Category: Propaganda

  • Some listeners may know the Sentencing Project for their work calling out racial disparities in sentencing associated with crack versus powder cocaine, and mandatory minimums. A recent project involves looking into another factor shaping public understanding and public policy around criminal justice—the news media. In this case, the focus is young people.

    “The Real Cost of ‘Bad News’: How Misinformation Is Undermining Youth Justice Policy in Baltimore” has just been released. We’re joined now by the report’s author. Richard Mendel is senior research fellow for youth justice at the Sentencing Project. He joins us now by phone from Prague.

    The post Baltimore Media Create A False Impression That Youth Are Responsible For A Lot Of Very Dangerous Crime appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • There was absolutely nothing stopping them. But not one single member of Western mainstream media ever visited a bomb site in Lebanon to verify whether Israeli claims it was a Hezbollah base or missile site were true because they knew the answer is negative, as I found across dozens of bomb sites, and that is not the narrative they are paid to promote.

    But when a narrative they are paid to promote came to the fore, they flocked to Damascus – driving right past the bombed civilian homes, ambulance centres and schools of Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley to get there – to promote Syria’s new Israel-, U.S.A- and Turkey-sponsored “democratic” government of entirely “reformed” HTS (Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham) Wahhabists.

    The post Twisting The Terrorism Narrative appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • The vast censorship and suppression campaign launched by American tech companies since October 7, 2023 has been both systemic and deliberate. Instagram, Facebook, X as well as other tech platforms and companies like Google, Microsoft and Apple have actively worked to stifle information regarding the genocide in Gaza. Dissent against policies or individuals who enable these decisions is often met with swift reprimand in the form of job loss.

    Joining host Chris Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report are three courageous individuals who chose to put their careers on the line to fight against Big Tech suppression of voices fighting for Palestinian lives.

    The post Exposing Big Tech’s Complicity In Genocide appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Taiwan’s government on Thursday hit back at a New Year’s propaganda video created by China’s People’s Liberation Army in which President Xi Jinping reiterated Beijing’s claims on the democratic island.

    The video, set to the song “Chinese People” by veteran Hong Kong pop star Andy Lau, features Chinese warships and planes, and what appeared to be a Chinese fighter jet flying near a P-8 Poseidon patrol aircraft that the United States sometimes sends through the Taiwan Strait.

    The accompanying Weibo post read: “The officers and soldiers in the war zone are ready to fight at any time and resolutely safeguard the reunification of the motherland.”

    In a Jan. 1 address to the nation, Xi vowed to unify Taiwan with the mainland.

    “We Chinese on both sides of the Taiwan Strait belong to one and the same family,” Xi declared. “No one can ever sever the bond of kinship between us, and no one will ever stop China’s unification.”

    Taiwan has never been ruled by Beijing, nor formed part of the People’s Republic of China. It is governed by the Republic of China government, formed after the 1911 fall of the Qing Dynasty under Sun Yat-sen, that fled to Taipei in 1949 after losing the civil war to Mao Zedong’s communists.

    Psychological warfare

    Taiwanese Foreign Minister Lin Chia-lung told reporters that the video is an example of China’s United Front propaganda targeting the island’s 23 million people, and aimed to intimidate them with an “illusion” of unity.

    “It is the People’s Liberation Army showing its intimidation of Taiwan,” Lin said, adding that the video was a form of psychological warfare.

    A music video published by the People's Liberation Army's Eastern Theater Command shows China as ready to invade democratic Taiwan, Jan. 1, 2025.
    A music video published by the People’s Liberation Army’s Eastern Theater Command shows China as ready to invade democratic Taiwan, Jan. 1, 2025.
    (PLA Eastern Theater via Weibo)

    While China insists on eventual “unification” with Taiwan — by armed invasion if necessary — the majority of Taiwan’s 23 million people have no wish to give up their democratic way of life to submit to Communist Party rule.

    China has threatened the death penalty for supporters of Taiwan independence, while Taipei says Beijing has no jurisdiction over the actions of its citizens.

    A recent public opinion poll from the Institute for National Defense and Security Research showed that 67.8% of respondents were willing to fight to defend Taiwan in the event of a Chinese invasion.

    RELATED STORIES

    EXPLAINED: What is China’s United Front and how does it operate?

    Taiwanese students shout pro-democracy slogans at Chinese delegation

    A tale of two National Days: Artists pick sides across Taiwan Strait

    The video came as Chinese warplanes and ships carried out the first “combat patrol” around Taiwan in 2025. The island’s defense ministry said it had detected 22 Chinese military aircraft including J-16 fighter jets, carrying out a “joint combat readiness patrol” around Taiwan in conjunction with Chinese warships starting Jan. 2.

    The People’s Liberation Army video also included images of Chinese students visiting Taiwan late last year at the invitation of former president Ma Ying-jeou, who has been criticized by many in Taiwan for undermining its government.

    It omits footage of Taiwanese students shouting and waving pro-democracy slogans at the Chinese delegation, however.

    ‘No discounts on freedom’

    Taiwanese President Lai Ching-te said his government would boost defense spending this year to keep up its defenses and protect it’s democratic way of life.

    “Taiwan needs to prepare for danger in times of peace,” Lai said in his Jan. 1 address. “We must continue increasing our national defense budget, bolster our national defense capabilities, and show our determination to protect our country.”

    He called on the island’s people to build resilience, vowing to “combat information and cognitive warfare, so that the populace rejects threats and enticements and jointly guards against malicious infiltration by external forces.”

    He warned people not to be enticed by Chinese ID card schemes or junkets to China, quoting a Taiwanese saying: “Nothing costs more than a freebie.”

    “Democracy is priceless, and there are no discounts on freedom,” Lai warned. “A wrong step today could mean a far higher price to pay in future.”

    Stealth fighter

    Across the Taiwan Strait, state media said the People’s Liberation Army video showed “the determination, will and ability of officers and soldiers in the theater to stay vigilant, remain ready to fight at any time and resolutely safeguard the reunification of the motherland.”

    The nationalistic Global Times newspaper quoted military experts as saying that the video also highlighted China’s latest military equipment, including references to the “ginkgo leaf” sixth-generation stealth fighter jet and the Type 076 amphibious assault ship.

    A music video published by the People's Liberation Army's Eastern Theater Command shows Chinese celebrities visiting democratic Taiwan, Jan. 1, 2025.
    A music video published by the People’s Liberation Army’s Eastern Theater Command shows Chinese celebrities visiting democratic Taiwan, Jan. 1, 2025.
    (PLA Eastern Theater via Weibo)

    “The PLA Eastern Theater Command’s release of the video on the first day of the New Year also issued a stern warning to the separatist forces of ‘Taiwan independence’,” the paper reported on Thursday.

    It quoted Chinese military expert Zhang Junshe as saying that it showed China would “resolutely fight back and … will never allow any forces to split the island of Taiwan from China’s sovereign territory.”

    Zhu Fenglian, spokesperson for Beijing’s Taiwan Affairs Office, said the song reminded people in Taiwan that they are “all Chinese.”

    Taiwan’s Mainland Affairs Council responded: “Taiwanese people should be more alert to China’s United Front propaganda targeting Taiwan and strengthen their understanding of cross-strait relations.”

    Andy Lau

    Hong Kong current affairs commentator Sang Pu said Lau was a shrewd choice to act as Beijing’s mouthpiece, given his huge fan-base across the sinophone world.

    “People who love freedom and democracy definitely won’t like Andy Lau, but he’s a very good United Front tool when it comes to centrists, or the politically apathetic,” Sang said. “He can be used as leverage.”

    He said Lau, who is also a movie actor, holds a number of official posts in the Chinese Communist Party regime, including vice chairman of the China Film Association and visiting professor at the Sichuan Opera School.

    Sang called on Taiwan to ban him from performing there, following a visit in November where Lau performed “Chinese People” on Taiwanese soil.

    Former Hong Kong district councilor Lee Man-ho said Hong Kongers have known Lau is a mouthpiece for Chinese propaganda for years.

    “A few years ago he made a video promoting the ‘Tomorrow’s Lantau’ [development] project, which was an attempt at United Front brainwashing in Hong Kong,” Lee, who now lives in Taiwan, told RFA Cantonese.

    “But nobody fell for it. Everyone in Hong Kong has seen through Andy Lau.”

    Lee said that back in the 1990s, Lau had been a staunch supporter of Taiwan, and used to make a point of celebrating the Republic of China’s national day on Oct. 10, instead of the Chinese Communist Party’s national day on Oct. 1.

    “But after 30 years of manipulation by the United Front Work Department of the Chinese Communist Party, he has totally changed,” he said.

    Translated by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Malcolm Foster.


    This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Yam Chi Yau for RFA Cantonese.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • By now, it’s indisputable that we’re experiencing a global crisis of plastics production and plastics waste. There may be as much as 200 million tonnes of plastic in our oceans. Humans annually consume thousands of plastic particles and their harmful chemicals. The Global North dumps massive amounts of plastic waste on the Global South.

    Powerful corporate interests, especially in fossil fuels and petrochemicals, are driving the ongoing boom in plastics production. The plastics industry is pushing false solutions like chemical recycling, even as it’s clear that we can’t recycle our way out of this crisis.

    The post Organizers Fight The Greenwashing Of Plastic Pollution appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • In an attempt to ground myself at the turn of the year, I recently attended two webinars hosted by abolitionist organizer Mariame Kaba. A common thread through both talks was the need for the left — or lefts, as Kaba astutely observes — to abandon purity and embrace difference; to ground ourselves in common purpose to meet what comes ahead. In an increasingly divided world…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • BBC editor Raffi Berg has almost complete control of the British broadcaster’s online coverage of Israel’s war on Gaza and is ensuring that all events are reported with a pro-Israel bias, according to a new report published on 28 December by Drop Site News.

    “This guy’s entire job is to water down everything that’s too critical of Israel,” one former BBC journalist said.

    Drop Site News spoke to 13 current and former staffers who stated that the BBC’s coverage consistently devalues Palestinian life, ignores Israeli atrocities, and creates a false equivalence in an entirely unbalanced conflict.

    The post BBC Staffers Reveal Editor’s ‘Entire Job’ To Whitewash Israeli War Crimes appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • I was in Cuba (again) during the first week of December. I traveled with a delegation of members of the National Single Payer organization, which is working to achieve a national healthcare system in the US that would fully cover everyone under a single, comprehensive, government-funded program. We visited a variety of healthcare institutions in the cities of Havana and Matanzas, the capital of the province of the same name.

    One of the most memorable interactions took place at the University of Medical Sciences in Matanzas. After receiving a presentation about the organization and curriculum by one of the leaders of the institution, I asked the assembled academic and clinical professors how many of them had participated in international medical missions.

    The post The Cuban Healthcare System And Its Lessons For The US appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Read this story in Chinese

    The Chinese Communist Party’s United Front Work Department is counting on a new ally in the fight to persuade Taiwan’s 23 million people to give up their democratic way of life to be ruled by Beijing — Cheng Huang, the god of cities.

    Officials in the southeastern province of Fujian, just across the Taiwan Strait from self-ruled Taiwan, invited hundreds of Taoists, temple representatives, scholars and experts to a lavish cultural exchange event last month, according to the provincial government’s official website.

    The event included seminars on Cheng Huang temples across Fujian as well as beliefs around the god in Taiwan, particularly in smaller towns on the island, the Nov. 14 report said.

    Cheng Huang isn’t the first supernatural being to be enlisted by the Chinese Communist Party in pursuit of its political goals, in this case, to control Taiwan, whether by soft power and propaganda or by military force if necessary.

    China has already tried to co-opt the sea goddess Matsu, widely revered in Taiwan, as part of a United Front operation targeting millions of voters.

    And it has also encouraged the worship of the controversial Tibetan dharma protector Shugden, a move at loggerheads with the Tibetan Buddhist Gelugpa sect of the exiled spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama.

    A man places incense sticks at the Taishan Up Temple, a Taoist temple built in 1754, New Taipei City, Taiwan, March 2, 2023.
    A man places incense sticks at the Taishan Up Temple, a Taoist temple built in 1754, New Taipei City, Taiwan, March 2, 2023.
    (Sam Yeh/AFP)

    The United Front is a shadowy government agency in charge of seeking Chinese influence outside the country through individuals and often innocuous-sounding organizations.

    The Chinese Communist Party embraces atheism and exercises tight controls over any form of religious practice among its citizens, requiring them to join government-backed governing bodies and to display the Chinese flag, along with other demonstrations of loyalty to Beijing.

    But apparently it isn’t opposed to using religion to further its political objectives.

    Religious cross-straits links

    Cheng Huang emerged in Chinese folk belief as a spirit protector of city walls and moats, and later diversified into a more complex deity with his own following and underworld bureaucracy mirroring structures found in the land of the living.

    “Cheng Huang culture is one of the important links connecting compatriots on both sides of the Taiwan Strait,” the report quoted Cheng Ming-hui of Taiwan’s Wuji Sanching Temple as saying.

    “I hope we can to hold more such activities in the future to further enhance the understanding and friendship between believers on both sides of the Taiwan Strait,” Cheng said.

    Worshippers carry the Matsu statue, center, during the annual pilgrimage in honor of sea goddess Matsu in Dajia, Taiwan, April 17, 2010.
    Worshippers carry the Matsu statue, center, during the annual pilgrimage in honor of sea goddess Matsu in Dajia, Taiwan, April 17, 2010.
    (Pichi Chuang/Reuters)

    Taiwan has never been ruled by Beijing and is formally governed by the Republic of China government, formed after the 1911 fall of the Qing Dynasty under Sun Yat-sen, that later fled to Taipei after losing the civil war in 1949 to Mao Zedong’s communists on the mainland.

    While China insists on eventual “unification” with Taiwan, by armed invasion if necessary, the majority of Taiwan’s 23 million people have no wish to give up their democratic way of life to submit to Chinese rule.

    RELATED STORIES

    China steps up political control over religious venues, sermons and activities

    EXPLAINED: What is China’s United Front and how does it operate?

    China targets Taiwan’s temples, Matsu worshippers in influence ops

    Ho Cheng-Hui, who heads Taiwanese civil defense organization the Kuma Academy, said China likes to cash in politically on religious devotion of any kind, citing its involvement in the cult of Matsu as an example.

    “They are catering to the customs of the Taiwanese people, but with other motives behind it,” Ho said. “They call it religious exchange, but actually it’s a United Front operation — scholars have defined it as the warfare of influence in recent years.”

    “Some Taiwanese take part in these so-called exchanges because of their religious feeling, or sense of the historical origins [of their beliefs],” he said. “But that’s not what’s happening here.”

    He called on religious believers in Taiwan to become more aware of China’s motives, “so as not to be used” by Beijing.

    ‘Living chess pieces’

    Wu Se-Chih, a researcher at Taiwan’s Cross-Straits Policy Association, agreed.

    “There is also a certain degree of United Front motivation,” he said. “China will always try to leverage any United Front gains from the people of Taiwan.”

    Wu said the “deep connection between folk beliefs and local politics” in Taiwan also offers a channel for funds to flow into — and influence — the island’s messily democratic political life.

    The Chinese government has acquired a number of local temples in Taiwan in recent years, which he described as “living chess pieces” in Beijing’s hands, to boost its influence in Taiwanese politics at a local level.

    “These interest groups haven’t been subjected to enough supervision,” Wu said. “That’s the main reason the Chinese Communist Party targets local temples.”

    And there are also personal risks involved for any religious believers traveling to China, according to Wu, who cited the recent detention of three elderly Taiwanese members of the I-Kuan Tao religion in Zhongshan city.

    “Sometimes the red lines aren’t very clear … so people need to think twice and be vigilant, which is the best way to protect themselves,” Wu said.

    Translated by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Malcolm Foster.


    This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Huang Chun-mei for RFA Mandarin.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • “In nearly twenty years as a journalist, this was one of the most extraordinary moments I have witnessed.”

    That’s how veteran CNN journalist Clarissa Ward described her foray into a Syrian prison on December 12, where she promptly claimed to have rescued a forgotten inmate after three months in jail. But there was just one problem with the “extraordinary moment”: a review of a dramatic story depicted by CNN reveals a number of glaring inconsistencies, the greatest of which is that the man stands accused of being an impostor.

    The post Scandal Deepens Around CNN’s Clarissa Ward Staging Syria Prison Scene appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • The rapid fall of the Syrian Arab Republic government was both a shock and a catastrophe for that region and for the world. It was incomprehensible that the state which withstood a sustained attack since 2011 from the United States, Israel, Turkey and other NATO members, and gulf monarch states such as Saudi Arabia, would collapse so swiftly. The defeat was political, not military. There was surprisingly little actual fighting on the battlefield.

    Russia, Syria’s most powerful ally, is engaged in Ukraine, while Turkey, Syria’s nemesis, played a two-sided game of working with its NATO allies while claiming to be negotiating in good faith with Russia.

    The post War Propaganda And The Fall Of Syria appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Congress has just passed a new bill that will see the U.S. spend huge sums of money redesigning much of the public school system around the ideology of anti-communism. The “Crucial Communism Teaching Act” is now being read in the Senate, where it is all but certain to pass. The move comes amid growing public anger at the economic system and increased public support for socialism.

    The Crucial Communism Teaching Act, in its own words, is designed to teach children that “certain political ideologies, including communism and totalitarianism…conflict with the principles of freedom and democracy that are essential to the founding of the United States.”

    The post Congress Revives Cold War Tactics With New Anti-Communism Curriculum appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • In September 2023, California passed a law requiring fast food restaurants with more than 60 locations nationwide to pay workers a minimum of $20 an hour, affecting more than 700,000 people working in the state’s fast food industry.

    Readers will be unsurprised to hear that corporate media told us that this would devastate the industry. As Conor Smyth reported for FAIR (1/19/24) before the law went into effect, outlets like USA Today (12/26/23) and CBS (12/27/23) were telling us that, due to efforts to help those darn workers, going to McDonald’s or Chipotle was going to cost you more, and also force joblessness. This past April, Good Morning America (4/29/24) doubled down with a piece about the “stark realities” and “burdens” restaurants would now face due to the law.

    The post Corporate Fearmongering Over Fast Food Wage Hike Aged Like Cold Fries appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Orientation
    Situating my article

    Often the rise of China and the Middle East appears to many Westerners as something recent, maybe 30 years old. Before that? Is Western dominance beginning with the Greeks and Romans – right? Wrong, not even close! The rise of the East and the South has roughly a 1,300 year history of dominance from 500 CE to 1800 CE. What is happening in the East today is no “Eurasian Miracle”. With the wind of 1,300 years at its back, it is returning to its long historical prominence today.

    In two my recent articles, Neocon Realists and Global Neoliberals Dead on Arrival and The Myopia of Anglo Saxons Rulers, I attempted to show how narrow International Relations Theory is in its systematic exclusion of the Eastern and Southern parts of the world from its theoretical history. In his book The Eurocentric Conception of World Politics, John Hobson rightfully accuses the West of Eurocentrism, paternalism, and imperialism. But in an earlier book, The Eastern Origins of Western Civilization, he methodically shows how the West first depended on and then denied that Eastern and Southern civilizations were a source of most of their technological, scientific and cultural breakthroughs. This article is based on The Eastern Origins of Western Civilization.

     Western claims about their place in world history

    • Charles Martel’s victory over the Saracens at the battle of Tours and Poitiers 732 CE
    • Europe pioneers the medieval agricultural revolution 600-1000 CE
    • Italian pioneers long-distance trade and early capitalism. Italy the leading global power 1000 CE
    • European crusaders assert control over the Islamic Middle East Post 1095 CE
    • Italian Renaissance and scientific revolution 1400-1650 CE
    • China withdraws from the world, leaving a vacuum filled by Europeans 1434 CE
    • Guttenberg invents the movable metal-type printing press 1455 CE
    • Bartolomeu Diaz is the first to reach the Cape of Good Hope 1487-88 CE
    • European Age of Discovery and the emergence of early Western globalization Post 1492 CE
    • The Spanish plunder the gold and silver bullion of Indigenous Turtle Islanders post 1492 CE
    • Da Gama makes its first contact with “primitives” and isolate Indigenous people 1498 CE
    • The Europeans defeat the Asians and monopolize world trade 1498-1800 CE
    • European military revolution 1550-1660 CE
    • First industrial miracle happens in Britain 1700-1850 CE
    • British industrialization is the triumph of domestic or self-generated change 1700-1850 CE
    • Commodore Perry opens up isolated Tokugawa Japan 1853 CE
    • Meiji Japan industrializes by copying the West 1853 CE
    • Britain reverses its trade deficit with China in the 1820s CE
    • Opium wars and unequal treaties force open and rescue China’s “backward” economy 1839-1858 CE

    Stopping Eurocentric thinking in its tracks
    You might not suspect that European goods were considered inferior both in terms of quality and price by Easterners. Public health and clean water were more advanced in China than in Europe. By 1800, as much as 22% of the Japanese population were living in towns, a figure that exceeds Europe. Even as late as 1850, the Japanese standard of living was higher than that of the British. In conclusion,  Europe invented very little for themselves. The only genuine innovations that they made before the 18th century were the Archimedean screw, the crankshaft or camshaft and alcoholic distillation process.

    Countering the Eurocentric Myth of the Pristine West
    John M. Hobsons claims in his book The Eastern Origins of Western Civilisation are:

    • The West and the East have been fundamentally and consistently interlinked through globalization ever since 500 CE.
    • The East was more advanced than the West between 500-1800 CE. It wasn’t until 1800 that the West first caught up with and then surpassed China.
    • The East and South were not only not passive bystanders, but in the overwhelming number of cases, they were the initiator of technological, economic and even cultural change.
    • The West did initiate new inventions and ways of life but only beginning in the 19th century.
    • It was also in the 19th century that the West began its denial of Eastern and Southern influence.
    • This denial of pioneering role of  Western leadership in world history requires a revisionist history of virtually the whole world of the last 1500 years.

    Eurocentric Propaganda Maps
    Eurocentrism has multiple sides to its denial, neglect and outright lying about its place in world history. One piece of black propaganda can be seen is in the ways its maps are constructed. Hobson points out that on the realistic map, the actual landmass of the southern hemisphere is exactly twice that of the Northern hemisphere. And yet in the Mercator map the landmass of the North occupiers 2/3 of the landmass. Secondly, while Scandinavia is about a third of the size of India, they are accorded the same amount of space on a map. Lastly, Greenland appears almost twice the size of China even though the latter is almost four times the size of Greenland.

    Placement of National and Regional Formations in World History Textbooks
    I remember my textbooks on world history. While they might start with Africa and Asia, the chapters were relatively short. But as soon as we got to Europe there are long chapters on technology, economics, politics and philosophy. It might not be until the end of the book than the rest of the world is reintroduced again. It’s as if there was no interaction going on between the West and the rest of the world between the time of the Greeks and the 20th century.

    Orientalist and Patriarchal Construction of the West vs the East
    The West is presented as a dynamic, ingenious, proactive, rational, scientific disciplined, ordered, self-controlled, sensible, mind-oriented, scientific, paternal, independent, functional, free, democratic, tolerant, honest, civilized morally and economically progressive (capitalist), parsimonious, and individualistic.

    On the other hand, the East (China, India and the Middle East) and the South (mostly Africa) is conceived of as unchanging, imitative, ignorant, passive, irrational superstitiously ritualistic, lazy, chaotic, erratic, spontaneous, emotional, body-oriented, exotic, alluring and childlike. Furthermore they are dependent, dysfunctional, enslaved, despotic, and intolerant. They are presented as corrupt, barbaric, savages, who are morally regressive economically stagnant, indolent, cruel and collectivist. Ten Western social scientists from the 19th century down to the present have accepted these dualistic stereotypes. It is out of these extremely unjust characterizations that the myth of the pristine Western development was born.

    Hobson writes that there is no dualist more extreme in categorizing the East and West than Max Weber. See Table 1 below.

    Table 1  Max Weber’s Orientalist View of the East and the West

    Occident Modernity Orient tradition
    Rational public law Ad hoc private law
    Double entry bookkeeping Lack of rational accounting
    Free and independent cities Political/Administrative camps
    Independent urban bourgeoise State controlled merchants
    Rational bureaucracy Patrimonial despotic state
    Rational science Mysticism
    Protestant ethics and the emergence of the rational individual Repressive religions and the predominance of the collective
    Basic institutional constitutions of the West are fragmented civilizations with balance of social power between all groups and institutions Basic institutional constitution of the East is a unified civilization with no social balance between groups and institutions
    Multi-state system of nation-states Single state system – empires
    Separation of the public and private Fusion of public and private


    The Western Falsification of the World Before 1500 CE

    Furthermore, standard picture of the world before 1500 is presented by Eurocentrism as:

    • the world mired in stagnant tradition;
    • a fragmented world divided between insulated and backward regional and; civilizations governed by a despotic states, mainly of the East.

    This concept was consciously reconstructed by Eurocentric intellectuals in the 19th century so that first Venice and later Portugal, Spain, The Netherlands and Britain were represented as the leading global powers in the post 1000 period. Please see Table 2 for Hobson’s rebuttals

    Table 2 The Status of World Civilizations before 1500

    Eurocentric Myths Hobson’s Rebuttals
    Major regional civilizations were insulated from each other Persians, Arabs, Africans Jews, Indians and Chinese created and maintained a global economy
    Political costs were too high to allow global trade Globalization in the East was a midwife if not the mother of the Medieval and Modern West
    There was an absence of capitalist institutions
    credit, money changes, banks, contract laws
    There was plenty of commercial activity among Muslims and Chinese before 1500
    Transport technologies were too crude to be effective Use of camels 300-500 was more cost effective than horses
    Trade in the East was only in luxury goods Mass consumer products in China and the Middle East. Africans imported beads cowries, copper and copper goods, grain, fruits and raisons, wheat and later on, textiles which were mass-based goods, not luxuries
    Global flows were too slow to be of consequence Transcontinental trade pioneered by Islamic merchants reached from China to the Mediterranean
    Global processes were not robust enough to have a major reorganizational impact The rise of Tang China (618-907), the Islamic empire (661-1258) and North Africa 909-1171) were plenty robust
    There was no iron production in the world prior to the British Muslims dominate the Europeans in iron production and in steel production until the 18th century. China as well

    The Eastern Origins of Western Civilization
    Middle Ages and the Islamic state
    We are now in a position to compare the Western claims of civilization and what happened when the East and South are given their due. First, much greater than the victory of Charles Martel, between 751-1453 there was the Arab victory in the Battle of Talas which established Islamic domination in West Central Asia. In addition, the Ottoman Turks took over Constantinople in 1453. Nine hundred years before the Europeans developed an agricultural revolution, the Chinese pioneered many technologies that enabled the European agricultural revolution of the 18th and 19th centuries.

    There was no comparison between the primitive and hopeless agriculture of Europe before the 18th century and the advanced agriculture of China after the 4th century BCE (57)

    Technology of the agricultural revolution

    The basic technological ingredients of the medieval agricultural revolution were:

    • watermills;
    • windmills;
    • heavy moldboard plough which created drainage furrows;
    • new animal harnesses; and
    • iron horseshoes.

    Contrary to Eurocentric historians, none of these technological innovations were pioneered by Europeans. Either it was diffused to the West by the East, or Westerners innovated after the Eastern raw materials made them available. For example, Hobson tells us the plough entered Eastern Europe through the East from Siberia in the 9th century. The collar harness was clearly pioneered by the Chinese in the 3rd century CE. The invention of the stirrup really came from India in the late 2nd century and the Chinese bronze and cast-iron stirrup in the 3rd century. Other inventions adapted from China included the rotary winnowing machine and seed drills. Some of the revolutionary rotational crops used by the British in the 18th century were being used by the Chinese some 12 centuries earlier.

    Italian Trade
    Hobson’s central claim is that virtually all the major innovations that lay behind the development of Italian capitalism were derived from the more advanced East, especially the Middle East and China. The Italians might have been pioneers of long-distance trade that established merchant capitalism in Europe, but not on a world scale. The Italians were late arrivals to an Afro-Asian led global economy. The globalization enabled the diffusion of Eastern inventions to enable the development of a backward West. Neither did the European Crusades assert control over the Islamic Middle East. They remained dependent on the Islamic Middle East as well as Egypt. One last point about the Italians. Six-hundred years before the Italian Renaissance of 1400-1650 there was an Eastern and Islamic Renaissance which was the foundation for not only the Western Renaissance, but the scientific revolution of the 17th century.

    Eastern origins of the financial revolution
    Italians did not invent the bills of exchange, credit institutions, insurance and banking. Sumerians and Sassanids were using banks, bills of exchange and checks before the advent of Islam, although it was the Muslims who took these early beginnings the furthest. In the West, single entry bookkeeping was the most widespread use right down to the end of the 19th century. The Italian traders only began to use mathematics to replace the old abacus system once the Pisan merchant Fibonacci relayed eastern knowledge in 1202.

    The Eastern Renaissance
    Arab scholars drew heavily on Persian and Indian as well as Chinese sources on medicine, mathematics philosophy theology, literature, and poetry that lay the foundation for the Italian Renaissance. It’s true that Leonardo Fibonacci, wrote a book rejecting the old abacus system in favor of the new Hindu-Arabic system. However, by the beginning of the 10th century all six of the classical trigonometric functions had been defined and tabulated by Muslim mathematicians. Ibn al-Shatir of the Maragha school develop a series of mathematical models which were almost the same as those developed 150 years later by Copernicus in his heliocentric theory of the heavens.

    The Eastern origins of the navigational revolution
    The foundation of the navigational revolution was the astrolabe and mariners’ compass. The compass could be used even in cloudy weather when the stars were covered. These breakthroughs allowed Europeans to take to the oceans. However, most of them were invented and all were refined in the East. It was the Muslims who undertook all the major innovations.

    Qualification about Italy
    This is not to say that Italy was unimportant to the fortunes of European commerce. However, Venice prevailed over its rival Genoa not because of its so-called ingenuity but because of its lucrative access to the East via Egypt and the Middle East. Italians played a vitally important role in spreading commercialization through Christendom (not the world). According to Hobson, the belief that Italy was important or the development of Europe in the medieval period seems reasonable. But the notion that Italians pioneered these inventions is a myth

    The myth of the European Age of Discovery
    When we examine the so-called European Age of Discovery we find that  that over 1,000 years before Bartolomeu Diaz circled the Cape of Good Hope the Arabs sailed around the Cape and into Europe. The Chinese did so in the 9th century and in the third century the “primitive” Polynesians and Indians sailed to the Cape and the East Coast of Africa.

    Chinese ships were striking in both their size and quantity. In the 8th century some 2,000 ships were working on the Yangtze.  It can be safely said that the Chinese were the greatest sailors in history. For nearly two millennium they had ships and sailing techniques far in advance of the rest of the world that comparisons are embarrassing. (58)

    As for the Portuguese, they borrowed Islamic innovations in mathematics in order to work out latitude, a longitude relying on the Islamic tables developed by an 11th century Muslim astronomer. The European age or the “Vasco da Gama epoch of Asia” turns out to be retrospective Eurocentric wishful thinking

    The myth of Spanish gold ruling the world
    As for the globalization of the economy in the 15th century, one thousand years ago, the Afro-Asian age expanded to a globalized market while not choosing to initiate imperialism. In the late 15th century, the Spanish plundered New World civilizations for their gold and silver. But 40 years before this, the Chinese initiated a silver currency and provided a strong demand for European silver.

    India was not isolated
    It is said that Vasco Da Gama made the first contact with Indian civilization which is presented as isolated. However, John Hobson tells us India was not isolated but had trading contact with the rest of Eurasia. In fact, Indians were economically superior to their Portuguese discoverers. Furthermore, the Chinese, Indian, Islamic and maybe Black African science and technology provided the basis for Portuguese ships and navigation.

    China and the Ming Dynasty

    When we turn to China, we hear the common claim that China withdrew in 1434, inexplicitly renouncing an opportunity to compete with Western imperialism. Supposedly they left a gap which the West filled.  But the truth is China maintained its power as a world trader all the way from 1434 to well into the 19th century (1840). Hobson tells us that:

     The original documents were distorted by the Chinese state in an attempt at being seen as maintaining a Confucius-like isolationist ideal. It was clear that one way or another Chinese merchants continued their extremely lucrative trading with or without official sanctioning. Many European scholars had been therefore easily seduced by the rhetoric of the Chinese state. (63,70)

    One typical myth of Chinese  state was that in true oriental despotic form, they crushed all capitalist activities. The reality is that the system was simply too large and the state too weak to be able to set up a command economy. The second myth is that the Ming state only dealt with luxury commodities. The truth, according to Hobson is that the majority of textiles produced in India were aimed at mass markets.

    Hobson says half the world was in China’s grip. China could have had the greatest colonial power 100 years before the great age of European exploration. They simply were not interested in imperialism (nor are they today). China was the most powerful economy between 1100 to 1800/1840.  Even as late as roughly 1800-1850, Chinese population growth rates increased at a phenomenal rate and would only be matched by Britain after its industrialization.

    China and the printing press
    As for the Gutenberg printing press and the movable mental type printing press, the Chinese had this by 1095. In addition, the Koreans invented the first metal type thirty years before the Guttenberg press. By the end of the 15th century, the Chinese published more books than all the other countries combined. Even as early as 978, one of the Chinese libraries contained 80,000 volumes. It was exceeded by the holdings of some of the major Islamic libraries. It was only in the 19th century that the European printing press became faster than its Asian counterparts.

    Myth of European pioneering of a military revolution
    Before the military revolution, swords, lances, mace and cross-bows were used in warfare. These were replaced by gunpowder, guns and cannons. Much has been made about the European military revolution between 1550 and 1660. But at most, 700 years before this between 850-1290, the Chinese developed all three that underly that military revolution. While the Europeans eventually took these military technologies further, (certainly by the 19th century) the fact remains that without the available advances from the East, there would have been nothing to have been taken further. It was the Jesuits who persuaded Europeans to face the fact that gunpowder, the compass, paper and printing all were invented in China.

    England drug-dealing opium
    Lastly we turn to the relationship between the British and the Chinese. Up until 1820, the Chinese matched the British industrially and it was the British who had a trade deficit. Eurocentric historians congratulate the British in reversing its trade imbalance, not bothering to mention the way they did that was by pushing opium. Even radicals like Marx and Engels looked the other way when the British “opened up” China, rescuing it, according to Marx and Engels, from Oriental despotism. There is a slight problem according to Hobson. Since as far back as 850 China has been open to world trade and achieved great economic progress long before the British had any industrialization of comparative commercial relations.

    Respect for China until the 19th century
    Many Enlightenment thinkers positively associated with China and its ideas including Montaigne, Leibniz, Voltaire, Wolf, Quesnay, Hume and Adam Smith. Voltaire’s book in 1756 has been described as the perfect compendium of all the positive feeling of the time in Europe about the Far East. Martin Bernal reminds us that no European of the 18th century (before 1780) could claim that Europe had created itself.

    Britain as a late developer of the industrial revolution
    For Eurocentric historians, the British genius was responsible for the industrial revolution unaided by anyone else, non-Europeans especially. But almost 2,000 years earlier, the Chinese had developed industry.

    The first cast-iron object dated from 513 BCE. Steel was being produced by the 2nd century BCE. China produced 13,500 tons of iron in 806, some 90,400 tons by 1064 and as many as 125,000 by 1078. Even as late as 1788 Britain was producing only 76,000. Chinese iron was not confined to weapons and decorative art but to tools and production. All this was made possible by the breakthroughs in smelting… and the use of blast furnaces. It was the assimilation of what the Chinese had built that made possible  the industrial revolution in Britain. Further, the industrialization process was made possible not by some independent British know-how but through the exploitation of multiple African resources. (51-53)

    The steam engine, pride of the British industrial revolution, was antedated by the Chinese as early as 1313 CE. The cotton industry, Hobson says, was the pacemaker of British industrialization. But here too, the cotton industry first found its home in both China and India centuries earlier.

    Japan industrialized before England
    When we turn to Japan, we find that Eurocentric historians agree that the Meiji empire underwent a powerful industrialization process, but they imagine that the process happened late, after 1853. Furthermore, it was only through Commodore Perry “opening up” the isolated Tokugawa Japan that industrialization began. But little did they know that Tokugawa Japan was tied to the global economy ever since 1603! Independent Tokugawa development provided a starting point for the subsequent Meiji industrialization. In other words, Japan was an early developer of industry, even before the industrial revolution in Britain.

    English Racist Identity in Justifying Imperialism

    In my article The Myopia of Anglo-American Rulers I went into great detail about the Eurocentrism, paternalism and racism that is involved in Western international relations theory. This described how Westerners convinced themselves of their superiority over the East and South. I will just briefly add George Fredrickson’s two kinds of racism, implicit and explicit in the eightieth and 19th centuries. Implicit racism occurs in the 18th and first half of the 19th centuries. Its foundation was cultural, institutional and environmental. People were not conscious of practicing it and their way of expressing imperialism was to imagine they were on a civilizing mission. They had a “Peter Pan” theory of East as childlike, alluring and exotic.

    In Britain after 1840 there was a new kind of racism which Fredrickson called explicit. Here the criteria for this “scientific” racism was genetic or physical characteristics of the Easterners and Southern civilizations. This racism was overt and conscious, and the superiority of the West was understood as permanent. Their ways of justifying imperialism were a mixture of optimism and pessimism. It was optimistic in its Social Darwinist mentality of subjugation at the hands of the superior British. However, it was also pessimistic because the English feared contact with other races might contaminate the Westerners.

    Evolution of Western Identity 500 CE to 1900 CE
    Westerners also divided societies into civilized (British, Germany) barbaric (China, India, Japan) and  savage (Africa). Each type had a skin color, temperament, religion, climatic character, type of government, self, manner of thinking, ontogenesis, social and political legitimizing and social pathology.

    Table 3  The Construction and Consequences of Western Identity

    Time period Western Identity Eastern and Southern Projections Western Appropriation Strategies
    500-1453 Constructed as Christendom Hostile and evil threat
    Islamic Middle East and Persia
    Attacking Islam through the first round of the Crusades
    1453- 1780 Increasingly as the
    advanced West
    Ottoman Turk as hostile and barbaric threat Attacking Islam through the second Crusades initiated by da Gama, Columbus
    Africans and indigenous Americans considered as pagans or savages ripe for exploitation and repression Appropriating bullion and circulating through global silver recycling process
    Slave trading and commodification of labor
    1780- 1900 Superior and carrier of advanced civilization Either inferior or evil savages or barbarians Slave trading in Britain and US
    Appropriation of Asian and African land, labor and markets through formal and informal imperialism

    How Than Did Contingency Enable The Rise of the Oriental West?
    The prominent anti-Eurocentric scholars Kenneth Pomeranz and James Blaut emphasize contingency (the fortuitous accident) as the critical factor in the rise of the West. The West was lucky that:

    • The more powerful Eastern societies did not seek to colonize Europe.
    • The Mongols turned to China – not Europe.
    • Mongols delivered both goods and Eastern resources.
    • The Muslims were not interested in conquering Western Europe.
    • The Spanish stumbled on the Americas where gold and silver lay in abundance.
    • The Native Americans had inadequate immune systems.
    • African slaves had adequate immune systems.
    • The East Indian company happened to be in India at a time when the Mughal polity began to disintegrate of its own accord

    Conclusion
    I began this article by situating it within two previous articles I wrote showing how narrow International Relations Theory is cross-culturally in the exclusion of the Eastern and Southern civilizations from its theoretical understanding of world events. Embedded in this theory was Eurocentrism, paternalism, racism and imperialism. In this article, thanks to John M. Hobson’s book Eastern Origins of Western Civilization I show how in 19 areas of its history Western claims to superiority and leadership in relationship to science, technology, world trade, military weaponry, industry the West was dependent on the East from the 5th to the 19th centuries. It only clearly took the lead around 1840.

    So how did the West first deny its dependency and then insist on its superiority over the civilizations it once depended on? I begin by pointing out how on a microlevel its propaganda can be experienced in the areas of map-making and textbook construction. I name Max Weber as the historian with the most extreme hostility to the East and South in his study of Eastern and Western civilizations. I identify eight European myths about the status of world civilizations at the dawn of the modern West, 1500 CE. I then comb through the West’s dependency on Islamic, Chinese, Indian and African civilizations from 500 to 1900 BCE. I close my article by showing the extent to which the West did become more powerful was based on luck more than skill.

    So what does this have to do with the world today? It has been clear to me through my study of political economists and world historians that the West has been in decline since the mid 1970s and as China, Russia and Iran are rising along with BRICS. My article attempts to show that the rise of the West has not been a glorious 500 year trek, beginning with the Renaissance or two thousand year triumph beginning with Greeks. It has been a short 130-year history which is ending. The rise of the East and the South has roughly a 1,300 year history with the wind at its back and is returning to its long historical prominence today.

    The post Ungrateful Lying Upstarts first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • The world ponders at the destruction that Israel has inflicted upon the Middle East and North Africa and questions why the United States serves as a surrogate force that assists Israel in accomplishing its purposes. How did a relatively few Zionists deceive an unknowing world to trust its cause and actions were legitimate, convince the United States government to aid and abet in the genocide of the Palestinian people, and achieve decisive power? If there were an obvious answer, and the answer predicted the future, then alerted governments would take remedial action. This has not happened. Approaches to ascertain the cause of the genocide of the Palestinian people and finding the solution to prevent it warrant scrutiny.

    Zionism succeeded as a concept and failed as a mission. Starting with spurious premises, Zionism fulfilled promises to its followers, enabled some Jews to obtain a better life, and added little to what the established Jewish community had already achieved and was continuing to achieve. It traded destruction, oppression, and decades of suffering of the Palestinian community for a contrived state, an ideal nation where Jews could easily integrate and be safe from persecution and physical danger. The latter has not happened. The narrative consisted of unproven and fantastic propositions that scattered Jewish communities throughout the world, who spoke different languages, had different histories, ate different foods, and practiced different customs, constituted a nation. Although a limited number of Jews lived, visited, or had any interest in the area for 2000 years, this nation had a national home in Palestine. The latter concept succeeded from another preposterous supposition ─ 19th century Jews, separated by 100 generations, were descendants of Hebrew tribes that wandered the area, and their wanderings, which left no significant footprints on the soil, were mesmerizing connections, beckoning Jews to return. The preposterous narrative remains relatively unchallenged in a preposterous world.

    Palestinians watched helplessly as Zionists seized their lands and kept them in submission. Caught between “heads I lose,” and ”tails you win” choices, the Palestinians had no choice but to participate in meetings of  “peace proposals” that offered establishment of two states, while knowing  that the Israeli government never intended to fulfill a “two state agreement.” If the PLO refused to continue with the farce, it faced accusations of sabotaging peace; going along with the farce meant diverting from countering Israel’s aggressions that prevented peace. This had become obvious during the 1980s, when Palestinians in the West Bank were hopeful, willing to cooperate with Israeli authorities, and eager to pave a path to self-governance. During that decade, Jewish terrorists planted bombs in the cars of elected Mayors Karim Khalaf of Ramallah and Bassam Shakaa of Nablus. Khalaf lost a foot and Shakaalost both of his legs. A third bomb planted in the car of Ibrahim Tawil, elected Mayor of El Bireh, was discovered before detonation. Between 1980 and 1984, Jewish terrorists killed 23 and injured 191 Palestinians in 354 attacks. The terrorist attacks on Palestinians motivated Hamas, a charity organization, to rebrand itself into an organization fighting for Palestinian rights. As usual, the Zionists used the charges against them for their benefit; the terrorist Israelis who murdered Palestinians provoked Hamas to retaliate and Hamas became known as a terrorist organization murdering innocent Israelis.

    Not until recent years, after several Israeli invasions brought death and destruction to the Gazans, not until illegal settlers stole land, proliferated throughout the West Bank and Jerusalem, and casually murdered Palestinians, and not until the 2023 invasion of Gaza has the world’s populace realized the extent of Israel’s murderous rampages and intent to commit genocide of the Palestinian people. Not until contemporary times has the extent of a worldwide propaganda machine that obscured the truth of the Zionist endeavor been completely recognized. There is no Israeli state, no Israeli people, no Israeli government with which to deliberate and arbitrate. They refuse all entreaties and, by doing that, deny their existence. Three salient characteristics describe the Zionism that led to the establishment of Israel:

    (1)   The Zionist adventure is best characterized as an enterprise, which became criminal in its manifestation. An enterprising band of discontented and idealistic Jewish outliers organized themselves as a business enterprise. Their Histadrut, the General Organization of Workers in Israel, became one of the most powerful institutions in the British mandate and turned into a state sponsored enterprise. As an enterprise, the marauding Zionists resembled the Puritans; their sponsors, Jewish entrepreneurs throughout the world, duplicated the Massachusetts Bay Company, financiers of the Puritan voyage.

    A small congregation of Puritans refused to reconcile their independent organization with the established Church of England. Desiring to preserve their identity and feeling constantly persecuted, they sought new places to live their unique social and communal life. In the year 1621, they concluded Europe would never accept them and sought an opportunity in America. The Massachusetts Bay Company sponsored the Puritan settlements and constructed the Massachusetts Bay Colony, whose fatal encounter with the local native population set the stage for the settlement of the entire coast-to-coast American territory and the decimation of the native peoples.

    The Zionist experience is not being detoured and, because the result may be the same ─ decimation of the native population ─ it is important that the crisis be accurately characterized. Israel is a criminal state that willfully murders Palestinians, steals their lands, ethnically cleanses them, buries their villages under rubble, and destroys their history and heritage.

    One word summarizes the taking of another person’s property, livelihood, and dignity – theft! In this case, there is a specific type of theft, Raubwirtschaft, German for “plunder economy.” In Raubwirtschaft, the state economy is partially based on robbery, looting and plundering conquered territories. States that engage in Raubwirtschaft are in continuous warfare with their neighbors and usurp the resources of their conquered subjects, while claiming security objectives and defensive actions against defenseless people.

    (2) Israel is a mirror image of the Nazi state.
    Comparisons of Israel to Nazi Germany result from its constant wars and policies that insinuate Israel as a repressive and militaristic nation.

    • Virulent nationalism ─ Israel, similar to Nazi Germany, combines a virulent nationalism with militarism.
    • Irredentism ─ Annexation of territories administered by another state on the grounds of common ethnicity or prior historical possession, drove the Third Reich. Israel’s irredentism regains mythical lands and joins a single folk in these lands.
    • Military adventures ─ The Third Reich fought continuous wars for about eight years. Israel has been fighting continuously for 75 years. The former explained their military thrusts as revenging a “stab in the back” loss in World War I. Israel explains its battles by warranted reprisals, defensive, and security measures.
    • Using overwhelming military force to subdue powerless antagonists ─ The Nazis and its Panzer troops went full attack against all opponents, regardless of their strengths. Israel uses a strategy that minimizes its casualties, and despite its claim of being a humane army, has always attacked with pulverizing force, with kill ratios of tens to one and having civilians constitute a large proportion of casualties
    • Racist laws ─ The Nazis had their Nuremberg laws. In Israel, a Jew cannot marry a non-Jew within the boundaries of Israel, similar to a Nuremberg Law that prohibited marriage between Jews and other Germans. The Nakba Law, states that “groups or institutions that mourn Israel’s Independence or deny the state’s Jewish and democratic nature” can be denied state funds. The Citizenship Law allows the state to revoke citizenship and imprison anyone convicted of acting against “the sovereignty of the state.” Few Palestinian Israelis can rent housing or buy property in West Jerusalem. Immigrant Jews are able to acquire property and not allowed to sell the property to Arab citizens. Few, if any Arabs, have been able to purchase government sponsored housing and obtain mortgages. A separation of ethnicities results in the separation of their activities, recreation centers, schools, and education.
    • Severe repression in occupied territories ─ Israel duplicates Nazi repression of conquered people, and construction of ghettoes to house them. Repression of Palestinians under occupation includes confiscation of Palestinian lands for military use, destruction of wells, olive trees and agriculture, raids on villages, obtrusive checkpoints, mass arrests of opposition, and denial of highway use. Walls separate Palestinian communities and families and farmers from livestock and fields, choke the Palestinian economy, and obstruct daily exchanges between people.
    • Killing of opposition and punitive measures after an attack ─ The Nazis used punitive measures and collective punishment to terrorize its captive peoples and crushed resistance. Israel has done the same. The Nazis had Lidice, a village destroyed after the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, the Nazi leader in Bohemia and Moravia. In 1953, in retaliation for a Palestinian guerrilla incursion into Israel that killed several Israeli civilians, the Israeli military raided the West Bank village of Qibya, killed 67 Palestinians and destroyed 56 houses. Palestine has been victim to tens of Lidicies ─ destruction of areas and houses due to accusations of being the homes of suicide bombers.
    • Ethnic cleansing ─ The Nazis planned to move populations in Eastern European nations and repopulate the areas with Germans. After the 1948 and 1967 wars, Israel destroyed 412 Palestinian villages and eventually created 1.2 million refugees who were not permitted to return to their homes. Palestinian bank accounts, land, homes, and industries were confiscated. Incursions have destroyed patrimony, archives, and cultural identity of the Palestinians. Israel military seized the Palestinian archives in Beirut during the war in Lebanon and, under international pressure, eventually returned them.
    • Propaganda ─ Due to its international reach, the Israel propaganda machine exceeds that of the Nazis, churning out each day books, films, plays, music, and articles that extend memories of the Holocaust, references to anti-Semitism, and the greatness of little Israel who needs support as it fights against the world’s evils. An army of several hundreds of thousands of Israeli supporters include planted “emigrants” to the United States and Germany, who invade civic life and institutions throughout the western word, lobby support for Israel, criticize opponents, spread false charges of anti-Semitism, and convince the world of Israel’s cause.
    • Genocide ─ The Nazis are identified with a genocide of European Jews. Israel’s policies are paving a route to destruction of the Palestinian people. Hopelessness, despair, immobility, lack of redress for the loss of their lands, economic insecurity, and constant attacks against their persona and livelihood drive the Palestinians to a difficult existence. Israel’s occupying force shows no care for the rights of the occupied people and no desire to address the fatal issues concerning them; even reinforcing the misery.

    (3) Psychologically disturbed ─ Widely known and not widely discussed, are the disturbing comments and activities of Jewish Israelis and Zionist Jews around the world. Rarely censored by the Israeli government and their native countries, they give an impression that Zionist Jews are morally corrupt, psychologically disturbed, and gain pleasure in lying, deceiving, and harming others, even murdering innocents. Zionist Jews elevate themselves to a superior and unique place in the firmament, the chosen people to whom all others must give homage. Claiming to be eternal victims of anti-Semitism, they daily demand restitution and forgiveness for mostly fabricated crimes committed against them.

    Nowhere and never in the civilized world have a preponderance of a nation’s leaders and its citizens expressed hatred and violence against others equivalent to the expressions from Israel’s leaders and citizens. Without shame, without control, and without concern of their malevolent appearance to others, their detestable utterances have become commonplace and are well known.

    • Israeli Heritage Minister Amihai Eliyahu suggested that dropping a nuclear bomb on the Gaza Strip was “one of the possibilities” in the current conflict.
    • Israel’s Defense Minister Yoav Gallant referred to Palestinians as “human animals.”
    • Israel’s Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said: “The Palestinian village of Huwwara should be wiped out. The state needs to do it and not private citizens.”
    • David Ben-Gurion said, “it doesn’t matter what the gentiles say, only what the Jews do.
    • Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said, “We will turn Gaza into an island of ruins.”
    • Former Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin gave orders “to break the bones of Palestinian inciters.”
    • Ariel Kallner, a member of Israel’s parliament, said, “Right now, one goal: Nakba! A Nakba that will overshadow the Nakba of ’48. Nakba in Gaza and Nakba to anyone who dares to join! Their Nakba, because like then in 1948, the alternative is clear.”

    Israel’s citizens reflect an indoctrination of hate and violence that complement their government’s expressions. Maccabi Tel Aviv fans arriving at Ben Gurion airport from Amsterdam sang: “Ole ole, ole ole ole, Why is school out in Gaza? There are no children left there!” An X user commented, “These people are deranged. They have lost all humanity. A culture of murder and theft doesn’t come without cost.”

    A rocket hit the northern Israel home of Safa Awad, a Palestinian Israeli schoolteacher, and killed her. The Middle East Eye reports that a volunteer at Magen David Adom, an Israeli rescue service organization, wrote, in a post that has received more than a thousand likes, that, “There is nothing to feel sorry for. She is a terrorist in every respect. She is not in our favour in any way. May her getting fucked be blessed.”

    Go to Quora, and observe a string of comments by Israeli propagandists who plant  question and then answer it: “Gaza has a fertility rate of 3.38 in 2023. In 2005 its fertility rate was 6.2. Islam at its finest. They breed like cockroaches.”

    Contending  those defending Israel’s genocidal tactics as geopolitical power politics (USA), guilt for the Holocaust (Germany), and as a settler colonial state (Western nations) have legs, but are counterproductive and have not moved nations to contend Israel. Accusing nations of duplicity only makes them defend themselves and reinforce their duplicity. Showing that Israel cannot be defended and is an immoral, social, economic, and military threat to humanity ─ well, who wants to defend a nation of that description?

    Unless others share in the proceeds, a criminal nation has no defenders. What benefit is it for the Western nations to support criminal activities that negatively affects them?

    Western nations and the Soviet Union fought a World War to defeat Nazism and bring order to the world.

    • How can nations allow the transfer of the racist and genocidal doctrines of the German Nazis to a similar regime? Why did we fight the war?
    • How can Germany claim to makes amends for its past Nazi experience and support the transfer of that experience to another nation?
    • How can nations allow Israel serve as a model and catalyst for ultra-reactionary regimes?

    The mentality that perpetrates the genocide and regales in it is unacceptable. Turning protests against genocide into attacks on Jews, and using the anti-Semitism word are delusionary. We need protection against people who exhibit murderous, racist, venomous, and delusionary characteristics and not offerings of invitations for them to manipulate our society.

    The analysis may seem overkill, but for understanding the critical situation, it is necessary to place in proper perspective the nature of the Israeli regime. Treating it as a despotic nation is incomplete. People make a country and the Israeli people and their worldwide supporters are not the empathetic and cordial populace that guarantees healthy living.

    The post Bringing Reality to the Palestinian Struggle first appeared on Dissident Voice.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Dan Lieberman.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Miami, November 26, 2024—The Committee to Protect Journalists calls on CONATEL, Haiti’s telecommunications authority, to end its suspension of a popular evening show on Radio Mega, one of the country’s largest broadcast outlets, amid concerns the penalty was imposed without due process. 

    “Haitian authorities should reverse their suspension of the Radio Mega show ‘Boukante Lapawòl’ (Exchange of Words) and refrain from further interfering with the free flow of information,” said CPJ U.S., Canada and Caribbean Program Coordinator Katherine Jacobsen in Washington, D.C. “Haitian authorities would do well to focus on restoring order in the country, rather than accusing journalists of spreading propaganda.” 

    The suspension was imposed on November 22 after a wanted Haitian gang leader, Jimmy ‘Barbecue’ Cherizier, called into the show the night before to denounce alleged public corruption, claiming that he was offered a large bribe by a member of the ruling Presidential Transition Council to negotiate peace with the gangs. It was the second time in several weeks that Cherizier had called into the show without prior arrangement, said Radio Mega’s owner, veteran journalist Alex Saint-Surin.

    CONATEL cited a 1977 decree in issuing the suspension without giving Radio Mega the opportunity to explain the incident or defend itself legally.  

    “Notorious leaders have benefited greatly from airtime, spreading messages of hatred and terror against society,” CONATEL said in a letter to the station.

    CONATEL did not immediately reply to an inquiry from CPJ, but a government spokesman told CPJ in a WhatsApp message that Radio Mega had lent its airwaves to Cherizier’s “propaganda,” adding that Haiti was “weak state” struggling to defend itself from Viv Ansamn, a heavily armed gang coalition led by Cherizier.

    Cherizier has called on the council to resign and launched a series of deadly attacks in recent days targeting the prime minister’s office and other government buildings. Armed members of Viv Ansamn control large parts of the capital using tactics such as rape, murder, child recruitment and kidnapping to terrorize the population over the last nine months, according to the United Nations.

    The Haitian media support group, SOS Journalistes, rejected CONATEL’s accusations against Radio Mega, saying that “Boukante Lapawòl has never served as a propaganda platform for gangs.” 


    This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by CPJ Staff.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • As recorded in Hansard, Canada’s prime minister Justin Trudeau, as he did on so many occasions without ever citing the scientific evidence, stated, “We will continue to trust the science.

    The post Trust the Science first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • The North Korean Army’s main anti-socialism inspection division is going door to door in the northern province of Ryanggang to make sure that hardwired propaganda speakers installed in each home are in working order, residents told Radio Free Asia.

    The speakers deliver messages from the local government and play propaganda songs, and residents are told that they are critical in emergencies, including during wartime.

    A resident of Ryanggang province, who requested anonymity for security reasons, told RFA that although the speakers were inspected in March by the local post office, this time it is more serious because Unified Command 82 is the inspecting agency.

    Unified Command 82 was established in August 2021, when the army merged several anti-socialism inspection units.

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    The resident explained that since Oct. 11, the government has been broadcasting patriotic war songs, and ordered that residents listen to the daily broadcasts dutifuly.

    “Starting on Oct. 21, Unified Command 82 went around each household in every neighborhood-watch unit to inspect whether there was a cable broadcast speaker and whether the residents were listening to the cable broadcast properly,” he said.

    Two days later, the broadcasts shifted tone, naming citizens who either did not have a speaker installed, or who weren’t actively listening to the propaganda broadcasts when inspectors came around, he said.

    “Houses without speakers are advised to immediately purchase and install speakers through the post office,” said the resident.

    According to the resident, the speakers must be turned on from 5 a.m. to 10 p.m. Messages from the local governemnt that are not aired on radio or television come through the hardwired speakers, which are called the “Third Network” in North Korea.

    Based on the Soviet “radiotochka” network that hardwired a speaker in every home to a central broadcast location so that messages could be transmitted without sending them over the air, the broadcasts can include local news and mobilization instructions.

    “This broadcast inspection is the second inspection conducted this year, with the last one in March. the resident said. ”Whenever the political situation becomes tense, the Central Committee inspects cable broadcasting to scare residents.”

    A resident who works in agriculture in the province told RFA that there were many households in rural areas where the Third Network is not working. During the economic collapse and famine of the 1990s, the government ran out of resources to maintain cable connections to each home, and in some cases, the wires were cut by residents who sold them for scrap.

    He said authorities were holding emergency meetings to address the issue. The key issue was funding, so some officials proposed that each house should donate edible ferns and omija, a kind of berry used in tea.

    “If each household offers 10 kilograms (22 pounds) of dried ferns or 5 kilograms (11 pounds) of dried omija, the local governments can [sell them] to purchase broadcasting lines from China to restore cable broadcasting,” he said.

    But other officials thought the scheme was not realistic, considering that the rural residents have enough trouble making ends meet as it is.

    “The meeting did not reach any conclusion and ended with the words, ‘We will severely punish the rural management committee and party secretaries who fail to restore cable broadcasting by the end of November,” the agricultural resident said. “There are threats every year that rural officials will be punished over the restoration of cable broadcasting, but no actual punishment has ever been carried out.”

    Translated by Claire S. Lee. Edited by Eugene Whong.


    This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Moon Sung Whui for RFA Korean.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Orientation
    What is politics?

    Nine Questions for Determining What is Politics
    In Part I of my article Seven Theories of Politics I posed ten questions for narrowing down what the range for defining what is politics.

    Temporal reach

    How far back into human history does politics go? Does politics go back to pre-state societies? Or does politics begin with state societies? Is politics possible before there were political parties?

    Cross species scope

    Is politics confined to the human species or does it ooze into the life of other species? If so, which ones? If politics crosses species, is it social species that are political? Is it possible to have animal societies which are social such as lions or wolves, but not political? Does a species need to be social to be political? Is being social a necessary but not sufficient condition for politics? Is being social a necessary and sufficient condition for politics? Or is being social neither a necessary nor sufficient condition? In other words, is it possible for a non-social species to have political relationships?

    How much does evolutionary biology impact politics
    ?

    At a macro level, how does natural adaptation impact human politics? In terms of men and women, how much does sexual selection determine politics? At the micro level, how much do genetics and brain chemistry determine the level and the interest and skill in politics? Or is politics primarily a creature of the socio-historical level of reality?

    Spatial reach

    Where does politics take place? Many political scientists limit politics to what is taking place within states. Is that casting the net too narrowly? Can there be politics through discussions in private  space? Is it politics when I get into a discussion about the viability of capitalism while I am at the unemployment line waiting for my check? Are there politics within families? Are there politics between lovers? Or are politics only about public affairs?

    Am I being political if I ask my partner if she wants to go to the movies and propose a movie and she agrees to both proposals, is spontaneous agreement political? Suppose she said she wants to go to a movie but prefers another movie. We debate about it, and one of us persuades the other. Has the discussion become political? Suppose you and I are riding bicycles. We reach a crossroads where we have to decide whether to turn left or right. We each want to go in a different direction. Is the process of deciding this political?

    Political agency

    Who does politics? Is politics done only by politicians? If I argue with my neighbor about police brutality in my neighborhood, are my neighbor and I political beings in this discussion? Do I become political only when I vote on the issue in the next election? Do I become political when I bring police brutality to a town hall meeting next month? Or is the only person who is political the mayor who decides whether or not to make it part of his platform for his campaign next month?

    What is the relationship between politics and power?

    Can you have politics without having power? Can you have power without having politics? If power and politics are related, in what way? Are politics and power interchangeable? Is one a means to another? Is power the means and politics is the end? Is politics the means and power the end?

    Politics, force and coercion

    Let’s go back to this movie issue. Suppose Sandy has been drinking, and in the past she has been bad-tempered to her partner. She starts drinking while they are deciding on a movie. Sandy’s partner starts worrying and gives in to the movie Sandy wants to watch prematurely to avoid the risk of being yelled at. Is that politics?

    This example is a small slice of a larger issue: what is the relationship between politics and force or the threat of force? Is violence an inherent part of politics or is politics what you do to win someone over without being violent?  Some political theorists like Bernard Crick say that politics is the art of compromising when you know you cannot get what you want. Others say that the whole political system is based on violence because the entire class system is based on exploitation and force. All attempts to change things must come up against this militaristic force which protects the rulers. Some say that the only force is political and that the state is the ultimate political actor because it has, in Weber’s words, a monopoly on the means of violence.

    Interdisciplinary span of politics

    How (if at all) is politics related to economics? What is the relationship between technology and politics?  Does the economy dictate politics? Does politics determine economics? Does technology determine politics or does politics determine technology? The same question could be asked about religion or mass media.

    What, if any, is the relationship between theories of politics and political ideologies?

    Is there a relationship between a consistent set of answers to these questions and whether you are a liberal or conservative? How will the answers of social democrats, communists and fascists be different than that of either anarchists on the left or libertarian capitalists on the right?

    As it turns out, the field of cross-cultural politics I will be discussing gives very narrow answers to these questions and therefore leaves a great deal out.

    • Temporal reach – narrow, starts with class societies and leaves out tribal societies
    • Cross-species – narrow, limits it to the human species
    • Is politics biological? Narrow, politics is limited to the social, psychological
    • Spatial reach – narrow, limited to what happens in states
    • Political agency—limited to what politicians do, no one else
    • Relationship between politics and power, wide, used interchangeably
    • How is politics related to force or coercion? Narrow, understates force
    • Interdisciplinary span of politics – narrow, it excludes economics
    • Theories of politics and ideology -narrow, it tries to make politics scientific and above ideology

    In Part II of my article, I identity seven theories of politics:

    Old Institutionalists

    Civil Republicans

    • Weberian political sociologists
    • Marxian political scientists
    • Rational choice theorists
    • Radical feminists
    • Bio-evolutionary

    All the answers comparative politics gives to those questions primarily come from two schools, the old institutionalists and rational choice theorists. They pretty much leave out the other five schools.

    Connection to past articles
    About three years ago I wrote four articles about the ideological nature of political science. One article Anti-Communist Political Science: Propaganda for the Capitalist State was primarily about political science as it is practiced in the United States (not Europe). The second article, Invasion of the Body Snatchers connects political science to neo-classical economics and shows how both support each other while blocking out an integrated approach called political economy. In my third article Dictatorship and Democracy I expose how Mordor political scientists were quite interested in dictatorships both in Europe and even within the United States in the 1930s. On the other hand, their interpretation of democracy was thin and lacked any subsistence. Lastly, my piece Totalitarian Anti-Communism showed the manipulation of the use of the word “Totalitarian” from the 1930s into the late 20th century. However, there is one topic that I did not cover in much detail and that is the subject of comparative politics. I did discuss it a bit in the last part of my first article but not in any depth. I would especially like to write about it now because while the field of comparative politics is not taken seriously outside the United States because its political manipulation is well-known, it still serves as propaganda for war and imperialism within the United States. It is as part of Yankee self-propaganda that discussing the field of comparative politics is still worth an analysis.

    Sources for my criticisms of comparative politics
    Sources for my criticisms of comparative politics are as follows. Ronald Chilcote wrote a very good criticism of comparative politics from a Marxian point of view. He was especially good at exposing the ideological nature in the field. For example he pointed out the connection between the social sciences and the CIA. Ido Oren was also really excellent at showing the connection between modernization theorists and the promotion of US foreign policy. Michael Latham’s book Modernization as Ideology reveals how modernization theory was behind JFK’s international anti-communist program, Alliance for Progress. Lastly, Irene Gendzier’s book Development Against Democracy explains how the word “development” was used by comparative politics involved in foreign policy to railroad countries on the capitalist periphery away from socialist and communist transition programs.

    Where are we going?
    In this article I will show eight foundational problems with comparative politics:

    • Its characterization of capitalist societies as democratic;
    • Its characterization of states as governing rather than ruling;
    • Its relative exclusion of propaganda from political communication in the West;
    • Its ignoring the presence of how capitalism undermines political relations;
    • Its ignoring of the Secret Service and the rest of deep state in political decision-making processes;
    • Its blanket characterization of socialism with authoritarian;
    • Its neglect of anarchism as a legitimate part of socialism;
    • Its treatment of nation-states as autonomous and not determined by alliances and between larger, more powerful states and transnational capitalists.

    Oligarchies vs Democracy

    Those of you who were unlucky enough to take a political science class might have been exposed to a cross-cultural version of the same thing. I refer to the field of comparative politics. The first thing that struck my eye in looking at the table of contents of a college textbook on comparative politics was the different types of rule. According to mainstream theorists, there are only two kinds of rule, democratic and authoritarian. The United States and Western Europe are deemed “democratic” whereas Russia, China and Iran are deemed authoritarian.

    The unpopularity of democracy in the West until the 20th century
    One problem with this formulation is that it fails to address the unpopularity of democracy in Yankee history itself, not only among conservatives but liberals as well all the way to the end of the 19th century. In the 19thcentury when liberalism really took hold as a political ideology, liberals were not interested in democracy, and considered it “mob rule”. Most industrialized countries did not have the right to vote at the end of the 19th century. Back then farmer populist parties and socialist parties took their democracy seriously, bringing economics into it. The result was a “substantive democracy” championed by Charles Merriman and Charles Beard in the 1930s. But the rise of fascism and communism had shaken liberal confidence in the natural sympathy between democracy and capitalism. So in the 1940s Joseph Schumpeter introduced a weakened form of democracy as simply the circulation of elite politicians  that people choose between. The procedural democracy of Robert Dahl of the 1950s involved choosing between these elites through voting. There was nothing about economics.

    In his book Strong Democracy, Benjamin Barber distinguishes “thick democracy” from the “thin democracy” of Dahl. My point is by the standards of thick democracy few if any Western countries are democratic. To call them democratic serves the ideological purposes of cold warriors and their desire to fight communism. Since democracy is a loaded virtue word, and authoritarian is a loaded vice word, a cold war opposition between the two is built into the entire field of comparative politics.

    How many parties make a democracy?
    What is striking is the criteria for what constitutes democracy when it comes to political parties. For comparative politics, a single party rule constitutes authoritarian rule. But the addition of just one more party, as in the American political system, we suddenly then have a democracy. Countries with many parties including most of Europe are also constituted as democracies. Aristotle argued that there were 3 forms of rule – monarchy, oligarchy and democracy. Oligarchy is the rule of the few. Given the actual nature of who controls the elections in the United States, it is most reasonable to say the United States and Western Europe are oligarchies, ruled by the ruling class, the upper class and the upper middle class. Taken together this is about 20% of the population, hardly a democracy. In the United States most of middle class, working class and poor have no representation and yet the country is called democratic.

    One party – authoritarian

    Two parties – democratic

    Many parties – democratic

    In other words, the difference between one and two parties is greater than the difference between two parties and many parties. In fact, the implication of those who defend the two-party system is that having many parties can be confusing and unwieldly. So we wind up with the two parties of the United States as a kind center of stability. This is so despite the fact that for about the last 50 years, forty percent or more people in the United States do not vote. Is this a sign that democracy in the United States doesn’t work? Not at all. Those who don’t vote are dismissed as ignorant, apathetic or pathological in some way. The reason people don’t vote is simply because neither party represents their interest is never present. When voting tallies are presented, the number of people who don’t vote is rarely presented. Voting tallies are presented like 50% vs 49% for the two parties as if that constituted all the people who could have voted. In fact, in the actual tallies the winning party gets 30% of the vote. The loser gets 29%. What is ignored is the highest tally: 40% who don’t vote. This is democracy? What we have here is an oligarchy. But in comparative politics, democracy is not a process that actually exists but a self-congratulating ideology for the ruling capitalist oligarchs who control both parties.

    Governing vs Ruling
    In comparative politics, “governing” is a taken for granted term for Western capitalist societies. “Ruling” is saved for countries suspected of not being democratic, like “authoritarian” countries. I prefer to take the governing word very seriously as it is used in cybernetic systems. Governing in cybernetic systems means steering a system which includes goals, communication within the system, adaptation to the environment, feedback systems which allow for adjustment and few forward system which results in planning. The human heart is a “governor” of the human body. By these standards the only type of society in which there was governing was the egalitarian politics of hunting and gathering societies. Simple horticulture societies in these societies decision-making was collective. They adapted and moved when the ecology dictated a change.

    For the last 5,000 years, complex political systems had rulers. This means that political goals were rarely carried out, communication systems were blocked and muddled by self-interested bureaucracies. Adaptations to the environment were slowed down by the machinations of the short-term thinking of ruling classes. Feedback systems were ignored such as extreme weather and pollution. Feed forward mechanisms were clogged by myopic ruling classes who couldn’t think three months ahead – if that. In Joseph Tainter’s book The Collapse of Complex Societies he describes how inept the ruling classes can be. Calling complex societies “governing” is ridiculous when compared to hunting and gathering societies which prevailed for 90% of human history. We are ruled by oligarchies and this should be reflected in any political field that considers itself scientific.

    The Exclusion of Propaganda from Political Communication in the West
    In part, the reason we have the illusion of democracy and a governing class rather than rulers of an oligarchy is because of Western propaganda. There are many textbooks describing propaganda in the West. If you like videos more than books, check out Adam Curtis’ documentary, The Century of the Self. This video demonstrates how 100 years of psychological propaganda in the person of Edward Bernays and the brainwashing in the work of Ewen Cameron controlled the Mordor public. Despite this, the only mention of propaganda in my comparative politics textbook is when it comes of “authoritarian” regimes. No surprises here.

    Comparative Politics Ignores Capitalism
    Following the tradition of Mordor social sciences, just as political science excludes economics while neoclassical economics ignores politics, comparative politics ignores the economic system of capitalism when it discusses Western politics. They ignore economic exchange and act as if politics was merely system of law, voting, institutional systems of bureaucracies and foreign policies. Without saying so, countries that count as “democratic” have capitalist exchanges. The field of comparative politics theorists act as if there was a natural, unremarkable relationship between capitalism and democracy. But as Rueschemeyer, Stephens and Stephens have described in their book Capitalist Development and Democracy, it was not the capitalist merchants that brought representative democracy to the West, but the working class. Capitalist economic exchanges should be foundational to understanding political systems. Yet in my comparative poetics textbook that I’m reading, “political economy” is buried in the last chapter of the book.

    Two reasons why capitalism should be included in politics
    Capitalism should be foundational to politics because countries that have counted as politically “underdeveloped” have become so because of capitalist imperialism, as Gunder Frank pointed out decades ago. At the same time capitalist societies should be foundational to politics because it was under capitalist crisis that fascism emerged. The political ideology of fascism can never be understood without its roots in capitalism. There has never been fascism in human history before capitalism and there has never been fascism without the presence of capitalism.

    The Deep State and International Pressure Groups are not Included in the Decision-making Processes of Politics

    Supposedly, democratically elected leaders of political parties govern their populations by carrying out “the will of the people”. I am countering this by saying these politicians represent the will of the oligarchs who rule over people. But the oligarchs do not just use political leaders to carry out their will. Besides capitalists that politicians have to answer to, there are agencies such as the FBI, the CIA as well as international pressure groups such as AIPAC, Five Eyes, and NED. None of these groups are mentioned in my comparative politics textbook as involving political decision making. The textbook on Political Psychology in International Relations writes as if political leaders make decisions for their nation by themselves. It is only in “authoritarian” societies that bureaucracies, revolutionary factions and terrorist groups come into play that constrain the decision-making will of the official political leaders.

    Authoritarian Politics is Synonymous With Socialism 

    When it comes to the West the field of comparative politics ignores the fact that its ruling oligarchy is run by capitalism. However, they have no problem declaring that authoritarian politics goes with a socialist “command economy”. Western countries that became socialist, such as Sweden and Norway, are presented as socialist democracies only because the presence of a market or capitalism. This made the naturally socialist authoritarian states more democratic.

    Most military dictatorships are capitalists

    Advocates of comparative politics ignore the fact that military dictatorships are often attempts by capitalists to hold on to power in the face of socialist uprisings. Most dictatorships are not socialist, but capitalist installations. In the case of socialism, the textbook cases that are trotted out are the old Soviet Union, Cuba or China. These countries have oligarchies as well. But whether or not they are more authoritarian than the capitalist West is much more complex than it first appears. Theories of comparative politics play down or ignore the relentless international class war any socialist system has to endure on a daily, weekly, monthly and yearly basis at the hands of the heads of state in the West along with their capitalist rulers. Capitalists in the West act as if the whole world is their private property. They treat any elected national leader (even if not a socialist) who has the nerve to set their own agenda for international trade as an enemy. All socialist leaders have to treat most any oppositional party in their country as potentially a tool of international capital. The extent to which socialist countries are authoritarian has a great deal to do with the pressure they experience from international capital.

    What about “totalitarian”? 

    Fortunately, this Cold War vice word is now internationally  discredited. However, the use of the term totalitarian to characterize socialist or communist countries, leaves out at least the following. If we grant that Sweden and Norway were once socialist, there has never been a socialist country with an advanced technology, communication systems, or advanced science. These societies have never had the ability to control the messages sent out to the population so that people were all thinking the same thing at the same time due to centralized control of propaganda. It is only advanced capitalist countries that have the capacity to do this. For example, Mordor’s media has roughly five corporations that all send out the same propaganda message in the case of Israel. People are severely punished by the police for supporting the Palestinians. All third parties in Mordor are blacked out. They cannot get into the “debates”. My point is that because of its control over mass media, capitalist control of the state is much closer to real totalitarianism than anything Stalin or Orwell ever dreamed up. The Soviet Union and China are poor countries. Their communist parties have no centralized control over their entire nation state. Peasants in both countries made up their own mind as to what was happening. Only in Mordor do you hear the same anti-working-class slogans against health care, or “welfare queens” from New York to San Francisco, from Houston Texas to Missoula in Montana. This is the power political propaganda holds to be internalized by people who imagine they are making up their own minds.

    Comparative Politics Ignores Anarchism as Part of Socialism
    The claim that all socialism is authoritarian ignores the 180-year history of the anarchist movement and its leaders from Proudhon to Bakunin to Malatesta, Kropotkin, to Lucy Parsons, Emma Goldman to Durruti. Anarchism was no intellectual movement. It was followed by thousands of people who fought in and out of labor unions and in the Russian and Spanish revolutions. This negligence on the part of comparative political theorists is ironic given that anarchism at its best is the purist form of democracy – direct democracy. If comparative political theorists understood the scale that the anarchists organized during the Spanish revolution of 1936-1939, they would be ashamed to think that what goes on in Western societies has anything to do with democracy, at least comparatively speaking.

    Comparative Politics Ignores the International Pressures Within Larger States or Alliances Between other States

    Comparative politics acts as if political decisions begin and end at national borders and with only official political leaders. But today’s nation-states have formed alliances with other nation-states. They have agreements about where they or won’t all act together. In the West we have the alliance of United States, England and Israel. None of those countries enacts a political decision by themselves. The same is true with China, Russia and Iran. Nation-states are interdependent, not independent actors.

    Conclusion

    I began this article with nine foundational questions of what politics is. I described how narrowly the field of comparative politics is in answering these questions. Then I identified seven theories of politics and showed how each of the seven theories of politics answers these nine questions differently. As it turned out, the field of political science uses only two of the seven theories: old institutionalism as rational choice theory.

    Then I embedded within this article other articles I had written about how anticommunist domestic political science and neoclassical economics are in their studies and how international political science (comparative politics) is in carrying on that tradition. After that I named eight areas in which comparative politics are weak, including:

    • Its propagandistic use of the word “democracy”. I claim that no state society on this planet is democratic. They are oligarchies.
    • Its propagandistic use of the world governance. I identify with a cybernetic definition of governance, using the heart as an example. With this as criteria, no state system in the world governs a society. They all rule, not govern.
    • Comparative politics over-emphasizes the use of propaganda in “authoritarian” societies while barely even mentioning propaganda in capitalist ruling  oligarchies.
    • Comparative politics does not successfully integrate capitalism into the comparative systems it analyzes . One textbook tacks it on as a last chapter.
    • Comparative politics ignores the power of the institutions of the deep state and transnational capitalists in determining the decision-making capacities of politicians.
    • Its treatment of the term “authoritarian” is more or less synonymous with socialism. It plays down the existence of socialism in Scandinavian countries and communal councils in Venezuela.
    • Lastly, the use of the term “totalitarian” to depict Soviet Union, China and Cuba is completely false. In the case of the Soviet Union and China they were too poor to have a centralized state that could reach down to every peasant village and bombard them with propaganda. The foundation for this totalitarian state is a centralized media apparatus, mass transportation, a country that was electrified. Paradoxically it is Mordor’s control over its mass media where we see the closest approximation to totalitarianism.
    The post Cross-Cultural Comparative Politics first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The world’s peoples recoil in shock over the previously unimaginable barbarity of the US-Zionist assault on Palestine. The European Parliament is not impervious to what is transpiring. On the contrary, the body normalizes the cruelty by awarding its highest human rights award, the Sakharov Prize, to dissident Venezuelan genocide supporters.

    This is an example of how Western “democracies” fail to respect democracy in the Global South. “Human rights” are weaponized and used to repudiate Venezuela’s right to choose its own leaders, while rewarding those who sell out their country. The US-aligned camp has a clear double standard on when and where upholding “democratic institutions” apply, considering their stances on Venezuela compared to Israel, described below.

    The European Union functions as a factotum of the US empire, as is evident regarding its treatment of Venezuela. The European Parliament is a legislative body of the European Union (EU). Of the 27 member states, 23 are also members of the empire’s praetorian guard, aka NATO. The EU and NATO are official “partners” with integrated planning capabilities, closely linking security to the dictates of the US.

    EU’s relationship with Venezuela

    The EU is Venezuela’s fourth largest trading partner, but the relationship is abusive. The EU punishes Venezuela for being independent of the US empire when they are unwilling to do so themselves.

    In 2019, the EU recognized the unelected and US-selected “interim president” of Venezuela, Juan Guaidó. In the same resolution, they imposed additional sanctions on Venezuela, hypocritically lamenting the “need of humanitarian assistance,” while making it more difficult for Venezuela to receive vital food, fuel, and medicines.

    Following earlier extensions, in November 2023, the EU further extended its sanctions on Venezuela through May 2024. Then, a day before those sanctions were to expire and two months before the Venezuelan presidential election, the EU again extended their sanctions until January 2025.

    The implicit message to the Venezuelan people was that they had better vote for the right candidate. Otherwise, when the new president is inaugurated on January 10, 2025, the sanctions would be extended yet again if not enhanced.

    Defying foreign intervention, Venezuelans reelected incumbent President Nicolás Maduro on July 28. But from the EU’s perspective, the only possible explanation for the Venezuelans making what they viewed as the wrong choice is fraud. The EU consequently recognized the runner-up in the election, Edmundo Gonzalez Urrutia, as the “legitimate president” of Venezuela. That individual was then awarded the EU’s Sakharov Prize. The Venezuelan opposition had itself renounced the corrupt Guaidó, who had been the EU’s earlier designated president of Venezuela.

    A week later, the EU plus 33 individual countries signed a US-led “joint statement” expressing “grave concerns about the urgent situation in Venezuela” and calling for a political “transition” in Venezuela.

    The Sakharov Prize

    Gonzalez and his co-awardee Maria Corina Machado are typical recipients of the European Parliament’s Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought. Such folks are usually dissidents from countries that are targeted for regime change by US – and by default echoed by the European Parliament – such as Venezuela, but also Russia, Syria, Belarus, Cuba, and China.

    Previously, the “democratic opposition of Venezuela” received the award in 2017. Ajamu Baraka of the Black Alliance for Peace commented on this “bizarre example of the reactionary nature of the European left [awarding]…a group that has openly attacked journalists and burned alive two dozen people of primarily Black or dark complexions who they assumed were probably government supporters because they were poor and Black.”

    This year, beating out semi-finalist Elon Musk (I’m not making this up), the award again went to Venezuelan dissidents. Machado and Gonzalez were honored as fighters for “freedom and democracy.”

    Machado’s “democracy” credentials include signing the infamous Carmona Decree, which shuttered Venezuela’s parliament, courts, and executive in a short-lived US-backed coup in 2002. After President Hugo Chávez was returned to his elected post by a popular uprising, he pardoned the coup plotters, including Machado.

    Gonzalez’s “freedom” credentials include being implicated in the US-backed death squads in the 1980s when he was a Venezuelan diplomat in El Salvador. TeleSUR reported on Gonzalez’s “past of crimes against humanity.”

    According to the EU’s announcement: “Machado won primary elections in 2023 to run as the candidate of the democratic opposition (Unitary Platform) in the 2024 presidential elections, but after she was arbitrarily disqualified by the Venezuelan regime, González became the candidate.”

    Machado did in fact win a primary election, but not one conducted by the official Venezuelan electoral authority, the CNE. Rather, it was a private affair administered by the NGO Súmate, a recipient of funds from the US National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a CIA-cutout.

    As Washington’s prechosen candidate, Machado won in a crowded field of 13 candidates with an incredulous 92%. When some of the other candidates called fraud, Machado had the ballots destroyed. She could do so because Súmate is her personal organization.

    True, Machado had been barred from running, but that was back in 2015; the disqualification was reconfirmed by the Venezuelan supreme court this year. Far from “arbitrary,” she had accepted a diplomatic post with a foreign power in order to testify against her own country while serving in the Venezuelan parliament. Such treason is constitutionally prohibited in Venezuela as it is in many other countries.

    For the US and its junior partner, the EU, Machado’s disbarment was a bonus. They could claim that their candidate was unfairly disqualified, when that was a given to begin with. Their intent was not to encourage a free and fair democratic process, but to delegitimize the one already in place.

    Sakharov winners’ “strategic alliance” with Zionists

    Venezuela’s far-right opposition, along with their international counterparts, support the US/Zionist campaign of extermination and regional domination in the Middle East.

    Literally nothing is known about the political positions of Sakharov-winner Edmundo Gonzalez. Long retired, Gonzalez was personally chosen to run for the presidency by the other Sakharov winner, Maria Corina Machado. While the infirm “grandpa,” as the press dubbed him, convalesced in Caracas, Machado campaigned around Venezuela as his surrogate. After he lost the election, the EU’s designated president of Venezuela voluntarily left Venezuela for Spain.

    In comparison, Machado is a well-known scion of one of the wealthiest families in Venezuela. Fluent in English, the photogenic Machado was first vetted for the Venezuelan presidency before the US Congress and given a bipartisan nod before running in her ersatz “opposition primary.”

    Machado is a darling of the international far-right with close ties to Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu. In a leaked document signed by her, Machado requested military support from Netanyahu to overthrow the Venezuelan government in December 2018.

    A month later, after Juan Guaidó self-appointed himself “interim president” of Venezuela, Machado publicly thanked Netanyahu for recognizing the US puppet and specifically called on Jews who had left Venezuela to return and help overthrow the elected government.

    Machado gushed: “Prime Minister Netanyahu joins our many allies…We certainly have a common enemy with Israel: the criminal forces that undermine freedom and peace in the world.”

    Later that year in an interview with the Israeli news outlet Haaretz, Machado appealed for help from Israel in “our goal of dismantling” Venezuela.

    Machado’s Vente Venezuela and Netanyahu’s Likud parties publicly signed a cooperative agreement in 2020 to collude on “political, ideological and social issues.”

    Venezuelan government supports Palestine

     In contrast to the dissidents, the elected Venezuelan government is distinguished as a recognized world leader for, in President Maduro’s words, “unconditional support to the Palestinian cause.” Hugo Chávez cut diplomatic ties with Israel in 2009 in response to response to Israel’s military operations in Gaza back then.

    The countries of Latin America and the Caribbean, including Venezuela, perhaps more than in any other region have expressed their solidarity with Palestine. Quite the reverse, on September 18, thirteen EU countries either abstained or voted against the UN General Assembly resolution demanding Israel end its “unlawful” occupation of Palestine. Meanwhile, the preponderance of humanity, 124 countries, voted to condemn the Zionist state.

    The post Venezuelan Dissidents Supporting Israel Receive Human Rights Award: European Parliament’s Sakharov Prize Goes to US-backed Opposition first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • Bangkok, October 31–A court in Hanoi sentenced Duong Van Thai, an independent Vietnamese blogger who went missing in Thailand and was later in Vietnamese custody in April 2023, to 12 years in prison and three years’ probation on Wednesday on charges of anti-state propaganda.

    “Vietnam’s harsh sentencing of blogger Duong Van Thai is grotesque and an outrage, particularly amid allegations he was kidnapped in Thailand and forcibly sent back to Vietnam for wrongful prosecution,” said Shawn Crispin, CPJ’s senior Southeast Asia representative. “The real criminal in this instance is the Vietnamese state. Thai should be released immediately and allowed to leave Vietnam.” 

    Thai was convicted October 30 in a one-day, closed-door trial at the Hanoi People’s Court, of “making, storing, disseminating or propagating information, documents, and items aimed at opposing the Socialist Republic of Vietnam” under Article 117 of Vietnam’s penal code, according to multiple reports.

    In 2019, Thai fled to Thailand, fearing persecution for his journalism, and was given refugee status by the United Nations refugee agency’s office in Bangkok. He was interviewing for third-country resettlement at the time of his apparent abduction and deportation to Vietnam, according to multiple reports.

    Thai posts political commentary, critical of government policies and leaders, to his around 119,000 followers on his Tin Tuc 24H YouTube channel, which has been disabled. He previously ran the Servant’s Tent online news platform, which reported critically on the ruling Communist Party and its top members, and is a member of the banned Independent Journalists Association of Vietnam.

    CPJ’s email to Vietnam’s Ministry of Public Security about Thai’s conviction did not immediately receive a response. Vietnam was the world’s fifth-worst jailer of journalists, with at least 19 reporters behind bars on December 1, 2023, at the time of CPJ’s latest prison census


    This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by CPJ Staff.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • If you believe, as I do, that the war of ideas is a critical front in political struggle, then clarity and logic become a necessity in that war. Indeed, the war of ideas can often become a war of words or phrases. When we allow or accept phrases like “the axis of evil” or words like “deplorables” to uncritically enter popular discourse, we have lost a skirmish in the ideological struggle.

    This project is not the same as the language-policing so popular with liberals. It is not an excuse for shaming, embarrassing, or demeaning people because they are ignorant or dismissive of liberal etiquette.

    Instead, it’s a search for focus and rigor, an attempt to sharpen our tools in the war of ideas. Therefore, it’s time to call out words or expressions that mislead, distort, or poison our discourse. Below, I nominate several candidates for retirement, restraint, or caution.

    ●Terrorism: Those holding power have persistently labeled their weaker opponents who rise up as “terrorists.” Virtually every anti-colonial movement in the post-war period has been called “terrorist,” regardless of the tactics employed in their struggle or whether those tactics were defensive or offensive. From the Indian National Congress to the Mau Mau movement, to the Palestine Liberation Organization, to the Vietnamese National Liberation Front, to the African National Congress, oppressors have denounced the oppressed as terrorists. The term lost any even minimal credence with the US government’s blatant and blatantly inconsistent use as a slander against socialist Cuba. Retirement of the term is obligatory.

    ●Middle Class: There is no middle class except in the clouded minds of those who dispute that the US and other advanced capitalist societies are class societies. Of course, there is a statistical middle when incomes and wealth are divided into three, five, seven, or more parts. But those divisions are arbitrary and virtually meaningless. We can speak loosely of a middle stratum, provided we understand that there is no significant social boundary with the strata on either side. “Middle” itself identifies no useful socio-economic category.

    Of course, there are classes and significant strata identifiable by socio-economic criteria. One such criterion that has stood the test of time is the Marxist class distinction between those who own and control the wealth-producing assets and those who must secure employment from them. This remains a clear and rigorous divide with vast social, political, and economic consequences.

    When politicians and labor leaders refer to the “middle class,” we can be sure that they have no intention of challenging real, existing class society and its inevitable inequality, oppression, and destruction.

    ●Authoritarianism: When the Soviet Union fell, capitalist ruling classes reserved the shop-worn Cold War term “totalitarianism” for People’s China and the remaining countries ruled by Communist Parties. Yet there were many countries that structurally embraced the institutions of bourgeois democracy — regular elections, representative bodies, legal institutions, and constitutions — though earning the ire of the Euromerican ruling classes and their media and academic lapdogs. A new term was appropriated to condemn the dissenters for allegedly abusing, corrupting, or influencing those institutions: authoritarianism.

    Countries like Russia, Venezuela, or Iran — while sharing look-alike institutions with the “liberal” democracies — are condemned as authoritarian, even though their institutions function similarly, or sometimes better than their accusing critics. US critics depicting other countries as authoritarian are particularly hypocritical, coming from a country where political outcomes are determined by money or power to a greater extent than any other place on the planet. International polling (here and here) consistently shows that the people in supposedly authoritarian-ruled countries have greater trust in their governments than their Euromerican counterparts, a finding that surely sends the word “authoritarianism” to the historical dustbin.

    ●Fascism: The word “fascism” has a legitimate use to refer to a specific historical period, its essential features, and the common conditions that generate its arrival. Its twentieth-century rise in the aftermath of the Bolshevik revolution, from the volatility in the wake of a global war, and coincident with severe economic instability, is no mere accident, but is vital to our understanding. Just as the conditions of its development were unprecedented, fascism was unprecedented, generated by a profound challenge to the capitalist order. Fascism was a desperate reaction to a powerful, emergent revolutionary working-class movement, growing political illegitimacy, and economic collapse. The word’s rigorous use requires that these conditions be met.

    Instead, the word has come to be used by unprincipled political operatives in the way that the charge of Communism has been used so often by unscrupulous red-baiters, trading on emotions. Bereft of a telling argument for a policy or strategy, philistines fall back on fascist-baiting, to paint their opponents with an association with Blackshirts, Stormtroopers, and the Gestapo. Weaponizing “fascism” distracts from revealing the actual obstacles to change and devising real answers to those obstacles.

    ●Neoliberalism: The era — beginning in the 1970s — identified with policies first associated with Margaret Thatcher in the UK and Ronald Reagan in the US– has often been called “neoliberalism.” There is some logic to labeling the period accordingly, drawing attention to its similarity to an earlier period of laissez faire capitalism before the Keynesian revolution and before intensified government oversight of the capitalist economy. Academic writers David Harvey and Gary Gerstle have understood the term in a more precise way: as an effort to “restore and consolidate class power,” in Harvey’s words.

    But “neoliberalism” has come to connote a rightwing-imposed deviation from the benign, social democratic, social safety-net regime of the heralded thirty glorious post-war years. With this interpretation, capitalism with a humane, happy face was interrupted by a far-right counter-revolution, leading to massive deregulation, privatization, commodification, market fetishism, and rabid individualism.

    Omitted from this tale is the harsh and telling fact that the post-war social democratic consensus was rapidly collapsing before intensified global competition, pressure on profits, inflation mutating into stagflation, and unemployment. That deviation from classical economic liberalism left its own scars on working people. The crisis of the New Deal model– widely followed internationally — opened the door to options, quickly filled by the far-right zealots of market fundamentalism.

    Neoliberalism, understood as the disease and not a symptom, deflects attention from diagnosing the real disease: capitalism.

    ●Deep State: The idea that there is a highly visible, superficial state that is widely believed to be the governing body, but merely a facade for a far deeper, secret apparatus, is an attractive alternative to the official, widely circulated myths of popular sovereignty. From various perspectives, that apparatus is the CIA, Freemasons, followers of Lyndon Larouche, George Soros, or zombies.

    And therein lies the problem: the deep state is whatever the latest schemer, plotter, or crackpot says it is. The vague idea of a wizard (of Oz?) pulling strings behind the scenes is the genesis of conspiracy theories, and should be seen as such.

    There is a far more robust, time-tested, and scientific concept to describe the bogus high-school-civics-class picture of transparent, democratic, and representative governance uniquely practiced by the advanced capitalist countries. That well-founded concept is the notion of a ruling class, developed by — but not exclusive to — Marxists. A ruling class has both shallow and deep features — overt and covert aspects — that work together to maintain class rule. While elements of the ruling class may differ on how best to guarantee the interests of the elites — typically the employer class — they all agree that they will promote and protect those interests.

    Where the so-called “deep state” conjures a picture of puppeteers hidden in the shadows manipulating and distorting a benign government structure, the ruling class concept offers a robust and rational picture of the existing asymmetry of power and wealth generating a governing body that operates to preserve and protect that asymmetry. Absent a countervailing force organized to wrest the power away, one would expect no less from a social order constructed on inequality of wealth and income.

    It is not plotting or conspiracies or intrigues that shape how we are ruled, but the social composition of our states. “Deep State” leads us away from that understanding.

    ●Microaggressions and Safe Spaces: The “social justice” industry — academics, NGOs, non-profits, and consultants– creates its own language of social advancement. Certainly, many engaged in the industry are well meaning, but they are also transactional. They believe that their services are best commodified and paid for with promotions, donations, grants, and direct compensation. Accordingly, they have an interest in creating new justice-rendering commodities, new social-justice services. Microaggressions and Safe Spaces are the basis for such new commodities.

    In a just society, all spaces should be safe. Short of a commitment to making all public spaces safe, designating certain spaces as safe is necessarily supporting privilege for those with access to such spaces, whether determined by lot, by merit, or by special characteristics. Safety, like health, is not something merited by a specific time, place, or group. Safe Spaces invokes the logic of a gated community.

    Microaggressions become relevant in a world without war, poverty, genocide, and exploitation. Until those gross aggressions are gone, microaggressions — the bruising of individual sentiments — remain matters of etiquette. Hurt feelings, slights, and discomforting words or body language belong in the realm of interpersonal misfortunes and not in the realm of social injustice.

    The “social justice” industry fails us because it is caught between sponsors, donors, and administrators heavily invested in the existing order and the radical needs of the victims of that order. Too often they offer the victims empty or useless words as salve for deep wounds.

    Again, the point sought here is not to shame, accuse, or denigrate, but to sharpen language to better advance the struggle for social justice, to win the battle of ideas. Those who oppose social change benefit when words are chosen for their emotive power, when they subtly reflect class bias, or when they distort a real insight.

    Words have power. We should use them carefully.

    The post Cringeworthy Words in the Battle of Ideas first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • SPECIAL REPORT: By David Robie in Taipei

    It was a heady week for the Paris-based global media freedom watchdog Reporters Without Borders (RSF) — celebration of seven years of its Taipei office, presenting a raft of proposals to the Taiwan government, and hosting its Asia-Pacific network of correspondents.

    Director general Thibaut Bruttin and the Taipei bureau chief Cedric Alviani primed the Taipei media scene before last week’s RSF initiatives with an op-ed in the Taiwan Times by acknowledging the country’s media freedom advances in the face of Chinese propaganda.

    Taiwan rose eight places to 27th in the RSF World Press Freedom Index this year – second only to Timor-Leste in the Asia-Pacific region.

    But the co-authors also warned over the credibility damage caused by media “too often neglect[ing] journalistic ethics for political or commercial reasons”.

    As a result, only three in 10 Taiwanese said they trusted the news media, according to a Reuters Institute survey conducted in 2022, one of the lowest percentages among democracies.

    “This climate of distrust gives disproportionate influence to platforms, in particular Facebook and Line, despite them being a major vector of false or biased information,” Bruttin and Alviani wrote.

    “This credibility deficit for traditional media, a real Achilles heel of Taiwanese democracy, puts it at risk of being exploited for malicious purposes, with potentially dramatic consequences.”

    Press freedom programme
    At a meeting with Taiwanese President Lai Ching-te and senior foreign affairs officials, Bruttin and his colleagues presented RSF’s innovative programme for improving press freedom, including the Journalism Trust Initiative (JTI), the first ISO-certified media quality standard; the Paris Charter on Artificial Intelligence and Journalism; and the Propaganda Monitor, a project aimed at combating propaganda and disinformation worldwide.

    RSF director-general Thibaut Bruttin speaking at the reception celebrating seven years of Taipei's Asia Pacific office
    RSF director-general Thibaut Bruttin speaking at the reception celebrating seven years of Taipei’s Asia Pacific office. Image: Pacific Media Watch

    The week also highlighted concerns over the export of the China’s “New World Media Order”, which is making inroads in some parts of the Asia-Pacific region, including the Pacific.

    At the opening session of the Asia-Pacific correspondents’ seminar, delegates referenced the Chinese disinformation and assaults on media freedom strategies that have been characterised as the “great leap backwards for journalism” in China.

    “Disinformation — the deliberate spreading of false or biased news to manipulate minds — is gaining ground around the world,” Bruttin and Alviani warned in their article.

    “As China and Russia sink into authoritarianism and export their methods of censorship and media control, democracies find themselves overwhelmed by an incessant flow of propaganda that threatens the integrity of their institutions.”

    Both Bruttin and Alviani spoke of these issues too at the celebration of the seventh anniversary of the Asia-Pacific office in Taipei.

    Why Taipei? Hongkong had been an “likely choice, but not safe legally”, admitted Bruttin when they were choosing their location, so the RSF team are happy with the choice of Taiwan.

    Hub for human rights activists
    “I think we were among the first NGOs to have established a presence here. We kind of made a bet that Taipei would be a hub for human rights activists, and we were right.”

    About 200 journalists, media workers and press freedom and human rights advocates attended the birthday bash in the iconic Grand Hotel’s Yuanshan Club. So it wasn’t surprising that there was a lot of media coverage raising the issues.

    RSF director-general Thibaut Bruttin (centre) with correspondents Dr David Robie and Dr Joseph Fernandez
    RSF director-general Thibaut Bruttin (centre) with correspondents Dr David Robie and Dr Joseph Fernandez in Taipei. Image: Pacific Media Watch

    In an interview with Voice of America’s Joyce Huang, Bruttin was more specific about the “insane” political propaganda threats from China faced by Taiwan.

    However, Taiwan “has demonstrated resilience and has rich experience in resisting cyber information attacks, which can be used as a reference for the world”.

    Referencing China as the world’s “biggest jailer of journalists”, Bruttin said: “We’re very worried, obviously.” He added about some specific cases: “We’ve had very troublesome reports about the situation of Zhang Zhan, for example, who was the laureate of the RSF’s [2021 press freedom] awards [in the courage category] and had been just released from jail, now is sent back to jail.

    “We know the lack of treatment if you have a medical condition in the Chinese prisons.

    “Another example is Jimmy Lai, the Hongkong press freedom mogul, he’s very likely to die in jail if nothing happens. He’s over 70.

    “And there is very little reason to believe that, despite his dual citizenship, the British government will be able to get him a safe passage to Europe.”

    Problem for Chinese public
    Bruttin also expressed concern about the problem for the general public, especially in China where he said a lot of people had been deprived of the right to information “worthy of that name”.

    “And we’re talking about hundreds of millions of people. And it’s totally scandalous to see how bad information is treated in the People’s Republic of China.”

    Seventeen countries in the Asia-Pacific region were represented in the network seminar.

    Representatives of Australia, Cambodia, Hongkog, Indonesia, Japan, Myanmar, Mongolia, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, Philippines, South Korea, Tibet, Thailand and Vietnam were present. However, three correspondents (Malaysia, Singapore and Timor-Leste) were unable to be personally present.

    Discussion and workshop topics included the RSF Global Strategy; the Asia-Pacific network and the challenges being faced; best practice as correspondents; “innovative solutions” against disinformation; public advocacy (for authoritarian regimes; emerging democracies, and “leading” democracies); “psychological support” – one of the best sessions; and the RSF Crisis Response.

    RSF Oceania colleagues Dr David Robie (left) and Dr Joseph Fernandez
    RSF Oceania colleagues Dr David Robie (left) and Dr Joseph Fernandez . . . mounting challenges. Image: Pacific Media Watch

    What about Oceania (including Australia and New Zealand) and its issues? Fortunately, the countries being represented have correspondents who can speak our publicly, unlike some in the region facing authoritarian responses.

    Australia
    Australian correspondent Dr Joseph M Fernandez, visiting associate professor at Curtin University and author of the book Journalists and Confidential Sources: Colliding Public Interests in the Age of the Leak, notes that Australia sits at 39th in the RSF World Press Freedom Index — a drop of 12 places from the previous year.

    “While this puts Australia in the top one quarter globally, it does not reflect well on a country that supposedly espouses democratic values. It ranks behind New Zealand, Taiwan, Timor-Leste and Bhutan,” he says.

    “Australia’s press freedom challenges are manifold and include deep-seated factors, including the influence of oligarchs whose own interests often collide with that of citizens.

    “While in opposition the current Australian federal government promised reforms that would have improved the conditions for press freedom, but it has failed to deliver while in government.

    “Much needs to be done in clawing back the over-reach of national security laws, and in freeing up information flow, for example, through improved whistleblower law, FOI law, source protection law, and defamation law.”

    Dr Fernandez criticises the government’s continuing culture of secrecy and says there has been little progress towards improving transparency and accountability.

    “The media’s attacks upon itself are not helping either given the constant moves by some media and their backers to undermine the efforts of some journalists and some media organisations, directly or indirectly.”

    A proposal for a “journalist register” has also stirred controversy.

    Dr Fernandez also says the war on Gaza has “highlighted the near paralysis” of many governments of the so-called established democracies in “bringing the full weight of their influence to end the loss of lives and human suffering”.

    “They have also failed to demonstrate strong support for journalists’ ability to tell important stories.”


    An English-language version of this tribute to the late RSF director-general Christophe Deloire, who died from cancer on 8 June 2024, was screened at the RSF Taipei reception. He was 53. Video: RSF

    Aotearoa New Zealand
    In New Zealand (19th in the RSF Index), although journalists work in an environment free from violence and intimidation, they have increasingly faced online harassment. Working conditions became tougher in early 2022 when, during protests against covid-19 vaccinations and restrictions and a month-long “siege” of Parliament, journalists were subjected to violence, insults and death threats, which are otherwise extremely rare in the country.

    Research published in December 2023 revealed that high rates of abuse and threats directed at journalists put the country at risk of “mob censorship” – citizen vigilantism seeking to “discipline” journalism. Women journalists bore the brunt of the online abuse with one respondent describing her inbox as a “festering heap of toxicity”.

    While New Zealand society is wholeheartedly multicultural, with mutual recognition between the Māori and European populations enshrined in the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi, this balance is under threat from a draft Treaty Principles Bill.

    The nation’s bicultural dimension is not entirely reflected in the media, still dominated by the English-language press. A rebalancing is taking place, as seen in the success of the Māori Television network and many Māori-language programmes in mass media, such as Te Karere, The Hui and Te Ao Māori News.

    Media plurality and democracy is under growing threat with massive media industry cuts this year.

    New Zealand media also play an important role as a regional communications centre for other South Pacific nations, via Tagata Pasifika, Pacific Media Network and others.

    Papua New Guinea's Belinda Kora (left) and RSF colleagues
    Papua New Guinea’s Belinda Kora (left) and RSF colleagues . . . “collaborating in our Pacific efforts in seeking the truth”. Image: Pacific Media Watch

    Papua New Guinea
    The Papua New Guinea correspondent, Belinda Kora, who is secretary of the revised PNG Media Council and an ABC correspondent in Port Moresby, succeeded former South Pacific Post Ltd chief executive Bob Howarth, the indefatigable media freedom defender of both PNG and Timor-Leste.

    Currently PNG (91st in the RSF Index) is locked in a debate over a controversial draft government media policy – now in its fifth version – that critics regard as a potential tool to crack down on media freedom. But Kora is optimistic about RSF’s role.

    “I am excited about what RSF is able and willing to bring to a young Pacific region — full of challenges against the press,” she says.

    “But more importantly, I guess, is that the biggest threat in PNG would be itself, if it continues to go down the path of not being able to adhere to simple media ethics and guidelines.

    “It must hold itself accountable before it is able to hold others in the same way.

    “We have a small number of media houses in PNG but if we are able to stand together as one and speak with one voice against the threats of ownership and influence, we can achieve better things in future for this industry.

    “We need to protect our reporters if they are to speak for themselves and their experiences as well. We need to better provide for their everyday needs before we can write the stories that need to be told.

    “And this lies with each media house.

    The biggest threat for the Pacific as a whole? “I guess the most obvious one would be being able to remain self-regulated BUT not being accountable for breaching our individual code of ethics.

    “Building public trust remains vital if we are to move forward. The lack of media awareness also contributes to the lack of ensuring media is given the attention it deserves in performing its role — no matter how big or small our islands are,” Kora says.

    “The press should remain free from government influence, which is a huge challenge for many island industries, despite state ownership.

    Kora believes that although Pacific countries are “scattered in the region”, they are able to help each other more, to better enhance capacity building and learning from their mistakes with collaboration.

    “By collaborating in our efforts in seeking the truth behind many of our big stories that is affecting our people. This I believe will enable us to improve our performance and accountability.”

    Example to the region
    Meanwhile, back in Taiwan on the day that RSF’s Thibaut Bruttin flew out, he gave a final breakfast interview to China News Agency (CNA) reporter Teng Pei-ju who wrote about the country building up its free press model as an example to the region.

    “Taiwan really is one of the test cases for the robustness of journalism in the world,” added Bruttin, reflecting on the country’s transformation from an authoritarian regime that censored information into a vibrant democracy that fights disinformation.

    Dr David Robie, convenor of the Asia Pacific Media Network’s Pacific Media Watch project and author of several media and politics books, including Don’t Spoil My Beautiful Face: Media, Mayhem and Human Rights in the Pacific, has been an RSF correspondent since 1996.

    RSF Asia Pacific correspondents and staff
    RSF Asia Pacific correspondents and staff pictured at the Grand Hotel’s Yuanshan Club. Image: RSF

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • The post What Some People Will Believe first appeared on Dissident Voice.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Allen Forrest.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Western colonialism and imperialism are the roots of the Palestinian struggle. A common characteristic of western powers is their shared history of colonization and oppression of indigenous populations. This distinction is important because it is clear that there is heavy bias against Palestinians in both western political policy and western mainstream media. The United States and Israel share similar histories and politics as settler colonialist nations, each established through the violent dispossession of indigenous populations. Both countries utilized dehumanization of the indigenous populations they displaced to obtain the land they have settled upon. Native Americans were called “merciless Indian savages,” while Palestinians are called “animals” and “terrorists.” Examining relevant histories with a broader view will demonstrate how western interpretations of Palestine are biased. The prevailing western standard has been nonobjective and heavily promotes dishonest and biased narratives, omitting relevant histories and current event considerations. This biased narrative reads as a prejudiced tale meticulously designed to promote the interests of the more powerful side, an oppressive colonial regime and its imperial supporters.

    Framing as a Tool of Erasure

    The Palestinian struggle and foundations of Israel are a matter of modern-day colonialism achieved through atrocities. Israel is widely supported by the west over their imperialist interests and maintained by political and media propaganda. Criticism of a brutal occupying force is often harshly censored. The matter is frequently mischaracterized as a religious matter, labeled as complicated, or described as a conflict. Framing the Palestinian struggle as a “religious matter” generally encourages people to reduce politics to faith-based tensions. Dismissing something as “complicated” deters any type of engagement because the implicit message is that the issue is too difficult for most people to understand. Referring to the matter as a “conflict” implies symmetry, leaving no conceptual room for the disparity of power that defines a colonial struggle. It is none of those things. At its core, this is an ongoing process of colonization, resulting in the displacement of the Palestinian people and the violent military occupation of Palestinian land.

    The strategic framing of Palestine has been used to support zionism for over 76 years. During a 1970 interview with renowned Palestinian activist and author Ghassan Kanafani, Australian media correspondent Richard Carleton referred to the matter of Palestine as a conflict. Kanafani countered that it is not a conflict, but a liberation movement fighting for justice, continuing, “This is where the problem starts. Because this is what makes you ask all your questions. This is exactly where the problem starts. This is a people who are discriminated against fighting for their rights. This is the story.” Fifty-four years later, these same issues about the framing language persist.

    Foreign Policy and Domestic Repression

    There are several elements to consider when examining the western distortion of the Palestinian struggle. First, we must look at United States foreign policy as it pertains to Middle Eastern, North African, and Muslim-majority nations. Interconnected to these foreign policies are United States domestic policies designed to target American citizens of MENA and/or Muslim backgrounds. These policies are rooted in the Palestinian struggle. Secondly, we must take a closer look at zionism, a western colonial project supported by the US in large part due to its imperialist goals and American interests in the MENA region. Interconnected to the matter of zionism is the strategy of intentional false conflation of antisemitism to criticism of zionism or Israel intended to suppress and silence criticism so that zionism can continue without accountability. These propagandist tactics are supported and reinforced by the United States over their imperialist goals in the MENA region. Third, we must look at the state of Israel more closely, the brutality in which it was created and maintains itself, and Israel’s influence on American politics and media. Interconnected to the matter of Israeli influence, we must look at lobby and special interest groups such as AIPAC and the ADL. These powerful groups use large sums of money to influence media organizations and exert influence and control over American elections and US policy both foreign and domestic.

    United States foreign policy in the Middle East has always been in the absolute interest of western imperialism. This has continuously come at the cost of the suffering of MENA nations and their civilians for over a century. President Joe Biden, while serving as a United States Senator, gave a speech on the Senate floor on June 5, 1986, speaking to US foreign policy in the Middle East. He stated that the US should “operate and move in the naked self-interest of the United States of America.” Referring to Israel, he said, “It is the best three-billion-dollar investment we make. Were there not an Israel, the United States of America would have to invent an Israel to protect our interests in the region.”  His current position and statements regarding Israel and the Middle East remain unchanged thirty-eight years later. Biden has openly referred to himself as a zionist to the media on numerous occasions for several decades. He has made repeated statements of support for Israel, even as Israel has been accused of the ongoing genocide of Palestinians, and after several decades of its numerous violations of international law. In December of 2023, Biden stated, “I got in trouble many times for saying you don’t have to be a Jew to be a zionist, and I am a zionist. I make no apologies for that. That’s a reality.” The statements then-Senator Biden made on the Senate floor in 1986 speak volumes to the reasons behind the United States’ predisposition to show favorable bias towards Israel and, therefore, against Palestinians.

    The matter of Palestine has always been at the core of United States antiterrorism laws. Palestinian liberation efforts continue to be a central target of both foreign policies and domestic laws oppressive to Arab Americans. The idea of the Arab or Muslim terrorist was introduced to the west by Israel’s current Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu in 1979. Netanyahu used the term in Washington, DC, in 1984 at the “Second Conference on International Terrorism” he organized where he pushed this label and agenda into American politics. On December 22, 1987, he achieved his goal as the Palestinian Liberation Organization was formally declared a terrorist organization by the United States. This was the “first and only time” Congress designated a group as a terrorist organization. These series of events are directly related to escalations that led to the first intifada in 1987. It was also during these conditions that Hamas, a resistance organization, had formed. The region endured continuous turmoil, and heightened escalations continued until the Oslo Accords in 1993.

    Journalism vs. Propaganda: A Brief History

    While the media is a very influential source in shaping views on important matters, the United States mainstream media has long ago lost its journalistic integrity.  Yellow journalism is a type of journalism that uses exaggerated and sensationalist reporting often based on false accounts of events to boost sales and attract readers. The peak of early-stage yellow journalism began as a competition between the publications of two major newspaper publishers in the late 1800s, Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst. To drive public appeal, the two pushed out sensationalist newspapers, which prominently featured political coverage. In 1898, both Pulitzer and Hearst published misleading newspapers pushing a rumor that Cuba had sank a US battleship when, in fact, a coal fire aboard the ship led to an explosion. The US Maine sinking in the Havana Harbor contributed to the outbreak of the Spanish-American War. Propagandist publications have tainted American journalism to this day and continue to incite both conflicts and hate.

    The New York Times’ publishing controversies began in the 1800s and include numerous instances pertaining to significant events from the Russian Revolution to the Iraq War. In more recent times, the New York Times has been cited for publishing articles based on misinformation leading to incitement. In 2003, the Harvard International Journal of Press/Politics found that “the New York Times is more favorable toward the Israelis than the Palestinians, and the partiality has become more pronounced with time.” This trend continues today and is an ongoing ethical and moral problem. During the current genocide in Gaza that began in 2023, The New York Times has been cited multiple times for publishing false accounts of events, from false claims of rapes to disproven accounts of beheaded babies. In April of 2024, The Intercept obtained an internal New York Times memo that instructed journalists to avoid “use of the terms ‘genocide’ and ‘ethnic cleansing’ and to ‘avoid’ using the phrase ‘occupied territory’ when describing Palestinian land.” They were additionally instructed to avoid the use of “Palestine” or terms such as “refugee camps.” Numerous other mainstream media outlets have also been accused of both biased and inaccurate reporting on Palestine. This trend is commonplace and has persisted for over a century.

    A Definitive Bias

    The issue of Palestine is deeply intertwined with the rise of anti-Arab hate, contributing to the dehumanization and stereotyping of Arabs. The Middle East and North Africa have rich cultural variances and diverse ethnicities, but there is a strong cultural ignorance in the west about the geography and geopolitics of the MENA region. To many, “an Arab is an Arab” without any thought or attention to regional or political distinctions. The mainstream media promotes this cultural ignorance, flattening public understandings of MENA communities and struggles as a result. Media bias is not only harmful to the populations they target but is a catalyst driving discriminatory hate within their audience here in the United States as well. Media bias plays a role in contributing to harmful stereotypes toward people of Arab, Middle Eastern, and North African ethnic backgrounds, regardless of their religion. Media bias has also contributed to the western racialization of Muslim Americans and has played a destructive role by inciting Islamophobia, giving rise to hate crimes against individuals from these ethnic groups in the US. Natalie Khazaal, associate professor of Arabic and Arab Culture at the Georgia Institute of Technology, published an article for The Conversation, an independent news organization, highlighting anti-Palestinian bias in US corporate media: “Reporting can prime audiences to see a Palestinian fighter in a mask as either an icon of terrorism or a hero resisting occupation, depending on how the news is presented.” This one sentence encapsulates the issue Palestinians face in the west. Media portrayals are often biased and tend to leave out crucial histories and background information of events they report on, often totally omitting decades of Palestinian suffering at the hands of an oppressive military colonial settler regime. A definitive bias controls the narrative and information available to the public, leading to a widespread impact and sway on public perception. The media bias infects public viewers and drives large-scale public prejudice against Palestinians.

    The convenient western amnesia of Palestinians’ history of suffering must end. We cannot only look to condemn Palestinians, who are blamed for their own suffering. We are now over a year into Israel’s ongoing genocide of Palestinians. Media disinformation has played a significant role in justifying Israel’s criminal actions. Media bias has grave consequences. The Palestinian fight for liberation will persist as long as Palestinians continue to be dehumanized by mainstream western media and imperialist political agendas. The ongoing Palestinian struggle for liberation remains in a state of great peril. There is no true peace process without taking a more critical look at histories and current event considerations through a more honest lens.

  • First published at Project Censored.
  • The post Western Distortions of the Palestinian Struggle first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out for himself, without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane, and intolerable…

    — H.L. Mencken, “Le Contrat Social” in Prejudices: Third Series (1922)

    If the three-ring circus that is the looming presidential election proves anything, it is that the Deep State’s plot to destabilize the nation is working.

    The danger is real.

    Caught up in the heavily dramatized electoral showdown between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, Americans have become oblivious to the multitude of ways in which the government is goosestepping all over our freedoms on a daily basis.

    Especially alarming is the extent to which those on both sides are allowing themselves to be gaslighted by both Trump and Harris about critical issues of the day, selectively choosing to hear only what they want to hear when it casts the opposition in a negative light.

    This is true whether you’re talking about immigration and border control, health care, national security, the nation’s endless wars, protections for free speech, or the militarization of the U.S. government.

    For starters, there’s the free speech double standard, what my good friend Nat Hentoff used to refer to as the “free speech for me but not for thee” phenomenon in which the First Amendment’s protections only apply to those with whom we might agree.

    Despite her claims to being a champion for the rule of law, which in our case is the U.S. Constitution, Harris isn’t averse to policing so-called “hate” speech. In this, Harris is not unlike those on both the Right and the Left who continue to express a distaste for unregulated, free speech online, especially when it comes to speech with which they might disagree.

    Then there’s Trump, never a fan of free speech protections for his critics, who has been particularly vocal about his desire to see the military vanquish “radical left lunatics,” which he has dubbed “the enemy from within.”

    If it were only about muzzling free speech activities, that would be concerning enough.

    But Trump’s enthusiasm for using the military to target domestic enemies of the state should send off warning bells, especially coinciding as it does with the Department of Defense’s recent re-issuance of Directive 5240.01, which empowers the military to assist law enforcement “in situations where a confrontation between civilian law enforcement and civilian individuals or groups is reasonably anticipated.”

    This is what martial law looks like—a government of force that relies on the military to enforce its authority—and it’s exactly what America’s founders feared, which is why they opted for a republic bound by the rule of law: the U.S. Constitution.

    Responding to concerns that the military would be used for domestic policing, Congress passed the Posse Comitatus Act in 1878, which makes it a crime for the government to use the military to carry out arrests, searches, seizure of evidence and other activities normally handled by a civilian police force.

    The increasing militarization of the police, the use of sophisticated weaponry against Americans and the government’s increasing tendency to employ military personnel domestically have all but eviscerated historic prohibitions such as the Posse Comitatus Act.

    Yet sometime over the course of the past 240-plus years that constitutional republic has been transformed into a military dictatorship disguised as a democracy.

    Unfortunately, most Americans seem relatively untroubled by the fact that our constitutional republic is being transformed into a military dictatorship disguised as a democracy.

    The seeds of chaos that have been sown in recent years are all part of the Deep State’s plans to usher in martial law.

    Observe for yourself what has been happening right before our eyes.

    Domestic terrorism fueled by government entrapment schemes. Civil unrest stoked to dangerous levels by polarizing political rhetoric. A growing intolerance for dissent that challenges the government’s power grabs. Police brutality tacitly encouraged by the executive branch, conveniently overlooked by the legislatures, and granted qualified immunity by the courts. A weakening economy exacerbated by government schemes that favor none but a select few. Heightened foreign tensions and blowback due to the military industrial complex’s profit-driven quest to police and occupy the globe.

    This is no conspiracy theory.

    There’s trouble brewing, and the government is masterminding a response using the military.

    Just take a look at “Megacities: Urban Future, the Emerging Complexity,” a Pentagon training video created by the Army for U.S. Special Operations Command.

    The training video is only five minutes long, but it says a lot about the government’s mindset, the way its views the citizenry, and the so-called “problems” that the government must be prepared to address in the near future through the use of martial law.

    Even more troubling, however, is what this military video doesn’t say about the Constitution, about the rights of the citizenry, and about the dangers of locking down the nation and using the military to address political and social problems.

    The training video anticipates that all hell will break loose by 2030, but the future is here ahead of schedule.

    We’re already witnessing a breakdown of society on virtually every front.

    By waging endless wars abroad, by bringing the instruments of war home, by transforming police into extensions of the military, by turning a free society into a suspect society, by treating American citizens like enemy combatants, by discouraging and criminalizing a free exchange of ideas, by making violence its calling card through SWAT team raids and militarized police, by fomenting division and strife among the citizenry, by acclimating the citizenry to the sights and sounds of war, and by generally making peaceful revolution all but impossible, the government has engineered an environment in which domestic violence is becoming almost inevitable.

    The danger signs are screaming out a message

    The government is anticipating trouble (read: civil unrest), which is code for anything that challenges the government’s authority, wealth and power.

    According to the Pentagon training video created by the Army for U.S. Special Operations Command, the U.S. government is grooming its armed forces to solve future domestic political and social problems.

    What they’re really talking about is martial law, packaged as a well-meaning and overriding concern for the nation’s security.

    The chilling five-minute training video, obtained by The Intercept through a FOIA request and made available online, paints an ominous picture of the future—a future the military is preparing for—bedeviled by “criminal networks,” “substandard infrastructure,” “religious and ethnic tensions,” “impoverishment, slums,” “open landfills, over-burdened sewers,” a “growing mass of unemployed,” and an urban landscape in which the prosperous economic elite must be protected from the impoverishment of the have nots.

    And then comes the kicker.

    Three-and-a-half minutes into the Pentagon’s dystopian vision of “a world of Robert Kaplan-esque urban hellscapes — brutal and anarchic supercities filled with gangs of youth-gone-wild, a restive underclass, criminal syndicates, and bands of malicious hackers,” the ominous voice of the narrator speaks of a need to “drain the swamps.”

    Drain the swamps.

    Surely, we’ve heard that phrase before?

    Ah yes.

    Emblazoned on t-shirts and signs, shouted at rallies, and used as a rallying cry among Trump supporters, “drain the swamp” became one of Donald Trump’s most-used campaign slogans.

    Now the government has adopted its own plans for swamp-draining, only it wants to use the military to drain the swamps of futuristic urban American cities of “noncombatants and engage the remaining adversaries in high intensity conflict within.”

    And who are these noncombatants, a military term that refers to civilians who are not engaged in fighting?

    They are, according to the Pentagon, “adversaries.”

    They are “threats.”

    They are the “enemy.”

    They are people who don’t support the government, people who live in fast-growing urban communities, people who may be less well-off economically than the government and corporate elite, people who engage in protests, people who are unemployed, people who engage in crime (in keeping with the government’s fast-growing, overly broad definition of what constitutes a crime).

    In other words, in the eyes of the U.S. military, noncombatants are American citizens a.k.a. domestic extremists a.k.a. enemy combatants who must be identified, targeted, detained, contained and, if necessary, eliminated.

    In the future imagined by the Pentagon, any walls and prisons that are built will be used to protect the societal elite—the haves—from the have-nots.

    If you haven’t figured it out already, we the people are the have-nots.

    Suddenly it all begins to make sense.

    The events of recent years: the invasive surveillance, the extremism reports, the civil unrest, the protests, the shootings, the bombings, the military exercises and active shooter drills, the color-coded alerts and threat assessments, the fusion centers, the transformation of local police into extensions of the military, the distribution of military equipment and weapons to local police forces, the government databases containing the names of dissidents and potential troublemakers.

    The government is systematically locking down the nation and shifting us into martial law.

    This is how you prepare a populace to accept a police state willingly, even gratefully.

    You don’t scare them by making dramatic changes. Rather, you acclimate them slowly to their prison walls.

    Persuade the citizenry that their prison walls are merely intended to keep them safe and danger out. Desensitize them to violence, acclimate them to a military presence in their communities, and persuade them that there is nothing they can do to alter the seemingly hopeless trajectory of the nation.

    Before long, no one will even notice the floundering economy, the blowback arising from military occupations abroad, the police shootings, the nation’s deteriorating infrastructure and all of the other mounting concerns.

    It’s happening already.

    The sight of police clad in body armor and gas masks, wielding semiautomatic rifles and escorting an armored vehicle through a crowded street, a scene likened to “a military patrol through a hostile city,” no longer causes alarm among the general populace.

    Few seem to care about the government’s endless wars abroad that leave communities shattered, families devastated and our national security at greater risk of blowback.

    The Deep State’s tactics are working.

    We’ve allowed ourselves to be acclimated to the occasional lockdown of government buildings, Jade Helm military drills in small towns so that special operations forces can get “realistic military training” in “hostile” territory, and  Live Active Shooter Drill training exercises, carried out at schools, in shopping malls, and on public transit, which can and do fool law enforcement officials, students, teachers and bystanders into thinking it’s a real crisis.

    Still, you can’t say we weren’t warned about the government’s nefarious schemes to lock down the nation.

    Back in 2008, an Army War College report revealed that “widespread civil violence inside the United States would force the defense establishment to reorient priorities in extremis to defend basic domestic order and human security.” The 44-page report went on to warn that potential causes for such civil unrest could include another terrorist attack, “unforeseen economic collapse, loss of functioning political and legal order, purposeful domestic resistance or insurgency, pervasive public health emergencies, and catastrophic natural and human disasters.”

    In 2009, reports by the Department of Homeland Security surfaced that labelled right-wing and left-wing activists and military veterans as extremists (a.k.a. terrorists) and called on the government to subject such targeted individuals to full-fledged pre-crime surveillance. Almost a decade later, after spending billions to fight terrorism, the DHS concluded that the greater threat is not ISIS but domestic right-wing extremism.

    Meanwhile, the government has been amassing an arsenal of military weapons for use domestically and equipping and training their “troops” for war. Even government agencies with largely administrative functions such as the Food and Drug Administration, Department of Veterans Affairs, and the Smithsonian have been acquiring body armor, riot helmets and shields, cannon launchers and police firearms and ammunition. In fact, there are now at least 120,000 armed federal agents carrying such weapons who possess the power to arrest.

    Rounding out this profit-driven campaign to turn American citizens into enemy combatants (and America into a battlefield) is a technology sector that has been colluding with the government to create a Big Brother that is all-knowing, all-seeing and inescapable. It’s not just the drones, fusion centers, license plate readers, stingray devices and the NSA that you have to worry about. You’re also being tracked by the black boxes in your cars, your cell phone, smart devices in your home, grocery loyalty cards, social media accounts, credit cards, streaming services such as Netflix, Amazon, and e-book reader accounts.

    All of this has taken place right under our noses, funded with our taxpayer dollars and carried out in broad daylight without so much as a general outcry from the citizenry.

    And then you have the government’s Machiavellian schemes for unleashing all manner of dangers on an unsuspecting populace, then demanding additional powers in order to protect “we the people” from the threats.

    Are you getting the picture yet?

    The U.S. government isn’t protecting us from terrorism.

    The U.S. government is creating the terror. It is, in fact, the source of the terror.

    Just think about it for a minute: Cyberwarfare. Terrorism. Bio-chemical attacks. The nuclear arms race. Surveillance. The drug wars.

    Almost every national security threat that the government has claimed greater powers in order to fight—all the while undermining the liberties of the American citizenry—has been manufactured in one way or another by the government.

    Did I say Machiavellian? This is downright evil.

    We’re not dealing with a government that exists to serve its people, protect their liberties and ensure their happiness. Rather, these are the diabolical machinations of a make-works program carried out on an epic scale whose only purpose is to keep the powers-that-be permanently (and profitably) employed.

    Mind you, by “government,” I’m not referring to the highly partisan, two-party bureaucracy of the Republicans and Democrats.

    I’m referring to “government” with a capital “G,” the entrenched Deep State that is unaffected by elections, unaltered by populist movements, and has set itself beyond the reach of the law.

    I’m referring to the corporatized, militarized, entrenched bureaucracy that is fully operational and staffed by unelected officials who are, in essence, running the country and calling the shots in Washington DC, no matter who sits in the White House.

    Be warned: in the future envisioned by the government, we will not be viewed as Republicans or Democrats. Rather, “we the people” will be enemies of the state.

    For years, the government has been warning against the dangers of domestic terrorism, erecting surveillance systems to monitor its own citizens, creating classification systems to label any viewpoints that challenge the status quo as extremist, and training law enforcement agencies to equate anyone possessing anti-government views as a domestic terrorist.

    What the government failed to explain was that the domestic terrorists would be of the government’s own making, and that “we the people” would become enemy #1.

    As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, we’re already enemies of the state.

    It’s time to wake up and stop being deceived by Deep State propaganda.

    The post The Deep State’s Plot to Destabilize the Nation Is Working first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • International Relations (IR) theory fails to deliver on one of its key promises, specifically to produce positivist, value free analysis. What we encounter in the vast majority of international theory is the provincial or parochial normative purpose of defending and celebrating the ideal of the West in world politics. IR theory can no longer be represented as positivist, objective or value free.
    ~ John M. Hobson

    Orientation

    In 1981, Eric Jones wrote a very powerful book called The European Miracle: Environments, Economies and Geopolitics in the History of Europe and Asia. He was not alone in claiming there was something unique about Europe compared to the rest of the world. Though I doubt it was his intention, his work perhaps unintentionally supported a Eurocentric, paternalistic, racist orientation of a Wren theory which claimed to explain world politics. This is called International Relations Theory which claimed to be positivist, objective and value free. International relations theory is so deeply embedded in Western triumphalism that it has failed to notice that the West has been losing to China, Russia and Iran for the last 20 to 30 years. International  relations theory barely understands that this has happened and it has no theory to explain it. What we are witnessing today is a “Eurasian Miracle.”

    In my article “Neocon Realists and Global Neoliberals Dead on Arrival,” I identify five international relation theories: Neocon Realists; Neoliberal Globalists; Liberal Institutionalists; Constructivists and World-Systems Theorists. Most of my criticism in that article was leveled at the first three theories for their inability to account for the rise of China, Russia and Iran and the whole multipolar world. In this article, following the work of John A. Hobson in his book “The Eurocentric Conception of World Politics,” I point out a good reason for this is because of the Eurocentric nature of Neocon Realists, Neoliberal Globalists and Liberal Institutionalists theory. However, Hobson’s criticism of Eurocentrism does not stop there. He argues that even left-wing theories like constructionism and world-systems theory are guilty of Eurocentrism. Eurocentrism, not only because it takes different forms, but that some of these are even anti-imperialist. The conventional contrast of a Eurocentric or racist conception of imperialism from a constructivist and Marxist point of view is too simple and Eurocentrism is too deep.

    What is Eurocentrism?
    Hobson’s claim that there two steps in Eurocentric big-bang theory of world politics:

    • Europeans single-handedly created a European capitalist international state system through their pioneering and exceptional institutional genius.
    • They export their civilization to remake the world in their own image through globalization, imperialism or hegemony.
      To add to this, Eurocentrism claims the Eastern and Southern part of the world had no independent status. There was no East or South big bang. In the West the various movements of the Renaissance, the Protestant Reformation the scientific revolution, capitalism, the Enlightenment, the industrial revolution or socialism were purely Western. The East and South either helped out or they were left behind. With rare exceptions. Eastern and Southern parts of the world system never led Western development.

    What is paternalism?
    Historians of the modern West sought to explain social evolution. In doing so, they divided societies into three stages:

    • savagery (hunter-gatherers);
    • barbarism (horticultural and agricultural states) and
    • civilization—industrial capitalist societies

    Supposedly Europeans hoped that all societies would want to become civilized. But when societies of the East and South did not aspire to this, they were labelled either savages or barbarians. However, some historians and anthropologist thought it was their duty (white man’s burden) for the savages and barbarians to see the light. This led to paternalism.

    An example of well-intentioned paternalist Eurocentrism: Rawls
    John Rawls believed that his liberal vision has genuinely universalist criteria that do not offend cultural sensibilities of non-Western people. He was interested in culturally converting Eastern people rather than containing them as in Western liberal realism.

    Yet there are five key Eurocentric dimensions of his theory:

    • All well-ordered hierarchical societies must exhibit a separation of church and state (this will not work for Muslims).
    • Imposition of free trade (free trade can only work with wealthy societies).
    • Governed by a liberal law of peoples (teaching Eastern women to have less babies won’t work if they are being blocked by the IMF and the World bank from industrializing.
    • Eastern states receive only conditional sovereignty because they are classified as despotic states and “failed” states are deemed uncivilized.
    • Developed societies have a duty to assist burdened societies (paternalism).

    Hobson’s claims

    Hobson’s explicit claims are first that International Relations Theory contains six myths:

    • the noble identity and foundational myth of the discipline;
    • the positive myth of International Relations Theory;
    • the great debates myth and reconceptualizing the clash of IR theories;
    • the sovereignty or anarchy myth;
    • the globalization myth; and
    • the theoretical great traditions myth.

    Hobson’s 2nd claim is there are six types of imperialism which are laid out over 250 years. His third claim is that Western racism was not always triumphant but was based on fear of what would become of Europe if Easterners and Southerners of the world  got the upper hand. Lastly, I close out with theories that are exceptions to the rule and are not Eurocentric or paternalistic and with a minimum of racism.

    Hobson’s implicit claim is that without “the rest” there might be no West. The West was not an early, but a latedevelopment. This topic will be covered in my future article based on another of Hobson’s books, The Eastern Origins of Western Civilization.

    Six Eurocentric Myths of International Relations Theory
    Hobson tells us the conscious or unconscious moral purpose of IR is to be a defender and promoter of Western Civilization. The key of disciplinary assumptions that are presently revered as self-evident truths really are largely Eurocentric myths. As stated above, these include the above myths.

    The noble identity foundation myth: Whig and progress theory of history
    International Relations Theory has embedded in a Whig an interpretation of its intellectual history. Whiggish means that the past is reorganized to make it seem that the present was the only possible passage that could have led to contemporary life. The Whig theory of history has the theory of progress embedded in it. The theory of progress claims that the later in time we go in social evolution the better societies get in material wealth, less labor, higher morality and happiness.

    It is a now conventional assumption that the discipline of International Relations was born in 1919. Supposedly, it had a moral purpose to finding ways to solve the universal problem of war. This now conventional view was originally constructed by E.H. Carr in his classical text The Twenty Year’s Crisis (1946).

    Contrary to this convention, IR theory did not appear all of a sudden after WW I out of the head of Zeus. It continued from its pre-1914 roots which were neither positive, objective nor value free. Rather they were paternalist, Eurocentric and intentionally or unintentionally racist. There are deep continuities that the 1919-1945 period of international theory has with the pre-1914 period of international theory. The Eurocentric racism and paternalism that underpinned it had been forged in the previous century. In addition, there is a continuum of imperialism that goes all the way back to the middle of the 18th century. Thirdly, there was an explosion of anti-colonial resistance. What were colonists resisting – those noble Western powers that colonialized them. In this larger scheme of things, the end of World War I was not the only game in town. As positivists, what Neocon realists and liberal globalists ignore is that the noble identity myth can also be a ideological justification for Eurocentrism, capitalism, racism and imperialism. The four stages are of Hobsons history if International relations include:

    • 1760-1914 Manifest Eurocentrism and scientific racism
    • 1914-1945 Manifest Eurocentrism and scientific racism
    • 1945-1989 Subliminal Eurocentrism
    • 1989-2010 Manifest Eurocentrism

    The positive myth of IR of theory of liberalism as emerging between the wars

    This myth was that the between the wars IR theory was dominated by liberal globalists who searched for a new cooperative global order as a reaction to the Neocon realism of World War I. It was characterized as a harmonious and optimistic theory because it stands for peace. But as Hobson points out, interwar international theory was not monopolized by idealism or liberalism because it also exhibited a vibrant racism realist stream that emerged after 1889, especially in the world of geopolitical theorists, Ratzel, Mackinder, Mahan and others.

    IR claims to be positivist with a value free epistemological base. This has been challenged by African-American Marxists Ralph Bunche, WEB Dubois and CLR James. They say that when viewed through a non-European lens, the vast majority of international theory produces a parochial or provincial analysis of the West that can masquerade as if it were universal. Further, the imperialist aspect of interwar idealist theory has not been widely noticed among modern IR scholars. Realist and so-called Liberal Idealists were united by the concern to restore the mandate of Western civilizational hegemony in one guise of another.

    The great debate myth and reconceptualizing the idea of the clash of IR theories

    These debates include the controversy between realism and idealism in the interwar period between history and scientism in the 1960s and between positivists and post-positivists in the 1990s. The first two appear as if these were great qualitative struggles, but like with Republicans and Democrats in Mordor, all parties have far more in common than they have in differences. The struggle between positivists and post-positivists are real but it are presented in too stark a manner. There were post-positivists as far back as the 1960s and those political scientists who were more statistical and quantitative also go back to the 50s and 60s. In other words that debate did not begin in the 1990s as IR theorists claim but thirty years earlier. In spite of these differences, there is consensus of virtually all parties concerning the politics of defending and celebrating Western civilization in world politics. These theories supported the Western powers. Their differences were small compared to the paternalism, racism and imperialism that they all shared.

    Sovereignty vs anarchy myth
    The sovereignty vs anarchy myth claims that in International Relations Theory all states are sovereign. But because there is no world-state the relations between nation-states are characterized as anarchistic. In the first place, IR theory limits which nation-states are considered sovereign to European countries. Eastern and Southern states are not considered sovereign because they lack the proper Western European credentials such as voting systems, more than one party, and capitalism. The school of Realism operates with universalist analytical principles that supposedly apply to all states regardless of how 2nd class some states are treated in practice. The problem for IR theorists is that the post the 1648 era there had been a proliferation of international imperial hierarchies, which were comprised of a series of single sovereign colonial powers, many of which were not nation-states. Its supposedly universal and ideologically unbiased principles of state-centrism sovereignty directly contradict its practice. For example, in 1878 the conference in Berlin divided Africa between European imperial powers. These sovereign states had colonies.

    Furthermore if by anarchy they mean disorder, the relationship between sovereign states without a world state is by no means disorderly. There are shifting alliances between states rather than a Hobbesian war of all single states against each other. Secondly, to characterize this disorder as “anarchy” reveals either complete political bias or ignorance of anarchism as a respectable political tendency on the socialist left. Anarchism has involved thousands of people in many countries around the world since the late 1840s. It has had some success in the Paris Commune, the Russian and especially the Spanish revolutions. To characterize this as disorderly is an unforgivable omission from theorists who claim to be political scientists.

    The globalization myth
    The myth is that globalization has only recently (the last century) become an issue for international theorists. But to Hobson’s own surprise in his initial research, in many areas including some though not all realists, international theorists since 1760 have placed considerable emphasis on globalization. In his book The Eastern Origins of Western Civilization,Hobson points out that there were globalizing trade networks of, Africa, West Asia, India and China as far back as 500 CE.

    The theoretical great traditions myth
    IR theorists are no different than those who initiate artistic or spiritual movements in their search for origins. All political, artistic or spiritual movements seek to find their origins in the deep past rather than the recent past. In the IR traditional textbooks realism is claimed to go back to Thucydides in the ancient world and then forward to Hobbes and Machiavelli to culminate in Waltz, Gilpin and Mearsheimer via Carr and Morgenthau. But each of these theories are not air-tight. In fact IR theories mix with other theories within a given moment in time and each theory changes internally due to  changes in history.

    Defining Imperialism and Anti-imperialism International Theory
    Hobson claims that the vast literature on imperialism and anti-imperialism generally lacks conceptual precision. Here Hobson confront two broad definitional approaches:

    • Narrow Eurocentric
    • Expansive postcolonial

    Most of modern Eurocentric international theory embraces a narrow definition and allows for considerable wiggle room when confronted with a charge of imperialism. It sees Eurocentrism and imperialism as distinct. You can be Eurocentric and not imperialist and conversely imperialist without being Eurocentric. At the other extreme, by contrast, post-colonial theorists seek to completely shut down this wiggle room by assuming that being Eurocentric is inherently imperialist and imperialism is always Eurocentric.

    In table 1 I have a divided a spectrum of imperialism throughout history into 6 types. The three types on the left accept that they are imperialists and don’t apologize for it. The theories on the right deny they are imperialists. The theories on the left are formal empires, while the theories on the right are informal liberal empires. The people in the last cell are the theorists of various types of imperialism. The cell above it include the nature and justification of their mission. The names of the theorists are not important for now, but some of the more famous ones might be familiar to you. The importance of this table are not the theorists but rather the systems of justification, none of which are value free, universal and objective.

    Table 1 The Definitional Continuum of Imperialism, Past and Present

    Definitional Consensus
    Most coercive definition
    Accept they are imperialists
    Definitional Controversy
    Least coercive definition
    Deny they are imperialists
    Formal Empire Informal liberal empire
    Tributary relations, political containment conquest of barbarism National civilizing mission/cultural
    conversion
    Civilizing mission, via international government
    protectorates
    Anglo-Saxon hegemony To protect, duty to prevent, duty to assist concept of democracies Universalization

    of Western civilization and global empire of liberal democratic peace

    Gumplowicz, Ward, Mahan
    Mackinder,
    K. Pearson, Hitler, Von Treitschke, Kidd, Spykman
    Haushofer
    Cobden, Bright, Angell, Mill, Marx, Reinsch,
    W.Wilson
    Hobson, Buell, Woolf
    Krasner, Fukuyama
    Gilpin
    Kindleberger Kagan, Brzezinski,
    Cooper, Ignatieff
    Slaughter, Ikenberry, Wheeler, Risse, Finnermore Rawls, Held
    Nussbaum
    Friedman, Wolf, Russet, Owen

    Eurocentric Imperialism: Liberal and Marxism

    In Table 2 below, one interesting but expected difference between liberalism and Marxism is that liberals see imperialism as benign. J. A. Hobson and John Stuart Mill see imperialism is benign at an international level, but Cobden, Bright and Angell see imperialism as benign at a national level. The fact that Marxists thinks imperialism as coerced rather than benign should not come as a surprise to anyone. Traditional International Relations Theory sees liberal internationalism and classical Marxism as the antithesis of imperialism. However, John Hobson’s main point is what Marxism and liberals have in common. They all agree that:

    • The East can be characterized as “barbaric oriental despotism”
    • The capitalist peripheral countries (Third world) are savage, anarchistic societies residing in a domestic state of nature
    • Western agency is always pioneering, learning nothing from the rest of the world
    • Eastern agency even at its best is conditional, always learning from the West

    It is these four points that show how deep Eurocentrism of all Western theories, even Marxism. These are the type of deep assumptions, hundreds of years old the keep Western theorists of world politics that the BRICS world of the East is bypassing them.

    Table 2 Paternalistic, Eurocentric. Institutional Imperial Concepts of World Politics

    Marxism Left Liberal Liberal
    Marx Mill and Hobson Cobden, Bright, Angell
    Coerced national civilizing mission Benign international mission Benign national mission
    East as barbaric Oriental Despotism East as barbaric Oriental Despotism East as barbaric Oriental Despotism
    South as savage—3rd world anarchistic societies residing in a domestic state of nature South as savage—3rd world anarchistic societies residing in a domestic state of nature South as savage—3rd world anarchistic societies residing in a domestic state of nature
    Pioneering Western agency Pioneering Western agency Pioneering Western agency
    Conditional Eastern agency Conditional Eastern agency Conditional Eastern agency

    Here are some further examples of Eurocentrism. In the 19th century, even when IR theory was sensitive to interdependence, it wasn’t world interdependence. Rather it was interdependence among the civilized states of Europe. Outside of Europe there was no recognition of interdependence. Eastern societies only got recognition once they became colonies or only if these countries were at war with Europe. It is something like calling the ultimate baseball playoffs “the World Series” even when it only includes the United States.

    At the same time, the Eurocentrists had no problem imagining war with the East if it was profitable. But when it came to the civilized states of Europe, war was seen as unprofitable. Also, as we shall see later, racist theories bemoaned Europeans fighting because this would result in the depletion of the white race. Colonial annexation was entirely appropriate when it come to Europe’s relation with the East. The East has  conditional agency, such as Japan during World War II. However, the East cannot take the lead in historical development without being predator (as in the Yellow Peril).

    As for the Global South, (Africa) for it  to be a respectable civilized state, Western core countries took a page out of Calvinism and insisted that these “savage societies” have a duty to develop their land productivity (meaning agriculturally) and abandon their primitivism (hunting and gathering). Non-Western politics, whether they be monarchies without constitutions or the egalitarian political consensus societies of hunting and gathering, are not recognized as sovereign. It was representative bourgeois state politics that was the “civilized” norm. As late as 1993 Paul Johnson said most African states are not fit to govern themselves. Their continued existence and the violence of human degradation they bring are a threat to the stability and peace as well as an affront to our moral sense. As of today Zionist Israel has massacred over 200,000 Palestinians. Yet there is no call from the United Nations (controlled by the West) to intervene in this “failed state”.

    European imperialists hide their protectionist policies. As Friedrich List remarked, once imperialists have attained their summit of greatness, they kick away the ladder by which they climbed up in order to deprive others of the means of climbing up afterwards behind them.

    Both the US and Britain industrialized on the back of extremely protectionist regimes and only turned to free trade once they arrived at the top of the global economic hierarchy. Thus, the imposition of free trade on developing countries by Britain after 1846 and the US after 1945 prevents Third World states from using tariffs to protect the infant industries. The projection of “free trade” by Americans…constitute an economic containment strategy to keep the Third World down.

    A Century of Marxist Eurocentrism

    Karl Marx’s paternal Eurocentrism and the political necessity of the Western civilizing mission
    Marx appears to have had little appreciation for the complexity of ancient Chinese and Indian civilizations. For him China and India were the home of “Oriental Despotism”. The East could only be emancipated from its backwardness by the British colonialists. India stands outside world history and China was understood as a rotting semi-civilization. Believe it or not, for Marx, opium wars were emancipatory for China. Without British intervention there would be no future emancipatory socialist revolution. Imperialism was an instrument for both political progress and a requirement of global primitive accumulation. Was the result of British colonization Chinese emancipation? No, it was a century of Chinese humiliation (1839-1949). The imperialist engagement with China did not lead to order but to massive social-dislocation. The various Chinese revolutions were in part stimulated by a reaction against the encounter with the West.

    For Marx and Engels, the East could belatedly jump aboard the Western developmental plane as Hobson says as “The Oriental Express”. It could participate in the construction of world history. But they could never lead the train in a progressive direction. They only had conditional agency. The Western states on the other hand had hyper-sovereignty. Sadly, Hobson says there hasn’t been much effort to reconstruct Marx’s theory along non-Eurocentric lines in traditional Marxism.

    Lenin has no theory of Eastern emancipation
    According to Hobson, Lenin says the East is inherently incapable of self-development. Lenin discusses how the period of free competition within Europe was succeeded after 1873 with the rise of cartels which intensified after 1903 into full-fledged monopoly capital and finance capital. But the causes of the crisis lay in the West whether underconsumption (Hobson) or the tendency of the rate of profit to fall (Marx and Engels). There was no mention of resistance in the colonies. Lenin discussed the right of self-determination of nations, but those nations would never influence the West or provide leadership.

    World-systems theory
    Wallerstein
    Immanuel Wallerstein was heavily criticized by Robert Brenner and other classical Marxists for overstating the interdependence of trade and hierarchy between societies and understating the class struggle within societies. But he maintains his traditional Marxian orientation in emphasizing the dynamics for the evolution of the world-system clearly in the Western part of the world. The West represents the civilized world, the core countries. The second division in the world is occupied by the regressive redistributive world empires in Asia. Division three of the world system is occupied by primitive reciprocal mini-systems found in North America, parts of Africa and Australasia (savage societies in the 19thcentury parlance).

    World-empires mainly in Asia saw their state structures weakened while their boundaries underwent a forced contraction and the surviving mini-systems of North American, Caribbean and Australia underwent wholesale destruction. 

    Arrighi and Chase-Dunn

    Other world-systems theorists like Giovanni Arrighi and Christopher Chase Dunn suggested that the world-system didn’t consist of just a core and a periphery but consisted of a semi-periphery which may or may not be Western. They argued that when core Western countries experienced crisis and decline, it was the semi-periphery countries that provided a new resource which allowed them to become a new core.

    Exceptions to the rule Gunder Frank, Abu-Lughod

    To be fair, both a sympathizer and an arch-critic of World-Systems theory, Andre Gunder Frank accused Wallerstein of Eurocentrism in his writings culminating in hisbook Re-Orient: Global Economy in the Asian Age. The work of Janet Anu-Lughod Before European Hegemony was so very powerful in showing the advanced state of non-Western trade networks  between 1250 and 1350 CE.

    Exceptions to the Rule Outside of Marxism: James Watson

    Watson’s analysis starts out with typical Eurocentrism with the Westphalian origins of European international society. He emphasizes the uniqueness of European restlessness and exceptional turbulence. Dynamic and enterprising as it is, it is  contrasted to the closed or isolated world of Asian cultures. The rise of the West is located in Weberian liberalism, neorealism and Marxism. Watson’s unusually explorative book The Evolution of International Society moves from the Italian city-state system and then proceeds with the emergence of sovereignly at the Westphalia conference by way of the Renaissance and the Reformation to arrive at the balance of power in 1713 at Utrecht. Yet he does talk about Eastern developments as reacting back on Europe as in a dialectical way. What the East contributed from the West included:

    • the Italian city-state system was dependent on Eastern trade;
    • financially cheques, bills of exchange, banks and commercial partnerships which had been pioneered in the Islamic and pre-Islamic Middle-East;
    • overseas expansion which began in 1492 was only possible with the navigational and nautical techniques that were pioneered by Chinese and especially Muslims; and
    • Industrialization, centerpiece of “British genius” was significantly enabled by Chinese innovations that stem back several millenniums.

    Further, Watson analyzes in considerable detail many non-Western political formations prior to 1648.

    Western Fear of Eastern and Southern Power

    Most interesting is that many anti-imperialist racists argue against imperialism because it brings the white race in racially fatal conflict with the contaminating influences of non-white races. The impossibility of Eastern progressive development renders the Western civilizing mission all but futile.

    Charles Henry Pearson: the decline of white supremacy and the barbaric rise of the yellow peril
    Charles Henry Pearson (1830-1894) achieved immediate fame with the dire prophesy that he issued for the  white race in his book National Life and Character, a ForecastHe argued that white racial supremacy was being superseded by very high levels of predatory Eastern agency. But in Pearson’s racist imagination it is the white West that has been fated to remain within its stationary limits while the yellow races are destined to expand and triumph over the higher whites. The barbaric threat also came from within as a result of the socialist states’ preference to prop up the unfit white working classes and from without via the Yellow Peril were all leading to deterioration.

    James Blair and David Jordan

    Jordan’s defensive social Darwinist racism was a pacifist’s eugenics. It had three components:

    • The white race cannot survive in the topics.

    It serves to affect a degeneration of the physical and intellectual energy of the Europeans. He gives an example of that as the Philippines lie in the heat of the torrid zone which he called natures asylum for degeneration. Benjamin Kidd argued though we in Europe have the greatest food-producing regions of the earth, we want to administer the tropic from a distance. The white races needed to wake up because the topics will lure them to their death. Kidd wanted to absolve the West of its home-grown liberal imperial guilt syndrome. His key concern about colonizing the tropics was the degenerative impact that the climate would have on white imperialists.

    • The second anti-imperialist argument concerned the perils of immigration.

    The Oriental is of the past. They have not progressed for centuries. The Easterner hates progress. He contends that the constitution of China is said to not have been changed for thousands of years. One the other hand, the West is progressive, energetic and intolerant of the very thing which is the East’s most marked characteristic, indolence. The two races should never amalgamate.

    • Anti-war because the fittest white people would get kille

    Jordan argues that warfare selects the best or fittest elements of the civilized white race to go out and fight, but in so doing leads to a reduction in the numbers of the fittest element as they lose their lives in futile colonial wars. Meanwhile the infirm and cowardly and feckless stay home, away from the battlefield. Some defensive racists were against the war between white countries so they could preserve white unity.

    To summarize the threat from the East:

    • Domestic white barbaric threat – unfit working class
    • Racist interbreeding threat – contamination
    • Tropical climatic threat
    • Threat of European wars depleting the white race

    The crisis of Western self-doubting and deep anxiety was reflected in a host of books which included:

    • Spengler’s Decline of the West (European Institutionalist) (1919,1932)
    • Madison Grant’s the Passing of the White Race (1918)
    • Lothrop Stoddard The Rising Tide of Color Against White Supremacy (1920)
    • Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents (1930)

     Stoddard

    Eurocentrism and racism do not always deny non-white race’s agency. The climax of eugenics reflected not the moment of supreme white confidence but an acute  sense of anxiety regardless the future hegemony of the white race. For Stoddard, globalization is a real threat. The greatest threat to white racial existence lies

    • in colored immigration problem
    • a demographic explosion

    The white races are under siege and disunited within their inner sanctum excavated by the Trojan horse of Western liberalism. Stoddard takes the notion of predatory Eastern agency beyond Mahan and Mackinder. He wants to call out the hubris of the white race. He is nervous and panicked about the Japanese victory over the white Russians in 1905. Further, rise of communism dealt a cruel blow to white racial unity. He is afraid of the white wars in which the best white stock would be lost on the battlefields. The white need to retreat from their imperial bases in Asia and leave the land to yellow and brown rule.

    Madison Grant
    Grant claimed colonialism weakens the white races. The Nordic race is unable to survive south of the line of latitude on white Virginia because of the detrimental impact of the hot climate. Nordics must keep away from the native population for fear of racial contamination from the sun’s actinic rays. Grant says the rapid decline in the birthrate of native white Americans is gradually withdrawing from the scene, abandoning to these aliens the land which they once conquered and developed. The man of the old stock is being crowded out.

    Patrick Moynihan
    In Patrick Moynihan book Pandemonium, he explores a  Malthusian logic in predicting the demographic doomsday scenario at the hands of the Eastern Hordes as does Paul Kennedy in his book Preparing for the 21st Century. For them, the greatest challenge to world order in the coming century is the rising relative demographic gap between West and East. Western civilizations will have stable or declining populations and would be swamped by the East and the South. While Malthus in his day did not prevent a rising demographic to Europe from the East, by the late 19th and early 20th centuries these became a staple of much of racist Western thought.

    Huntington and Lind on demographics
    In the work of Huntington and Lind a close parallel can be drawn between their work and the racist imperialist thinker Mahan. But an even closer link can be found with CH Pearson’s National Life and Character, a Forecast; Stoddard’s The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy (1920);  Clashing Tides of Color (1935).  In Huntington’s book The Clash of Civilizations (1996). The roots of the barbaric threat that the Chinese and Muslims pose for the Western Civilization are located within a neo-Malthusian framework. It begins with the Eastern population explosion. This surplus population is problematic because it will seek to flood into the heartlands of the West.

    For Huntington and Lind, non-Western societies were increasingly becoming the movers and shakers of their own history and of Western history. This meant in their ability to economically develop as well as resist imperialism. Lind writes that with the break-up of the Soviet “empire” the West’s great right flank will almost certainly be endangered as the Islamic republics will seek to join their Muslim brothers. Islam will be at the gates of Vienna as either immigrants or terrorists. Domestically multiculturalism in the West today is a “political virus” for it serves to boost the vitality of foreign cultures within the West.

    Conclusion
    The purpose of this article is to expose the theoretical blockages to the West’s understanding that they are being left beyond by the multipolar world of BRICS.

    First, their Western International Relations Theory history has hardly been a positivist value free theory. It oozes Eurocentrism, paternalism, racism and imperialism. Secondly International Relations Theory only dimly perceives that these theories are not 100 years deep, starting after World War I, but have a 250 year history as Table 3 below shows. Thirdly, table 3 shows over 50 theorists over that 250 years, thus cementing a deep ideological commitment to “the rise of the West”. Those international theorists who have really understood that the East and the South are not merely passive recipients of the wisdom of the West but are themselves innovators. These theorists are isolated and could be counted on two hands.

    Table 3 Eurocentrism, Paternalism and Racism  in International Theory 1760-2010

    1760-1914
    Manifest Eurocentrism
    Paternalism
    Cobden/ Bright, Angell, Hobson, Mill, Marx
    Ant-paternalism
    Smith, Kant
    Scientific racism Offensive racism
    Ward, Reinsch, Kidd, Mahan, Mackinder and von Treitschke
    Defensive Racism Spencer, Sumner, Blair, Jordan, CH Pearson, Ripley, Brinton
    1914-1945
    Manifest Eurocentrism
    Paternalism
    Wolff, Zimmern, Murray, Angell
    Anti-paternalism
    Subliminal Eurocentrism
    Laski/ Brailsford, Lenin, Bukharin
    Scientific racism Offensive Racism Defensive racism
      Wilson, Buell, Kjellen, Spykman, Haushofer, Hitler Stoddard, Grant,
    E. Huntington
    1945-1989
    Subliminal Eurocentrism
    Paternalism
    Gilpin, Keohane
    Walz, Bull, Watson
    Anti-Paternalism
    Carr, Morgenthau
    1989-2010
    Manifest Eurocentrism
    Paternalist
    Rawls, Held, Nussbaum, Fukuyama
    Anti-paternalist
    World-system theory, Cox
      Offensive Eurocentrism
    Kagan, Cooper, Ferguson
    Defensive Eurocentrism
    SP Huntington, Lind

     

    Below is the Conventional linear narrative of Liberal great tradition:

    • From 1760 to 1816 there is classical liberal internationalism of Smith, Kant and Ricardo.
    • From 1830 to 1913 classical liberal internationalism continues in the work of Cobden, Bright, JS Mill and Angell.
    • Between 1900 to 1945 the emphasis switches to interdependence theory of liberal institutionalism of Hobson, Wilson, Zimmerman and Murray.
    • Between 1989 and 2010 liberal cosmopolitanism is embodied in the theories of Fukuyama, Held and Rawls.

    The Table 4 below shows Hobson’s very different breakdown of liberalism, calling it “paternalistic imperial liberalism”.

    See Table 4 Hobson’s history in international Liberalism on Socialist Planning Beyond Capitalism

    Table 5 shows that history of realism has also been filled with political activity about as far from positivism as one can imagine.

    See Table 5 Hobson’s history of international realism on Socialist Planning Beyond Capitalism

    Lastly Hobson charts the history of Marxism from 1840 to post 1989.

    • With classical Marxism of Marx and Engels between 1840-1895. Hobson calls it explicit imperialism which is paternalist Eurocentrism.
    • Between 1910 and the 1920s classical Marxism continues with the work of Lenin, Luxemburg, Hilferding and Bukharin which Hobson characterizes as anti-imperialist, but a subliminal anti-paternalist Eurocentrism.
    • Between 1967 and 1989 although World-Systems Theory differs from classical Marxism with its emphasis on conflicts between states more than class struggles within states, it shares the same combination of anti-imperialist, subliminal, anti-paternalist Eurocentrism of the Marxists of 1910-1920. The same is true for Robert Cox’s Gramscian hegemony theory.
    • In the post 1989 period we find in the work of Giovanni Arrighi and Christopher Chase-Dunn a continuation of anti-imperialist, anti-paternalist emphasis on Europe, but both are more willing to grant autonomy to non-Western countries. If Eastern or Southern countries  occupy what both call the capitalist  semi-periphery of the world system. Arrighi’s last book was called Adam Smith in Beijing, showing his interest in China as the new global hegemon
    • In the same period It is in the work of Andre Gunder Frank and Janet Abu-Lughod that we finally theories that challenge any Eurocentrism or paternalism. Gunder Frank has always contended that World Systems Theory is Eurocentric and claims, as Hobson argues in another book that Europe only surpassed China after 1800. His book Re-Orient claims, correctly I think that the new Asian Age is on the horizon.
    The post The Myopia of Anglo-American Rulers first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Down at my grocer’s for half a dozen eggs and some melon, I answered the usual question about my well being openly as accustomed. My neighbour is a friend and his query is sincere. After recounting local concerns he expresses his frustration, one more people certainly share, that they can witness audio-visual depictions of the rampage in the Gaza concentration camp of occupied Palestine on television and hear the words of the ostensible leaders of the great states in the United Nations assembled say little and do less to stop the carnage. Of course neither of us is in a position to raise more than private outrage. I add, however, that this performance of mass murder has been escalating since the end of the Great War when the great states of British Empire, the French Republic and the United States agreed to the European colonization of a strategic prize from the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in 1918.

    Neither of us was alive at the time. Nor were we contemporary with the declaration of statehood by those colonizers on 14 May 1948. The stories we were told to explain and justify European colonization at the same time when those states had proclaimed in San Francisco the universal rights to self-government even for brown people, were that the Europeans concerned had been so punished by the Great Powers through the centuries, especially most recently by the two-time loser among the Great Powers—Germany, that as an act of contrition the population of Palestine had been chosen for collective retribution. That is to say, the brown inhabitants of Palestine in the British Mandate were chosen as a people to be punished, deprived of life, liberty and property, as a penalty for the evils inflicted upon a mass of Europeans whose most important characteristic was that they had been identified as Jews. In the case of Germany under the NSDAP many of the Europeans in question had been deprived of their citizenship as Germans and defined as Jewish by nationality. Thus, under the NSDAP tyranny they were deprived of all their rights as citizens of the state in which they had been born and to whom they had owed allegiance, by operation of law and administrative procedure. One of the principles formalized in the conventions adopted with the United Nations Charter stipulated that no one could be deprived of their nationality against their will. Thus, it would seem the acts of the German regime were declared retroactively violations of human rights. Unfortunately, this principle, like so many others adopted by the Great Powers, was not taken very seriously when skin complexions or geographical locations differed from those of the charter members of the League of Nations successor club. Very little in the stories we were told addressed the obvious inconsistencies between the expressed prohibitions, e.g. collective punishment and deprivation of nationality, when applied to skin colours.

    Moreover the stories we were told conflated the victims of the NSDAP regime, a tyranny that enjoyed massive financial and covert political support from the commanding heights of Western industry and finance, with an established settler-colonial movement about which so little was said as possible. While we were entertained by Hollywood productions—beginning with the show trials in Nuremberg and their later film adaptation cast with famous stars of American stage and screen— and continuing with the Leon Uris’s pulp fiction, also adapted for propaganda cinema—the settler-colonial movement was busy practicing what they had no doubt learned from seminars with experts like Adolf Eichmann behind a screen of genuine NSDAP victims and displaced persons manipulated to lend legitimacy to the crimes it continues to perpetrate, live on TV as this is being written. All of this was known to representatives, high and low, of the Great Powers that gave license to this invasion. Where reports of the crimes were not suppressed, the amazing control over mass media and brutal assassinations silenced them quickly.

    It has often been said that those methodical Germans were so disciplined that they kept careful records, which could be used to incriminate them later. Thomas Suárez (State of Terror, 2016) found he could reconstruct enough of the criminal history of Zionist occupation of Palestine from the perpetrators records to suggest that not only the NSDAP regime was proud of its attention to detail. As we have seen over the past four years, one of the principal functions of mass media is to inoculate the population at large so as to make them resistant to facts. The details Suárez relates based on research in the National Archives (Kew, UK) cover the period until the declaration of statehood by the settler-colonial regime in Tel Aviv: in other words the behaviour of the founders before we were told that Tel Aviv was the only “democracy” in the Middle East with “the most moral army” on the planet. The book is worth reading if only as a corrective to the amnesiac shock suffered by millions who only discovered that there was “savage and relentless killing in Gaza” a year ago.

    Suárez’s story is full of aid workers and UN officials being abused, attacked and murdered. The archives showed that meticulous account was taken of how many Palestinians the invaders were able to rape, torture, kill or otherwise violate and eliminate from the country in which they had been born. Deep intelligence operations throughout the West combined with well-funded and effective mass media campaigns in the US and Britain were as prevalent then as they are today. Innovations in lethality and terror accompanied every effort leading to statehood—and as can be seen beyond. Nobel Peace laureate Menachem Begin, a proud veteran of that era, could justifiably claim—as he indeed once did (in a January 1974 television interview when Russell Warren Howe asked Begin: “How does it feel, in the light of all that’s going on, to be the father of terrorism in the Middle East? “In the Middle East”, Begin bellowed, “in all the world”)—that they (Irgun et al.) had invented terrorism. Striking is the account of youth cadres, some as young as 13, who had been trained as terrorists within the trinity of Zionist paramilitary organisations (Hagana, Irgun and Lehi). Innumerable operations were performed by these highly indoctrinated cadres disguised in the attire typical of the natives (dressed as Arabs). Chronologically it becomes obvious that the methods of terrorism attributed in the West to Muslims were in fact all standard operating procedures for Zionist paramilitary death squads—long before there was any armed resistance to the Zionist invasion and occupation of Palestine.

    None of this historical context was part of our history lessons. Nor is it part of the ranting that counts for reporting now. I have heard enough said about my compatriots and their supposed affinity for fascism or natural racism—all based on the interminable repetition of increasingly bizarre films about the NSDAP era in Germany. That all ended in 1945. The insinuations have not stopped, although their application in the past four years defies coherent explanation. However the same regime has been in power in Palestine, de facto since the establishment of the Jewish Agency and de jure since statehood was declared.

    It is worth noting that settler-colonialism was still high fashion in 1948 since the Union of South Africa and Rhodesia (also under British rule with a close relationship to Cecil Rhodes’ principal financial advisor) also proclaimed their nationalist version of white supremacy, apartheid. Despite many predictions to the contrary, they have not survived as long as the regime in Tel Aviv. The Afrikaner nationalist attempt to establish a racial-ethnic state with its own language (Afrikaans) and culture also failed. (see also Church Clothes: Land, Mission and the End of Apartheid, 2024) Decades of National Party rule were predicated on the potential onslaught awaiting whites on the continent if a strong white government did not defend them. There was no onslaught. In 1991, the feared horror of Bantu/ Black/ African communism had disappeared. Even the Afrikaner nationalist attempt to support its racial-ethnic state with a “white African” language and culture failed. Although Afrikaans remains one of South Africa’s nine official languages, there is no longer a single Afrikaans-medium university in the country since the apartheid constitution was abolished. The “Cape Dutch” had been established in South Africa since the 1600s and within a mere decade the whole edifice was gone.

    That leaves us with the question; especially if one dares to take the absurd woke ideology currently propagated in the West at its word, why settler-colonialism can prevail in Palestine in forms that even heads of state are now likening to those of the NSDAP tyranny? While all manner of institutions, monuments, and artefacts are being renamed, removed or vandalized because of their imputed relationship to racism, colonialism, slavery or some other grave injustice (mainly in Britain and the US), the uninterrupted century of settler-colonial terror in Palestine barely caused a ripple. Is it ignorance, hypocrisy, or plain stupidity? What seems long ago now, Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky (The Manufacturing of Consent: The Political Economy of Mass Media, 1988) nearly popularized the distinction between “worthy and unworthy victims”. In their propaganda model the mass media—and those who own it—decide which victims are worthy and hence treated as victims whose suffering is acknowledged and which victims are unworthy and whose suffering can be and is dismissed. This distinction is certainly helpful in calling attention to the silence and invisibility of a century of mass murder and terrorism, after 1948 state terrorism. In order to understand the source of silence, obfuscation, and mendacity, it is necessary to ask the questions how the “worthy victims” are chosen and also by whom?

    What we say we know about the past is a construct. Even in the course of a conversation develops as a construct by which the exchange continues on the assumptions of two speakers as to the appropriate way to respond to what was just uttered. Each of us is unwittingly a small scale amateur historian when confronted with utterances, like “what did you mean?” or “what I meant to say was.” There is no way to know definitively what someone was thinking in the past. One can only judge the utterance, either as memory (covertly) or as recording (written or audio), to have some chronological significance and respond to it as one deems appropriate. We have all heard people respond with statements like, “when I said that I did not mean what you think” or “the situation was different then” or “I can change my mind, can’t I? (When someone refuses or denies the interpretation of an utterance assigned to the past). We all know people whom we say are unreliable because in our judgement statements “in the past” do not permit predictions of future behaviour. “Oh he never comes on time” or “he always says one thing and does another”. In all these cases the purpose of our assessment is to control our own behaviour, our reaction to others. We can call it prediction if it means that it controls what we will do (it cannot control what we already have done.) At the same time we have certainly all heard “Oh you are being unfair. He is not always like that” or “He is never like that with me”. In other words the judgement that “he never does what he says he is going to do” is judged by someone else to be an inappropriate explanation and prediction for that person’s behaviour. At the same time it is certainly reasonable to reply, “maybe he does not behave that way with you but he does with me. I cannot rely on him.” At this point, one is acknowledging that although it may be inappropriate to claim that “he is universally unreliable”, it is reasonable to say that “he is unreliable for me”—and it is my interest in reliability that is important here. My interest is another way of saying, reliability is a category of personal conduct which I value and which controls my interaction with others.

    Explanations are unavoidable. Whether they are good explanations or bad explanations depends on the judgement of someone and on the interests controlling that judgement. Those interests may also include rendering no judgement that deviates from those others consider appropriate. So in more explicitly historical research, reflection and debate, the interests of the investigator may be controlled by the desire to be treated as a “serious historian” or “serious scholar”, another way of saying that investigation will be governed not only by one’s personal judgement but by what one perceives as the judgement of others as to the appropriateness of one’s work. Academic institutions and other venues where history (often conflated with the past) are the focus of human activity are not only repositories of data but organizations for structuring the use of that data. Structuring the use is another way of saying controlling the way those who are engaged in historical research or study respond to the artefacts and the utterances of other investigators or members of the research institution. There is data, e.g. documents, and utterances and redundancies in response to the data. In that sense historical research is no different from the activity in a chemistry laboratory. It is impossible to separate the utterances and redundancies of response that form an institution from the research product. There is no pure objective fact in the test tube or the archive that is self-evident. Explanations arise from attempts to respond to data in meaningful ways, for instance to control or predict our responses to other data. Even the most abstract forms of research constitute controls on the researcher, what he sees; what he may discover; what he discards or ignores.

    A historical explanation, regardless of the volume and nature of the data available (whether known or unknown in scope), will always be a selection of data and its organization. It will always be governed by interests of the researcher or of other researchers or those on whose behalf the research is selected and performed or even of those to whom the researcher addresses his work, e.g. readership, students, public policy, etc.

    The armistice of 1918 ended the open hostilities between the regular forces of the alliance (the British Empire, the French Republic and the United States) against those of Austria-Hungary, the German Empire and the Ottoman Empire, the so-called Central Powers. However, it by no means ended the organized military operations on the Continent or the non-military warfare, as might have been expected by anyone who took the Wilsonian rhetoric at face value. War continued in Eastern Europe. The United States fought with Czech legions, Japanese troops and White Russians against the new Bolshevik government in the Soviet Union until 1922. Economic warfare continued throughout the interwar period despite negotiations and the conclusion of a plethora of treaties known under the rubric of Versailles. The Allies fought overtly or covertly to capture and allocate the extinguished empires among themselves while reinforcing their hold on the empires with which they began the war.

    If war aims are not defined by what is announced in declarations but are ascertained by examining forensically the results, then such imputed war aims can be said to constitute a pattern. In other words, a sequence of distinguishable outcomes can form the basis for interpretation of belligerent conduct, specifying general aims or attitudes to explain present and future wars. Such patterns may be classified as instructions by which belligerents chose to wage war or analysis can identify the latent or implicit culture that drives the behaviour. The forensic examination serves to identify redundancies that must be practiced in order to sustain the institutional behaviour underlying the belligerence.

    None of the foregoing would have been practically relevant in the 19th century. However, the adoption and ratification of the General Treaty for Renunciation of War as an Instrument of National Policy aka Kellogg – Briand Pact (1928) which declared war illegal as a means of resolving international disputes; a violation of international law also known as the law of nations. This pact has yet to be renounced by any of its principal signatories. Thus the prohibition stands. Therefore the determination of war aims and the causes attributed to such wars by those who wage them becomes highly relevant.

    If the aims of a given war are not clearly understood, neither the appropriate defence nor a realistic negotiating position to end hostilities can be found, let alone pursued.

    In battle, the assailing force seeks to magnify its impact by concealing the actual targets or objectives from the defender. In waging war itself the aggressor is obliged to justify the use of force within the rhetorical framework of the law of nations as commonly understood. Rhetorical legitimacy is no trivial weapon in the aggressor’s arsenal, especially under the League of Nations/ United Nations framework. The more intensely the claims are asserted, the more difficult it becomes to ascertain the effective aims. This is a peculiar aspect of modern ideological warfare. Silencing the defender in public opinion and international fora relies on domination of the totality of communications channels.

    The history of modern warfare actually begins with the Crusades. These centuries of assaults against the declared enemies of Christendom always comprised both psychological and physical orders of battle. The papal-rabbinical infrastructure under the command of the Roman pontiff “preached” the Crusades. The military force unleashed through the vassals of the Latin Church wielded the swords and other instruments of death. The pulpit and ecclesiastical apparatus mustered the support needed to drain manpower and other resources for the campaigns of slaughter, demolition and plunder. Prospects of plunder and intangible wealth (salvation) have been essential to convince all those who sacrifice that they will be rewarded on Earth as it is in Heaven, or at least compensated for the material and bodily losses they have to bear.

    This is no less true in the 21st century than it was in the 11th.

    It is really quite remarkable that while the NSDAP era has been an almost obsessive target of historical research for as long as I can remember, the era in which the settler-colony in Palestine was established receives so little attention although its ostensible legitimation is derived from (retroactively) and enhanced by the very existence of the German fascist regime from 1936 until 1945. Although the ideological roots of Afrikaner nationalism and its close relationship to the doctrinal authors of German National Socialism have been investigated and publicly debated. The relationship between Zionism and Nazism has been given more muted attention. When Zionism and Nazism are discussed generally then there is a tendentious context, which fosters the conflation of Herzl’s ambitions with the campaign to funnel all displaced Jews from Europe into Mandatory Palestine under administration of the Jewish Agency. The implication is that Zionism anticipated the Nuremberg laws, the deprivation of Germans once classified as Jewish of their German nationality and their relocation – disposal, including enslavement and murder. However, any attempt to examine the practices of the Tel Aviv regime over the past century in historical context, including comparison of those practices with practices under other regimes, has been vigorously discouraged.

    While it is understandable that the practitioners in the “only democracy” with the “most moral army” may be reluctant to discuss their conduct and utterances in comparative context, it ought to be asked why this reluctance is so widespread beyond the 1967 borders? The most obvious, if somewhat superficial, reason is that the regime in Tel Aviv is the state incarnation of “worthy victims” whose every suffering, real or imagined, must be smothered in sympathy and adoration. Whatever its misdeeds, these are the understandable errors of a distraught, somewhat paranoiac victim for whom at least pity but not punishment is appropriate. The traumatized maiden amidst the bearded, brown-skinned hordes must be forgiven for every act taken in defence of her purity. The mythological, cinematic clichés that can be applied are innumerable. Like cinema, they also distract from serious observation and assessment of the utterances current and past, i.e. the documentary evidence.

     (Americans do not realize) the extent to which partition was refused acceptance as a final settlement by the Zionists in Palestine, (nor the conviction among Zionists that) they cannot be satisfied with Palestine alone, that they must have not only all of Palestine but Trans-Jordan, parts of Syria and Lebanon, parts of Iraq and Egypt as well…” Kermit Roosevelt, Jr., CIA officer who led Operation Ajax (TPAJAX) to overthrow Iran’s elected prime minister in 1953. He was the grandson of Theodore Roosevelt. From a lecture to the US National War College in 1948.

    Comparison of practices across countries and periods presents theoretical and methodological problems. These are in part due to the aforementioned institutional constraints. For example, there are material incentives and penalties within academic as well as general research that reward or punish investigation and publication according to the degree of conformity with official, i.e. establishment opinion. A scholar who is successful at promoting established views on any subject would be rewarded with grants, promotions, publication, lecture fees and other favourable attention to his works. The reverse applies. A well-rewarded scholar serves as a model for correct scholarship and indirectly a monitor against deviance. The capacity to reward, also known as patronage, is also the ability to propagate views, defined questions and types of research product desired. It implies the capacity to suppress other views, if only by the stampede for patronage, which a generous investor triggers. This is often called “soft power” in contrast to exile, imprisonment or assassination of dissidents—hard power.

    Caroll Quigley argued forcefully (The Anglo-American Establishment From Rhodes to Cliveden, 1981) that one of the principal accomplishments of the Round Table/ Milner Group was to dominate the institutions that wrote and disseminated the history of the British Empire. From fellowships at All Souls and other Oxford colleges in their gift to ownership or control of the newspapers of record and the major publishing houses, members of what would become the Royal Institute for International Affairs (and its imperial franchises in the US — the Council on Foreign Relations — and Commonwealth), “legitimate” history could be propagated and alternative histories excluded. The revolving doors between government and academia also gave the mouthpieces of the Empire the additional credibility lent by access to decision-makers and the official record, both public and confidential. Herbert Hoover, in his capacity as head of the private-public partnership Commission for Relief in Belgium and later the US Food Administration, contributed to this effort after the Great War by confiscating untold volumes of government archives wherever he dispensed “aid” to the distressed countries after the war had ended. The Hoover Institution at Stanford received his loot by bequest thus assuring that this data remained in private hands. After World War II the occupation forces repeated the procedure by capturing the archives of the Axis wherever they went. Access to this treasure has remained subject to the control of friendly agents to this day. Hence the evidence of what conquered nations actually intended or did can be selectively disclosed in ways that are consistent with the established history. Alternative research is largely derived from either accidental discovery or inference. Such alternatives can always be attacked because they necessarily rely on interpretive methodologies at odds with the published record where no “smoking guns” are available. Moreover, the sheer volume of redundant accounts of the official history propagated by those same leading publishing houses and academic institutions effectively buries the alternative publication landscape.

    No later than with the inception of the Manhattan Project, the leading sciences were captured by the national security state. The largesse expended to produce atomic weapons and other vile instruments of death created a scholarly and scientific cartel of enviable wealth. Those who did not benefit directly by participation in death and destruction science were induced to shape their work so that it would qualify for funding at the various troughs the national security state had built. The comprehensive focus of all scholarship and scientific research on classified development projects included the imposition of an extensive security system including loyalty tests and secrecy oaths. In short, participation in funded research required membership or at least submission to the rules of the national security cult, not unlike the induction practices for the infamous NSDAP paramilitary organisations.

    Britain, as a monarchy, constitutionalism notwithstanding, retained a long tradition of regulated scholarship and research inherited from the Latin Church where the Crown assumed the authority of the Papacy and Episcopate. The extension of this system and practice to North America was a logical consequence of the Round Table project. Cecil Rhodes, and presumably his executor Lord Rothschild, was determined to modernize and thus preserve the British Empire, especially by “recovering” the United States as a member of the English-speaking commonwealth. The intention behind Winston Churchill’s propaganda, A History of English-speaking Peoples (started in 1937 and published in 1956-58 in four volumes), aside from earning money to redeem his chronic indebtedness, was to popularize the idea that America and the Empire (to be renamed more innocuously the Commonwealth) were one race destined to rule the world for the usual benefits its acolytes ascribed to it—democracy, free trade, etc. The meanwhile infamous CIA “Mockingbird” operation emerged from established British intelligence (covert action) practice.

    The ability to wage psychological warfare or promote criminal enterprise was centralized in the US very early, despite the republican and federal structure of the State, because its ruling elite had the benefit of treating the country as terra nulla, exterminating the indigenous culture and brainwashing those it selectively admitted to its shores. Despite all claims to diversity today, the “melting pot” myth was a 20th century invention by its propagandists, i.e., the advertising and public relations industry. That machine grew from the massive economic concentration that accelerated after the 1893 depression. Although the Standard Oil trust was dissolved by enforcement of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act (1890), cartels continued to be formed. Rothschild agent JP Morgan negotiated the merger that resulted in US Steel. General Electric, General Motors and American Telephone and Telegraph (AT&T) and other conglomerates gained control over the US economy. The Federal Reserve Act of 1913 gave control over the country’s fiscal and economic policy to an Anglo-American banking cartel functioning through a parastatal “system” which preserved the illusion of a de-centralized economy while consolidating the foundations for the permanent war economy that the US became. The necessity to sell the output of these massive industrial enterprises promoted warmongering and consumerism. The advertising and public relations industry became the American version of the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith.

    After the Great War, the Volstead Act (1919) that enforced the 18th Amendment that introduced prohibition also made crime ripe for national organization. Prohibition of alcoholic beverages was depicted as an anti-drug measure when in fact it was part of a variety of anti-immigrant political legislation. Wine and beer consumption was common in the social venues of Germans (socialists) and Italians (anarchists) and other politically threatening working class elements. Their meeting places could be closed and social events circumscribed on the pretext that illegal alcoholic beverages were consumed, thus disrupting unwanted political activism. “Organized crime has traditionally made its profit from providing goods and services people are not supposed to want… Prohibition was responsible for the organization of crime on a national scale and it was the genius of Al Capone to realize that the way to proceed was to organize crime on the model of national business organizations or corporations.” Thus organized crime as “counter-business” is primarily concerned with control over people. (Peckham, 1995). In fact, contrary to the Hollywood history, organized crime owes its effectiveness not to Sicilians but to the crime cartel led discretely by Meyer Lansky. It was far more dramatic and politically advantageous to put Italians in the limelight, initiating a standing tradition by which the term “Mafia” is applied almost exclusively to undesirable immigrants. At no time was there a serious decrease in alcohol consumption. However the federal and state police forces together with their counter-enforcers could protect the development of the legal and illegal drug cartels.

    This natural and incestuous relationship was instrumentalized for the establishment of the US national security apparatus. (Douglas Valentine, The Strength of the Wolf, 2004; The Strength of the Pack, 2010)  National crime meant national law enforcement and international crime meant international (extra-territorial) policing. The Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Federal Bureau of Narcotics were the precursors to what is called euphemistically today the “Intelligence Community”.

    National drug cartels needed national control over venues, points of sale as well as marketing vehicles. The wealth generated also had to be laundered. The most natural downstream extension of organized counter-business was the entertainment industry. Not only racetracks, gambling casinos where permitted, bars and houses of prostitution (with the attendant human trafficking) were used. Drug money (alcohol and narcotics profits) created the studio system in the film industry, i.e. Hollywood. The “lifestyle” of the famous and temporarily rich appearing on the silver screen was rightly criticised by the residues of Puritan America—if somewhat hypocritically—as a major source of corruption, both overt and covert. The social managers in Washington and more discrete locations recognized the magnificent power in the Hollywood cartel for instilling whatever tastes or opinions were needed among the entertained public. War Department money enriched Du Pont and other weapons manufacturers. It also filled the coffers of those who produced the thousands of films promoting war against whomever the ruling elite had designated as enemy. As Malcolm X once pointed out the American propaganda machine was able to turn Germans from friends to enemies and back to friends again in a space of time in which no effort was made to alter the perception of Blacks as inferior.

    Just as in Britain, the Anglo-American Establishment controlled most of the print media directly. The entertainment industry and the drug system were managed at arm’s length. The cartel was assisted in its international mission by discriminatory legislation that placed Hollywood product in a highly competitive advantage capable of overwhelming the film industries of all other countries. Winning the Second World War meant that with the exception of France, American movie conglomerates were able to flood the world with the “American Way of Life” as defined by the moguls of Southern California and their financial backers, both licit and illicit.

    The business corporation had evolved into the single most effective means of power projection. Its single-mindedness, reduced rhetorically to the pursuit of profit, made it efficient in regulating the “market” whether for goods, services or ideas. The legality of the business was irrelevant for the organizational form. Legality is merely a criterion for public appearances, not underlying purposes or methods.

    It has been one of the singular deficiencies of common education that attention is devoted to formal rules and government that have little to do with the actual processes of rule. Even those who study the ecclesiastical tradition of business education from the late 19th century are only taught computation. Altogether the strict compartmentalization of what counts as socially relevant knowledge prevents all but a tiny few from ever recognizing how any significant decision is made or executed. Even those who devote their energy to exposing conspiracies, real or imagined, neglect the published and advertised rules and procedures by which Business, that is to say the business corporations, trusts and similar entities are constituted and governed. They do not analyse the principal-agent conflicts that comprise an important part of business litigation. The intricacies and complexities are indeed daunting. Yet even a rudimentary grasp of the allocation of power and authority and its operation would reveal more than a thousand books on political science.

    In the US, millions of people occupy single-family dwellings, which they call their homes while they pay over their lifetimes two to three times the ostensible purchase price to a bank to redeem a mortgage bond before they die. This is called in the vernacular “home ownership”. Peter Drucker, a liberal among the Austro-fascists who came to rationalize modern economic exploitation, argued years ago that Americans were all shareholders since their deductions from their pay, essentially deferred compensation, was invested through pension funds in the nation’s economy. Hence, according to Drucker the mere voter had been elevated to the status of mass capitalist. What he did not say was that these pension funds would be held by cartels of asset managers. The most infamous of those hedge funds, better called plantation funds perhaps, are the big three, BlackRock, State Street and Vanguard. These corporations, owned and managed by a miniscule clique of financial magnates, control virtually all the economic assets of Drucker’s popular capitalists. John D Rockefeller did not control much of the world’s oil industry by prospecting for oil but by rendering it impossible to pump oil from the ground without paying him for the privilege. His Standard Oil controlled everything, directly or indirectly, before the well and after the well, upstream and downstream. This gave Standard Oil what the US Defense Department calls “full spectrum dominance”, which he shared with what were once six other “sisters”. Although as mentioned above, the trust was dissolved by court order, more than a century later the Standard Oil successors, Exxon and Mobil, are still in the top four worldwide. Most of the world’s media is owned by six corporations, National Amusements, Disney, TimeWarner, Comcast, News Corp, and Sony. Whatever one believes the purpose of “media” to be, it is not free and certainly not democratically organized.

    Whatever one believes about the nature of the “market”, “democracy” or even something as banal as consumer choice, we live in a world in which three financial entities, six media corporations and four energy companies exercise effective control over fundamental instruments of power: money, information and fuel. Needless to say they control a lot more. So when the 0.1 or more accurately the 0.01% are mentioned there is no need to be abstract. We can talk about an almost microscopic portion of the human population that decides what is good for themselves and how they get it from us. They may be what Larry Fink and his friends like to call “passive investors”. However they own the State and therefore have the capabilities at their disposal to be exceptionally active to increase the value and power of their investments—value and power that can only come at our expense.

    What we are told we know about the world (what constitutes accepted “knowledge”) and what is deemed important are matters decided under the foregoing conditions. If we do not understand the extent and depth of control we cannot imagine the full meaning of what Stuart Ewen called Captains of Consciousness (1976). He explored the invention of public relations (propaganda or public diplomacy) in his 1986 book PR! A Social History of Spin, which formed the basis of an Adam Curtis film, Century of the Self (2002). The economic concentration that began in the late 19th century continued unabated by war, war against the body, against populations and against the mind.

    Consciousness became an industrial product first by training humans to identify with the consumer goods they did not need but were expected to buy with money they did not have. Thus like the home mortgage, the individual or family invested a lifetime of earnings in constant replacement of things designed to be obsolete or worn out almost as soon as the purchase price had been paid. Thus opportunities for long-term security were compulsively squandered. Excess wages paid to workers in an expanding empire were recovered through artificially high rates of consumption. Once this kind of extraction was exhausted—or in the case of the West rendered ideologically superfluous—the individual himself was converted into a self-consuming product.

    The defeats inflicted upon the post-WWII independence movements, by primarily US wars, were also suffered by those in the industrialized West who had struggled to end historical racial oppression at home. This process was highly selective but no less brutal. The most influential leaders among Black Americans fighting to end racial discrimination and oppression were assassinated, imprisoned or driven into exile. This wave of murders occurred within a relatively short space of time at the end of the 1960s in the US and continued beyond its borders far longer, e.g. Guyana scholar and activist, Walter Rodney was murdered in 1980. Malcolm X was assassinated in 1965. Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered in 1968.

    Norman Finkelstein (The Holocaust Industry, 2000) who is possibly the first American scholar to openly criticize the American Jewish establishment and what has become the central consciousness myth in America and hence in the world of consciousness the US makes and shapes. In order to explain his position, he addresses the relationship of Jews to other groups in US society. The Holocaust is first and foremost an event portrayed as exemplary of Jewish victimhood. Hence Finkelstein asked how Jewish Americans stand as victims along with other victims in the US, in particular the “founding victims”, the African slaves who as James Baldwin said to the Cambridge Union (1965)—built America. The history books and Hollywood films portray American Jews as the allies of Black Americans in their struggle for human rights. (They do not talk about Jewish slave traders or plantation owners.) He observed (that) “the end of Jewish ‘solidarity’ in the US began in the 1960s when Blacks in the North began to challenge the class position of Jews rather than the racial status as in the South… American Jewish elites turned to the Right to defend their class interests—this coincided with increased support for the occupation and colonization of Israel.” Whitney Webb, in her One Nation under Blackmail (2022) documents the intimate personal and political links of organized crime, Jewish “philanthropy” and the espionage business that operates behind and in addition to the “Holocaust Industry”, with many of the same managers.

    Is it a coincidence that between the murder of Malcolm X in 1965 and King’s 1968 assassination lay the Six Day War in 1967? During that war Israel attacked the USS Liberty, killing 34 and wounding another 171 of the crew in an attempt to sink the vessel. Malcolm X was vilified but only executed after returning from the Hajj, when he declared that Black Americans must abandon their “victim” status and join with the rest of the world’s oppressed in facing the class war. King was not murdered after his Riverside Church sermon against the war in Vietnam but while in Memphis to support striking workers.

    If, as Finkelstein argues, organized Jewry saw reasons to support the civil rights movement in the 1950s because they comprehended them as “race” issues, was this a way of asserting the underlying Zionist argument that Jews constitute a race and also a victim race in a country where race was the most fundamental discriminatory category, e.g., the old “one drop” rule. Calling attention to Jewish race directly would have been counter-productive. However, magnifying the factor race as a trans-historical category for oppression, while ostensibly working to eliminate Blacks from the race of the oppressed could be seen as an intuitive strategy for reserving the race card as a positive political instrument. As explained above, there is no way to know how sincere or pure individual motives for supporting the civil rights movement were among American Jews. However, it is possible to observe the trajectory between 1965 and 1980 when Ronald Reagan was appointed POTUS.

    There are those who assert that the key shift in US policy toward the settler-colonial regime was the assassination of John F. Kennedy, replaced by a POTUS notoriously pro-Israel. Laurent Guyénot and others argue that Kennedy’s determination to prevent the Tel Aviv regime from acquiring atomic weapons capability was a strong incentive for Mossad intervention. Johnson turned a blind eye to the Liberty attack and Dimona.  Taken as a whole one could argue that the wave of political murders that followed Kennedy’s assassination exemplifies the alignment of the ruling elite, which had been fighting decolonization tooth and nail, with the settler-colonial state in Palestine as a vehicle for de-centring the counter-revolution. The category of race oppression would have been cultivated, only to be hijacked by elites who needed a cast for their legitimation through victimhood.

    Finkelstein shows that the great magnification of the Holocaust in American life, and hence in all the means by which it is psychologically and economically managed, coincided with the victory of the IDF in 1967. An event, which had been insignificant in mass American consciousness, along with all but the American participation in the Second World War, was rapidly transformed into something more average Americans could identify than landmarks in its own history. Like “recovered memory” Americans have been taught (as well as all those taught by American mass media) that they were culpable for crimes committed in places even US soldiers had never been during that war. At the same time the crimes actually committed by their own forefathers on American soil were barely mentioned. Thus it seems this magnification not only served the interests of the Jewish elite in concealing class conflict.

    While there is no doubt that some twenty million or more people were killed in Eastern Europe and especially the Soviet Union by the Nazi regime’s war against the Soviet Union, it strains logic and plausibility to assert that the only mass murder was committed only against European Jews. Yet the story of the Holocaust that is taught and force fed everywhere in the West with the round number of six million, conspicuously omitting the elderly and disabled, communists, socialists, Roma and Sinti, and Slavs of every description. As details recorded not only by Finkelstein but also by many other historians show, the consciousness product Holocaust begins to corrode once one examines the claims for the numbers of survivors of the war and the camps. The 1961 film, Judgement at Nuremberg, dramatizes the discrepancy when the defence argument that no other war crimes were tried except the ones committed by the NSDAP regime is belittled rather than answered. Even Justice Jackson, for the prosecution, insinuated that the trials were problematic by warning that the manner in which they were held could be applied to others. The Soviet Union had insisted that war criminals be tried against the resistance of the British and Americans. As in many cases before and since, the Soviet Union was forced to accept the limitations of the trials in order to have any trials at all. Throughout the occupation, the Western allies conspired to prevent favoured persons from being arrested, let alone charged, hiding them or aiding their escape from jurisdiction. In the Asia-Pacific theatre they effectively prevented Soviet participation in war crimes trials against Japan. In other words, even the official proceedings against those accused of seeking to annihilate all Jews were tainted by serious irregularities. Yet this thoroughly corrupted official record has been used to support the claim that Jews were the paramount victims of World War II.

    Though too many people were worked to death, murdered individually and through mass actions by so-called Einsatzkommandos of the regular and Waffen-SS in Eastern Europe. The rescue of whole Waffen-SS divisions from war crimes prosecutions, e.g. the Waffen-SS Division Galizia composed of Ukrainians, further demonstrates the insincerity of the Western Allies in their condemnations. The story, the foundational myth of unique Jewish victimhood, is so riddled with inconsistencies and corruption that its integrity ought to be questioned by any serious historian—not to mention all those in the world who had nothing to do with World War II. Is it possible that the reason is the same as that for the peculiar change in the policy/ attitude of organized Jewish elites with regard to race in the US (and elsewhere)? Could it be that when the US regime defended its leniency and clemency for whole divisions, without even the pretence of criminal investigation in the interest of opposing alleged Soviet communist expansionism, it was expressing the crucial priority of class over any other interest?

    Suárez, Finkelstein, and Brenner (Zionism in the Age of Dictators, 1983 and 51 Documents: Zionist Collaboration with the Nazis, 2002) supply evidence from the Zionist leadership from the very beginning of the movement’s ascendancy to support such a hypothesis. When today’s regime in Kiev, supported by Zionists too, not only disregards the war crimes committed by Ukrainian Waffen-SS units, but has integrated military and paramilitary formations whose insignia are the same as those notorious divisions, e.g. SS-Leibstandart Adolf Hitler and Waffen-SS division Das Reich (the Azov Battalion) in its regular army in the continued war against Russia, it is hard to ignore the true war aims of the West—then and now. It was the foremost objective of Paul Hausser, one of the last commanders of these Waffen-SS forces (Das Reich, II SS Panzer Corps) after 1945 until his death to rehabilitate the Waffen-SS (which had been declared a criminal organization per se) as a brave, multi-national force defending European values, just like any other Western army. From the high official pronouncements throughout the EU, the Ukrainian Armed Forces with its Waffen-SS legacy fights Russia for everything the West holds dear. Just as do the armed forces of the settler-colonial state in occupied Palestine. Ukraine is a victim, as are those who invaded Palestine and declared their conquest to be the Jewish state of Israel in 1948.

    The campaigns waged to generate the “victims’ immunity” claimed by these regimes are atrocious. They both rely on a patent of racial superiority but unlike that of classical “white supremacy”, this racial superiority is based on alleged victimhood. They are not superior because of their virtue. Instead their superiority derives from the blanket assertion that all others are perpetrators, latent or active, against whom any measure can be justified as pre-emptive and therefore defensive. Every high official must and does use all the power at his or her disposal to defend the aggression by these self-identified victims.

    Self-identification has become a primary instrument of psychological manipulation and warfare. The self-identified not only asserts a whim or personal predilection. He also demands that he is the sole judge of what evidence may be used to support or refute his claims. As a strategy however it must have a mass component. One person alone cannot maintain self-identification against a crowd or against a group with a genuinely recognizable set of features that can be generally classified. Therefore, it is necessary to spread the dogma of self-identification. This is a corollary to the conversion of the individual consumer into a consumed individual, the emergent consciousness strategy of what for want of a better term can be called finance capitalism. That finance capitalism it has been argued above is the contemporary formation of the ruling class, the 0.01%.

    If we are experiencing the climax of a massive reaction in the West, one that has intensified since the French Revolution, then the process by which the latest manifestation of feudal empire, presents us with a kind of global feudalism. The doctrines promulgated for this restoration are studied and preached from such altitudes as the Swiss Alps. However, we can understand them better if we examine the history of the West’s paramount merger of power and consciousness, the Latin Church.

    Before the Holocaust, the spectre of anti-Semitism (a misnomer if one is talking about European Jews) was first raised by the Latin Church. It is the Latin Church that created the legal and ecclesiastical regime by which Jews in Europe were subjected to special laws of all sorts. Practically speaking however the most intense application of these laws and the persecution they entailed coincided with the wars of Aragon (Spain) to conquer then entire Iberian peninsula and Christianize it. That meant expelling Muslims and Jews who together inhabited the southern half of the peninsula. These wars were called the “Reconquista” so as to imply that Christian Aragon was recovering for the Faith what had been lost to the infidels. Missing from that story is the fact that North Africa — from Egypt to Morocco and Iberia had indeed been “Christian” to the extent that the great landowners who ruled the region self-identified as Christians. It was the systematic oppression of the masses in these “Christian” territories that led them to join the armies of Islam to drive this Christian elite out of the country and restore decent living conditions for them. Islam was an organized force for liberation that would scarcely have taken root had the region’s Christians been civilized people with a sense of justice and equity. When Augustine of Hippo (in North Africa) went to Rome it was as a leader of a putsch driven by this Christian landowning class. Rome was established as the capital of a schismatic church, one that fundamentally contradicted the ecclesiastical plurality that had been characteristic of Christianity with its several centres, e.g. in Antioch and Constantinople. Augustine’s Roman Catholicism claimed to be the sole centre of Christianity. Moreover, it usurped the de-centralized episcopate and installed an absolutist monarchy. The papacy with its cardinalate rejected the Greek elements of Christianity and adopted a form of government that more closely resembled the Talmudic rabbinate. It was therefore hardly surprising that the Pentateuch would be merged with the New Testament and that later the idea of “Judeo-Christian” culture would emerge. If one examines closely the economic policies and political enforcement measures that evolved as pontifical power grew, the papal persecution of Christians who maintained belief in the real poverty preached by Jesus in the New Testament since this was entirely at odds with the class that had established the Latin rite. It was entirely at odds with the beliefs of the great landowners that Islam had driven from North Africa and Iberia. (Islam once extended all the way to the southern provinces of France.) Just as Christianity had grown out of opposition to the Jewish elite’s abuse of the masses, Islam gained its foothold in the most Christian part of the world because the Christian elite so viciously oppressed the common people (Deschner, Die Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums). The Roman support for Aragon was not for the restoration of Christianity of the common man. Those Christians continued to live along with Muslims and ordinary Jews throughout the two caliphates. The House of Aragon was fighting holy class war as the Latin Church has from its inception. The peoples who have traditionally inhabited North Africa were mainly nomadic except in those areas like the Nile Valley where intensive agriculture was established or in the cities from which crafts and trade were practiced. To call a group of people a diaspora—in some elevated, sacrificial form—is another incomplete depiction of population movements in the African continent. Christians and Muslims practicing their religion in other parts of the world are not considered a diaspora, although both religions originate in the same place as the religion of Jews. The myth of the Reconquista and the suppression of Judaism in Spain are facets of political expansion and territorial conquest, not serial universal anti-Semitism. The myth of the unique diaspora is ahistorical since it actually negates any other genuinely diasporic population, e.g., Africans transported throughout the world by slave traders.

    Henry Lea, in his multi-volume studies of the Inquisition, made it very clear that the driving force behind the Holy and Universal Inquisition was economic enrichment and not matters of faith or heresy. Alexander Herculano, in his history of the Inquisition in Portugal, supplies ample evidence that the question of whether one was considered a “Jew” in the meaning of the act depended on how much one was able and willing to pay to the Portuguese crown or the Roman pontiff for protection. Certainly poor people were persecuted too. However, exile of Jews or heretics also provided the Portuguese crown with bonded labour for its colonial enterprises while selectively manipulating the domestic labour market, as well as for political ends. The historical monochrome by which the history of Europe is reduced to the persecution of Jews, creating an original sin for all Christians for which they must atone, is a serious distortion of a far more complex fabric of class conflict and struggles for power among the ruling elite.

    This supposed blind and irrational persecution of Jews in Europe—there is no evidence to prove it occurred anywhere else—cannot be sustained once the political-economic conditions are seriously examined. What can be said is that ecclesiastical operations and canon law were applied in the same way that anti-communist legislation and repression have been applied—and for the same reasons. At the same time, the realities of political-economic confrontation between merchants, landowners, clergy and military require a sober appraisal of the intra-class conflicts waged just as perniciously and dishonestly then as today. During the US war against Vietnam, the unwritten rule was “if you do not do what you are told (by the Saigon government or any of its officers and beneficiaries), then you are VC (a communist). If you were declared VC, you were an outlaw. (Valentine, The Phoenix Program, 1990) So if someone unaware of this or disregarding this were to examine the National Police records of the era they would no doubt find innumerable “communists”, with no way of knowing if those in the files were communists in fact. Communists have not been able to attain universal victim status, even though the Nazis killed communists before they even thought of killing Jews.

    Yet we still have to consider the question: how did this universal Jewish victimhood become established as a dogma in the West? Naturally it is helpful to consider who is served by it. Clearly it is not only Jews who profit from this status. It has been a source of unending contention whether the benefits that accrue to the settler-colonial state are primary or incidental to the institution of Jewish victimhood. I would argue that Jewish victimhood is not even primarily a benefit enjoyed by the regime in Tel Aviv. Finkelstein has shown how it benefits the organized Jewish elite as a running extortion racket. However, as I have tried to show above, that extortion racket is just one operation in a web of activity driven by the 0.01%, those nameable and unnamed who presently own and operate the world’s drug, weapons, money-laundering, and primary resource cartels. However, more than that the concept of Jewish victimhood stands really for class victimhood. The ruling class itself, from the moment it adopted the Latin rite, has endeavoured to present itself as the victims for whom salvation is intended. Jesus did not die to save the poor. He died to save the rich. That is the literal reading of the Passion and it is the only one that makes sense. Given that the Vulgate is largely a forgery over the ages, it is no wonder that the central document upon which Christianity is supposedly based was prohibited to the masses of the faithful upon pain of death until the Reformation. (Another interpretation of the Reformation is beyond the scope of this discussion.) The Roman Church has devoted centuries of effort proving that poverty and damnation are the wages of sin and that the poor deserve their lot. Every attempt, including the last major effort in Latin American liberation theology, to change this dogma and practice has been viciously suppressed by the hierarchy. The first pontiff to retire rather than die in office (Joseph Ratzinger, a child of the Hitler Youth and the close cooperation between the Vatican and the NSDAP) was the leader of that most recent wave of purges.

    The portion of the world’s population with the most relative wealth to plunder is still concentrated in North America and Western Europe. They have long ceased to pay their tithes or even go to mass or prayers. The Latin Church and its semi-autonomous Protestant sisters are sustained mainly by the unaccounted wealth accumulated in the past or state subsidies. Although the current pontiff still enjoys the professional media attention and due respect among the faithful in all the poor and populous nations, there is no growth potential where there is still cash to be had. The short-lived Soviet Union and with it the Red threat also lost its salvific attraction. Only the professional killers and sadists were willing to drive through desert sands in search of Muslims for the sake of their souls. A return to the 11th century requires the kind of crusades that enriched the Church then. Quo vadis?

    The ruling elite has always been cutthroat and vicious. A major function of their charity is to pay for a better image or assuage opposition when it is impossible or inopportune to exterminate it. So we are constantly served performances that suggest that either there is no ruling elite with shared interests and purposes or that that elite is incapable of overcoming its internal conflicts, thus depriving it of the vast plenitude of power needed to rule us. In fact, the ruling elite constitutes a critical mass of individuals who are born and die but who also reproduce. They reproduce organically like other mammals. However, they also create structures capable of cultivating future members and preserving the class cohesion needed to dominate the rest of us who have no class cohesion, despite regular efforts to instil it. While tyrannicide has its obvious attractions, the hydra-like character of class power means that no sooner is a Rockefeller, Gates or Soros gone, either naturally or assisted, someone else grows into his place. Like the birth and death cycle to which we are all subject, the struggle to deal with the ruling class never ends. There is no salvific moment in which the heavens open to deliver a shower of love, happiness and justice. What class cohesion offers the members of the ruling class are simplifications. With few exceptions if they have to choose between us or one of their own, we will lose. And yet they are also biological individuals whose personal tastes and styles need to be satisfied. The stronger eat the weaker in their homes too.

    That means there are different goals for different members of the ruling class. They harmonize to the extent that class interests prevail. However, the impact of their actions is rarely uniform. The problem is generally solved by betting on both sides of any risk. Thus, the hedge fund is the most natural form for the retrograde process of neo-feudalism. When someone like Klaus Schwab repeats the dogma, “you will own nothing and be happy”, he is as ambiguous as a true oracle can be. The hedge fund “owns” nothing and therefore has no risks of loss, but controls all the essential cash flow and therefore can be happy. The rest of us own nothing because all forms of material title are to be converted to various types of lease or rental agreements where possession is merely a transitional status but payment a permanent obligation. Feudalism in the 11th century was not a popularly chosen societal form. It was the sanctification of theft and extortion, which the Roman pontiff tried to monopolize. It was sustained by the active policing of the feudal gangs led by barons and princes. It was justified by the ideological propaganda operations of the clergy in the Latin Church. Sometimes the priest/ missionary came first and then the armed brigands, sometimes the brigands came first. In the end the indigenous culture was absorbed or destroyed and the people subjugated. Taking their land and whatever religions they may have had were both necessary if the theft was to remain permanent.

    Since the defeat of the Soviet Union, after the decolonization process had been stopped dead in its tracks, the crusade to steal back everything that had been accumulated by ordinary people over the past two centuries began in earnest. There is no longer a cohesive ecclesiastical instrument and sufficient blind faith in traditional modes of belief. Ironically the traditional modes of belief have become a threat to those charged with organizing the restoration. Whether in the Orthodox Church or the conservative Latin congregations, the ruling class finds resistance built around preservation of family and old-fashioned morality. It is no wonder then that these traditional religious communities are under attack from the armed propaganda gangs of Wokism and transhumanism. These ideologies were developed from what could be called cultural reverse engineering.

    When the real social movements were decapitated, they were only partially destroyed. Instead, academically trained cadres were promoted to replace the dead or neutralized activists. They brought with them synthetic ideologies that were made by a kind of recombinant intellectual process, like gene editing. The basic liberation language was dismantled and the dangerous parts replaced with narcissistic code. Self-identification became an individual choice not the recognition of one’s consciousness in a community of real human beings sharing the same material and spiritual conditions. The identity itself becomes the consumable product. In order for this identity to be fully commodified it also had to “perform” like a commodity, i.e. subject to unlimited power of the market. Previously the dissatisfaction or fear induced by the propaganda apparatus was to be satisfied through purchase and consumption of goods and services. Since the body itself—the consumer—is that which is to be consumed a contradiction arises. This contradiction has to be expressed in some material threat or fear. Thus, Wokism achieves its insidious purpose by turning the “woke” person into an individual victim. The model for this chimeric victimhood is the universal Jewish victimhood fuelled by the Holocaust story machine. The total victim is threatened and persecuted by everything and by everyone who does not actively nurture the narcissism upon which this permanent immanent victimhood is based. That is the meaning of all this rhetoric about “safe environments”, “affirming care” and the hysterical chanting of whatever political slogans have been conceived to fuel the internal threat machine. One wears senseless face masks, accepts toxic injections, applauds the injuries to female athletes by male pugilists in skirts, and cheers institutional child abuse and medical mutilation as “affirming care”, while engaged in constant panic reactions to the latest bogus CO2 or pandemic scare. The woke person has established the right to be protected from unpleasant or dissenting utterances or experiences, especially if they could erode the carefully engineered edifice of narcissism. Liberty has been replaced by libertinism. Unwittingly – for most—they are adopting the archaic entertainments of the ruling class, offered as a sensuous reward for all the material well being they will surrender as a result of toxic substances or poisonous propaganda. The traditionalists are attacked for rejecting those poisons and because they support everything these new narcissists have been taught to despise. The woke are constantly threatened by the traditionalists who deprive them of their “safe environment”. On the other hand this gives them another opportunity to exercise victimhood.

    By now the social management strategy ought to be clear. Whereas the medieval crusades offered the poor salvation if they would take the cross and die to conquer the Holy Land, the Woke faith is based on salvation offered to those who take the cross and crucify themselves, surrendering everything to those who not only have taken the Holy Land but are taking everyone else’s land too.

    In order to place the present conflict, most visible in the radical expansion of the mass murder perpetrated by the settler-colonial regime in Palestine as I write, in cultural historical context, I have argued that it is entirely legitimate to deduce the aims of an action, like a war, from the consequences of that action. In fact, such a studied conclusion is the only type of assessment we can ever make since the past is irretrievable. The character of any conclusion is inseparable from the kind of questions that are asked and the actions contemplated depending on the response to those questions. There is a significant relationship between the organized, sustained mass murder by the Tel Aviv regime and wider social-political-economic aims. Naturally there are inconsistencies and deficits in the information, which, were, they resolved, might permit more precise prediction of what can be found in the near or long-term future.  Yet there is a preponderance of consistency between the war waged in Palestine and the aims of those supporting the war in Ukraine against Russia. This consistency can be found on the one hand by examining the facts. On the other hand it can be found by recognising the “overlapping directorates” at work.

    Were the war waged to create Greater Israel the project of a fanatical sect in Tel Aviv, it would be apparent that such mild measures as removing the offending persons to another place, dead or alive, might suffice at least to diffuse the situation. But there is more at stake. Even though Arthur Koestler, who was no enemy of the settler-colonial regime, has been challenged on many points, his The Thirteenth Tribe (1976), draws conclusions from the historical conversion of the Khazars (a people who inhabited the much of the area of today’s Eastern Ukraine) to Judaism. The Soviet era, Russian historian, geographer and ethnologist, Lev Gumilev called it “chimeric”.  By that he meant that a parasitical relationship. He argued that a fanatical Jewish sect, the Radhanites, essentially infiltrated the Khazar ruling class and converted them by decree to Rabbinical Judaism. This turned Khazaria into a “merchant octopus” which extended its commercial power both to the East and West. The power they enjoyed straddled the East-West land routes of international trade at the time. This empire collapsed in 965 after wars with Kieven Rus. If there was any diaspora it was not dispersal from the grounds of a mythical Solomon’s temple but the real dispersal of an empire in Central Eurasia (Guyénot, 2022, From Yahweh to Zion, 2018).

    When Benjamin Netanyahu told the UN General Assembly that his regime was going to join with its partners to create some channel parallel to China’s new Silk Road and BRI, for which Iran had to be neutralized, could he have meant a restoration of the Khazar Empire and not just the expansion of the settler-colonial regime to the territories Kermit Roosevelt identified as the regime’s ambitions in 1948? In A Jewish State (1904), Theodor Herzl emphasized that Zionism aimed to create what in essence was a commercial empire not unlike Rhodes British South Africa Company (originally seeking to conquer from the Cape to Cairo), religion was the pretext but not the aim. (In fact, contrary to mass media depictions, the pious Jew has traditionally been viewed as a threat to the Zionist colonial project.) Could the man in Kiev who said once that he saw the Tel Aviv regime as a model for Ukraine have been uttering a vision intuitively or instructively underlying the verbosity between bomb explosions in occupied Palestine? Did he mean that Russians in the Donbass were “his Palestinians”? Tel Aviv officials were once routinely cited as telling Americans that the Palestinians are “our Indian problem”.

    If we imagine that the war aims are not those declared but quite different ones, then a cultural historical examination might offer another comprehensive interpretation. Namely, the class of people who really own important stuff, like the mass media, the oil channels, the money supply, are closely connected in every way. In a world that has seen the return of manufacturing and much of the world’s productive economy return to Asia, while the West has been de-industrialized and its population reduced to varying degrees of indebtedness and penury, why would not those owners, the great captains of finance capital, see their future power as the foot on the hoses that China and Russia would want between their productive economies and those countries where there is a demand for that output? Wouldn’t it be practical to be the troll at the bridge charging everyone to go across? Isn’t this kind of business something for specialists, like the one banks control? It should not be forgotten that while the outcome of the war with Russia remains uncertain, for many in the West forced to take one of the COVID injections it is their personal future that is uncertain.

    Whether this mass murder eliminates enough or all of the Palestinians the Tel Aviv regime has been trying to destroy for the past century, the flow of refugees of all sorts from this region has been uninterrupted since the US launched its first assault on Iraq in 1991. The secret recruitment of mercenary terrorists under cover of religious radicalism has also continued unchecked since Zbigniew Brzezinski conceived the terrorist war in Afghanistan at the end of the 1970s.  Thus, the IMO will be assured of a continuous flow of displaced persons. These displaced persons are the true “human shields” behind which organized crime and state terrorism are waged. The war against Russia or China, just as Orwell’s 1984 described is first and foremost a war against the civilian populations of the world. These they will transfer to wherever labour is needed at the expense of the indigenous populations where these refugees are injected. As the indigenous of the Ukraine, Middle East and other attractive zones for exploitation are evacuated or eliminated, the underlying land and resources are confiscated by those who have been funding the wars and the migration in the first place. As I have argued elsewhere, global cash flow is to be matched by globally managed human trafficking. These are realities. This business is being conducted in just this manner. Does it mean that the intent of the actions is to create this system of extraction flows? That is the wrong question. We cannot change intent. What we can change is action and the kinds of consequences agreed by the righteous to be inimical to the welfare of real human beings. It helps if we have a grasp of the enormous cultural historical context in which the assessments must be made and courses of response found.

    The same organized criminality that formed the financial and managerial base of the world’s biggest propaganda industry shares power with those who build the weapons of mass depopulation, i.e., the guns and pharmaceuticals sectors. Needless to say interlocking directorates and socialization through exclusive institutions from birth until bodily demise instill the shared values that lead Schwab to preach without the least embarrassment that the World (as property of the elite for whom he speaks) is threatened by the rest of us. When the prelates of the World Economic Forum preach that the “Planet” must be saved, what they really mean is that their world is a victim of popular persecution. By calling this feigned victimhood the threat to the Planet, the mass of ordinary inhabitants is implicated, in fact, vociferously accused, of destroying their world. Their answer to this threat is to destroy us. However, it is more efficient if we can be persuaded to destroy ourselves. So we are commanded to self-identify as threats to “the Planet”. Those who see the Planet as their property also take George Carlin seriously. “The Planet is not going anywhere, we are…” The Zionist war against Palestinians is the ostentatious crucifixion that exemplifies unambiguously the depth of viciousness with which the universal victims represented on Swiss ski slopes and spas wage class war. The evil of communism was used to deny genuine independence and self-government to millions in Africa, East Asia and Latin America. Now the evil of carbon dioxide, a gas essential for human life as well as plant life on Earth as a pretext for continuing to deny and obstruct human development in all those same countries. Their populations are excessive and can only be supplied with energy and food at the expense of “the Planet”—i.e. those victims represented by the annual councils in Davos (and the less publicized or secret meetings). Morse Peckham wrote, “Man does not live by bread alone, but mainly by platitudes.” Victimhood is a part of the rhetoric of power. It has to be repeated in every conceivable form as a means of controlling the range of mass behaviour. The ideology of victimhood does not veil the terrorism and mass murder in Palestine perpetrated by the Tel Aviv regime. Instead it sanctifies it, converts it into a holy sacrifice. It is the logical extension of the pectoral cross worn by the Roman pontiff and other prelates who preached the original crusades against the inhabitants of the critical interface between the centre of the world economy and population and the real victims of Western tyranny in Africa.

    The Portuguese and Spanish were the first of the barbarian kingdoms that went to sea to circumvent the bottleneck of the Middle East and the land routes linking a sparsely populated peninsula of the Eurasian continent, impoverished and oppressed by its feudal lords, temporal and spiritual. The recovery of China and the core of human population have meant that the seas are no longer the only channels of communications among the peoples of the world. Captain Mahan’s (The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1890) doctrine is now seriously challenged by the BRI, which could easily link China to Africa as it once was before the Portuguese pirate fleets disrupted the Indian Ocean trade five centuries ago (Gunder Frank, ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age, 1998). This strategic transformation cannot be blocked by direct confrontation; only by annihilation (atomic war) or perpetual war waged by the masters of espionage, covert action, and psychological warfare, in the service of the oligarchic cult of finance capital in the West and their vassals throughout the world. Armed propaganda is the tradition of the Church militant and its descendants in London, Brussels, and New York. The success of the COVID campaign in paralysing the world’s commerce demonstrates the power still held by that 0.01%. This war has only really begun.

    The post Economical Explanations: Reflection on the Aims of Past Wars and Wars to Come first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • In late August, a Taiwanese YouTuber named Chang Shao-qun, who goes by “Han Guo Ren”, with more than half a million followers posted a video on YouTube of his tour of a large bazaar in Xinjiang’s capital of Urumqi, accompanied by two other Taiwanese online celebrities. 

    At around the video’s five-minute mark, Chang abruptly asks one of his guests: “First time in the bazaar? See any ‘extermination’ going on?” 

    Chang’s remark was a sarcastic reference to concerns of some Western governments and international organizations about genocide in Xinjiang, home to many members of the Uyghur Muslim community and other ethnic minorities. 

    The Chinese government has been accused of ethnic genocide there, involving mass detentions, forced labor, and cultural suppression. Beijing denies the accusations, framing its actions as counter-terrorism efforts.

    Chang is not alone in promoting the message that Xinjiang is a safe place to travel with no abuses to be seen.

    AFCL found several other Taiwanese YouTubers who made trips to Xinjiang to promote a message that Xinjiang was a safe place to travel or there were “no concentration camps” there because they didn’t see them.

    2 (17).png
    Several Taiwanese YouTubers posted videos walking through Xinjiang. (Graphic/AFCL)

    Who paid for their trips?

    Some of the videos posted by Taiwanese YouTubers sparked online debate among Chinese-speaking users, with many questioning whether the content creators were paid by the Chinese government. Some accused the creators of being a mouthpiece for the state, while others defended the content as independent and genuine.

    In one of the videos, a young man mentioned spending about 66,000 Taiwanese dollars (US$2,094) to join a tour of Xinjiang, but AFCL has not been able to independently verify whether the YouTubers’ trips were self-funded or sponsored by the Chinese government. 

    As of press time, none of the YouTubers had responded to inquiries on  their trips.

    However, AFCL found that the Chinese government has used the  comments and content from those Taiwanese YouTubers to promote its political narratives about Xinjiang and Taiwan on social media and in reports published by state media, as seen here.

    5 (3).png
    Both Taiwanese and Chinese media outlets posted coverage supporting the YouTubers’ comments  (Screenshots/CTI YouTube and China Daily’s official X account)

    “Although the [video’s] production is rough and its logic weak, it still gives an air of ‘authenticity’ that attracts many young viewers,” said Su Chiao-ning, an associate professor of journalism at Oakland University, after watching one of the videos. 

    “The videos give the impression that Chinese policies in Xinjiang are doing great,” Su told AFCL, adding that this is meant to make Taiwanese less wary of China, in line with Beijing’s goal of unifying Taiwan with mainland China.

    The overarching goal of Chinese propaganda is to uphold the legitimacy of the Chinese Communist Party in the face of international criticism, Su said. 

    Narratives about Xinjiang in particular were aimed at portraying it in a positive light to deflect international criticism and accusations of rights abuses, she said.

    China has been accused of cultivating foreign influencers who promote the Communist Party line and counter global narratives.

    A Canberra-based think tank Australian Strategic Policy Institute said China had “cultivated” a large pool of foreign influencers and content creators who push the Chinese government’s online propaganda and sell the China dream.

    Beijing has set up multilingual influencer incubator studios, tapped into a  network of international students at Chinese universities, and created competitions among ambitious creators to push the pro- party-state’s narrative and combat global perception of China, the think tank added. 

    No concentration camps?

    A claim made by one of the YouTubers that there are no concentration camps in Xinjiang because he or she didn’t see them is misleading. 

    Evidence and testimonials strongly suggest the existence of concentration camps in Xinjiang, where Uyghur Muslims and other ethnic minorities are detained. 

    Former detainees have reported being subjected to forced labor, indoctrination, and severe human rights abuses, including torture. 

    Satellite imagery, leaked government documents, and investigative reports have also provided further proof of these camps, which Beijing describes as “vocational training centers” but are widely seen as part of a broader campaign to suppress and control the Uyghur population.

    ‘Safe’ for travel?

    The claim that Xinjiang is a safe place to travel is also misleading, at least for Taiwanese people. 

    Taiwan raised its travel alert for China, Hong Kong and Macau to the second-highest orange alert in June, advising its citizens to avoid unnecessary travel to those regions due to increasing safety concerns. 

    This came after a set of newly issued guidelines by China, which allows individuals advocating for Taiwanese independence to be sentenced to life imprisonment or even death.

    Taiwan maintains that it is a sovereign state with its own government and democratic system, though it stops short of formally declaring independence to avoid escalating tensions with China, which views Taiwan as a renegade province that should be reunited with the mainland, by force if necessary. 

    Figures compiled by the Taiwan Association for Human Rights and several other non-government groups showed that 857 Taiwan nationals have been “forcibly disappeared or arbitrarily arrested” in China over the past 10 years. 

    3 (8).png
    Screenshot from one of the vloggers’ trips to Urumqi. (Screenshot/YouTube)

    Uygher language 

    One Taiwanese YouTuber claimed that there was no suppression of the Uyghur language in Xinjiang, citing the fact that the names of Urumqi metro stations were written in both Chinese and Uyghur.

    Chinese law stipulates that signs at public facilities in autonomous regions across China such as Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia must be written in both Chinese and the local minority language. 

    However, it is flawed reasoning to use this as evidence that the Chinese government is not suppressing the Uyghur language, as there have been clear signs that such suppression is taking place. For instance, in 2017, Radio Free Asia reported that Xinjiang’s Department of Education instructed schools across the region to stop using supplementary teaching materials in Uyghur and Kazakh.

    Mosques

    Some YouTubers claimed to have seen many mosques near the Urumqi metro, using this as evidence to argue that there had been no destruction of religious sites in the region.

    However, they failed to provide enough evidence, such as visual evidence, to back their claim. 

    Multiple media reports have highlighted the Chinese Communist Party’s crackdown on Islam, including a 2023 Financial Times investigation that revealed more than 1,700 mosques had been torn down or “sinicized” between 2018 and 2023. This process involved modifying visible Islamic elements and replacing them with Chinese-style architecture.

    These actions align with an RFA report indicating that, during his second visit to Xinjiang in August 2023, Chinese President Xi Jinping instructed officials to “promote the Sinicization of Islam” and “effectively control various illegal religious activities.”

    Translated by Shen Ke. Edited by Shen Ke and Taejun Kang.

    Asia Fact Check Lab (AFCL) was established to counter disinformation in today’s complex media environment. We publish fact-checks, media-watches and in-depth reports that aim to sharpen and deepen our readers’ understanding of current affairs and public issues. If you like our content, you can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram and X.

    This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Rita Cheng for Asia Fact Check Lab.

  • Justin Trudeau justified the brutal killing of the leader of a Lebanese political party on the grounds Canada lists his organization as “terrorist”.

    On Friday Israel leveled six large apartment buildings in the Dahiyeh suburb of Beirut with some 80 bombs weighing 2,000 to 4,000 pounds each. Dropped by US-made F-15 fighter jets, the US-made BLU-109 “bunker-busters” incinerated an unknown number.

    In response to this act of state terror Trudeau posted, “Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, has been killed. He was the leader of a terrorist organization that attacked and killed innocent civilians, causing immense suffering across the region.”

    When Israel’s terror campaign in Lebanon started in earnest ten days ago former ambassador to Norway and Communications Security Establishment Director General, Intelligence Operations Artur Wilczynski justified terrorizing Lebanese on the grounds of targeting “a terror group.” After Israel injured thousands by blowing up 3,000 pagers across Lebanon the University of Ottawa’s Special Advisor on Antisemitism posted that the “targeting of Hezbollah operatives was brilliant. t struck a major blow against a terror group.”

    But Hezbollah isn’t classified as a “terrorist” organization by the United Nations or most countries in the world. Nor was an organization that’s long been represented in Lebanon’s parliament defined as a “terrorist” organization by Ottawa for the first half of its existence. In fact, Prime Minister Jean Chretien met Hezbollah Secretary-General Nasrallah in Beirut in October 2002.

    In “Selectively Terrified” Mary Foster detailed “how Hezbollah became a terrorist organization in Canada”. Foster wrote that “pressure to list Hezbollah came from the Canadian Alliance Party (a precursor to today’s Conservative Party), senior Liberal politicians Irwin Cotler and Art Eggleton, B’nai Brith (a Jewish human rights organization, staunchly pro-Israel in orientation), and the Canadian Jewish Congress.” The campaign was greatly boosted by fabricated quotes in the National Post claiming Nasrallah encouraged suicide bombing during a speech at a Beirut rally.

    If Hezbollah is a terrorist organization what is the Israeli military or government? Maybe the IOF and Netanyahu’s Likud party could be the first entries on a new Canadian genocidaires list!

    Israel supporters have long argued that that country has the right to terrorize Palestinians because Ottawa (usually at the lobby’s behest) listed some organization with limited means a “terrorist” group. Before Hamas’ October 7 attack Canada’s apartheid lobby argued Israel could terrorize 2.2 million Palestinians living in the open-air Gaza prison because Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad is listed a terrorist group in Canada.

    Over 10 percent of Canada’s terrorist list is made up of organizations headquartered in a long-occupied land representing one-tenth of one percent of the world’s population. Representing much of Palestinian political life, eight of the oppressed nation’s organizations are listed, ranging from the left secular Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine to the elected Hamas ‘government’ in Gaza.

    A dozen years after the terror list was established the first ever Canadian-based group was added. In 2014 the International Relief Fund for the Afflicted and Needy (IRFAN) was designated a terrorist organization for engaging in the ghastly act of supporting orphans and a hospital in the Gaza Strip through official (Hamas-controlled) channels.

    In recent months the genocide lobby has pushed to add the anti-imperialist group Samidoun to Canada’s terror enabling list. After its international branch “expressed our deepest mourning and our highest salutes” to Nasrallah upon his assassination, Holocaust Housefather opined that “Samidoun needs to be listed as a terrorist organization in Canada and around the world.” Liberal MP and Special Advisor on Jewish Community Relations and Antisemitism, Anthony Housefather added, “it is one of my priorities to get this done and by expressing how much they loved a terrorist leader who caused civilian deaths in Israel and around the world they are proving my point.”

    While Palestinian groups are criminalized, Canada has close ties to the main generator of terror and killing of civilians in historic Palestine. Current Israeli government officials openly boast about their terror as necessary to teach Palestinians a lesson. Yet Canada has been selling weapons to the Israeli military and the two countries’ armed forces work together on various fronts. Additionally, Canadian officials turn a blind eye to illegal recruitment for the IOF while the Canada Revenue Agency takes a soft approach to registered charities that defy its rules by financially assisting the Israeli military.

    Measured by the number maimed or killed, the Israeli army is responsible for far more violence than any Palestinian or Lebanese group (and they are doing so on behalf of a European colonial project). Yet the Israeli military is not a listed terrorist organization.

    Canada’s terrorist list highlights the stark double standard in Ottawa’s treatment of the colonized and colonizer. In fact, events over the past year clearly illustrate how this list enables Israel to terrorize Palestinians and Lebanese. Once again, shame on us.

    The post Time to Face Truth: Canada’s Terrorist List Enables Terrorism first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.