAC, the vehicle will allow for the formation of specialized corporations “that hold the rights to the ecosystem services produced on a given chunk of land, services like carbon sequestration or clean water.” These NACs will then maintain, manage and grow the natural assets they commodify, with the end goal of maximizing the aspects of that natural asset that are deemed by the company to be profitable.

    The vehicle is allegedly designed to preserve and restore Nature’s assets; but when Wall Street gets involved, profit and exploitation are not far behind. Webb writes:

    [E]ven the creators of NACs admit that the ultimate goal is to extract near-infinite profits from the natural processes they seek to quantify and then monetize….

    Framed with the lofty talk of “sustainability” and “conservation”, media reports on the move in outlets like Fortune couldn’t avoid noting that NACs open the doors to “a new form of sustainable investment” which “has enthralled the likes of BlackRock CEO Larry Fink over the past several years even though there remain big, unanswered questions about it.”

    BlackRock is the world’s largest asset manager, with nearly $9.5 trillion under management. That is more than the gross domestic product of every country in the world except the U.S. and China. BlackRock also runs a massive technology platform that oversees at least $21.6 trillion in assets. It and two other megalithic asset managers, State Street and Vanguard (BlackRock’s largest shareholder), already effectively own much of the world. Adding “natural asset companies” to their portfolios could make them owners of the foundations of all life.

    A $4 Quadrillion Asset — The Earth Itself

    Partnering with the New York Stock Exchange team launching the NAC is the Intrinsic Exchange Group (IEG), major investors in which are the Rockefeller Foundation and the Inter-American Development Bank, notorious for imposing neo-colonialist agendas through debt entrapment. According to IEG’s website:

    We are pioneering a new asset class based on natural assets and the mechanism to convert them to financial capital. These assets are essential, making life on Earth possible and enjoyable. They include biological systems that provide clean air, water, foods, medicines, a stable climate, human health and societal potential.

    The potential of this asset class is immense. Nature’s economy is larger than our current industrial economy ….

    The immense potential of “Nature’s Economy” is estimated by IEG at $4,000 trillion ($4 quadrillion).

    Webb cites researcher and journalist Cory Morningstar, who maintains that one of the aims of creating “Nature’s Economy” and packaging it via NACs is to drastically advance massive land grab efforts made by Wall Street and the oligarch class in recent years, including those made by Wall Street firms and billionaires like Bill Gates during the COVID crisis. The land grabs facilitated through the development of NACs, however, will largely target indigenous communities in the developing world. Morningstar observes:

    The public launch of NACs strategically preceded the fifteenth meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity, the biggest biodiversity conference in a decade. Under the pretext of turning 30% of the globe into “protected areas”, the largest global land grab in history is underway. Built on a foundation of white supremacy, this proposal will displace hundreds of millions, furthering the ongoing genocide of Indigenous peoples.

    The UN’s “30 x 30”

    The land grab of which Morningstar speaks is embodied in a draft agreement called the “Post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework,” currently being negotiated among the 186 governments that are signatories to the Convention for Biological Diversity. Part I of its 15th meeting (COP15) closed on October 15, just ahead of COP26 (the 26th UN Climate Change Conference of the Parties) hosted in Glasgow from October 31 through November 12. COP26 focuses on climate change, while COP 15 focuses on preserving diversity. Part II of COP15 will be held in 2022. The draft text for the COP 15 nature pact includes a core pledge to protect at least 30% of the planet’s land and oceans by 2030.

    In September 2020, 128 environmental and human rights NGOs and experts warned that the 30 x 30 plan could result in severe human rights violations and irreversible social harm for some of the world’s poorest people. Based on figures from a paper published in the academic journal Nature, they argued that the new target could displace or dispossess as many as 300 million people. Stephen Corry of Survival International contended:

    The call to make 30% of the globe into “Protected Areas” is really a colossal land grab as big as Europe’s colonial era, and it’ll bring as much suffering and death. Let’s not be fooled by the hype from the conservation NGOs and their UN and government funders. This has nothing to do with climate change, protecting biodiversity or avoiding pandemics – in fact it’s more likely to make all of them worse. It’s really all about money, land and resource control, and an all out assault on human diversity. This planned dispossession of hundreds of millions of people risks eradicating human diversity and self-sufficiency – the real keys to our being able to slow climate change and protect biodiversity.

    30 x 30 in the United States

    The 30 x 30 target was incorporated in President Biden’s Executive Order on Tackling the Climate Crisis at Home and Abroad dated January 27, 2021, which includes at Sec. 219 “the goal of conserving at least 30 percent of our lands and waters by 2030.”

    How that is to be done is not clearly specified, but proponents insist it is not a “land grab.” Critics, however, contend there is no other way to pull it off. Only about 12% of land and water in the U.S. is now considered to be “in conservation,” including wilderness lands, national parks, national wildlife refuges, state parks, national monuments, and private lands with permanent conservation easements (contracts to surrender a portion of property rights to a land trust or the federal government). According to environmental expert Dr. Bonner Cohen, raising that figure to 30%, adding 600 million acres to the total, “means putting this land and water (mostly land) off limits to any productive use in perpetuity. To accomplish this goal, the federal government will have to buy up – through eminent domain or other pressures on landowners making them ‘willing sellers’ of their property – millions of acres of private land.”

    In July 2021, 15 governors wrote to the Administration opposing the plan, led by Gov. Pete Ricketts of Nebraska. Ricketts said in a press release:

    This requires restricting a land area the size of the State of Nebraska every year, each year, for the next nine years, or in other words a landmass twice the size of Texas by 2030.

    This goal is especially radical given that the President has no constitutional authority to take action to conserve 30% of the land and water.

    The Real Threat to Mother Nature

    The federal government may have no constitutional authority to take the land, but a megalithic private firm such as BlackRock could do it simply by making farmers and local residents an offer they can’t refuse. This ploy has already been demonstrated in the housing market.

    According to a survey reported in The Guardian on October 12, 2021, nearly 40% of U.S. households are facing serious financial problems, including struggling to afford medical care and food; and 30% of lower income households (those earning under $50,000 per year) said they had lost all their savings during the coronavirus pandemic. In the first quarter of 2021, 15% of U.S. home sales went to large corporate investors including BlackRock, which beat out families in search of homes just by offering substantially more than the asking price. Sometimes whole neighborhoods were bought up at once for conversion into rental properties.

    BlackRock’s chairman Larry Fink is on the board of the World Economic Forum, which until recently featured a controversial promotional video declaring “You will own nothing, and you’ll be happy.”

    We all want a clean environment, and we want to preserve species biodiversity. But that includes human biodiversity – acknowledging the rights of rural landowners and Indigenous peoples, the land’s natural stewards. The greatest threat to the land is not the people living on it but those well-heeled investors who swoop in to buy up the rights to it, financializing the earth for profit.

    Not just private property but those public lands and infrastructure once known as “the commons” are now under threat. We face an existential moment in our economic history, in which accumulated private wealth is acquiring carte blanche control of the essentials of life. Whether that juggernaut can be stopped remains to be seen, but the first step in any defensive action is to be aware of the threat at our doorsteps.

    • This article was first posted under a different title on ScheerPost. Ellen Brown is an attorney, chair of the Public Banking Institute, and author of thirteen books including Web of Debt, The Public Bank Solution, and Banking on the People: Democratizing Money in the Digital Age.  She also co-hosts a radio program on PRN.FM called “It’s Our Money.” Her 300+ blog articles are posted at EllenBrown.com. 

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    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Ellen Brown.

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