Category: Propaganda

  • In the midst of extensive coverage of the war in Gaza, there are questions that the U.S. mass media should address:

    1. How did Hamas, with tiny Gaza surrounded by a 17-year Israeli blockade, subjected to unparalleled electronic surveillance, with spies and informants, and augmented by an overwhelming air, sea and land military presence, manage to get these weapons and associated technology for their October 7 surprise raid?

    2. What is the connection between the stunning failure of the Israeli government to protect its people on the border and the policy of P.M. Netanyahu? Recall the New York Times (October 22, 2023) article by prominent journalist, Roger Cohen, to wit: “All means were good to undo the notion of Palestinian statehood. In 2019, Mr. Netanyahu told a meeting of his center-right Likud party: ‘Those who want to thwart the possibility of a Palestinian state should support the strengthening of Hamas and the transfer of money to Hamas. This is part of our strategy.’” (Note: Israel and the U.S. fostered the rise of Islamic Hamas in 1987 to counter the secular Palestine Liberation Organization [PLO]).

    3. Why is Congress preparing to appropriate over $14 billion to Israel in military and other aid without any public hearings and without any demonstrated fiscal need by Israel, a prosperous economic, technological and military superpower with a social safety net superior to that of the U.S.? USDA just reported over 44 million Americans struggled with hunger in 2022. This, in the midst of a childcare crisis. Should U.S. taxpayers be expected to pay for Netanyahu’s colossal intelligence/military collapse?

    4. Why hasn’t the media reported on President Biden’s statement that the Gaza Health Ministry’s body count (now over 7000 fatalities) is exaggerated? All indications, however, are that it is a large undercount by Hamas to minimize its inability to protect its people. Israel has fired over 8,000 powerful precision munitions and bombs so far. These have struck many thousands of inhabited buildings – homes, apartments buildings, over 120 health facilities, ambulances, crowded markets, fleeing refugees, schools, water and sewage systems, and electric networks – implementing Israeli military orders to cut off all food, water, fuel, medicine and electricity to this already impoverished densely packed area the size of Philadelphia. For those not directly slain, the deadly harm caused by no food, water, medicine, medical facilities and fuel will lead to even more deaths and serious injuries.

    Note that over three-quarters of Gaza’s population consists of children and women. Soon there will be thousands of babies born to die in the rubble. Other Palestinians will perish from untreated diseases, injuries, dehydration, and from drinking contaminated water. With crumbled sanitation facilities, physicians are fearing a deadly cholera epidemic.

    Israel bombed the Rafah crossing on the Gaza-Egypt border. Only a tiny trickle of trucks are now allowed there by Israel to carry food and water. Fuel for hospital generators still remains blocked.

    5. Why can’t Biden even persuade Israel to let 600 desperate Americans out of the Gaza firestorm?

    6. Why isn’t the mass media making a bigger issue out of Israel’s long-time practices of blocking journalists from entering Gaza, including European, American and Israeli journalists? The only television crews left are Gazan-residing Al Jazeera reporters. Israeli bombs have already killed 26 journalists in the Gaza Strip since October 7. Is Israel targeting journalists’ families? The Gaza bureau chief of Al Jazeera, Wael Al-Dahdouh’s family was killed in an Israeli airstrike on Wednesday.

    7. Why isn’t the mainstream U.S. media giving adequate space and voice to groups advocating a ceasefire and humanitarian aid? The message of Israeli peace groups’ peaceful solutions are drowned out by the media’s addiction to interviews with military tacticians. Much time and space are being given to hawks pushing for a war that could flash outside of Gaza big time. Shouldn’t groups such as Jewish Voice for Peace, the Arab-American Institute, Veterans for Peace and associations of clergy have their views and activities reported?

    8. Why is the coverage of the war overlooking the Geneva Conventions, the United Nations Charter and the many provisions of international law that all the parties, including the U.S., have been violating? (See the October 24, 2023 letter to President Biden). Under international law, Biden has made the U.S. an active “co-belligerent,” of the Israeli government’s vocal demolition of the 2.3 million inhabitants in Gaza, who are mostly descendants of Palestinian refugees driven from their homes in 1948. (See, Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide).

    9. What about the human-interest stories that would be revealing? For example: How do Israeli F-16 pilots feel about their daily bombing of the completely defenseless Gazan civilian population and its life-sustaining infrastructures? What are the courageous Israeli human rights and refuseniks thinking and doing in a climate of serious repression of their views as a result of Netanyahu’s defense collapse on October 7?

    10. Where is the media attention on the statements from Israeli military commentators, who, for years have declared high-tech US-backed, nuclear-armed Israel to be more secure than at any time in its history? Israel is reasserting its overwhelming military domination of the entire region, fully backed by U.S. militarism.

    Historians remind us that in a grid-locked conflict over time, it is the most powerful party’s responsibility to lead the way to peace.

    Establishing a two-state solution has been supported by Palestinians. All the Arab nations, starting with the Arab League peace proposal in 2002, support this solution as well. It is up to Israel and the U.S., assuming annexation of what is left of Palestine is not Israel’s objective. (See, the March 29, 2002 New York Times article: Mideast Turmoil; Text of the Peace Proposals Backed by the Arab League).

    More media attention on this subject matter is much needed.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Ralph Nader.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Secretary General Antonio Guterres recently said, “the attacks by Hamas did not happen in a vacuum. The Palestinian people have been subjected to 56 years of suffocating occupation.” The Israeli Ambassador responded that Guterres’ comments were “shocking”, “unfathomable” and  “disconnected from reality”.  He called for the Secretary General’s resignation. Below are some facts about Gaza to evaluate whether Guterres was accurate or not.

    Gaza is a tiny strip of land on the Mediterranean coast with the 5,000 year old Gaza City in the north. The entire strip is only 5 miles wide by 25 miles in length with 2.3 million Palestinians locked in this territory by Israel.  It is the size of a small US city.

    In 1996 Israeli journalist Amira Haas published the book Drinking the Sea at Gaza. After living and researching in Gaza, she described the history, conditions, religion and politics. The subtitle was “Days and Nights in a Land Under Siege”. Gaza has been under siege for decades.

    About 80% of the people in Gaza are descendants of refugees who were expelled from their villages in what is now southern Israel in the 1948 Nakba (Catastrophe).  Most Gazans have never been able to set foot outside the territory. They are born, live their lives and die in this concentration camp.

    At least 50% of Gaza’s work force is unemployed. Israel restricts nearly all aspects of their economy. For example, Gaza’s fishermen are prevented from going into deeper waters to fish. If they try, they are fired on by Israeli naval boats. Farmers and shepherds are also fired on as they try to eke out a living.

    From December 1998 to February 2001, there was an airport in Gaza until Israel bombed the control tower and destroyed the runways to make it unusable.

    Gaza has a port but foreign boats are prevented from landing. In 2010, six civilian ships including the Turkish Mavi Marmara tried to bring humanitarian relief to Gaza. Israeli paratroopers attacked  the ships,  killing 9 passengers including one American.

    Israel routinely demolishes the homes of Palestinians. In 2003, American peace activist Rachel Corrie was killed by an Israeli bulldozer as she attempted to prevent the destruction of the home of a Palestinian pharmacist in Gaza.

    Israel routinely denies exit permits to outstanding youth who have received scholarships to study abroad.

    In 2014 Israel bombed Gaza’s water reservoir and sanitation treatment facilities, escalating the shortage of drinking water while sewage ran in the streets. Since then, as documented by Oxfam, Israel has prevented the importation of equipment necessary to rebuild sanitation and water treatment.

    In spring 2018 Gazans demonstrated against their imprisonment. They called it the Great March of Return.  The two year report documents that 217 Palestinians were killed and over 19,000 injured  by Israeli soldiers.

    In 2020 the UN issued a report saying that Gaza is not liveable. “The primary cause of this ‘unliveable environment is a highly restrictive Israeli blockade … which has reduced Gaza to the point of ‘systematic collapse.’”

    Conclusion

    Clearly, the Secretary General was accurate in his statement that Palestinians have endured decades of “suffocating occupation”. It is a measure of the Israeli Ambassador’s sense of impunity that he attacks the top UN official who dares to mention this.

    The diplomatic conflict will increase in the coming days and weeks as Israel’s genocidal campaign continues.

    The facts about Gaza and Palestine are clear: Israel is violating international law and Western states that support this are complicit. It is up to the people all over the world to speak out.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Viewers in China are ridiculing a propaganda film showcasing attempts by President Xi Jinping to merge the thought of Karl Marx with that of Confucius, slamming the show on social media as “boring,” too “far out” and counter to the Marxist-Leninist philosophy that the People’s Republic of China was founded on.

    According to officials, the Hunan Satellite TV show, which comes as Xi steps up a campaign to promote his personal brand of ideology, has been viewed more than 1 billion times.

    Based on a short story by late communist author Guo Moruo titled “Marx Enters the Temple of Confucius,” it depicts the founding father of communism in conversation with China’s most famous sage, taking theoretical questions from students, all interspersed with performances of traditional music, cartoons and rap.

    It clearly has the seal of presidential approval, having been screened during a recent propaganda conference in Beijing that was chaired by Xi and marked his attempt to stamp his political ideas on the cultural life of the nation.

    But its attempt to meld the two vastly different philosophies – dubbed the “second combination” by Xi – met with very mixed reactions on social media.

    “If I remember correctly, those who believed in Marx during those ten years should have smashed everything related to Confucius [Second Combination] #WhenMarxMetConfucius,” @Phuket New Forest said in a reference to the 1966-1976 Cultural Revolution.

    “They didn’t smash it hard enough,” commented @Agony丶Cloud.

    ENG_CHN_MarxConfucius_10232023.2.jpg
    Computer-generated mythical figures appear to endorse the story as the true representative of traditional Chinese culture in “When Marx Met Confucius.” Credit: Screenshot from movie

    Others griped about the dialogue, in which Marx says: “I have been in China for more than 100 years. In fact, I have been Chinese for a long time,” and says both philosophies “share a commitment to stability.”

    Confucius agrees, saying that both “hoped to achieve the highest happiness for mankind.”

    “Who came up with these lines?” one comment wanted to know.

    Common enemies

    Marx and Confucius also agree that they fought common enemies, including non-approved takes on history and Western attempts to impose “universal values” on China, something Xi has explicitly banned since taking power in 2012.

    Computer-generated mythical figures appear to endorse the saga as the true representative of traditional Chinese culture, while Lenin makes an appearance to call for an end to the “feudal” elements of that culture.

    They then hail Xi’s “second combination” of their philosophies.

    “When history happens the first time round, it’s often a tragedy, and when it happens again, it’s often a comedy,” wrote @absolute_zero_9, adding in apparent reference to life under Xi Jinping: “I sincerely hope that this decade-long farce will be over soon!”

    @Choice_is_very_important wanted to know if the fictional meeting meant that retail stock market investors will now have to pay for officials to “go to clubs, eat high-end Western food [and] have their feet washed,” citing the Confucian respect for authority figures.

    Others had a more succinct reaction.

    “I feel sick,” @Your_Ah_Q_Spiritual_Victory_Method wrote, while @clown_actor_1920 commented: “All I see is oppression.”

    User @qkeaa described Confucius as “a wandering soul, something only fit for a museum,” while @10_hours_of_charging wrote: “#WhenMarxMeetConfucius# made me see how ridiculous contemporary literary and artistic work is.”

    In a reference to the leader of the doomed Taiping Rebellion, who said he was Jesus’ brother and tried to topple the Qing Dynasty, they added: “But I’d still watch ‘When Jesus met Hong Xiuquan’.”

    “I’d rather watch ‘In the Night Garden’,” @Captive_snail_003 said, of the British TV show for small children. “At least it’s not intellectually challenged.”

    “There will be more and more jokes like this in the future,” commented @A Zhuma with a cry-laughing emoji.

    Shoddy production

    Others took issue with the show from a Marxist point of view, saying that Confucius was in favor of slavery and other hierarchies of power, and wouldn’t have wanted to eat at the same table as Marx’s wife and children.

    “I am speechless over this disgusting show,” @Drink_coco wrote, while commentator An Haoxin said it would appeal to older, middle-class people.

    “What they want is not Confucianism, nor is it a study of its historical value, but a re-reinforcement of the hierarchical order,” they wrote.

    ENG_CHN_MarxConfucius_10232023.3.jpg
    Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin makes an appearance in “When Marx Met Confucius” to call for an end to the “feudal” elements of the culture. Credit: Screenshot from movie

    Others took aim at the production values.

    “The technology is shoddy, the scenery is poor, the filters are saturated to death, the special effects are abrupt, and the shots are inexplicable,” one user wrote. “It’s like a rough product rushed out of a small workshop, like a group assignment made up after staying up late the night before.”

    The Hunan provincial radio and television bureau, which administers Hunan Satellite TV, had other ideas, however, lauding the show for using technology to “create visual wonders.”

    “The real-life stage design is supplemented by virtual reality technology to create a fantasy scene where reality and reality coexist,” it said in a statement on the show.

    Attempts to marry Marxism with Confucianism have been made since the founding of the Chinese Communist Party in the early 20th century, commentator Zhou Kexin said in a recent commentary for Bitter Winter magazine.

    “Readers of Bitter Winter are familiar with the debates about the nature of Confucianism, and the Chinese Communist Party’s attempt to empty it of all spiritual elements, presenting Confucius’ teachings as an early form of atheism,” Zhou wrote.

    “It is not surprising that this counterfeit Confucius would agree with Marx. And that both Confucius and Marx would agree with Xi Jinping,” he said.

    Translated with additional reporting by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Malcolm Foster.


    This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Lee Wing Tim for RFA Cantonese.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • “Hamas terrorists”, “hostages”, “anti-Semitism”, Israeli “right of self-defense”, standing with Israel, upholding the “laws of war”, peace thru “negotiations”, “2-state solution”, end game?  What are the relevant facts?  How should recent events be evaluated?

    Double standard

    Western imperial states (US, Britain, France, Germany, et cetera) and their mainstream media report the conflict with a pro-Israel anti-Arab bias.

    + Palestinian violence is categorized as “terrorism”, while Israeli violence never is.  Statistics: Israeli violence (2008-2023 June) killed 6,407 Palestinians, while Palestinian violence killed 307 Israelis.[1]

    + Israelis taken captive by Palestinian fighters are categorized as “kidnapped” and “hostages”, while the 4,500 Palestinians (including 147 minors as young as 12) in Israeli detention are not so categorized despite the facts that: more than 1,100 are held under administrative detention without charge or access to any court, and many of the remainder were detained on purported “security grounds” (sometimes for nothing other than: denunciation of harsh Israeli policies, relationship with actual militants, expressions of sympathy with the resistance, and/or mere suspicion of support for militant resistance) by military courts (used only against Palestinians) with outcome almost always predetermined with a 99% conviction rate).[2]

    + Ethnic cleansing is recognized in international law as a crime against humanity, but the Zionist state’s ethnic cleansing to create a Lebensraum for their so-called “Jewish state” is simply accepted.

    + Apartheid in South Africa (though the US and its Western allies did not always oppose it) is now considered an injustice, but Israeli apartheid-like persecutions of Palestinians go mostly unmentioned and without condemnation.[3]

    + The territory between the river and the sea is often called “Israel”, never “Palestine”.

    + When Israeli forces kill Palestinians one or a few at a time; it is barely, if at all, mentioned. It is only when Israeli bombings kill Palestinian civilians by the hundreds and thousands that the West sees fit to report on it. Killings of Israelis by Palestinians are reported empathetically as tragic, while Palestinians killed in far greater numbers by Israeli forces are merely unfortunate. With Israel now beginning to mass-murder Palestinians of all ages with indiscriminate bombing and thru starvation (preventing access to food, safe drinking water, and necessary medical supplies with which to treat mass casualties from Israeli bombing); Western state leaders excuse Israeli genocidal war crimes in Gaza, with banal assertions that Israel is only exercising its “right of self-defense” against “terrorists”, assertions which go unchallenged in the mainstream media.

    + Palestinian grievances (home demolitions, road blockages and checkpoints applied only to Palestinians, land and water resources taken from Palestinians and given to neighboring illegal Israeli settlements, grossly inequitable social services, travel restrictions applicable only to Palestinians, the economic siege of Gaza which impoverishes its population, the closing of Gaza’s borders so as to turn it into an “open-air prison”, and so forth) almost invariably go unmentioned.[4]

    + Ever increasing attacks (including murders) upon West Bank Palestinians by neighboring Israeli settlers, sometimes accompanied by participating Israeli soldiers, are perpetrated with impunity and rarely reported in the Western mainstream media.[5]

    The most overtly fascist coalition now governing the Zionist state has intensified its oppression of the Palestinians, especially in the occupied West Bank. That has naturally provoked an increase in militant resistance. Hamas and Islamic Jihad, notwithstanding their faults, currently constitute the most organized force in said resistance. The current armed conflict (begun October 07) between Gaza and the Zionist state is the natural outcome of Israeli/Zionist persecution and violence against the Palestinians.

    Hamas

    There are valid criticisms of Hamas as a governing entity. For example, it has permitted its most Islamist faction to impose a religiously intolerant, theocratic, and patriarchal regime in Gaza (acts which oppress fellow Palestinians); but that is not why Israel and the US condemn it.

    Hamas evolved from a Palestinian affiliate of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood.  Israel originally promoted Hamas as an alternative to the PLO which then represented the Palestinian resistance to Zionist oppression.  Indiscriminate Israeli violence against Palestinians during the first intifada (1987—93) affected all Palestinians including Hamas supporters. At that point, Hamas embraced the resistance against the Zionist state. Following the Oslo Accords (1993), Fatah and Israel established the Palestinian Authority which then devolved into a corrupt and subservient client regime for the Zionist state.  Hamas has filled much of the vacuum for the militant resistance.

    Israel, the US, and their apologists accuse Hamas of being ISIS.  That is not a valid comparison; in fact, Hamas denounced ISIS and its crimes.  Hamas fighters may have committed some “atrocities” (killing unarmed Israelis of all ages) in the current conflict; but the sensational allegations (beheading babies, immolating captives, raping women) voiced by Netanyahu and Biden are evidently false. Moreover, the charge that Hamas targeted “innocent” civilians ignores context (which is never considered by apologists for Israel, even though it mitigates Palestinian violence). For example, the Kibbutz residents attacked by Hamas are largely armed settlers in possession of land stolen from Palestinians.  Furthermore, most non-Arab Israeli adults (women as well as men) serve, or have served, in the Israeli army, which has perpetrated decades of often-murderous persecutions of the Palestinians (including ethnic cleansings); and those Israelis are military reservists until they reach the age of exemption (which varies from 40 to 49 depending upon rank and specialty).  Reasoned analysis of Hamas’ actions indicates that they intended to take as many captives (bargaining chips) as possible rather than simply kill Israelis. It appears that it was primarily those Israelis who resisted capture, including by fleeing, who were the ones killed.

    Should actual Hamas atrocities be disapproved? Yes. Should every violent Palestinian response to Israeli violence be denounced? No. Should Hamas excesses be equated to, and condemned equally with, those of the Zionist state? To do so (as have, all too eagerly, many left liberal peace advocates posturing as sympathetic to the plight of the Palestinians) is to equate the violence of the resistance to that of the oppressor. In effect, it legitimizes the existence of a racist state built upon mass murder, often brutal persecutions, and the violent ethnic cleansing of a country stolen from its indigenous population. Is it appropriate to express uncritical praise for Hamas (October 07) action (as have some radical pro-Palestinian activists)? No. Such response dehumanizes and fails to recognize that the dead and wounded (sometimes avoidably, sometimes unavoidably) included, not only actual enemies, but also innocent children and likely some Israeli Jews of the minority which are actual opponents of the Zionist oppressions of Palestinians. Israeli assertions to the contrary, Hamas does not hate Jews in general; but it is not wrong in recognizing that Israeli “civilians” are not all “innocents”.

    Israelis

    Many Jews in Israel (and elsewhere: Jewish Voice for Peace, If Not Now) have sought an end to the Zionist state’s apartheid-like oppressions of the Palestinians[6]; but, in Israel, they are a minority.  A much smaller minority of Israeli Jews (along with many Jews in other countries) actually renounce the Zionist project and demand a single state between the river and the sea with equal rights for all, and the right of return and compensation for exiled Palestinians. Certainly, justice-seeking Israelis (some affiliated with organizations such as B’Tselem) do not deserve to suffer and die because of the crimes perpetrated by their government, crimes which provoke the inevitable counter-violent resistance by its victims.

    Fantasy: a permanent peace based upon the 2-state solution!

    Many liberals (including many of those denouncing Hamas while posturing as sympathetic to the suffering Palestinians) insist that the “Palestinian problem” be resolved thru negotiations toward the vaunted “2-state solution”. They evade the facts. The Zionist state (regardless of ruling party) has never been willing to share Palestine with any actual Palestinian Arab state.

    1. After 30 years of British Mandatory rule with democratic governance denied to the Palestinian populace (in violation of Mandate precepts); the UN (then with white-ruled countries constituting nearly ¾ of its 56 member states), indifferent to the rights of the indigenous Palestinians, divided Palestine so as to give 55% of the territory to the Zionist settlers who then constituted 32% of the total population.
    2. The Zionists, after having “agreed” to the UN plan, then invaded, conquered, and annexed half of the 42% of territory designated by the UN for the Palestinian state (which was never established). The Zionists also permanently expelled a majority of the Palestinians from the 77% of Palestine which then came under their rule.
    3. The Zionist state, in secret alliance with Britain and France, launched a war of conquest to seize the remainder of Palestine plus the Egyptian Sinai. The US, then led by President Eisenhower, issued a firm “no”, and compelled the aggressor: to abort before it had seized the West Bank, and to withdraw from seized territory in Gaza and Egypt.
    4. Israel launched another war of conquest, this time enabled by the US and its allies, and seized all remaining Palestinian territory plus parts of Egypt, Syria, and Lebanon. It then began its ongoing practice of planting illegal Zionist settlements in the newly conquered territories.

    1993-95. Israel signed onto the Oslo Accords, which did not include any actual provision for the creation of a real “state” in the West Bank and Gaza. Palestinians are wrongfully blamed for the failure to achieve a 2-state peace agreement. In fact, no Israeli government, then or at any other time, has ever been willing to remove the illegal settlements or to accept a truly sovereign and independent Palestinian state. Moreover, repeated Palestinian attempts to achieve justice by peaceful methods have always been thwarted by the Zionist state and its imperial allies.

    For a more detailed history, see Charles Pierce: “The essential facts concerning Zionism and Palestine,” (Dissident Voice, 2023 Oct 10).

    End game?

    Israel, asserting “right of self-defense” as pretext, states its intention to wipe out Hamas and its operatives. Toward that end, Israel, in addition to bombing the territory into rubble, plans a ground invasion of Gaza. If that occurs, it appears reasonable to expect: much more mass killings of Gaza Palestinians (whom the Israeli Defense Minister describes as “human animals”, followed by a very brutal Israeli military rule, and eventual establishment of a quisling regime to rule the populace, plus Israeli detentions of any Palestinians who openly decline to be subservient to that regime, and inevitably a renewed violent Palestinian resistance to the ongoing persecution. Either that or Israel will complete its ethnic cleansing (as advocated by some parties in the ruling coalition) by expelling most remaining Palestinians from all Israeli-ruled territory.

    Biden, most members of Congress, and the US foreign policy establishment

    Israeli and US leaders responded to outrage over the aerial bombing of the Baptist hospital in Gaza (on Oct 17), with death toll in the hundreds, by blaming it on a misfired Islamic Jihad rocket. Except by their apologists, that assertion is reasonably disbelieved. Militants in Gaza simply do not have rockets with bombs large enough to kill hundreds; whereas Israeli bombs have actually and deliberately destroyed multi-story buildings in Gaza, killing hundreds of their residents. Lies and cover-ups such as this are nothing new for the US; remember previous lies: babies taken from incubators in Kuwait, WMD in Iraq, unprovoked Vietnamese attack in Gulf of Tonkin, no US commanders’ orders to massacre civilians at No Gun Ri and elsewhere during the War in Korea, et cetera.

    Biden, who rushed to assert that the US “stands with Israel”, pretends to be pressing Israel to abide by the “laws of war” which prohibit making war on civilians; but he certainly knows that Israel will not comply as long as he refuses to use US leverage to compel compliance; and he clearly will not do so. Likewise pro-Israel politicians in the US Congress will not stop, or even put conditions upon, the $3.8 billion/year of US taxpayer funding (to which Biden intends to add an extra $14 billion) for the Israeli war machine; because (beyond their commitment to Western imperial world domination) they only care that the election-campaign funding, provided by the rich and powerful Zionist lobby and US Zionist billionaires, shall go to themselves rather than to their challengers.

    The anti-racist “left” needs to recognize that Biden along with most members of the US Congress and their counterparts in the Western allies, all now rushing to assist Israel, are ultimately no less racist than are Trump’s MAGA Republicans and other right-wing populists.

    ENDNOTES

    [1] United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs: “Data on casualties,” 2023.

    [2] Addameer: “The Israeli military court system,” 2017 July.  B’Tselem: “Statistics on Palestinians in Israeli custody,” 2023 Sep 07.

    [3] B’Tselem: “A regime of Jewish supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea: This is apartheid,” 2021 Jan 12.

    [4] Amnesty International: “Israel’s apartheid against Palestinians, a look into decades of oppression and domination,” 2022 Feb.

    [5] Leila Fadel: “Palestinians appear to have been killed in reprisal attacks in the West Bank,” NPR, 2023 Oct 18.  Amira Hass: “Israeli Settlers Aren’t Pausing the Expulsion and Dispossession in the West Bank,” Ha’aretz, 2023 Oct 12.

    [6] Ellen Brotsky & Ariel Koren: “We’re anti-Zionist Jews and we see genocide unfolding in Gaza,” Guardian, 2023 Oct 18.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The past never truly stays where it belongs. Even when the truth is carefully scrubbed from our understanding of history, its spores disperse through time to seep into the firmament like a persistent black mold poisoning the air we breathe.

    This post was originally published on Real Progressives.

  • What is a terrorist? Seriously. I’m asking.

    Per the Oxford Dictionary, terrorism is the unlawful use of violence and intimidation, especially against civilians, in the pursuit of political aims.

    So it makes sense that we would regard the murder of at least 260 attendees of the Supernova music festival in southern Israel as terrorism. It makes sense that we would see the indiscriminate killing of Israeli civilians as terrorism.

    I fully understand the demands–coursing across social media–to condemn Hamas’s recent atrocities as terrorism. From my apartment in Brooklyn, I can only imagine what Israelis are experiencing at this moment, but I imagine that it is something that can be justifiably described as terror.

    What I don’t understand is that if this is terrorism, what is the Israeli airstrike, on Monday, that reduced a marketplace in the Jabalia refugee camp to rubble and killed dozens of civilians?

    What are the airstrikes that destroyed four mosques in the Shati refugee camp, killing people worshiping inside?

    What is the word that we should use to describe an air force that levels entire school buildings, hospitals, apartment complexes, and neighborhoods?

    I am asking what these things are, because when they’ve happened, there has been no overwhelming demand from the American public to label these atrocities as terrorsim. There have been no calls by politicians to label Israel as an entity that yearns for the extermination of all Palestinians. There have been no coordinated attempts to label Israel’s actions as terrorism.

    But then what is an appropriate descriptor for the siege that will cut off Gaza from food, water, aid, and electricity and that is being enacted in contradiction of international law?

    What shall we call the killing, last year, of Palestinian journalist Shireen Abu Akleh by Israeli soldiers in the occupied West Bank? Or the killing of at least six more journalists in Gaza in recent days?

    What about the murder, carried out this past September by the Israeli special forces, of a 15-year-old boy as he was leaving his grandfather’s house?

    How should we think about the acts that killed 91 children in the Gaza Strip over the course of 48 hours this past weekend? Should we understand them as acts of self-defense? Because if we should, then I am unclear as to how this notion of self-defense differs from what I am being told to understand as terrorism.

    I visited Israel once, in 2016, on a Birthright trip alongside thirty other young American Jews. I remember that over the course of those weeks, we threw around the word terrorist with abandon. In fact–and this is true–one of the icebreakers that we engaged in after touching down at Ben Gurian airport was called “Escape the Terrorist.” The game involved seeking out a partner to help navigate an area of sidewalk littered with make-pretend bombs.

    The only history lesson we received on that trip was a brief lecture given to us by Gil Hoffman, the chief political correspondent at the time for the Jerusalem Post. What left the biggest imprint was Hoffman’s closing remark.

    I remember him, in a dramatic pause, holding his chin in his palm, and then looking into our eyes and saying, “When the Palestinians care about their own children, then there will be peace.”

    Later that day, I was reminded of Hoffman’s words as I stared into the grainy footage of a Nazi propaganda film on display at Yad Vashem. The film, ostensibly, showed the routine goings on within a Jewish ghetto. In the center of the frame, a group of emaciated children huddled together for warmth, as passersby didn’t so much as stop to take notice.

    A placard near the screen described the propaganda as an attempt to depict the Jewish people as callous–as a people incapable even of caring for their own children.

    Nearby, a mic’d-up guide addressed a group of elderly tourists, saying, “They tried to strip us of our humanity, but in doing so only revealed the absence of their own.”

    What does it mean to believe that an entire people would not care for their children? What does it mean to believe that an entire people would be more celebratory of death than they would be of their own emancipation?

    What does it mean that terrorism is defined not by the act but by the actors?

    What does it mean to be a terrorist? I’m not sure that we know.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • I want to know their names.  I want to know the names of every child, every woman, every man. I want to know exactly what they were doing the moment the bombs hit.

    Was a nurse staunching a bloody wound?  Was a mother leaning over her daughter stroking her forehead? Was a doctor preparing a syringe?

    I want to know the stories – the loves, the fears, the memories of each and every one who was struck down so bitterly, so casually, so easily.

    Is the Israeli who pushed the button burning with regret? Will he have nightmares for the rest of his life? Will he fall into the darkness of alcohol and hopelessness? Or is he standing on a corner joking about his murderous act? I want to know.

    I want to know who manufactured the bomb.  Is the nuclear physicist who sat at his desk parsing the complicated formulas that produced the bomb drinking coffee and playing with his dog? Or is he wracked by regret?

    I want to know.  I want to know the names of each and every child buried under the rubble of Al Ahli Hospital.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • I was “interviewed” by an Iranian journalist online (15 October) about the Hamas-Israel conflict and Iran’s involvement. My answers are below.

    1. During the war between Hamas and Israel, some sources in America and their affiliated media reported that Iranian money was blocked in Qatar again, which was later denied. Do you think there was a message hidden in this news?

    I have written about this accusation in the United States. For your readers, I want to lay out the reasoning behind the accusations in the United States. The reasons for these accusations are complex, and they have more to do with partisan politics in the United States than about Iran.

    First, the accusations of the tie between the Iranian settlement and the  Hamas attack was launched exclusively by Republicans, and it was a ploy to try and blame President Biden for the Hamas attack. There were many misstatements made, but “truth” is irrelevant when it comes to partisan politics. The main goal is to “score” points rhetorically.

    The most ignorant comments claim that Iran received the money and immediately used the funds to support the Hamas attack. This is of course a total lie, but for people who are ill-disposed toward Iran and toward President Biden, this was an easy lie to sell, and looking at the commentary from right-wing media and comments on new stories shows that many people heard this and immediately believed it.

    A slightly more sophisticated version of this same lie is that Iran received the funds, and couldn’t use them to support Hamas because they were earmarked for humanitarian purposes, but because they received the funds, they were able to “offset” other government funds which were sent to support Hamas.

    When the Biden administration decisively pointed out that first, the funds did belong to Iran, and that none of them had been disbursed from Qatar, a third version of this story started circulating, and that is that Iran anticipated  these funds after the settlement, and so disbursed other existing funds to support Hamas.

    Of course all of these were complete lies. Hamas had planned this attack for months. The Iranian settlement took place long after the planning and preparation for the Hamas attack was underway. Iran could not have anticipated that the $6 billion of its own money would  be released as a condition of the prisoner exchange, because negotiations were not finalized before the planning for the Hamas attack. So these accusations are false and illogical.

    However, that still did not stop Republicans from continuing the narrative that President Biden was “soft on Iran” and that concessions made to Iran “somehow” led to the Hamas attack, and so ultimately President Biden was responsible.  The Republican narrative that the attack was engineered, directed and supported by Iran continues and now has been cemented in the Republican political narrative, and the Biden administration has been unable to counteract it.

    Another narrative that has emerged claims that Iran will instigate Hezbollah to attack Israel from Lebanon, thus proving that Iran was behind the Hamas attack. This is illogical, of course, but the demonization of Iran has become such a complete fixture in American politics, this kind of narrative has been extremely easy to promulgate.

    So, in response to these falsehoods, the Biden administration froze the Iranian assets in Qatar. It was a violation of the agreement between Iran and the United States. But it was necessary to try and stop the Republican lies. It highlighted the fact that the funds were never disbursed, and that Iran could not now anticipate receiving them.

    And the other move by the Biden administration to counter this rhetoric was to engage in a full-throated, loud and very public support for Israel. Sending Secretary of State Blinken to Israel for a highly emotional presentation citing his own Jewish roots, and President Biden making many public statements in support of Israel blunted some of the Republican criticism. I am not suggesting that these sentiments were insincere, but they were a very deliberate, highly public and emotional display of support for Israel. And it appears to have worked.

    1. How likely is it that America will use these funds as leverage against Iran in the future? If so, what will be the harm to America?

    No one should expect these funds to be released very soon. There is a possibility that they could be quietly released after the 2024 elections when President Biden’s fate concerning his presidency is settled. If Trump were to win re-election in 2024 the funds would never be released while Trump was in office. One again, I emphasize that this is not about Iran. This is about electoral politics in the United States, where sadly,, any politician who does anything to support or provide any benefit to Iran will be attacked.

    1. What is the impact of this war on the future of Iran’s nuclear negotiations?

    The Israeli-Hamas conflict will result in a halt to any progress in the Iranian nuclear negotiations until after the 2024 presidential elections. Senator Lindsay Graham (Republican from South Carolina) said today that Iran was totally to blame for the Hamas attack. Other Republicans have said the same. Some have called for bombing of Iran’s oil facilities to destroy Iran’s economic base. Sadly, anything the United States would now do that would result in any improvement in Iran’s economic condition is on hold for now. It is too politically dangerous for the Biden administration to do this. At best the talks will “tread water” until after January 2025 when the new presidential administration is in office.

    Let me also point out that if Hezbollah attacks Israel from the North, any talks between Iran and the United States over the nuclear negotiations will be immediately abandoned.

    1. What effects will this war have on the future of Iran and Saudi Arabia relations?

    One of the narratives that is being widely spread in the United States by Republicans is that: Iran engineered the Hamas attack on Israel in order to prevent the establishment of diplomatic relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia. Iran has recently improved relations with Saudi Arabia. So the question of whether Iran sees establishment of Saudi Arabian-Israeli relations as a danger, or something to be prevented is a very potent issue that Iran will have to deal with diplomatically. If American conservative politicians have their way (including Trump), the Saudi Arabia-Israel accords will go forward, not only because that is seen as positive for Israeli security, but also because it will “deal a blow” to Iran–a double benefit for these politicians. But the Iranian government should take this accusation of Iranian support for the attack as a way to prevent this new alliance very seriously, because it is a major narrative in the United States.

    1. What is the effect of the war between Hamas and Israel on the normalization of relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel?

    See my answer above. This has emerged in some political circles as the root cause for the Hamas attack, and the supposed motivation for Iranian support of the Hamas attack–to prevent this normalization of Saudi Arabian-Israeli relations. It is assumed that Iran wants to prevent this, and it is also assumed that Hamas sees this as a blow to their cause.

    Because this has been put forward so strongly as a motivation for the attack, every effort will now be made on the part of the United States to see that the normalization takes place.

    Ass a final observation, however, many supporters of the Palestinians point out that normalization of Israel’s relations with Arab states will have no effect on the Palestinian cause, because in fact, Arab States have not been supporting Palestinians at all historically. There are individuals and groups within Arab states that have supported the Palestinian cause, but the Arab states themselves have never been supportive. This underscores Iran’s support for Palestinians–and the fact that Iran, as a non-Arab state has been the chief reliable support for the Palestinian cause.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • A Republican House member has filed a resolution to censure Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Michigan), the only Palestinian in Congress, who is facing a deluge of fierce criticism from both sides of the aisle after she called for an end to Israel’s apartheid in a statement this weekend. The resolution was filed on Wednesday by Rep. Jack Bergman (R-Michigan), who parroted unverified information from Israeli…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • In the second decade of the 21st century, after much empty talk of ‘government of the people, by the people, for the people’, it was discovered that people weren’t even capable of governing their own media consumption. Huge, artificially intelligent computers revealed that while 49.5% of the population was drowning in a ‘post-truth’ sea of ‘disinformation’, another 49.5% was away with the fairies in ‘filter bubbles’ borne aloft by nothing but hot air.

    This left the 1% to cope with the crisis. Giant media corporations recruited ‘disinformation experts’ – savant guardians uniquely qualified to distinguish between rational and propaganda journalism. Their mystical powers are such that, working within profit-maximising, billionaire-owned, advertiser-dependent, government-subsidised media, they are nevertheless exposing ‘disinformation’ without the slightest trace of bias. If CEOs, ad department managers and others privately despise these truth-tellers fearlessly biting the many hands that feed, they are holding their tongues, presumably out of deep respect for their noble cause.

    In all the endless blather about ‘misinformation’, you will see precious little recognition of the great Achilles’ heel of propaganda journalism, the characteristic by which it is instantly exposed, rooted in the fact that it has fundamentally different goals from rational journalism.

    The goals of rational journalism are honesty, accuracy, completeness and clarity. Rational journalism will, of course, present the US-UK governments’ explanation for why they invaded Iraq, and it will present honest, credible, authoritative sources challenging that explanation.

    Notice this claim to rational, honest journalism is not a claim to objective journalism. Judgment about which individuals and organisations are honest, credible and authoritative is a subjective one. We might insist that we are choosing credible sources based on rational, testable evidence, but rational thought is a subjective phenomenon that occurs inside a human head – it is not objective. Our reasoning might be faulty – we might simply be mad.

    Rational, subjective journalism requires that you and I play our parts as honest, rational readers and viewers checking the claims and forming our own subjective opinions. We cannot take the arguments of purportedly honest, subjective journalists on trust – we have to do the work ourselves.

    The goals of propaganda journalism are different: it aims to lead readers and viewers to a particular conclusion. In this case, honesty, accuracy and clarity are subordinated to the needs of persuasion. As for completeness, because it works against the goals of propaganda, it is not merely omitted; it is a threat to be attacked.

    This, then, is how we can distinguish rational journalism from mere propaganda. The great Achilles heel of propaganda journalism is that:

    • It necessarily combines meticulous, detailed, forensic analysis of the facts with vast, ‘inexplicable’, counter-intuitive gaps. The propagandist will collect every tiny detail in favour of the required conclusion but – as though mentally impaired – will ‘fail’ to notice any number of lounge-based elephants leading away from the desired conclusions. The aim is to present a clear-cut, black and white view of the world with no room for doubt.
    • It will find reasons to attack anyone suggesting that this filtered, black and white version is incomplete. Any rational journalist interested in completeness, in doubt, will be attacked as an ‘apologist’, a ‘traitor’, a ‘Lord Haw-Haw’-type character undermining the nation’s moral and intellectual health with ‘disinformation’. Any other rational journalists who then seek completeness in responding to these first claims of ‘treachery’ will be accused of ‘treachery’ in the same way. It is a logical closed-circle – vital because, for a propagandist, victory is all that matters. The flourishing of rational debate is both a threat and a defeat.

    Nils Melzer – ‘I Had Been Blinded By Propaganda’

    In 2019, while working as the UN’s Special Rapporteur on Torture, Nils Melzer – a highly experienced practitioner in the field of international law who was the Swiss Chair of International Humanitarian Law at the Geneva Academy of International Humanitarian Law and Human Rights, and who is now Director of Law, Policy and Diplomacy of the International Committee of the Red Cross – commented on Julian Assange:

    Surely, I thought, Assange must be a rapist! But what I found is that he has never been charged with a sexual offence. True, soon after the United States had encouraged allies to find reasons to prosecute Assange, Swedish prosecution informed the tabloid press that he was suspected of having raped two women. Strangely, however, the women themselves never claimed to have been raped, nor did they intend to report a criminal offence. Go figure. Moreover, the forensic examination of a condom submitted as evidence, supposedly worn and torn during intercourse with Assange, revealed no DNA whatsoever — neither his, nor hers, nor anybody else’s. Go figure again. One woman even texted that she only wanted Assange to take an HIV test, but that the police were “keen on getting their hands on him”. Go figure, once more.

    Melzer added:

    In the end it finally dawned on me that I had been blinded by propaganda, and that Assange had been systematically slandered to divert attention from the crimes he exposed. Once he had been dehumanized through isolation, ridicule and shame, just like the witches we used to burn at the stake, it was easy to deprive him of his most fundamental rights without provoking public outrage worldwide. And thus, a legal precedent is being set, through the backdoor of our own complacency, which in the future can and will be applied just as well to disclosures by The Guardian, the New York Times and ABC News.

    Melzer, clearly an impeccable source on these issues, offered this opinion piece to The Guardian, The Times, The Financial Times, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Australian, The Canberra Times, The Telegraph, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Thomson Reuters Foundation, and Newsweek. The result:

    None responded positively.

    Why not? Because Melzer was dealing with The Medium, a state-corporate propaganda system that needed the Assange case to be presented in black and white terms to neutralise public support so the state could ‘deprive him of his most fundamental rights without provoking public outrage worldwide’.

    This propaganda requirement is so important, so relentlessly pursued, that many state-corporate propagandists – people who genuinely imagine they are rational journalists – felt authentic revulsion for anyone interested in challenging the official narrative. As we found out, although no charges had been brought against Assange, and although he had not been convicted of any crime, to promote completeness by challenging the various claims was to be branded ‘a rape apologist’.

    Regardless of the truth of the claims made against Assange, the very fact that expert, rational journalism seeking completeness was not only ignored, but was barred, was the great Achilles’ heel indicating that Assange was indeed the target of a state-corporate propaganda blitz. This automatically meant that, whatever the claims against Assange, The Medium was already guilty of a profound subversion of democracy, civilised debate and freedom, because it was acting as an agent of state, not as an impartial source of information. It was treating the domestic population as an enemy to be controlled and manipulated.

    To summarise, then: when meticulous detail is widely combined with elephant-sized gaps, and when interest in completeness is widely denounced as ‘treachery’, or ‘immorality’ of some kind, this is the Achilles’ heel exposing a propaganda blitz.

    ‘La, La, La!’ The Medium Puts Its Fingers In Its Ears

    In June we were one of a tiny number of outlets who supported women exposing the sexual abuses of high-profile former Observer columnist Nick Cohen in a front-page article published by the New York Times. Seven women told the NYT that Cohen ‘had groped them or made other unwanted sexual advances over nearly two decades. Four insisted on anonymity, fearing professional repercussions. In each case, The Times reviewed documents or otherwise corroborated their accounts’. This was not trial by media – the NYT report followed an internal investigation by Guardian News & Media, after which Cohen had left the Observer.

    The contrast with the media reaction to the Assange allegations could hardly be more disturbing. The NYT’s report on Cohen was published on May 30. Our ProQuest media database search on June 15 of UK newspaper mentions after May 29 gave the following results:

    Nick Cohen’ = 9 mentions

    This was the sum total of interest in the entire UK press. The story was simply buried and was not covered by the Guardian or the BBC.

    We were one of very few outlets to quote sexual abuse survivor Lucy Siegle:

    In 2018, Freelance journalist and BBC One Show reporter Lucy Siegle – who wrote an Observer column on ethical living and launched the newspaper’s Ethical Awards – reported Cohen to the Guardian for groping her in the newsroom, but “nothing had happened”. Siegle described her 1 February 2018 meeting with senior Guardian management as “aggressive”, an “absolute car crash”, in which she felt “gaslit” and that they “basically spent half the time trying to diminish what I was saying and then the other half of the time sort of putting their fingers in their ears and almost going “la la la”.

    ‘La, la la’, pretty much sums up the reaction of the entire state-corporate Medium to the scandal.

    Compare, again, the response to claims against comedian and dissident political commentator Russell Brand, accused of rape by one woman, and of sexual abuse by three other women. The Metropolitan Police subsequently reported that it had also received a ‘number of allegations of sexual offences’. The World Socialist Network (WSWS) commented:

    The hysterical response to the Brand story in the media, with the Guardian and other nominally “liberal” newspapers far in the lead, undermines basic legal and democratic principles. It has pre-emptively judged Brand guilty, rendering him a pariah and jeopardising any chance of a fair trial if that were ever on the cards in the future…

    Legal and democratic rights must be defended to put an end to the situation where public figures and artists can be torn down purely through maliciously intended allegations and gossip. It should not need explaining what enormous power this gives those with the most influence on the media and politics, and the injustice which can be wrought.

    And indeed, anyone who has followed the Assange case will have been alarmed when Foreign Secretary James Cleverly commented publicly on the claims against Brand:

    ‘We have to be particularly careful when we listen to the voices of the people who are relatively powerless. Because we, I think, collectively have missed opportunities to do the right thing and intervene much, much earlier.

    This, of course, strongly implied Brand’s guilt, helping to set the tone for the subsequent trial by media. One might, of course, wonder why such a senior Foreign Office politician responsible for British relations with foreign countries and governments was speaking out on claims targeting a British comedian and actor. After all, Britain’s Foreign Secretary did not comment on the Cohen sex scandal.

    Dame Caroline Dinenage, chair of the House of Commons media committee, wrote to the media platform, Rumble:

    We would be grateful if you could confirm whether Mr Brand is able to monetise his content, including his videos relating to the serious accusations against him. If so, we would like to know whether Rumble intends to join YouTube in suspending Mr Brand’s ability to earn money on the platform.

    To their credit, Rumble replied:

    Today, we received a deeply disturbing letter from a committee chair in the UK parliament…

    We regard it as deeply inappropriate and dangerous that the UK Parliament would attempt to control who is allowed to speak on our platform or to earn a living from doing so.

    Singling out an individual and demanding his ban is even more disturbing given the absence of any connection between the allegations and his content on Rumble. We don’t agree with the behavior of many Rumble creators, but we refuse to penalize them for actions that have nothing to do with our platform.

    Although it may be politically and socially easier for Rumble to join a cancel culture mob, doing so would be a violation of our company’s values and mission. We emphatically reject the UK Parliament’s demands.

    Dinenage has also written to TikTok, and also to GB News, commenting:

    … it is concerning that Beverley Turner, who described Mr Brand as “a hero” and invited him to appear on her show, subsequently fronted GB News’s coverage of the allegations regarding Mr Brand on the morning of 18 September.

    Tweeting over a letter he sent to Dinenage, US journalist Glenn Greenwald asked:

    Since when do Western political officials have the power to impose extra-legal punishment on people for alleged crimes they’ve never been charged with? What gives US and UK officials the right to demand that tech companies remove or demonetize speakers?

    No government ministers wrote to the Guardian Media Group demanding the demonetisation of Cohen’s articles. The BBC and Guardian, which failed even to report the Cohen scandal, have lavished coverage in dozens of news and comment pieces on the claims against Brand.

    Once again, the Achilles’ heel of propaganda is clearly visible: meticulous claims with astonishing gaps – for example, the fact that the government is applying enormous pressure to silence Brand, though he has not been charged with, let alone convicted of, any crime – while rational journalists seeking completeness are widely shouted down as ‘rape apologists’, exactly as they were in the Assange case.

    Critics have argued that to suggest Brand is being targeted with a propaganda blitz is to dismiss the women’s claims as propaganda fabrications. This does not follow at all. It is quite possible, for example, that the claims are both true and being used by unscrupulous forces to silence Brand.

    Critics have also asked why we haven’t commented on the plausibility of the women’s allegations – how can we doubt the claims of four women speaking independently? The Assange case, and especially Nils Melzer’s expert analysis of that case, convinced us that it is frankly absurd for people like us – and people like the many people passing instant judgment on social media – to affect to offer an informed opinion on these complex legal issues based on media reports and commentary.

    Is Brand A Leftist?

    As ever, nothing is allowed to interfere with the required, black and white version of events. Cover for the propaganda blitz has even been provided by the assertion that Brand cannot be the subject of an Assange or Corbyn-style blitz because he is not a left dissident at all.

    Whether we call Brand a ‘leftist’ or not, the fact is that over the last decade he has done much to challenge and offend state-corporate power. This year, he has interviewed radical leftists like Cornel West, Noam Chomsky and Aaron Maté. He has long and vocally supported Corbyn and Assange, and in the last couple of years he has interviewed Max Blumenthal, Edward Snowden, Chris Hedges, Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi, Jimmy Dore, Joel Bakan, Helena Norberg-Hodge, Vandana Shiva and many others. This is important work giving a voice to leftists and environmentalists who are completely ignored by ‘mainstream’ media, when they aren’t being slandered and abused.

    Brand has consistently challenged the official narrative on the Ukraine war. On YouTube last February, he conducted the first interview given by investigative journalist Seymour Hersh after Hersh had published his damning claim that the US was behind the Nord Stream 2 terror attacks in Europe.

    As we documented, Hersh’s claims were either ignored, or at best ridiculed, by the likes of the Guardian, BBC and The Times as part of another suppression of dissent. Apply whatever label you like, the fact that Brand conducted this first interview with Hersh on YouTube, that he has 6.6 million YouTube subscribers, and that the video has been viewed 855,000 times, was a serious contribution to anti-war dissent.

    The Hersh interview alone and the fact that Brand is consistently reaching a large audience with his dissent – former Guardian journalist Jonathan Cook argues ‘He is possibly the most influential critic of capitalism in the English language’ – means Brand is certainly going to be targeted by the state-corporate propaganda system that successfully destroyed Corbyn’s political project, and Assange’s reputation, for fundamentally the same reasons.

    Indeed, as we discussed at the time, Brand had already been subjected to a Corbyn-style, media trashing a decade earlier, involving pro-war big hitters like David Aaronovitch, then of The Times, and Nick Cohen. Brand’s high-profile, 2014 book, Revolution, described as ‘anti-capitalist’, sold 22,000 copies in the first 11 days and cited the likes of Noam Chomsky and David Graeber. It was targeted because of comments of this kind:

    Today humanity faces a stark choice: save the planet and ditch capitalism, or save capitalism and ditch the planet.

    The reason the occupants of the [elite] fun bus are so draconian in their defence of the economy is that they have decided to ditch the planet.’ (Brand, Revolution, Century, 2014, ebook, p. 345)

    The reality is that ‘we live under a tyranny’. (p. 550) The US, in particular, ‘acts like an army that enforces the business interests of the corporations it is allied to’. (p. 493) Brand noted that 70 per cent of the UK press is controlled by three companies, 90 per cent of the US press by six, and ‘the richest 1 per cent of British people have as much as the poorest 55 per cent’. (p. 34)

    On possibilities for radical change, Brand wrote:

    Remember, the people who tell you this can’t work, in government, on Fox News or MSNBC, or in op-eds in the Guardian or the Spectator, or wherever, are people with a vested interest in things staying the same.’ (p. 514)

    Anyone who has read Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent, will know that dissidents reaching a massive audience with messages of this kind will certainly be subject to intense, escalating attacks from establishment media. Brand doesn’t need to be as radical as Assange, or as politically influential as Corbyn, to qualify. Even comparatively low-profile, UK academic dissidents like Piers Robinson, Tim Hayward and David Miller have been targeted with propaganda smears intended to silence them. The fact that Brand has recently interviewed the likes of right-wing Ben Shapiro doesn’t nullify his record on left dissent. Incidentally, the title of the video of that interview is: ‘Russell Brand & Ben Shapiro “Respectfully Disagreeing”.’

    Conclusion

    The discrediting and silencing of influential, anti-war dissidents is an extremely serious matter. In May, the Costs of War project, based at Brown University in the United States, estimated that the total death toll in post-9/11 wars – including Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria and Yemen – could be at least 4.5-4.7 million. The authors of the report commented:

    A 2018 survey of Syrian, Afghan, and Iraqi refugees showed that more than 60% were traumatized by war experiences, including attacks by military forces, coping with the murder or disappearance of relatives, living through torture and solitary confinement, and witnessing murders, abuse, and sexual violence. More than 6% had been raped.

    There is good reason to believe that the intensity of the 2002-2003 anti-war protests – not least the impact on Tony Blair’s political career – made it much harder for UK opposition parties and the UK government to support Obama’s planned war on Syria in 2013. Consequently, without British support, that formal, full-on US declaration of war did not happen.

    This absolutely does not mean that anti-war voices should be afforded lenient treatment; it means the claims against them, and any counterclaims, must be subjected to careful scrutiny in a way that is fundamentally rational and fair.

    If trial by media in a court of public opinion distorted by overwhelming propaganda is all it takes to silence leading anti-war voices seeking to restrain the rampant US-UK war machine, then that is simply not good enough.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • On February 12, 2002 at a Pentagon news conference, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was asked by Jim Miklaszewski, the NBC Pentagon correspondent, if he had any evidence that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and was supplying them to terrorists.  Rumsfeld delivered a famous non-answer answer and said:

    Reports that say that something hasn’t happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns — the ones we don’t know we don’t know.

    When he was pressed by Jamie McIntyre, CNN’s Pentagon correspondent, to answer the question about evidence, he continued to talk gobbledygook, saying, “I could have said that the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, or vice versa.”

    He never said he had evidence, because he didn’t.

    Rumsfeld, who enjoyed his verbal games, was the quintessential bullshitter and liar for the warfare state.  This encounter took place when Rumsfeld and his coconspirators were promoting lie after lie about the attacks of September 11, 2001 and conflating false stories about an alliance between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden in order to build a case to wage another war against Iraq, in order to supplement the one in Afghanistan and the war on “terror” that they launched post September 11 and the subsequently linked anthrax attacks.

    A year later on February 5, 2003, U. S. Secretary of State Colin Powell went before the U. N. Security Council and in a command performance assured the world that the U.S. had solid evidence that Iraq had “weapons of mass destruction,” repeating that phrase seventeen times as he held up a stage prop vial of anthrax to make his point.  He said, “My colleagues, every statement I make today is backed up by sources — solid sources. These are not assertions. What we’re giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence.”  He was lying, but to this very day his defenders falsely claim he was the victim of an “intelligence failure,” a typical deceitful excuse along with “it was a mistake.”  Of course, Iraq did not have “weapons of mass destruction” and the savage war waged on Iraq was not a mistake.

    Scott Ritter, the former Marine U.N. weapons inspector,  made it very clear back then that there was no evidence that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, but his expertise was dismissed, just as his current analysis of the war in Ukraine is.  See his recent tweet about Senator Diane Feinstein in this regard:

    Thirteen months after Rumsfeld’s exchange in the news conference, the United States invaded Iraq on March 19, 2003, knowing it had no justification.  It was a war of aggression.  Millions died as a result.  And none of the killers have been prosecuted for their massive war crimes.  The war was not launched on mistaken evidence; it was premeditated and based on lies easy to see.  Very, very easy to see.

    On January 28, 2003, eleven days before Powell performance, I, an independent writer, wrote a newspaper Op Ed, “The War Hoax,” saying:

    The Bush administration has a problem: How to start a war without having a justifiable reason for one.  No doubt they are working hard to solve this urgent problem.  If they can’t find a justification, they may have to create one.  Or perhaps they will find what they have already created. . . . Yet once again, the American people are being played for fools, by the government and the media.  The open secret, the insider’s fact, is that the United States plans to attack Iraq in the near future.  The administration knows this, the media knows it, but the Bush scenario, written many months ago, is to act as if it weren’t so, to act as if a peaceful solution were being seriously considered. . . . Don’t buy it.

    Only one very small regional Massachusetts newspaper, the North Adams Transcript, was willing to publish the piece.

    I mention this because I think it has been very obvious for a very long time that the evidence for United States’ crimes of all sorts has been available to anyone who wished to face the truth.  It does not take great expertise, just an eye for the obvious and the willingness to do a little homework.  Despite this, I have noticed that journalists and writers on the left have continued to admit that they were beguiled by people such as Bill and Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and Joseph Biden, con men all.  I do not mean writers for the mainstream press, but those considered oppositional.  Many have, for reasons only they can answer, put hope in these obvious charlatans, and some prominent ones have refused to analyze such matters as the JFK assassination, September 11th, or Covid-19, to name a few issues.  Was it because they considered these politicians and matters known unknowns, even when the writing was on the wall?

    Those on the right have rolled with Reagan, the Bushes, and Trump in a similar manner, albeit for different reasons.  It causes me to shake my head in amazement.  When will people learn?  How long does it take to realize that all these people are part of a vast criminal enterprise that has been continuously waging wars and lying while raking in vast spoils for the military-industrial complex.  There is one party in the U.S. – the War Party.

    If you have lived long enough, as have I, you reach a point when you have, through study and the accumulation of evidence, arrived at a long list of known knowns.  So with a backhand slap to Donald Rumsfeld, that long serving servant of the U.S. war machine, I will list a very partial number of my known knowns in chronological order.  Each could be greatly expanded. There is an abundance of easily available evidence for all of them – nothing secret – but one needs to have the will for truth and do one’s homework.  All of these known knowns are the result of U.S. deep state conspiracies and lies, aided and abetted by the lies of mass corporate media.

    My Known Knowns:

    • The U.S. national security state led by the CIA assassinated President John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963. This is The foundational event for everything that has followed.  It set the tone and sent the message that deep state forces will do anything to wage their wars at home and abroad.  They killed JFK because he was ending the war against Vietnam, the Cold War, and the nuclear arms race.
    • Those same forces assassinated Malcolm X fourteen months later on February 21, 1965 because he too had become a champion of peace, human rights, and racial justice with his budding alliance with Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. Such an alliance of these two black leaders posed too great a threat to the racist warfare state.  This conspiracy was carried out by the Nation of Islam, the New York Police Department, and U.S. intelligence agencies.
    • The Indonesian government’s slaughter of more than one million mainly poor rice farmers in 1965-6 was the result of a scheme planned by ex-CIA Director Allen Dulles, whom JFK had fired. It was connected to Dulles’s role in the assassination of JFK, the CIA-engineered coup against Indonesian President Sukarno, his replacement by the dictator Suharto, and his mass slaughter ten years later, starting in December 1975.  The American-installed Indonesian dictator Suharto, after meeting with Henry Kissinger and President Ford and receiving their approval, would slaughter hundreds of thousands East-Timorese with American-supplied weapons in a repeat of the slaughter of more than a million Indonesians in 1965.
    • In June of 1967, Israel, a purported ally of the U.S., attacked and destroyed the Egyptian and Syrian armies, claiming falsely that Egypt was about to attack Israel. This was a lie that was later admitted by former Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin in a speech he gave in 1982 in Washington, D.C.  Israel annexed the West Bank and Gaza and still occupies the Golan Heights as well.  In June 1967, Israel also attacked and tried to sink the U.S. intelligence gathering ship the U.S. Liberty, killing 34 U.S. sailors and wounding 170 others.  Washington covered up these intentional murders to protect Israel.
    • On April 4, 1968, these same intelligence forces led by the FBI, assassinated Martin Luther King, Jr. in Memphis, Tennessee. He was not shot by James Earl Ray, the officially alleged assassin, but by a hit man who was part of another intricate government conspiracy.  King was killed because of his work for racial and human rights and justice, his opposition to the Vietnam War, and his push for economic justice with the Poor People’s Campaign.
    • Two months later, Senator Robert F. Kennedy, on his way to the presidency, was also assassinated by deep state intelligence forces in another vastly intricate conspiracy. He was not killed by Sirhan Sirhan, who was a hypnotized patsy standing in front of RFK. He was assassinated by a CIA hit man who was standing behind him and shot him from close range.  RFK, also, was assassinated because he was intent on ending the war against Vietnam, bringing racial and economic justice to the country, and pursuing the assassins of his brother John.
    • The escalation of the war against Vietnam by Pres. Lyndon Johnson was based on the Tonkin Gulf lies. Its savage waging by Richard Nixon for eight years was based on endless lies.  These men were war criminals of the highest order.  Nixon’s 1968 election was facilitated by the “October Surprise” when South Vietnam withdrew from peace negotiations to end the war.  This was secretly arranged by Nixon and his intermediaries.
    • The well-known Watergate scandal story, as told by Woodward and Bernstein of The Washington Post, that led to Richard Nixon’s resignation in August 1974, is an entertaining fiction concealing intelligence operations.
    • Another October Surprise was arranged for the 1980 presidential election. It was linked to the subsequent Iran-Contra scandal during the Reagan administration, led by future CIA Director under Reagan, William Casey, and former CIA Director and Vice-President under Reagan, George H. W. Bush.  As in 1968, a secret deal was made to secure the Republican’s election by making a deal with Iran to withhold releasing the American hostages they held until after the election.  They were released minutes after Reagan was sworn in on January 20, 1981.  American presidential elections have been fraught with scandals, as in 2000 when George W. Bush and team stole the election from Democrat Al Gore, and Russia-gate was conjured up by the Democrats in 2016 to try to prevent Trump’s election.
    • The Reagan administration, together with the CIA, armed the so-called “Contras” to wage war against the Sandinista government of Nicaragua that had overthrown the vicious U.S. supported dictator Anastasio Somoza. The Contras were Somoza supporters and part of a long line of terrorists that the U.S. had used throughout Latin America where they supported dictators and death squads to squelch democratic movements. Such state terrorism was of a piece with the September 11, 1973 U.S. engineered coup against the democratic government of President Salvatore Allende in Chile and his replacement with the dictator Augusto Pinochet.
    • The Persian Gulf War waged by George H.W. Bush in 1991 – the first made for TV war – was based on lie upon lie promoted by the administration and their public relations firm. It was a war of aggression celebrated by CNN and other media as a joyous July 4th fireworks display.
    • Then the neoliberal phony William Clinton spent eight years bombing Iraq, dismantling the social safety net, deregulating the banks, attacking and dismantling Yugoslavia, savagely bombing Serbia, etc. In a span of four months in 1999 he bombed four countries: Afghanistan, Sudan, Iraq, and Yugoslavia.  He maintained the U.S. sanctions placed on Iraq following the Gulf War that resulted in the death of 500,00 Iraqi children.  When his Secretary of State Madeleine Albright was asked by Lesley Stahl of 60 Minutes if the price was worth it, Albright said, “We think the price is worth it.”
    • The attacks of September 11, 2001, referred to as 9/11 in an act of linguistic mind control in order to create an ongoing sense of national emergency, and the anthrax attacks that followed, were a joint inside operation – a false flag – carried out by elements within the U.S. deep state.  Together with the CIA assassination of JFK, these acts of state terrorism mark a second fundamental turning point in efforts to extinguish any sense of democratic control in the United States.  Thus The Patriot Act, government spying, censorship, and ongoing attacks on individual rights.
    • The George W. Bush-led U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, Iraq, etc. and its “war on terror” were efforts to terrorize and control the Middle East, Southwest Asia, as well as the people of the U.S. The aforementioned Mr. Rumsfeld, along with his partner in crime Dick Cheney, carried out Bush’s known known war crimes justified by the crimes of Sept 11 as they simultaneously created a vast Homeland Security spying network while eliminating Americans basic freedoms.
    • Barack Obama was one of the most effective imperialist presidents in U.S. history. Although this is factually true, he was able to provide a smiling veneer to his work at institutionalizing the permanent warfare state.  When first entering office, he finished George W. Bush’s unfinished task of bailing out the finance capitalist class of Wall St.  Having hoodwinked liberals of his bona fides, he then spent eight years presiding over extrajudicial murders, drone attacks, the destruction of Libya, a coup in Ukraine bringing neo-Nazis to power, etc.  In 2016 alone he bombed seven countries Pakistan, Libya, Yemen, Afghanistan, Syria, Somalia, and Iraq.  He expanded U.S. military bases throughout the world and sent special forces throughout Africa and Latin America.  He supported the new Cold War with sanctions on Russia.  He was a fitting successor to Bush junior.
    • Donald Trump, a New York City reality TV star and real estate tycoon, the surprise winner of the 2016 U.S. presidential election despite the Democratic Party’s false Russia-gate propaganda, attacked Syria from sea and air in the first two years of his presidency, claiming falsely that these strikes were for Syria’s use of chemical weapons at Douma and for producing chemical weapons. In doing so, he warned Russia not to be associated with Syrian President Assad, a “mass murderer of men, women, and children.”  He did not criticize Israel that to the present day continues to bomb Syria, but he recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. He ordered the assassination by drone of Iranian General Qasem Soleimani near Baghdad International Airport while on a visit to meet with Iraq’s prime minister.  As an insider contrary to all portrayals, he presided over Operation Warp Speed Covid vaccination development and deployment, which was a military-pharmaceutical-CIA program, whose key player was Robert Kadlec (former colleague of Donal Rumsfeld with deep ties to spy agencies), Trump’s Assistant Secretary of Health and Human Services for Preparedness and Response and an ally of Dr. Anthony Fauci and Bill Gates.  On December 8, 2020 Trump joyously declared: “Before Operation Warp Speed, the typical time-frame for development and approval [for vaccines], as you know, could be infinity. And we were very, very happy that we were able to get things done at a level that nobody has ever seen before. The gold standard vaccine has been done in less than nine months.”  And he announced they he will quickly distribute such a “verifiably safe and effective vaccine” as soon as the FDA approved it because “We are the most exceptional nation in the history of the world. Today, we’re on the verge of another American medical miracle.”  The Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine was approves three days later. Moderna’s Covid-19 vaccine received FDA emergency use authorization a week later.
    • This Covid-19 medical miracle was a con-job from the start. The official Covid operation launched in March 11, 2020 with worldwide lockdowns that destroyed economies while enriching the super-rich and devastating regular people, was a propaganda achievement carried out by intelligence and military apparatuses in conjunction with Big Pharma, the WHO, the World Economic Forum, etc. and promulgated by a vast around-the-clock corporate media disinformation campaign.  It was the third fundamental turning point – following the JFK assassination and the attacks of September 11, 2001 and anthrax – in destabilizing the economic, social and political life of all nations while undermining their sovereignty.  It was based on false science in the interests of further establishing a biosecurity state.  The intelligence agency planners who had conducted many germ war game simulations leading up to Covid -19 referred to a future arising out of such “attacks,” as the “New Normal.”  A close study of these  precedents, game-planning, and players makes this evident.  The aim was to militarize medicine and produce a centralized authoritarian state.  Its use of the PCR “test” to detect the virus was a lie from the start.  The Nobel Award winning scientist who developed the test, Kary Mullis, made it clear that “the PCR is a process. It does not tell you that you are sick.”  It is a processto make a whole lot of something out of nothing,” but it can not detect a specific virus.  That it was used to detect all these Covid “cases” is all one needs to know about the fraud.
    • Joseph Biden, who was Obama’s point man for Ukraine while vice-president and the U.S. engineered the 2014 coup d’état in Ukraine, came into office intent on promoting the New Cold War with Russia and refused all Russian efforts to peacefully settle the Ukrainian crisis. He pushed NATO to further provoke Russia by moving farther to the east, surrounding Russia’s borders.  He supported the neo-Nazi Ukrainian elements and its government’s continuous attacks on the Russian speaking Donbass region in eastern Ukraine.  In doing so, he clearly provoked Russian into sending troops into Ukraine on 24 February 2022.  He has fueled this war relentlessly and has pushed the world to the brink of nuclear annihilation.  He supported the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq.  He currently presides over an aggressive provocation of China.  And like his predecessor Trump, he promotes the Covid disinformation campaign and the use of “vaccines,” urging people to get their jabs.
    • Throughout all these decades and the matters touched upon here – some of my known knowns – there is another dominant theme that recurs again and again.  It is the support for Israel and its evil apartheid regime’s repeated slaughters and persecution of the Palestinian people after having dispossessed them of their ancestral land. This has been a constant fact throughout all U.S. administrations since the JFK assassination and Israel’s subsequent acquisition of nuclear weapons that Kennedy opposed.  It is been aided and abetted by the rise of the neocon elements within the U.S. government and the 1997 formation of The Project for the New American Century, founded by William Kristol and Donald Kagan, whose signees included Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, et al., and their claim for the need “for a new Pearl Harbor.”  Many of these people, who held dual U.S. and Israeli citizenship, became members of the Bush administration.  Once the attacks of September 11th occurred and a summer of moviegoers watching the new film Pearl Harbor had passed, George W. Bush and the corporate media immediately and repeatedly proclaimed the attacks a new Pearl Harbor.  Once again, the Palestinian’s and Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023 attack on Israel that is widely and falsely reported as unprovoked, as is Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, has been referred to as “a Pearl Harbor Moment.”  By today, Monday 9 Oct. 2023, President Biden has already given full U.S. support to Israel as it savagely attacks Gaza and has said that additional assistance for the Israeli Defense Forces is now on its way to Israel with more to follow over the coming days. Rather than acting as an instrument for peace, the U.S. government continues its  support for Israel’s crimes as if it were the same country. The Israel Lobby and the government of Israel has for decades exerted a powerful control over U.S. Middle East policies and much more as well.  The Mossad has often worked closely under the aegis of the CIA together with Britain’s M16 to assassinate opponents and provoke war after war.

    Donald Rumsfeld, as a key long time insider to U.S. deep state operations, was surely aware of my list of known knowns.  He was just one of many such slick talkers involved in demonic U.S. operations that have always been justified, denied, or kept secret by him and his ilk.

    One does not have to be a criminologist to realize these things.  It is easy to imagine that Rumsfeld’s forlorn ghost is wandering since he went to his grave with his false “unknown unknowns” tucked away.

    When he said, “I could have said that the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, or vice-versa,” he did say it, of course.  Despite double-talkers like him, evidence of decades of U.S. propaganda is easy to see through if one is compelled by the will-to-truth.

    “Ancestral voices prophesying war; ancestral spirits in the danse macabre or war dance; Valhalla, ghostly warriors who kill each other and are reborn to fight again.  All warfare is ghostly, every army an exercitus feralis (army of ghosts), every soldier a living corpse.”  – Norman O. Brown

    Note:  If you think I too have no evidence, look at this for many of them.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • And, so, THAT Anniversary too is on my mind: 22 Years Ago, October 7, 2001, US-NATO Invaded Afghanistan: It Was Presented as “Act of Self Defense.” “America Was Attacked by an ‘Unnamed Foreign Power.’”

    World Water Monitoring Day | Ecovie Water Management

    From silly to serious, these national and international celebration days give pause for serious writers.

    World Suicide Prevention Day - LMFM

  • So, I’ve been excommunicated from Michael Shellenberger’s global anti-censorship movement. It’s my own fault. I was sowing dissension. I engaged in harmful speech in the group chat. I was making people feel uncomfortable. I was not playing ball. I was not with the program.

    The program, as you may recall, was launched in Westminster, London, in June, when Mike and Matt Taibbi and Russell Brand exposed the Censorship Industrial Complex …

    … for 35 pounds sterling a head.

    My readers may recall this piece I published about the secret gathering of journalists, authors, artists, academics, and activists that took place after that public event. I couldn’t say too much about it at the time, as we were operating under strict OPSEC protocols, and had taken oaths of silence, and so on, which, being excommunicated, I am no longer bound by. I’m still going to be a little cagey, however, as there are a lot of people involved in Mike’s movement who I like and respect, and I don’t want to harm them with my dissension-sowing any more than necessary.

    Also, before I make fun of Mike, and share my somewhat more serious thoughts about how not to launch “a free-speech movement,” I want to make it clear that I still support this campaign, and any other anti-censorship campaign, regardless of how flawed or supercilious it may be.

    All right, let’s get down to it, shall we?

    Mike’s movement is preparing to publish a declaration. It’s a good declaration. I contributed to it. I signed it, although my name will not appear on it now, as Mike has threatened to remove it if I published a piece like this. Mike is an extremely smart guy, but he doesn’t seem to get that I don’t respond well to threats … or, rather, that this is how I respond to threats. Or, who knows? Maybe he actually wanted me to publish this piece, and goaded me into it, which, I can see how that could be a shrewd PR move.

    In any event, it’s a good declaration (or it was the last time I had access to it). There is nothing wrong with the declaration. What has taken up most of the last three months of the coalition’s time and energy, and has led to my excommunication, is the hunt for Very Important Persons to be included as signatories when the declaration is released.

    Apparently, the way it works with such declarations and “open letters,” and so on, is that you write up your declaration or letter and then you try to get selected big shots to sign it in order to make it look more impressive to … well, whoever you’re trying to impress. The character of your big-shot signatories is critical, because the media, and “the court of public opinion,” and your potential major philanthropic backers, are going to judge you by the company you keep.

    Mike’s anti-censorship coalition has been carrying out this process by “consensus,” under the watchful eye and firm hand of Mike. Mike is not the “leader” of this coalition, which is totally leaderless and democratic, of course. He is just the “facilitator,” who explains the objectives, makes the final decisions, polices people’s speech, and excommunicates suppressive persons whose dissension-sowing threatens to disrupt the “atmosphere of mutual respect” that Mike feels he needs to “maintain” in the group chat.

    Yes, Mike has a little control-freak problem. Many non-leader leaders of “movements” do. If you’ve ever been involved in political activism, you know what I mean. If you haven’t, count your blessings.

    Anyway, the Hunt for VIP Signatories has been awkward, due to (a) the need to maintain the appearance of “decision-by-consensus” in the coalition’s totally non-hierarchical group chat, (b) concern among various coalition members about including “divisive” VIPs, and (c) Mike’s behind-the-scenes machinations.

    For example, at one point, I offered to contact one of the only VIPs I know to ask him for help with further VIP outreach. Mike jumped into the chat and quashed that idea, as I had made it clear that I was not willing to try to dictate to this Very Important Person who he should and shouldn’t reach out to for us. Days or weeks later — I can’t remember exactly — one of Mike’s employees wrote to me sub rosa and gave me the secret go-ahead from Mike. So, I reached out to this VIP, who then reached out to some other VIPs, many of whom were happy to sign, and some of whom offered to help with further outreach.

    Panic broke out at Coalition HQ. Some of the Very Important Persons that my Very Important Person had invited were potentially Divisive Persons, who hadn’t been vetted by consensus on the coalition’s VIP-vetting spreadsheet. (I kid you not, there’s an actual spreadsheet.) So, I was asked to reach out to my VIP and instruct him to cease and desist with further outreach before he reached out to further Divisive Persons, who might reach out to further Divisive Persons, at which point, everything might spin out of control! Needless to say, I declined to do that.

    If you’re wondering about exactly who qualifies as a “Divisive Person” in the coalition … well, certainly not Very Important Persons like Richard Dawkins, who in 2021 compared folks who “refused” the Covid “vaccines” to “faith-heads releasing rattlesnakes in supermarkets”…

    But later admitted that “mistakes may have been made”

    Or fanatical New Normalist Slavoj Žižek …

    You can watch Slavoj getting extremely worked up in support of Covid “vaccine” mandates, and mocking people who care about “silly” things like their personal bodily autonomy, with Briahna Joy Gray in 2021, if you think you have the stomach for it …


    VIPs like Dawkins and Žižek are not “divisive.” They are very important A-list persons who are committed to universal human rights, and freedom of speech, and all that kind of stuff, unless, of course, the authorities announce that they need to go full-blown totalitarian and lock down and segregate and censor everyone because of a virus with a 99.8% survival rate, in which case, you know, “Sieg fucking Heil!”

    Russell Brand, however, is definitely “divisive.” You remember Russell Brand from that poster above advertising the big event in London, don’t you? Here’s our friend Russell Brand today …

    The Russell-Brand-cancellation op was what sealed my fate with Mike’s free speech movement. I had been holding my nose for quite a while — for example, I never opposed having people like Dawkins and Žižek on the signatories list, as I understood the PR logic — and I was praying that none of the coalition members would bring up “the revelations” (as one of them put it), but the odds of that not happening were poor. Sure enough, someone brought Brand up, and someone checked, and he had been asked to sign on, but as of Saturday he hadn’t responded, at least not according to the VIP-vetting spreadsheet. So that was obviously a huge relief. However, what if he responded now (i.e., post-“revelations”) and wanted to sign? Should he still be allowed to? A “risk assessment” was suggested.

    And, OK, I got a little snarky and proposed that we skip the “risk assessment” and all the other PR-strategizing bullshit and just uphold the principles we are claiming to defend.

    Whereupon Mike Shellenberger needed to reach me, urgently, presumably to shout at me and threaten me again. I’d had an earlier such phone call from Mike, when I criticized his sucking up to Elon Musk and suggested that it made us look not quite neutral. Mike called me at home, apoplectic, that time, and threatened to kick me out of the club if I didn’t toe the line, which I found sort of funny, and a bit disturbing, but nothing I couldn’t handle. I have known a lot of control freaks in my day. And Mike has done, and is still doing, a lot of great work. And we all have our character flaws, don’t we?

    Anyway, I wasn’t in the mood for another screaming, threatening conversation with Mike, as I was still at my friend’s converted monastery in Italy, and I finally had a peaceful day to myself. (The Italian workmen who are jackhammering big holes in the monastery walls don’t work on the weekends.) I decided I would call him back later.

    Next thing I knew, I was excommunicated.

    I’m not a professional movement builder, but I’m pretty sure this is not how you do it. I don’t mean my excommunication. I mean the suffocating top-down micromanagement, and the PR-strategizing, and the VIP-idolatry, and the paranoia about alienating mainstream people who are going to be alienated anyway, regardless of how many Hollywood celebrities and Harvard professors you dangle in their faces. The simple fact is, playing by the rules of the system and the “reality” you claim to be opposing a recipe for failure. Or, worse than failure, a diversion, the simulation of success. Which is where I’m afraid Mike’s “movement” is headed.

    Movements are not PR campaigns. Yes, of course, some PR is involved, but the masses are not your employees. And they aren’t CGI extras in your narcissistic movie. They are actual living, breathing people, people who do not need us to lead them. Basically, the masses don’t give a shit what Richard Dawkins and Slavoj Žižek endorse. The editors of “respected” publications like The New Yorker and The New York Times give a shit, but the masses don’t give a shit about them. If you are going to “build a movement” to oppose the Censorship Industrial Complex (which Mike claims he wants to do), at some point, you’re going to have to alienate some of your friends and colleagues in NormalWorld and get your hands dirty and connect with the masses, or the “people that no one has ever heard of,” as Mike calls them.

    The people that no one has ever heard of are not stupid. They know the difference between a serious anti-censorship campaign and a vanity project. There’s still time for Mike to turn this thing around, let go of the reins, stop sucking up to the mainstream establishment, and reach out to the masses. Honestly, I hope he will. I wish him and the London gang success. There are millions of people out there who would get on board with a grassroots campaign opposing the Censorship Industrial Complex, but, to get them on board, you have to let go of the wheel and let them steer the ship.

    The irony is, when you’re “building a movement,” when you know you are succeeding is when you lose control of it, when the movement doesn’t need you to “lead” it, when it starts moving in directions you never imagined and starts doing things you never intended. But you can’t get there if you suffocate it in its infancy, if you are so obsessed with maintaining control that you snuff out every idea and impulse that doesn’t conform to your vision of it.

    Mike means well. He’s got a good heart. And he’s a fighter. All of which I respect. I hope he can learn that lesson, quickly. Perhaps the thing he has set in motion will teach it to him as things progress. We could certainly do with an actual global grassroots anti-censorship movement. I hope Mike and the gang can unclench their anal sphincters a bit and help get us there.

    Oh, and regarding Russell Brand. I don’t know Russell Brand. I have absolutely no idea what he has or hasn’t done. Neither do you, probably. Which is not the point. The point is the current global-capitalist crackdown on dissent, which is in full-swing. Russell Brand is just the latest head on a spike, alongside the heads of Assange, Snowden, Trump, Corbyn, Carlson, et al. They are greasing up a spike for Bobby Kennedy’s head, and the head of anyone else who challenges them, even people that no one has ever heard of, like me.

    I think Max Blumenthal made the point succinctly …

    … but, you know, Max is a Russian-sponsored, Covid-denying, conspiracy-theorizing, Trump-loving, transphobic, anti-Semitic Jew, who raped his neighbor’s hamster … or whatever. But then, who among us isn’t, these days?

  • Shefa Salem al-Baraesi (Libya), Drown on Dry Land, 2019.

    Three days before the Abu Mansur and Al Bilad dams collapsed in Wadi Derna, Libya, on the night of September 10, the poet Mustafa al-Trabelsi participated in a discussion at the Derna House of Culture about the neglect of basic infrastructure in his city. At the meeting, al-Trabelsi warned about the poor condition of the dams. As he wrote on Facebook that same day, over the past decade his beloved city has been ‘exposed to whipping and bombing, and then it was enclosed by a wall that had no door, leaving it shrouded in fear and depression’. Then, Storm Daniel picked up off the Mediterranean coast, dragged itself into Libya, and broke the dams. CCTV camera footage in the city’s Maghar neighbourhood showed the rapid advance of the floodwaters, powerful enough to destroy buildings and crush lives. A reported 70% of infrastructure and 95% of educational institutions have been damaged in the flood-affected areas. As of Wednesday 20 September, an estimated 4,000 to 11,000 people have died in the flood – among them the poet Mustafa al-Trabelsi, whose warnings over the years went unheeded – and another 10,000 are missing.

    Hisham Chkiouat, the aviation minister of Libya’s Government of National Stability (based in Sirte), visited Derna in the wake of the flood and told the BBC, ‘I was shocked by what I saw. It’s like a tsunami. A massive neighbourhood has been destroyed. There is a large number of victims, which is increasing each hour’. The Mediterranean Sea ate up this ancient city with roots in the Hellenistic period (326 BCE to 30 BCE). Hussein Swaydan, head of Derna’s Roads and Bridges Authority, said that the total area with ‘severe damage’ amounts to three million square metres. ‘The situation in this city’, he said, ‘is more than catastrophic’. Dr Margaret Harris of the World Health Organisation (WHO) said that the flood was of ‘epic proportions’. ‘There’s not been a storm like this in the region in living memory’, she said, ‘so it’s a great shock’.

    Howls of anguish across Libya morphed into anger at the devastation, which are now developing into demands for an investigation. But who will conduct this investigation: the Tripoli-based Government of National Unity, headed by Prime Minister Abdul Hamid Dbeibeh and officially recognised by the United Nations (UN), or the Government of National Stability, headed by Prime Minister Osama Hamada in Sirte? These two rival governments – which have been at war with each other for many years – have paralysed the politics of the country, whose state institutions were fatally damaged by North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) bombardment in 2011.

    Soad Abdel Rassoul (Egypt), My Last Meal, 2019.

    The divided state and its damaged institutions have been unable to properly provide for Libya’s population of nearly seven million in the oil-rich but now totally devastated country. Before the recent tragedy, the UN was already providing humanitarian aid for at least 300,000 Libyans, but, as a consequence of the floods, they estimate that at least 884,000 more people will require assistance. This number is certain to rise to at least 1.8 million. The WHO’s Dr Harris reports that some hospitals have been ‘wiped out’ and that vital medical supplies, including trauma kits and body bags, are needed. ‘The humanitarian needs are huge and much more beyond the abilities of the Libyan Red Crescent, and even beyond the abilities of the Government’, said Tamar Ramadan, head of the International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies delegation in Libya.

    The emphasis on the state’s limitations is not to be minimised. Similarly, the World Meteorological Organisation’s Secretary-General Petteri Taalas pointed out that although there was an unprecedented level of rainfall (414.1 mm in 24 hours, as recorded by one station), the collapse of state institutions contributed to the catastrophe. Taalas observed that Libya’s National Meteorological Centre has ‘major gaps in its observing systems. Its IT systems are not functioning well and there are chronic staff shortages. The National Meteorological Centre is trying to function, but its ability to do so is limited. The entire chain of disaster management and governance is disrupted’. Furthermore, he said, ‘[t]he fragmentation of the country’s disaster management and disaster response mechanisms, as well as deteriorating infrastructure, exacerbated the enormity of the challenges. The political situation is a driver of risk’.

    Faiza Ramadan (Libya), The Meeting, 2011.

    Abdel Moneim al-Arfi, a member of the Libyan Parliament (in the eastern section), joined his fellow lawmakers to call for an investigation into the causes of the disaster. In his statement, al-Arfi pointed to underlying problems with the post-2011 Libyan political class. In 2010, the year before the NATO war, the Libyan government had allocated money towards restoring the Wadi Derna dams (both built between 1973 and 1977). This project was supposed to be completed by a Turkish company, but the company left the country during the war. The project was never completed, and the money allocated for it vanished. According to al-Arfi, in 2020 engineers recommended that the dams be restored since they were no longer able to manage normal rainfall, but these recommendations were shelved. Money continued to disappear, and the work was simply not carried out.

    Impunity has defined Libya since the overthrow of the regime led by Muammar al-Gaddafi (1942–2011). In February–March 2011, newspapers from Gulf Arab states began to claim that the Libyan government’s forces were committing genocide against the people of Libya. The United Nations Security Council passed two resolutions: resolution 1970 (February 2011) to condemn the violence and establish an arms embargo on the country and resolution 1973 (March 2011) to allow member states to act ‘under Chapter VII of the United Nations Charter’, which would enable armed forces to establish a ceasefire and find a solution to the crisis. Led by France and the United States, NATO prevented an African Union delegation from following up on these resolutions and holding peace talks with all the parties in Libya. Western countries also ignored the meeting with five African heads of state in Addis Ababa in March 2011 where al-Gaddafi agreed to the ceasefire, a proposal he repeated during an African Union delegation to Tripoli in April. This was an unnecessary war that Western and Gulf Arab states used to wreak vengeance upon al-Gaddafi. The ghastly conflict turned Libya, which was ranked 53rd out of 169 countries on the 2010 Human Development Index (the highest ranking on the African continent), into a country marked by poor indicators of human development that is now significantly lower on any such list.

    Tewa Barnosa (Libya), War Love, 2016.

    Instead of allowing an African Union-led peace plan to take place, NATO began a bombardment of 9,600 strikes on Libyan targets, with special emphasis on state institutions. Later, when the UN asked NATO to account for the damage it had done, NATO’s legal advisor Peter Olson wrote that there was no need for an investigation, since ‘NATO did not deliberately target civilians and did not commit war crimes in Libya’. There was no interest in the wilful destruction of crucial Libyan state infrastructure, which has never been rebuilt and whose absence is key to understanding the carnage in Derna.

    NATO’s destruction of Libya set in motion a chain of events: the collapse of the Libyan state; the civil war, which continues to this day; the dispersal of Islamic radicals across northern Africa and into the Sahel region, whose decade-long destabilisation has resulted in a series of coups from Burkina Faso to Niger. This has subsequently created new migration routes toward Europe and led to the deaths of migrants in both the Sahara Desert and the Mediterranean Sea as well as an unprecedented scale of human trafficking operations in the region. Add to this list of dangers not only the deaths in Derna, and certainly the deaths from Storm Daniel, but also casualties of a war from which the Libyan people have never recovered.

    Najla Shawkat Fitouri (Libya), Sea Wounded, 2021.

    Just before the flood in Libya, an earthquake struck neighbouring Morocco’s High Atlas Mountains, wiping out villages such as Tenzirt and killing about 3,000 people. ‘I won’t help the earthquake’, wrote the Moroccan poet Ahmad Barakat (1960–1994); ‘I will always carry in my mouth the dust that destroyed the world’. It is as if tragedy decided to take titanic steps along the southern rim of the Mediterranean Sea last week.

    A tragic mood settled deep within the poet Mustafa al-Trabelsi. On 10 September, before being swept away by the flood waves, he wrote, ‘[w]e have only one another in this difficult situation. Let’s stand together until we drown’. But that mood was intercut with other feelings: frustration with the ‘twin Libyan fabric’, in his words, with one government in Tripoli and the other in Sirte; the divided populace; and the political detritus of an ongoing war over the broken body of the Libyan state. ‘Who said that Libya is not one?’, Al-Trabelsi lamented. Writing as the waters rose, Al-Trabelsi left behind a poem that is being read by refugees from his city and Libyans across the country, reminding them that the tragedy is not everything, that the goodness of people who come to each other’s aid is the ‘promise of help’, the hope of the future.

    The rain
    Exposes the drenched streets,
    the cheating contractor,
    and the failed state.
    It washes everything,
    bird wings
    and cats’ fur.
    Reminds the poor
    of their fragile roofs
    and ragged clothes.
    It awakens the valleys,
    shakes off their yawning dust
    and dry crusts.
    The rain
    a sign of goodness,
    a promise of help,
    an alarm bell.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Many have noted that the indictments of Trump ring of lawfare by the Biden administration. Donald Trump has now been indicted four times, and in blatant overkill, now faces 91 criminal charges. In New York alone  he was hit with 34 felonies for the payments to Stormy Daniels. Trump also faces felony charges for claiming the 2020 election was the byproduct of fraud and then seeking to invalidate the outcome of that election through allegedly unlawful means.

    These criminal cases rest on the assumption that Trump knew his claims of election fraud were false, making his actions to overturn the election an illegal conspiracy. However, what anti-Trumpers declare disinformation is what Trumpers and others consider their First Amendment free speech right to speak the truth. So far, the US has no official 1984-style Ministry of Truth or “science” that declares what is misinformation – though Biden sought to create one with the Nina Jankowicz Disinformation Governance Board.

    Trump challenged the election results in some states and asked officials there to find evidence of fraud. Later he asked Vice President Pence to reject the Electors from those states. A candidate in any election has the right to challenge the vote count. The Constitution presents some procedures for doing this, which Trump followed.

    Yet, in 2000, 2004, and particularly in 2016, when Democrats lost the election, they also challenged the final vote. The US clearly has undemocratic presidential elections, where winning the popular vote does not mean you win the election, a consequence of the Constitution giving us no right to vote for president.

    In 2000, the Supreme Court did intervene to stop the recount of votes for president in Florida that would have made Al Gore the president. In 2004, Democratic Senator Barbara Boxer and others objected to certifying the Ohio elector votes for Bush, which would make him the victor. In 2016, after the Hillary Clinton-CIA-FBI Russia collusion hoax – the biggest national security state hoax since their WMDs in Iraq – had failed to stop Trump, Democratic activists tried to convince electors to switch their votes from Trump. Two did. Some even received death threats if they voted for Trump. No one was charged with obstructing an official proceeding in either case.

    Trump stands accused of violating the Espionage Act, treason, by possessing classified documents in his private mansion – something we know Biden did as Vice President and Clinton did as Secretary of State. Trump – unlike Biden or Clinton at the time – was President of the United States, the highest official of the Executive Branch of the government. Even the American Bar Association states the President has “broad authority to formally declassify most documents.”

    Glenn Greenwald asked:

    What is it that Donald Trump did exactly that was illegal? He definitely sued in court multiple times and lost, which is absolutely his right to do. He told Mike Pence what he heard from his lawyers was Mike Pence’s ability to do, even if it wasn’t, which was act as that vice presidential role and reject as certified results, ones that he regarded had evidence of fraud and send them back to the states. He arranged for an alternative state of electors to be ready to be anointed in the event he could prove that there was a fraud. But what about this is criminal? Which of these steps is illegal?

    In Georgia state court Trump was charged with 13 felony conspiracy counts under their RICO anti-racketeering law used against mobsters. The law makes everyone who did anything as part of the conspiracy a full member of the criminal ring and equally responsible for crimes committed by others, as long as they were committed as part of the conspiracy. The prosecutor outlandishly claimed this conspiracy began one day after the 2020 election, when Trump gave a speech saying he won. This is criminalizing our First Amendment free speech rights.

    National Security State Lawfare to Fix 2024 Election for Biden

    The Biden administration is using the Department of Justice to eliminate his only serious challenger in the presidential race. This lawfare election fixing is unprecedented in US history, though presidents have been “elected” in underhanded ways, as in 1824, 1876, 1960, 2000. Even more ominously, this lawfare is being engineered by the national security state. They have opposed Trump since he first condemned US wars in the Middle East during the 2016 Republican primary debates, and called out the national security state hoax of weapons of mass destruction to instigate the war on Iraq.

    It now looks like the 2024 presidential election will not be decided by our vote, but by the national security state intervening beforehand to remove Biden’s most formidable challenger.

    Trump could have brought the same charges against Biden in 2020, when Biden, years after no longer holding a government position, had secret documents in his house. However, there would have been national outrage and popular mobilizations against “fascism” if Trump’s Department of Justice had indicted Biden for treason in the run-up to the election. But today, progressive people either approve of lawfare against Trump, or are silent.

    In 2020, during the Black Lives Matter mass protests, people called for defunding the police and prison network, and regarded prosecutors as covering for police brutality. Now, the left and liberals champion the prosecutors of Trump, not questioning their credibility. Greenwald noted, “They really have come to be a political movement that reveres institutions of power because they regard them as being their political allies.”

    Voters for Democrats now Trust the FBI and CIA

    A Gallup poll a year ago, before the indictments of Trump corroborates this: 79% of Democrat voters say the FBI is doing an excellent or good job; only 29% of Republican voters do. And 69% of Democratic voters say the CIA is doing a good job; only 38% of Republican voters do. We live in a different era from what we grew up in, even 20 years ago at the start of Bush’s war on Iraq. Now most Democrats like the CIA and FBI and most Republicans don’t. Now all the Democrats in Congress vote to continually fund the war in Ukraine, while only Republicans vote against.

    It’s a bygone era when Republicans were the war hawks and a wing of the Democrats were pro-peace. Unfortunately most leftists and progressives still live in that era.

    Today many who want to defend free speech, stop endless war, stop censorship, oppose the “deep state,” find a hearing with Trump Republicans, while the Democrats have become advocates of war and state censorship.

    Lawfare Indictments against Trump will be directed against us

    These lawfare charges to remove Trump from the presidential race, presented by the national security police agencies along with the Democratic Party and neo-con Republicans, will be used against viable future third parties. They will be a threat to our constitutional rights and our ability to organize against the 1%. Already, in part thanks to the absence of progressive outcry, the RICO law prosecution of Trump in Georgia is used against Stop Cop City protestors in Atlanta.

    We should protest the indictments against Trump and the harsh criminal sentences against his January 6 supporters because if the left would ever move off the sidelines and become a force, they will be subject to similar prosecutions, only in an even more draconian way. Working class forces who effectively take on the bosses will suffer the same treatment.

    McCarthyism of the Left

    Unfortunately, anti-Trump sentiment infects and blinds much of the left milieu. Very few oppose these national security police state attacks on Trump or the lawfare manipulation of the 2024 election. We protest the New York Times’ McCarthyite attack on anti-war activists, but McCarthyism also exists in the left, where people are baited, and fear being baited – not as Reds, but as Trump supporters often simply for not condemning him enough. Consequently, they either participate in Trumper-baiting themselves or are intimidated into not standing up to it. This left McCarthyism is widespread and functions to push people towards voting for the supposed “lesser evil” Democratic Party and towards defending the actions of the national security police state.

    We see this left McCarthyism with cheering the harsh sentences of January 6 defendants, most of who were non-violent. We see it in progressives’ not demanding answers for what the 100-200 undercover FBI and other police agency undercover agents in the crowd were actually doing that day. We see it in their not demanding answers about what the federal agents who had infiltrated the Proud Boys and other groups months before January 6 actually knew of January 6 plans. Stewart Rhodes, leader of the Oath Keepers, was in regular contact with the Secret Service for months prior to January 6. We see it in progressives’ failure to question the reasons behind the deliberate lack of defense of the Capitol. We see it in progressives not standing up for Rhodes and Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio, who were non-violent on January 6, and did not even enter the Capitol, but were given 18 and 22 years for a charge often used against radicals: “seditious conspiracy.” These sentences are precedents that will be used against us. But left McCarthyism, fear of being baited as soft on Trump, makes progressives keep their mouths shut.

    Unfortunately, as the Democratic Party shifted far to the right, and now is in open collusion with the FBI and CIA, becoming increasingly owned by the national security state, more and more of the left has capitulated to the identity politics ideology of that Party and the belief that it represents the “lesser evil” to Trump “fascism.” How far this left will degenerate, and how long until there is a national reaction to national security state fixing the 2024 election is unclear. The left is digging themselves into a hole, and giving the police state the opportunity to cover them up when they try to get out of it.

  • A key function of state-corporate media is to keep the public pacified, ignorant and ill-equipped to disrupt establishment power.

    Knowledge that sheds light on how the world operates politically and economically is kept to a minimum by the ‘mainstream’ media. George Orwell’s famous ‘memory hole’ from ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’ signifies the phenomenon brilliantly. Winston Smith’s work for the Ministry of Truth requires that he destroys documents that contradict state propaganda:

    When one knew that any document was due for destruction, or even when one saw a scrap of waste paper lying about, it was an automatic action to lift the flap of the nearest memory hole and drop it in, whereupon it would be whirled away on a current of warm air to the enormous furnaces which were hidden somewhere in the recesses of the building.

    — Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four, 1949, Penguin edition, 1982, p. 34

    The interests of power, hinging on the domination of an ignorant population, are robustly maintained:

    In this way every prediction made by the Party could be shown by documentary evidence to have been correct, nor was any item of news, or any expression of opinion, which conflicted with the needs of the moment, ever allowed to remain on record. All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as was necessary. In no case would it have been possible, once the deed was done, to prove that any falsification had taken place.

    — Ibid., p. 36

    As the Party slogan puts it:

    Who controls the past, controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.

    — Ibid., p. 31

    In today’s fictional ‘democracies’, the workings of propaganda are more subtle. Notably, there is a yawning chasm between the rhetoric of leaders’ professed concern for human rights, peace and democracy, and the realpolitik of empire, exploitation and control.

    As Declassified UK observed earlier this year, the UK has planned or executed over 40 attempts to remove foreign governments in 27 countries since the end of the Second World War. These have involved the intelligence agencies, covert and overt military interventions and assassinations. The British-led coup in Iran 70 years ago is perhaps the best-known example; but it was no anomaly.

    If we broaden the scope to British military interventions around the world since 1945, there are as many as 83 examples. These range from brutal colonial wars and covert operations to efforts to prop up favoured governments or to deter civil unrest, including British Guiana (now Guyana) in 1953, Egypt in the 1950s, Iraq in 2003 and Libya in 2011 (more on this below).

    The criminal history of the US in terms of overthrowing foreign governments, or attempting to do so, was thoroughly documented by William Blum, author of Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions since World War II and Rogue State: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower.

    These multiple invasions, coups and wars are routinely sold to the public as ‘humanitarian interventions’ by Western leaders and their propaganda allies of the ‘mainstream’ media.

    A Feted War Criminal

    Tony Blair, the arch British war criminal, is largely treated by the UK political and media classes as a wise elder statesman on domestic and world affairs. It sums up the way this country is run by a corrupt and blood-soaked establishment. Proving the point, the Financial Times recently tweeted:

    Sir Tony Blair is back. Once vilified as a “war criminal” by some in Labour, his influence within the party is growing again under Sir Keir Starmer. The FT speaks to the former UK premier: https://on.ft.com/3PDkIpE

    You’ve got to love the FT’s insistence on using ‘Sir’, as though that bestows some measure of respectability on a man who waged devastating wars of first resort in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Costs of War project, based at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, estimates that the total death toll in post-9/11 wars – including Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria and Yemen – could be at least 4.5-4.7 million. Blair is one of the Western leaders who shares complicity for this appalling death toll. That fact has been essentially thrown down the memory hole by propaganda outlets who welcome him with open arms.

    Former NATO Supreme Allied Commander Wesley Clark once explained how, following the 9/11 attacks, the US planned to ‘take out’ seven countries in five years: Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Iran. It is remarkable that this testimony, and compelling footage, has never been deemed credible evidence by ‘mainstream’ media.

    The notion that Blair was ‘once vilified’ as a war criminal – and let’s drop those quotation marks around ‘war criminal’ – as though that is no longer the case is ludicrous. In any case, what does the carefully selected word ‘vilify’ actually mean? According to the online Merriam-Webster dictionary, it can mean two things:

    • 1: to utter slanderous and abusive statements against: defame;
    • 2: to lower in estimation or importance.

    The FT would presumably like to implant in readers’ minds the idea that Blair has been unjustly accused of being a war criminal; that the suggestion is a slander. But Blair, along with Bush and the Cheney gang, was one of the chief accomplices behind the mass terrorist attack on Iraq in 2003. It was the ‘supreme international crime’, judged by the standards of the Nuremberg trials held after the Second World War.

    The accompanying FT photograph of a supposedly statesman-like ‘Sir’ Tony Blair was overlaid with a telling quote:

    [Britain’s] a country that is in a mess. We are not in good shape.

    Unmentioned is that Blair had a large part to play in creating today’s mess in Britain. Other than his great crimes in foreign affairs, he is an ardent supporter of the destructive economic system blandly titled ‘neoliberalism’. He continued along the path laid down by Tory leader Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s. Indeed, when Thatcher was once asked what she regarded as her greatest achievement, she replied: ‘Tony Blair and New Labour’.

    As for Blair, he has described Thatcher in glowing terms as ‘a towering political figure’ whose legacy will be felt worldwide. He added:

    I always thought my job was to build on some of the things she had done rather than reverse them.

    The current Labour leader, Sir Keir Starmer – another ‘Sir’ and stalwart of the establishment – is unashamedly casting himself as a Blairite figure. They have even appeared in public together to ‘bask in each other’s reflected glory’, as one political sketch writer noted.

    Jonathan Cook observed of Blair:

    It says everything that Sir Keir Starmer, the UK’s former director of public prosecutions, is actively seeking to rehabilitate him.

    That’s the same Starmer who helped smear his leftwing predecessor, Jeremy Corbyn.

    The ‘Unprovoked’ Invasion of Ukraine

    The mass-media memory hole is proving invaluable in protecting the public from uncomfortable truths about Ukraine. Western leaders’ expression of concern for Ukraine is cover for their desire to see Russian leader Vladimir Putin removed from power and Russia ‘weakened’, as US Secretary of Defence Lloyd Austin admitted earlier this year. Austin was previously a board member of Raytheon Technologies, a military contractor, stepping down with a cool sum of $2.7 million to join the Biden administration: yet another example of the ‘revolving door’ between government and the ‘defence’ sector.

    Australian political analyst Caitlin Johnstone noted recently that:

    Arguably the single most egregious display of war propaganda in the 21st century occurred last year, when the entire western political/media class began uniformly bleating the word “unprovoked” in reference to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

    Pointing out that the West ‘provoked’ Russia is not the same as saying that the Russian invasion of Ukraine was justified. In fact, we were clear in our first media alert following the invasion:

    Russia’s attack is a textbook example of “the supreme crime”, the waging of a war of aggression.

    As Noam Chomsky pointed out, the 2003 invasion of Iraq was totally unprovoked, but:

    nobody ever called it “the unprovoked invasion of Iraq.” In fact, I don’t know if the term was ever used; if it was, it was very marginal. Now you look it up on Google, and hundreds of thousands of hits. Every article that comes out has to talk about the unprovoked invasion of Ukraine. Why? Because they know perfectly well it was provoked. That doesn’t justify it, but it was massively provoked.’

    Bryce Greene, a media analyst with US-based Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR), observed that US policy makers regarded a war in Ukraine as a desirable objective:

    One 2019 study from the RAND Corporation—a think tank with close ties to the Pentagon—suggested that an effective way to overextend and unbalance Russia would be to increase military support for Ukraine, arguing that this could lead to a Russian invasion.

    The rationale was outlined in a Wall Street Journal opinion piece by John Deni of the Atlantic Council, a US think tank with close links to the White House and the arms industry, headlined “The Strategic Case for Risking War in Ukraine”. Greene summarised the logic:

    Provoking a war would allow the US to impose sanctions and fight a proxy war that would grind Russia down. Additionally, the anti-Russian sentiment that resulted from a war would strengthen NATO’s resolve.

    Greene added:

    The consensus among policymakers in Washington is to push for endless conflict, no matter how many Ukrainians die in the process. As long as Russia loses men and material, the effect on Ukraine is irrelevant. Ukrainian victory was never the goal.

    As Johnstone emphasised in her analysis:

    It’s just a welldocumented fact that the US and its allies provoked this war in a whole host of ways, from NATO expansion to backing regime change in Kyiv to playing along with aggressions against Donbass separatists to pouring weapons into Ukraine. There’s also an abundance of evidence that the US and its allies sabotaged a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine in the early weeks of the war in order to keep this conflict going as long as possible to hurt Russian interests.

    She continued:

    We know that western actions provoked the war in Ukraine because many western foreign policy experts spent years warning that western actions would provoke a war in Ukraine.

    But you will search in vain for substantive reporting of such salient facts and relevant history – see also this piece by FAIR – in ‘mainstream’ news media.

    A recent interview with the influential US economist and public policy analyst Jeffrey Sachs, former director of The Earth Institute at Columbia University, highlighted just how serious these media omissions are in trying to understand what is going on in Ukraine. In a superb 30-minute exposition, Sachs presented vital truths, not least that:

    I think the defining feature of American foreign policy is arrogance. And they can’t listen. They cannot hear red lines of any other country. They don’t believe they exist. The only red lines are American red lines.

    He was referring here to Russia’s red-line plea to the West not to continue expanding NATO right up to its borders; something, as mentioned above, Western foreign policy experts have been warning about for more than three decades. Would Washington ever allow a Russian sphere of influence to extend to US borders, with Mexico and Canada under the ‘evil spell’ of the Kremlin? Of course not.

    Sachs added:

    It’s pretty clear in early 2014 that regime change [in Ukraine] – and a typical kind of US covert regime change operation – was underway. And I say typical because scholarly studies have shown that, just during the Cold War period alone, there were 64 US covert regime change operations. It’s astounding.

    What is also astounding, but entirely predictable, is that any such discussion is impermissible in ‘respectable’ circles.

    Sachs described how the US reassured Ukraine after the Minsk II agreement in 2015, which was intended to bring peace to the Donbass region of Ukraine:

    Don’t worry about a thing. We’ve got your back. You’re going to join NATO.

    The role of Biden, then US Vice-President and now President, was to insist that:

    Ukraine will be part of NATO. We will increase armaments [to Ukraine].

    On 17 December 2021, Putin drafted a security agreement between Russia and the United States. Sachs read it and concluded that it was ‘absolutely negotiable’, adding:

    Not everything is going to be accepted, but the core of this is NATO should stop the enlargement so we don’t have a war.

    Sachs, who has long had high-level contacts within successive US administrations, then described an exchange he had over the telephone with the White House. ‘This war is avoidable’, he said. ‘Avoid this war, you don’t want a war on your watch.’

    But the White House was emphatic it would give no commitment to stop enlargement. Instead:

    No, no! NATO has an open-door policy [i.e. any country can supposedly join NATO.]

    Sachs responded:

    That’s a path to war and you know it. You’ve got to negotiate.

    Click. The White House hung up.

    Sachs told his interviewer:

    These people do not understand anything about diplomacy. Anything about reality. Their own diplomats have been telling them for 30 years this is a path to war.

    Sachs also related how Ukraine’s leader Volodymyr Zelensky was so taken aback when the Russian invasion began on 24 February 2022, that he started saying publicly, within just a few days, that Ukraine could be neutral; in other words, not join NATO. This was the essence of what Russia was seeking. But the Americans shut down that discussion, as Sachs went on to explain.

    By March 2022, Ukrainian and Russian officials were holding negotiations in Turkey. Meanwhile, Naftali Bennett, who was then Israel’s Prime Minister, was making progress in mediating between Zelensky and Putin, as he described during a long interview on his YouTube channel. But, ultimately, the US blocked the peace efforts. Sachs paraphrased Bennett’s explanation as to why:

    They [the US] wanted to look tough to China. They were worried that this could look weak to China.

    Incredible! The US’s primary concern is to look strong to China, its chief rival in world affairs. This recalls the motivation behind the US dropping atomic bombs on Japan at the end of the Second World War as a show of might to the Soviet Union.

    Infamously, Boris Johnson, then the British PM, travelled to Ukraine in April 2022, presumably under US directive, telling Zelensky not to negotiate with Russia.

    If we had truly democratic, impartial news media, all these facts would be widespread across national news outlets. BBC News correspondents would continually remind viewers and listeners how the West provoked Russia, then blocked peace efforts. Instead, the memory hole is doing its job – inconvenient facts are disappeared -and we are bombarded with wall-to-wall propaganda about Russia’s ‘unprovoked’ invasion of Ukraine.

    Libya: A Propaganda Masterclass

    The memory-hole phenomenon is a huge factor in media coverage of Libya which, as we wrote last week, has suffered terribly in recent flooding and the collapse of two dams. The city of Derna was washed into the sea after 40cm of rain fell in twenty-four hours, leaving 20,000 people dead.

    But vital recent history has been almost wholly buried by state-corporate media. In 2011, NATO’s attack on Libya essentially destroyed the state and killed an estimated 40,000 people. The nation, once one of Africa’s most advanced countries for health care and education, became a failed state, with the collapse of essential services, the re-emergence of slave markets and raging civil war.

    The massive bombing, heavily involving the UK and France, had been enthusiastically championed (see our 2011 media alerts here and here) by Western politicians and state-corporate media, including BBC News, as a ‘humanitarian intervention’ to get rid of an ‘autocratic dictator’, Colonel Muammar Gaddafi.

    The tipping point was the alleged threat of a massacre by Gaddafi’s forces in Benghazi. A senior government official serving under then Prime Minister, David Cameron, stated:

    There was a very strong feeling at the top of this government that Benghazi could very easily become the Srebrenica of our watch. The generation that has lived through Bosnia is not going to be the “pull up the drawbridge” generation.

    The reference was to the massacre of 8,000 Bosnian Muslims at Srebrenica in July 1995 by Bosnian Serb forces. The threat of something similar happening in Benghazi was a relentless theme across the airwaves and newspaper front pages. The Guardian, in line with the rest of the supposed ‘spectrum’ of British newspapers, promoted Cameron as a world-straddling statesman. The Arab Spring had ‘transformed the prime minister from a reluctant to a passionate interventionist.’ The paper dutifully helped his cause with sycophantic pieces such as the bizarrely titled, ‘David Cameron’s Libyan war: why the PM felt Gaddafi had to be stopped.’

    In August 2011, serial Guardian propagandist Andrew Rawnsley responded to NATO’s overthrow of the Libyan government:

    Libyans now have a chance to take the path of freedom, peace and prosperity, a chance they would have been denied were we to have walked on by when Muammar Gaddafi was planning his rivers of blood. Britain and her allies broadly got it right in Libya.

    The BBC’s John Humphrys opined that victory had delivered ‘a sort of moral glow.’ (BBC Radio 4 Today, 21 October 2011)

    There are myriad other examples from the Guardian and the rest of the ‘MSM’. The pathology of this propaganda blitz was starkly exposed by a 2016 report into the Libya war by the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee. The report summarised:

    The result was political and economic collapse, inter-militia and inter-tribal warfare, humanitarian and migrant crises, widespread human rights violations, the spread of Gaddafi regime weapons across the region and the growth of ISIL in North Africa.

    As for the alleged threat of a massacre by Gaddafi’s forces in Benghazi, the repeated rationale for the intervention, the report commented:

    the proposition that Muammar Gaddafi would have ordered the massacre of civilians in Benghazi was not supported by the available evidence…Gaddafi’s 40-year record of appalling human rights abuses did not include large-scale attacks on Libyan civilians.’ (Our emphasis)

    More on this, and the propaganda blitz that enabled NATO’s attack on Libya, can be found in our 2016 media alert, “The Great Libya War Fraud“.

    Behind the rhetoric about removing a dictator was, of course, the underlying factor of oil; as it so often is in the West’s imperial wars. In 2011, Real News interviewed Kevin G. Hall, the national economics correspondent for McClatchy Newspapers, who had studied WikiLeaked material on Libya. Hall said:

    As a matter of fact, we went through 251,000 [leaked] documents… Of those, a full 10 percent of them, a full 10 percent of those documents, reference in some way, shape, or form oil.’ (‘WikiLeaks reveals US wanted to keep Russia out of Libyan oil,’ The Real News, 11 May 2011)

    Hall concluded:

    It is all about oil.

    In 2022, Declassified UK reported that:

    British oil giants BP and Shell are returning to the oil-rich north African country just over a decade after the UK plunged it into chaos in its 2011 military intervention, which the British government never admitted was a war for oil.

    There were additional ‘benefits’ to the West. As WikiLeaks co-founder Julian Assange explained in an interview with John Pilger, Hillary Clinton intended to exploit the removal of Gaddafi as part of her corporate-funded bid to become US president. Clinton was then US Secretary of State under President Barack Obama:

    Libya’s war was, more than anyone else’s, Hillary Clinton’s war…who was the person who was championing it? Hillary Clinton. That’s documented throughout her emails [leaked emails published by WikiLeaks]’.

    Assange added:

    She perceived the removal of Gaddafi, and the overthrow of the Libyan state, something that she would use to run in the election for President.

    You may recall Clinton’s gleeful response to the brutal murder of Gaddafi:

    We came, we saw, he died.

    Also, as Assange pointed out, the destruction of the Libyan state generated a catastrophe of terrorism and a refugee crisis, with many drowning in their attempts to cross the Mediterranean to Europe:

    Jihadists moved in. ISIS moved in. That led to the European refugee and migrant crisis. Because, not only did you have people fleeing Libya, people then fleeing Syria, destabilisation of other African countries as the result of arms flows, the Libyan state itself was no longer able to control movement of people through it…. [Libya] had been effectively the cork in the bottle of Africa. So, all problems, economic problems, civil war in Africa – people previously fleeing those problems didn’t end up in Europe.

    Very little of the above vital history and context to the recent catastrophic flooding in Libya is included in current ‘mainstream’ news reporting. At best, there is token mention. At worst, there is deeply deceitful and cynical rewriting of history.

    A report on the Sky News website went about as far as is permissible in detailing the reality:

    Libyans are worn down by years and years of poor governance many of which date back to 2011 and the NATO-backed ousting of the country’s autocratic dictator Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, during the period which became known as the Arab Spring.

    Gaddafi was killed and the country dived into instability with rival armed militias vying for power and territory.

    An article for the BBC News Africa section gave an even briefer hint of the awful truth:

    Libya has been beset by chaos since forces backed by the West’s NATO military alliance overthrew long-serving ruler Col Muammar Gaddafi in October 2011.

    This was the only mention in the article of Western responsibility for the disaster. The shameful propaganda censorship was highlighted when the article was posted by the BBC Africa Twitter/X account. So many readers pointed out the glaring omissions that a Twitter/X warning of sorts appeared under the BBC’s tweet:

    Readers added context they thought people might want to know.

    Then:

    Due to NATO intervention in Libya, several problems such as the lack of a unified government, the re-emergence of slave markets and collapse of welfare services have made the country unable to cope with natural disasters.

    If such ‘context’ – actually, vital missing information – were to regularly appear under BBC tweets because of reader intervention, it would be a considerable public service; and a major embarrassment for the self-declared ‘world’s leading public service broadcaster’.

    A major reason for the appalling death toll in the Libyan city of Derna was that two dams had collapsed, sending 30 million cubic metres of water into the city in ‘tsunami-like waves’. These dams were built in the 1970s to protect the local population. A Turkish firm had been contracted in 2007 to maintain the dams. This work stopped after NATO’s 2011 bombing campaign. The Turkish firm left the country, their machinery was stolen and all work on the dams ended. This was mentioned briefly in a recent Guardian article, but NATO’s culpability was downplayed and it certainly did not generate the huge headlines across the ‘MSM’ that it warranted.

    Further crucial context was also blatantly flushed down the media’s memory hole: NATO had deliberately destroyed Libya’s water infrastructure in 2011. Investigative journalist Nafeez Ahmed reported in 2015:

    The military targeting of civilian infrastructure, especially of water supplies, is a war crime under the Geneva Conventions. Yet this is precisely what NATO did in Libya, while blaming the damage on Gaddafi himself.

    Ros Atkins, who has acquired a huge profile as an expert ‘explainer’, with the moniker ‘BBC News Analysis Editor’, narrated a video for the BBC News website ‘on the floods in Libya – and the years of crisis there too.’ Once again, NATO’s appalling role in the 2011 destruction of the country was glossed over. The BBC’s ‘explanation’ explained virtually nothing.

    Meanwhile, the Guardian ran a wretched editorial which is surely one of the worst Orwellian rewritings of history it has ever published:

    Vast fossil fuel reserves and regional security objectives have encouraged foreign powers to meddle in Libya.

    As noted above, that was emphatically not the story in 2011 when the Guardian propagandised tirelessly for ‘intervention’. The editorial continued:

    Libyans have good reason to feel that they have been failed by the international community as well as their own leaders.

    In fact, they were also failed by Guardian editors, senior staff, columnists and reporters who did so much to sell ‘Cameron’s war’ on Libya. Nowhere in the editorial is NATO even mentioned.

    And beneath this appalling, power-serving screed was a risible claim of reasons for supporting the Guardian:

    Our fearless, investigative journalism is a scrutinising force at a time when the rich and powerful are getting away with more and more, in Europe and beyond.

    This assertion is an audacious reversal of truth from one of the worst perpetrators of memory-hole journalism in the Western world.

  • Today, we are witnessing the nudging (manipulation) of the population to accept a ‘new normal’ based on a climate emergency narrative, restrictions on movement and travel, programmable digital money, ‘pandemic preparedness’ courtesy of the World Health Organization’s tyrannical pandemic treaty, unaccountable AI and synthetic ‘food’.

    Whether it involves a ‘food transition’, an ‘energy transition’, 15-minute cities or some other benign-sounding term, all this is to be determined by a supranational ‘stakeholder’ elite with ordinary people sidelined in the process. An undemocratic agenda designed to place restrictions on individual liberty, marking a dramatic shift towards authoritarianism.

    In the 1980s, to help legitimise the deregulation-privatisation neoliberal globalisation agenda, government and media instigated an ideological onslaught, driving home the primacy of ‘free enterprise’, individual rights and responsibility and emphasising a shift away from the role of the state, trade unions and the collective in society.

    We are currently seeing another ideological shift: individual rights and freedoms are said to undermine the wider needs of society and the planet – in a stark turnaround – personal freedom is now said to pose a threat to national security, public health or the climate.

    As in the 1980s, this messaging is being driven by an economic impulse. This time, the collapsing neoliberal project.

    In the UK, poverty is increasing in two-thirds of communities, food banks are now a necessary part of life for millions of people and living standards are plummeting. Indeed, the poorest families are enduring a ‘frightening’ collapse in living standards, resulting in life-changing and life-limiting poverty).

    In the US, around 30 million low-income people are on the edge of a ‘hunger cliff’ as a portion of their federal food assistance is taken away. In 2021, it was estimated that one in eight children were going hungry in the US. Small businesses are filing for bankruptcy in the US at a record rate.

    The Bank of England’s chief economist, Huw Pill, says that people should ‘accept’ being poorer. This is similar to the response of Rob Kapito, co-founder of the world’s biggest asset management firm, BlackRock. In 2022, the unimaginably rich and entitled Kapito said that a “very entitled” generation of (ordinary working) people who have never had to sacrifice would soon have to face shortages for the first time in their lives.

    While business as usual prevails in Kapito’s world of privilege and that of major arms, energy, pharmaceuticals and food companies, whose megarich owners continue to rake in massive profits, Kapito and Pill tell ordinary people to get used to poverty and the ‘new normal’ as if we are ‘all in it together’ – billionaires and working class alike. They conveniently use COVID and the situation in Ukraine as cover for the collapsing neoliberalism.

    But this is part of the hegemonic agenda that seeks to ensure that the establishment’s world view is the accepted cultural norm. And anyone who challenges this world view – whether it involves, for instance, questioning climate alarmism, the ‘new normal’, the nature of the economic crisis, the mainstream COVID narrative or the official stance on Ukraine and Russia – is regarded as a spreader of misinformation and the ‘enemy within’.

    Although the term ‘enemy within’ was popularised by Margaret Thatcher during the miners’ strike in 1984-85 to describe the striking miners, it is a notion with which that Britain’s rulers have regarded protest movements and uprisings down the centuries. From the Peasants’ Revolt in 1381 to the Levellers and Diggers in the 17th century, it is a concept associated with anyone or any group that challenges the existing social order and the interests of the ruling class.

    John Ball, a radical priest, addressed the Peasants’ Revolt rebels with the following words:

    Good friends, matters cannot go well in England until all things be held in common; when there shall be neither vassals nor lords; when the lords shall be no more masters than ourselves.

    The revolt was suppressed. John Ball was captured and hung, drawn and quartered. Part of the blood-soaked history of the British ruling class.

    Later on, the 17th-century Diggers movement wanted to create small, egalitarian rural communities and farm on common land that had been privatised by enclosures.

    The 1975 song ‘The world Turned Upside Down’ by Leon Rosselson commemorates the Diggers. His lyrics describe the aims and plight of the movement. In Rosselson’s words, the Diggers were dispossessed via theft and murder but reclaimed what was theirs only to be violently put down.

    Little surprise then that, in the 1980s, Margaret Thatcher used the state machinery to defeat the country’s most powerful trade union and the shock troops of the labour movement, the National Union of Mineworkers – ‘the enemy within’. She needed to do this to open the gates for capital to profit from the subsequent deindustrialisation of much of the UK and the dismantling of large parts of the welfare state.

    And the result?

    A hollowed-out, debt-bloated economy, the destruction of the social fabric of entire communities and the great financial Ponzi scheme – the ‘miracle’ of deregulated finance – that now teeters on the brink of collapse, leading the likes of Kapito and Pill to tell the public to get ready to become poor.

    And now, in 2023, the latest version of the ‘enemy within’ disseminates ‘misinformation’ – anything that challenges the official state-corporate narrative. So, this time, one goal is to have a fully controlled (censored) internet.

    For instance, US Special Operations Command (USSOCOM) recently awarded Accrete a contract for Argus to detect disinformation threats from social media. Argus is AI software that analyses social media data to predict emergent narratives and generate intelligence reports at a speed and scale to help neutralise viral disinformation threats.

    Accrete AI is a leading dual-use enterprise AI company. It deployed its AI Argus software for open-source threat detection with the US Department of Defense in 2022.

    In a recent press release, Prashant Bhuyan, founder and CEO of Accrete, boasts:

    Social media is widely recognised as an unregulated environment where adversaries routinely exploit reasoning vulnerabilities and manipulate behaviour through the intentional spread of disinformation. USSOCOM is at the tip of the spear in recognising the critical need to identify and analytically predict social media narratives at an embryonic stage before those narratives evolve and gain traction. Accrete is proud to support USSOCOM’s mission.”

    ‍This is about predicting wrong think on social media. But control over the internet is just part of a wider programme of establishment domination, surveillance and dealing with protest and dissent.

    The recent online article ‘How the Government Weaponizes Surveillance to Silence Its Critics’ notes that, on any given day, the average person in the US is monitored, spied on and tracked in more than 20 different ways.

    The authors of the article ask us to consider some of the ways the US government is weaponizing its surveillance technologies to flag citizens as a threat to national security, whether or not they have done anything wrong – from flagging citizens as a danger based on their feelings, phone and movements to their spending activities, social media activities, political views and correspondence.

    The elite has determined that the existential threat is you. The article ‘Costs of War: Peterloo’, written by UK Veterans for Peace member Aly Renwick, details the history of the brutal suppression of protesters by Britain’s rulers. He also strips away any notion that some may have of a benign, present-day ruling elite with democratic leanings. The leopard has not changed its spots.

    As we saw during COVID, the thinking is that hard-won rights must be curtailed, freedom of association is reckless, free thinking is dangerous, dissent is to be stamped on, impartial science is a threat and free speech is deadly. Government is ‘the truth’, Fauci (or some similar figure) is ‘the science’ and censorship is for your own good.

    None of this was justified. It only begins to make sense if we regard the COVID restrictions in terms of trying to deal with an economic crisis by closing down the global economy under cover of a public health crisis (see the online articles ‘What Was Covid Really About? Triggering a Multi-Trillion Dollar Global Debt Crisis’ and ‘Italy 2020: Inside Covid’s Ground Zero’ which outline how COVID policies can be explained by economic factors not health concerns).

    The economic crisis is making many people poorer, so they must be controlled, monitored and subjugated.

    The transitions mentioned at the start of this article along with the surveillance agenda (together known as the ‘Great Reset’) are being accelerated at this time of economic crisis when countless millions across the West are being impoverished. The collapsing financial system is resulting in an interrelated global debt, inflation and ‘austerity’ crisis and the biggest transfer of wealth to the rich in history.

    As a result, the powers that be fear that the masses might once again pick up their pitchforks and revolt. They are adamant that the peasants must know their place.

    But the flame of protest and dissent from centuries past still inspires and burns bright. So, with that in mind, let’s finish with Leon Rosselson’s lyrics in reference to the Diggers movement (Billy Bragg’s version of the song can be found on YouTube):

    In sixteen forty-nine
    To St. George’s Hill
    A ragged band they called the Diggers
    Came to show the people’s will
    They defied the landlords
    They defied the laws
    They were the dispossessed reclaiming what was theirs

    We come in peace they said
    To dig and sow
    We come to work the lands in common
    And to make the waste grounds grow
    This earth divided
    We will makе whole
    So it will be
    A common treasury for all

    Thе sin of property
    We do disdain
    No man has any right to buy and sell
    The earth for private gain
    By theft and murder
    They took the land
    Now everywhere the walls
    Spring up at their command

    They make the laws
    To chain us well
    The clergy dazzle us with heaven
    Or they damn us into hell
    We will not worship
    The God they serve
    The God of greed who feed the rich
    While poor man starve

    We work we eat together
    We need no swords
    We will not bow to masters
    Or pay rent to the lords
    We are free men
    Though we are poor
    You Diggers all stand up for glory
    Stand up now

    From the men of property
    The orders came
    They sent the hired men and troopers
    To wipe out the Diggers’ claim
    Tear down their cottages
    Destroy their corn
    They were dispersed
    Only the vision lingers on

    You poor take courage
    You rich take care
    The earth was made a common treasury
    For everyone to share
    All things in common
    All people one
    We come in peace
    The order came to cut them down
    We come in peace
    The order came to cut them down

  • The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.

    — H.L. Mencken, In Defence of Women, 1918

    First came 9/11, which the government used to transform itself into a police state.

    Then the COVID-19 pandemic hit, which the police state used to test out its lockdown powers.

    In light of the government’s tendency to exploit crises (legitimate or manufactured) and capitalize on the nation’s heightened emotions, confusion and fear as a means of extending the reach of the police state, one has to wonder what so-called crisis it will declare next.

    It’s a simple enough formula: first, you create fear, then you capitalize on it by seizing power.

    Frankly, it doesn’t even matter what the nature of the next national emergency might be (terrorism, civil unrest, economic collapse, a health scare, or the environment) as long as it allows the government to lockdown the nation and justify all manner of tyranny in the so-called name of national security.

    Cue the Emergency State.

    Terrorist attacks, mass shootings, “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”: the government has been anticipating and preparing for such crises for years now.

    As David C. Unger writes for the New York Times:

    Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness have given way to permanent crisis management: to policing the planet and fighting preventative wars of ideological containment, usually on terrain chosen by, and favorable to, our enemies. Limited government and constitutional accountability have been shouldered aside by the kind of imperial presidency our constitutional system was explicitly designed to prevent.”

    Here’s what we know: given the rate at which the government keeps devising new ways to establish itself as the “solution” to all of our worldly problems at taxpayer expense, each subsequent crisis ushers in ever larger expansions of government power and less individual liberty.

    This is the slippery slope to outright tyranny.

    You see, once the government acquires (and uses) authoritarian powers—to spy on its citizens, to carry out surveillance, to transform its police forces into extensions of the military, to seize taxpayer funds, to wage endless wars, to censor and silence dissidents, to identify potential troublemakers, to detain citizens without due process—it does not voluntarily relinquish them.

    The lesson for the ages is this: once any government is allowed to overreach and expand its powers, it’s almost impossible to put the genie back in the bottle. As Harvard constitutional law professor Laurence Tribe recognizes, “The dictatorial hunger for power is insatiable.

    Indeed, the history of the United States is a testament to the old adage that liberty decreases as government (and government bureaucracy) grows. To put it another way, as government expands, liberty contracts.

    In this way, every crisis since the nation’s early beginnings has become a make-work opportunity for the government.

    Each crisis has also been a test to see how far “we the people” would allow the government to sidestep the Constitution in the so-called name of national security; a test to see how well we have assimilated the government’s lessons in compliance, fear and police state tactics; a test to see how quickly we’ll march in lockstep with the government’s dictates, no questions asked; and a test to see how little resistance we offer up to the government’s power grabs when made in the name of national security.

    Most critically of all, it has been a test to see whether the Constitution—and our commitment to the principles enshrined in the Bill of Rights—could survive a national crisis and true state of emergency.

    Unfortunately, we’ve been failing this particular test for a long time now.

    Indeed, the powers-that-be have been pushing our buttons and herding us along like so much cattle since World War II, at least, starting with the Japanese attacks on Pearl Harbor, which not only propelled the U.S. into World War II but also unified the American people in their opposition to a common enemy.

    That fear of attack by foreign threats, conveniently torqued by the growing military industrial complex, in turn gave rise to the Cold War era’s “Red Scare.” Promulgated through government propaganda, paranoia and manipulation, anti-Communist sentiments boiled over into a mass hysteria that viewed anyone and everyone as suspect: your friends, the next-door neighbor, even your family members could be a Communist subversive.

    This hysteria, which culminated in hearings before the House Un-American Activities Committee, where hundreds of Americans were called before Congress to testify about their so-called Communist affiliations and intimidated into making false confessions, also paved the way for the rise of an all-knowing, all-seeing governmental surveillance state.

    By the time 9/11 rolled around, all George W. Bush had to do was claim the country was being invaded by terrorists, and the government used the USA Patriot Act to claim greater powers to spy, search, detain and arrest American citizens in order to keep America safe.

    By way of the National Defense Authorization Act, Barack Obama continued Bush’s trend of undermining the Constitution, going so far as to give the military the power to strip Americans of their constitutional rights, label them extremists, and detain them indefinitely without trial, all in the name of keeping America safe.

    Despite the fact that the breadth of the military’s power to detain American citizens violates not only U.S. law and the Constitution but also international laws, the government has refused to relinquish its detention powers made possible by the NDAA.

    Then Donald Trump took office, claiming the country was being invaded by dangerous immigrants and insisting that the only way to keep America safe was to expand the reach of the border police, empower the military to “assist” with border control, and essentially turn the country into a Constitution-free zone.

    That so-called immigration crisis then morphed into multiple crises (domestic extremism, the COVID-19 pandemic, race wars, civil unrest, etc.) that the government has been eager to use in order to expand its powers.

    Joe Biden, in turn, has made every effort to expand the reach of the militarized police state, pledging to hire 87,000 more IRS agents and 100,000 police officers, and allowing the FBI to operate as standing army.

    What the next crisis will be is anyone’s guess, but you can be sure that there will be a next crisis.

    So, what should you expect if the government decides to declare another state of emergency and institutes a nationwide lockdown?

    You should expect more of the same, only worse.

    More compliance, less resistance.

    More fear-mongering, mind-control tactics and less tolerance for those who question the government’s propaganda-driven narratives.

    Most of all, you should expect more tyranny and less freedom.

    Given the government’s past track record and its long-anticipated plans for using armed forces to solve domestic political and social problems in response to a future crisis, there’s every reason to worry about what comes next.

    Mark my words: as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, if and when another crisis arises—if and when a nationwide lockdown finally hits—if and when martial law is enacted with little real outcry or resistance from the public— then we will truly understand the extent to which the powers-that-be have fully succeeded in acclimating us to a state of affairs in which the government has all the power and “we the people” have none.

    In the meantime, if all we do to reclaim our freedoms and regain control over our runaway government is vote for yet another puppet of the Deep State, by the time the next crisis arises, it may well be too late.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Many an artist have understandably taken stabs, with varying degrees of skill and success, at indicting capitalism and all its execrable effects. Rebecca Harding Davis’ short story, or novella, if you like, Life in the Iron Mills (1861), is one of the first, certainly one of the best and, given its mastery, one of the most overlooked.

    A cloudy day: do you know what that is in a town of iron-works?

    Thus we’re addressed by the narrator of Life … It’s the story’s opening line, and it serves to prepare the reader for exposure to an alien environment. Namely, the type inhabited by mill-hands in the middle of the nineteenth century. We’ll be led by Davis, in other words, down a steep descent into hell—a starkly real and graphic one that sticks in the mind long after the story’s bleak ending.

    In her memoirs, Davis argued that a writer’s responsibility is to offer “not the story of his own life, but of the time in which he lived,— as he saw it,— its creed, its purpose, its queer habits, and the work which it did or left undone in the world.”

    This sums up her approach to Life …—socially and aesthetically. We have here, after all, a seminal work of narrative art widely credited with heralding the realist tradition in American literature. It was Davis’ response to — and rejection of — romanticism; it helped usher in a new tack for American literary artists: authentic, corporeal, often brutal portraits of life as experienced by the rank and file of humanity.

    Returning to that opening line, it also constitutes a warning. Cloudy days are dreary, but have you viewed one from the perspective of an antebellum mill-hand? Through Davis’ language we see it with vividness. Take this description, from the third paragraph:

    Masses of men, with dull, besotted faces bent to the ground, sharpened here and there by pain or cunning; skin and muscle and flesh begrimed with smoke and ashes; stooping all night over boiling cauldrons of metal, laired by day in dens of drunkenness and infamy; breathing from infancy to death an air saturated with fog and grease and soot, vileness for soul and body.

    And here’s another excerpt, an extension of that warning issued by the first line:

    Stop a moment. I am going to be honest. This is what I want you to do. I want you to hide your disgust, take no heed to your clean clothes, and come right down with me,—here, into the thickest of the fog and mud and foul effluvia. I want you to hear this story. There is a secret down here, in this nightmare fog, that has lain dumb for centuries: I want to make it a real thing to you.

    You can see from those samples that there’s no space for the sublime in Davis’ vision. What we meet with when we go down into the “nightmare fog” is Dickens minus the levity, coincidence and cheery ending, plus a tougher style that anticipated Twain, Crane, Sinclair and London, through to Dos Passos, Hemingway and the other modernists, from whom today’s literature chiefly derives.

    To drive this point home, and at the risk of sounding like a broken record, I’ll note that Life… prefigured The Jungle by forty-five years and The Grapes of Wrath (a much overrated book, incidentally) by seventy-eight. Think of it as the American realist equivalent of the Epic of Gilgamesh.

    As to plot, Life … tells of the fall, and further fall, of Hugh Wolfe, an impoverished mill-hand who happens to be a genius sculptor. Using “the refuse from the ore after the pig-metal is run,” he “had a habit of chipping and moulding figures,—hideous, fantastic enough, but sometimes strangely beautiful …”

    Notably, there is no thought behind Hugh’s art; only feeling. His sculptures function as a sort of surrogate language, articulating what he can’t express through words.

    Hugh’s lot in life is a mystery to him. The circumstances underpinning his own misery escape his understanding. It isn’t until five wealthy men (including the mill-owner’s son) visit the mill, touring it as they might a zoo, that Hugh is made to appreciate the extraordinary power of money. Armed with this revelation, he enacts a small rebellion, which the system promptly crushes without mercy.

    Its not so much its themes as the uncompromising fashion in which Davis presents them that places Life … among the most searing indictments of capitalism ever written. Which is to say nothing of the exquisite quality of Davis’ prose.

    One last point. As a rule, overtly political art, aka propaganda, is a drag. It is, after all, the artist’s province to show us something; it is not his or her province to tell us how to feel about that something. Leave that to the clergy.

    There are exceptions, though. Some writers manage to have it both ways. Orwell is perhaps the most obvious example. These authors get away with their didacticism because what they show is so repellent that it can only be construed, by a balanced mind, in one direction—yet they’re throwing original light onto a universal truth about the human experience, with emotional resonance and inimitable style.

    Rebecca Harding Davis was one of those rare authors, and Life in the Iron Mills is her proof.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • It’s been well over a year now since the health scare dubbed the Covid-19 pandemic has had any widespread impact upon the lives of the vast majority of humanity. Since the “fog of war” has lifted, so to speak, there has been very little introspection regarding the knee-jerk authoritarianism imposed upon humanity in the liberal press or mainstream academia. Eerie parallels connect the panic stirred up during the health crisis with the reaction to 9/11. There is also plenty of circumstantial evidence of prior knowledge and pre-planning for both of these events. In their wake, mass hysteria, government propaganda, tyranny, censorship, and irrational belief systems spawned out of each, supported by ruling class interests and mass media mouthpieces.

    Although many policies related to the global war on terror and the pandemic certainly have fascistic and totalitarian impulses, there are key differences. Whereas the fascist and totalitarian rely on a single despot, and the marginalization of minority groups, postmodern tyranny operates according to the flows of late capitalism: diversity and inclusion are encouraged; power is spread through a corporate oligarchy, as well as political, military, and now medical hierarchies; and devastating economic and social effects are engendered by “absent causes”; i.e., abstract engines of capital: stock fluctuations, algorithms, financial instruments and various Finance/Insurance/Real Estate (FIRE) sector bubbles and scams. The public is predictably bewildered by a revolving cast of bureaucrats and elites with varying amounts of sociopathic and narcissistic traits; however, the personal attributes of the cast members are extraneous to capital accumulation, imperialism, and the liquidation of nature. It is fine to use phrases like fascist or totalitarian in response to government policies for rhetorical effect; however, most Americans do not feel that way or use that terminology, which harkens back to a simpler era of boot stamping. We are rather enmeshed in a dictatorship of capital.

    A related aspect of what we may call postmodern tyranny is the absence of metanarratives. The establishment props up whatever narrative suits their interest in the moment, but is able to cast them off at the first serious grumblings from the public. From about 2001-2011, the global war on terror dominated; from 2011-2016, it was “regime change” in Syria and Libya with a little ISIS and feigned horror at Russia taking Crimea sprinkled in; from 2016-2020, the overblown Russiagate connection; from 2020-2022, Covid-19; and now the Ukraine-Russia war, in which we are told NATO and the US are completely innocent allies who did not start, provoke, and manipulate the geopolitical chessboard going back decades, and who only want to assist the helpless Ukrainians.

    Yet after two years of being subjected to the tyrannical orders of an authoritarian medical panic orchestrated by the ruling classes, transnational political puppets, as well as the establishment medical “experts” who espoused fraudulent and laughable claims over and over, people worldwide are waking up to the health scare as well as the US proxy war in Ukraine. There are many striking similarities between the 9/11 false flag attack and the Covid-19 global health freak-out. Both events led to mass hysteria and a globalized form of ostrich syndrome, where denial and collective hallucination became the norm, paving the way for deeper imperial tyranny and mass obedience. Recently, many who supported government policies and narratives including lockdowns, travel bans, vaccine mandates, and health passports are asking for “Pandemic Amnesty” regarding their panic-inducing and tyrannical behavior; and admitting they were dead wrong, even as they championed ridiculous and deadly policies and demonized anyone who tried to stand in their way.

    Revisiting the “Catalyst”

    The parallels between government reactions to 9/11 and the Sars-CoV-2 pandemic are uncanny. Prior to 9/11, a sizable chunk of US citizens would not have put up with domestic mass surveillance. Similarly, prior to the health crisis of 2020, populations would have been very skeptical of mandatory lockdowns, absurd masking rules, and coercive vaccine mandates and propaganda; as well as blocking off access to travel, public spaces, and businesses with vaccine passports. Most interpret this as government exploiting a crisis, rather than governments’ prior knowledge and pre-planning of the events. However, from the start, the ready-made, manufactured hysteria and propaganda suggests a collusion of military-intelligence, industrial, financial, and medical forces of industry and government.

    The economic indicators had been blinking red for months before even January of 2020, going back to the repo crisis of September 2019. Quoting an investor in CNBC from March 2020:

    The virus was the catalyst but it’s not the cause,’ said Christopher Whalen, founder of Whalen Global Advisors. ‘Both bonds and equities were inflated rather dramatically by our friends at the Fed. You’re seeing the end game for monetary policy here, which is at a certain point you have to stop. Otherwise you get grotesque asset bubbles like we saw, and the engine just runs out of fuel.’ [Emphasis mine]

    Reuters concurs, with a major figure at the Fed blurting the quiet part out loud: “Pandemic aid was also ‘banking bailout‘”. The liberal/left site The Intercept sums up the game quite well, explaining that the CARES Act of March 2020 allows for:

    Direct purchases of corporate debt — the first nongovernment bond-buying in the Fed’s history — would now be allowed. Companies have swelled their borrowing in recent years, and experts have identified this as a source of serious economic risk. A sudden shock like the pandemic that wiped out revenues would not only cause bankruptcies, but also accelerate bond defaults, broadening stress throughout the financial system.

    Further on in the piece, the author notes how the CARES Act calls for an “Exchange Stabilization Fund”. Worth 454 billion, the money is leveraged just like a major bank, allowing for:

    A $4.5 trillion slush fund would be created, equity markets ballooned. The total value of the stock market cratered to 103 percent of GDP, about $21.8 trillion, on March 23. By April 30 it was back to 136.3 percent of GDP, or $28.9 trillion. By that metric, $7.1 trillion in stock market wealth has been created in that period.

    In other words, the US saw the writing on the wall coming from China: the economic slowdown and shuttering of factories which began in January 2020 was finally affecting the US stock market, which had cratered by mid-March 2020. Only the exaggeration of a pandemic, a sloughing off of millions of jobs, and new spigots opening for the banking sector, would allow for corporations to maintain profitability. Debt restructuring was inevitable and the only way to accomplish this was to railroad legislation through Congress, not a difficult task considering our lawmakers are essentially lobbyists for major multinational corporations. Large companies got billions in aid while workers and small businesses fell into ruin.

    Once the medical agenda was set, panic set in, and it turns out overcrowding nursing homes, firing one million medical workers and 40 million total US workers, blaring apocalyptic propaganda non-stop, censoring any talk of vitamin and supplement use, imposing stressful lockdowns, and turning patients away from doctors can have an effect on worldwide mortality. Hardly anyone in the medical community was willing to confront those inconvenient truths, and those that did were censored further.

    It was known very soon after March 2020 what the infection fatality rate would be: a very low percentage, perhaps twice the rate from seasonal influenza. World elites did not care- they had an agenda in hand.  Regardless of the seriousness, capitalist elites wouldn’t have put 40 million Americans out of work and imploded the economy without a plan. And they had one ready-made: a 5 trillion dollar plan. Later on, US elites would not have advocated for coercive vaccine mandates – get the shot or lose your job – unless the word came down from the very highest echelons of the elite, and although many, if not most, of the establishment bought it wholesale, it’s clear that the federal government was not going to leave states to make decisions based off the inputs of local county and state health officials. The word came down from on high; there certainly was obvious collusion to centralize and organize the Covid dogma, yes, a “conspiracy”, because asking the public to “trust the science” only takes you so far when conflicting and contradictory data about the danger of the virus is staring them right in the face.

    Given the unreliability of the initial tests for Sars-CoV-2, the deliberate use of too many PCR cycles per test, and the simple fact that it’s quite probable that multiple benign strains and variants of coronaviruses resulted in positive tests, it’s easy to see how a global pandemic was manufactured at the outset. From the very beginning, government propaganda emanating from the medical, military, and intelligence establishments were obviously coordinated, centralized, and directed to coerce and cow citizens into submission to a globalized, medical cult. Local and national news all parroted the same line, and a global groupthink biosecurity agenda was pushed to the forefront of society. It’s important to remember that before the declared emergency, to “quarantine” involved restricting access to the sick, not the whole of society.

    The language was not only Orwellian, but was written from scripts in the Department of Defense and Intelligence community. We were told to “shelter in place”, and doctors and nurses were on the “frontlines” of the fight. These were certainly designed to conjure images of war and create an impassioned atmosphere where dissent was marginalized, repeating the lockstep ideological conformity that occurred after 9/11. Phrases like social distancing and contact tracing entered the lexicon with barely a grumble. Hilariously, after more than a year of putting up with absurd and ever-changing laws, Britain toyed with the idea of offering its citizens “Freedom Passes” for those compliant enough to test frequently, their reward being the “freedom” to leave their own home.

    Canadian and British reporting confirms the unethical propaganda to coerce, scare, and guilt-trip civilian populations. One UK psychologist dubbed their government program “totalitarian”. Every mainstream news outlet in the US from March 2020 to February 2022 resembled a liberal version of the Sinclair broadcasting scandal from 2018, where the media conglomerate, which has a known right-wing bias, made 193 local news anchors repeat the same minute-long script, word-for-word, warning of “false news” and “fake stories” proliferating on social media and mainstream news, echoing Trump’s rhetoric at the time.

    Natural immunity was scoffed at, gathering in public was outlawed, visitors to households were forbidden, a vaccine was deemed to be the only response to the threat, and even health advocates who gave common-sense reminders to take vitamins and supplements were derided as unserious crackpots.

    A pertinent question to think about is this: given the uptick in supposed deaths from Sars-CoV-2 around March 2020, was a global upheaval of lockdowns, travel restrictions, limited movement outside one’s home, and caps on gatherings justified? With hindsight, many if not the majority of Americans now say no. However, the fact remains that many astute observers were calling the bluff of the World Health Organization, the CDC, and the medical and national security establishments from the beginning. Those voices were censored and silenced by a corporatist oligarchy bent on imposing pain on small business and the average citizen. Millions lost their livelihoods and small businesses never recovered.

    Another related question: how and why was the medical establishment so driven to combat an acute health threat caused by the virus Sars-CoV-2, but lies dormant when global poverty is clearly the number one cause of death in the world, followed by cancer and heart disease? We were led to believe the world could be turned upside down to fight a virus, yet nothing can be done to alleviate the leading causes of death, poverty: structural, chronic health issues are off the table, as they are caused by capitalism’s inexorable drive to profit, pollute, and impoverish the majority of the Earth’s inhabitants.

    Even the WHO admits that ¼ of total deaths today are attributable to “unhealthy environments”; i.e., conditions of extreme poverty, preventable disease, starvation, and malnutrition. In 2012 that was 12.6 million deaths per year, but the total is undoubtedly higher today, probably about 20 million.  The WHO also concedes about 2 million people in China alone die from air pollution every year, with about 6.7 million deaths per year worldwide. Where is the outcry and global mobilization to stop these much deadlier problems?

    Could there have been a more rational path, where people over the age of say, 60 or 65, the most likely to be affected, could have been shielded with voluntary plans to restrict interpersonal contact, as well as given access to the best care and medicine, while the rest of the world would be allowed to carry on without draconian measures? Surely medical professionals in the US could have developed a plan in conjunction with governments which allowed for freedom of movement, as in Sweden and Japan. The path, however, was blocked by the national security state in conjunction with unelected health authorities, Big Tech, Big Pharma, and global capitalists eager to institute repressive measures and rake in trillions from a restructuring of the world economy. The global economy needed a “Great Reset” to centralize and buy-up small businesses for pennies on the dollar, and the financial system was reeling going back to September of 2019. Disturbingly, this sequence of events is reminiscent of the last time the national security state remade the world, after 9/11.

    The Mask Comes Off

    Many leftists pointed out that the work stoppage from the lockdowns would allow us time to reflect on the inhumanity, overproduction, alienation, and exploitation inherent to capitalism. No doubt this was true. What most overlooked, however, was the ridiculousness of having the poor and working classes keep on working while the remote-working, white-collar privileged classes were offered a respite from the grind of work culture. There was, and is, an inherent inequality and power imbalance in having restaurants and drivers deliver packages and food to one’s doorstep while chastising those same people who refused to mask (even outdoors, absurdly).

    The middle and upper class guilty pleasures of living in a consumerist society cocooned at home with streaming TV and take-out overwhelmed the need for solidarity with the poor and working classes, who were in many cases unable and unwilling to shelter or get an experimental injection from a government that has treated the poor and minorities as human guinea pigs or worse for the entirety of its history.

    The felt need for security against an acute contagion, while resisting to grapple with the complexities and culpability of being part of a global-imperial-capitalist death machine, epitomized the Western Left position. Other than the obvious responses: “This is why we need universal health care!” etc., there was barely anyone talking about the number one cause of real pandemics: our proximity to inhumane and unsanitary animal agriculture. The collective, fear-based knee-jerk response was to inhumanely slaughter tens of millions of animals: estimates suggest more than 10 million hens, perhaps 5-10 million pigs, and 17 million mink were killed due to “overproduction”, and in the case of mink, to the possibility of the spread of Sars-CoV-2.

    A Brief Recap of our 21st Century Dystopia

    Twenty three years ago, many people around the world had high hopes as a new millennium dawned. The year 2000 was ushered in, and to untrained eyes, the global outlook looked rosy. The Fukuyaman “end of history” narrative still dominated after nearly a decade of unopposed US dominance in world financial markets and military and political hegemony. There were no major wars among world powers and the global economy provided new avenues of wealth for the middle classes around the world.

    The party didn’t last long. It turned out that globalization, that catch-all term trotted out over and over by both liberal internationalists and conservative realists to defend the seemingly interminable reign of capitalists, had plenty of cracks in the foundation. The notion that Western states were “democratic republics” caring for citizens’ interests began to crumble. The diminishing returns of capitalism as well as brazen corporate and government corruption began to disrupt the confidence of the global middle classes. The consent of the governed could no longer be assured; and as the façade of democratic legitimacy collapsed, Western governments, headed by the US, began to look for a new ideological force to justify neoliberal capitalism.

    World events took a swift turn for the worse starting from the very first months of the new millennium. In March 2000 the dot-com bubble burst, with losses eventually reaching 1.75 trillion in the US alone; this rippled through the world economy. The total loss in market capitalization was estimated to be 5 trillion by the end of the recession in 2002. Over 2.2 million jobs were lost in the US and unemployment continued to climb into mid-2003.

    In November of 2000 the contested Bush-Gore election ran into a stalemate. A judicial coup in the Supreme Court ruled in favor of Bush 5-4, effectively stopping the recount. There was relatively little public push-back, and the lack of any real resistance from the Democratic party machine solidified the coup, and the “Bush-Cheney junta”, as the late Gore Vidal called it, steamrolled into power.

    The true events of September 11th, 2001 may always remain partially shrouded in mystery, yet some tell-tale signs point to the obvious: a conspiracy in which the US government played an active role in orchestrating the sequence of events we call 9/11. Any cursory look at the “conspiracy theories” and the 9/11 truth movements’ findings shows the glaring holes in the official story. Examining and absorbing all the evidence leads to the inevitable conclusion- the events of 9/11 was a false flag, orchestrated by our own government, and the perpetrators are still at large, much like the JFK assassination.

    Most everyone over thirty remembers what came next, even though most are loath to recall. The Bush regime blamed Al Qaeda before the end of the night, news broadcasts showed the towers falling non-stop, and color coded terror alerts became our “new normal” (we’ll get to the next iteration shortly). An axis of evil was rolled out; any country who vaguely opposed US imperialism was put on the naughty list, and a new “crusade” was decreed, with explicit threats “if you’re not with us, you’re against us.” Shortly after, the mysterious anthrax attacks swept the nation, and captivated the US, even as it became crystal clear that the type of anthrax used was a highly weaponized version coming from a US biolab, which could only mean it was deliberately stolen and released by high elements within our own government.

    The state of emergency became normalized immediately. A new surveillance state was constructed, the Patriot Act and AUMF allowed for extra-judicial assassination, torture, and spy programs began to expand globally. Officially war was declared against Iraq and Afghanistan; unofficially, Special Forces and black ops spread to approximately 130 nations. The empire was expanding and on the move- especially in the Middle East, Central Asia, and North Africa, where control over access to fossil fuels alongside the continuing supremacy of the petrodollar is paramount in maintaining global hegemony today.

    The Permanent State of Emergency/Exception

    Power loves catastrophe: the running theme here being that when non-natural disasters occur, Western governments quickly rally and conspire in order to procure quick profits, maintain control, and flex power over weaker nations.

    In our era, authoritarian regimes have argued for the permanent suspension of the rights of their own citizens, as well as human rights and international law. This concept was popularized by Giorgio Agamben in his 2005 book, State of Exception. Agamben uses the example of Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt’s definition of sovereignty: the sovereign is the one who decides on the exception. By abrogating the rights of their own citizens in response to an emergency, both nominally democratic and dictatorial regimes can use the threat of future catastrophes to install permanent police states, declare martial law, and normalize what used to be considered extralegal into the framework of law in the name of national security.

    The imperial core settled on a tried and true model: programming the public to accept that every catastrophe caused by the capitalist global system is an emergency that must be responded to with an increasingly authoritarian society. Police state tactics, lifted from Nazi Germany, became normalized as the economic, political, and ideological forces backing the War on Terror saw little resistance from a mystified and fearful citizenry. This process is known as a state of exception, originally codified in law by the Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt. A succinct definition can be found here:

    [The state of exception] defines a special condition in which the juridical order is actually suspended due to an emergency or a serious crisis threatening the state. In such a situation, the sovereign, i.e. the executive power, prevails over the others and the basic laws and norms can be violated by the state while facing the crisis.

    Nearly every major significant political flash point of the last twenty two years was used as an excuse to broaden and deepen the national security state and corporate rule. This process has effectively disempowered the western masses to such a degree that the majority of Western populations, including many in the middle classes, have effectively neo-feudal, debtor relationships to state and market forces.

    The author Naomi Klein described the new, globalized, neoliberal model quite well in her 2007 book The Shock Doctrine, where disaster capitalism becomes a force for “creative destruction”, leading entire continents into debt spirals with World Bank and IMF loans while at the same time militarizing and financializing Western economies to serve the interests of Wall Street and the Pentagon while destroying small businesses and parasitizing off the working classes.  Soon after, President Obama’s chief of staff, Rahm Emmanuel, said the quiet part out loud discussing the financial crisis, when he referred to the trillions in public money used to prop up our unregulated banking system. He blurted out:

    You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. And what I mean by that [is] it’s an opportunity to do things that you think you could not do before.

    How can we define our time? Again, the phrase postmodern tyranny fits better than describing the present moment as totalitarian or fascist. Those two words have become so overused, interchanged, that they’ve lost much meaning and luster for people today. Although many of the various government responses to 9/11 and Covid certainly have elements of totalitarian, fascist, and dictatorial regimes, the terminology is outdated in a sense. It no longer fits the historical moment and hardly anyone really sees Joe Biden or Emmanuel Macron as totalitarian leaders. No single despot is necessary for the system to continue. We are facing is a dictatorship of money, an oligarchy dedicated to ensuring the smooth movement of capital. We live in a pyramid scheme, economically and socially: a system of petty tyrants consisting of your boss, your mayor, your landlord, your HOA president, etc. In fact, added together there are millions of petty tyrants in the US alone; the bourgeoisie and their millions of enforcers: judges, the police and military, politicians, lawyers, all who serve private property, an unjust hierarchy of labor, and, as we’ve seen, most doctors who were eager to impose and rubber-stamp the petty diktats we’ve enshrined into law.

    2019: Global Protests Mushroom

    Besides well-documented evidence such as US funding of coronavirus research, Event 201, and many other suspicious activities, there is one other piece of circumstantial evidence that ties into prior knowledge and pre-planning the pandemic. In 2019, global protests reached a height unsurpassed in modern history, with one commentator dubbing that year “The Age of Mass Protests”. On December 30, 2019, Robin Wright published a column in The New Yorker entitled: “The Story of 2019: Protests in Every Corner of the Globe”. One highlight from the piece claims:

    “‘People in more countries are using people power than any time in recorded history. Nonviolent mass movements are the primary challenges to governments today,’ Erica Chenoweth, a political scientist at Harvard, told me. ‘This represents a pronounced shift in the global landscape of dissent.’”

    The Washington Post dubbed 2019 “The year of the global street protest”. Bloomberg proclaimed that “A Year of Protests Sparked Change Around the Globe“. Massive disruptions to governments occurred in Iraq, Iran, Hong Kong, Sudan, Algeria, Chile, and many other nations. Ordinary people were becoming a nuisance to the smooth movement of capital. Governments were forced to face challenges they’d been ignoring for decades, as rising food, housing, heating, and materials costs skyrocketed globally. All of a sudden, in January 2020, the looming specter of a “global pandemic” put a stop to all of it, instantaneously.

    The positives for governments were obvious. No more protests. No public gatherings. No more pesky citizens demanding lower prices on goods, for more social programs, and protesting unjust taxes and authoritarian rulers. Without any in-person organizing, the momentum of people power from 2019 quickly died out.

    Shifting the Goalposts: From “Two Weeks to Flatten the Curve” to Biosecurity State

    Similar to 9/11, the justification for and continued adherence to official government propaganda rested on total obedience and social conformity: peer pressure at the familial, community, workplace, and public levels all contributed to an atmosphere of hysteria, panic, and paranoia. Shortly after 9/11, the US government shifted priorities from an invasion of Afghanistan and ousting the Taliban and Al-Qaeda, to an invasion of Iraq in 2003 which cost perhaps 1 million Iraqi lives, then to a global war on terror (remember US General Wesley Clark’s admission that the Pentagon’s intention was to invade nation’s dubbed as the “axis of evil” and take out “seven countries in five years”). Torture and mass surveillance was sanctioned and cheered, the Patriot Act and AUMF rammed through Congress.

    As soon as the pandemic was announced in March 2020, the goalposts kept moving, from a period where we were told two weeks of isolation would be enough to flatten the curve of infection to nearly two years of absurd rules for masking, lockdowns, public gatherings, household gatherings, vaccines, and passports. The hokum kept piling up, as increasingly illogical “expert opinions” were rolled out to “protect” us, or so we were told. It soon became clear that the lockdowns themselves were killing plenty of people. Many credible “medical experts” who believed in the seriousness of the pandemic were blunt about the lockdowns: they were a form of democide”, with many estimating that approximately one-third of the excessive deaths were caused by the lockdowns. Routine checkups were avoided, nursing homes were overcrowded, the elderly were being neglected, and unnecessary, and over a million healthcare workers were laid off precisely when they would have been most useful, at least according to the official narrative.

    The irrational masking mandates were completely unscientific, especially the outdoor masking requirements in major cities, and, ludicrously, beaches as well as various outdoor recreation areas. Regardless, it wasn’t until December 2021 that a major mainstream medical figure admitted the obvious: “cloth masks are useless” and little more than facial decorations. The mask was the signifier of the good citizen for two years; anyone who disagreed was tarred and feathered without regard for the actual science. Many analyses of randomized controlled trials (RCTs) were done with previous viruses. Not to mention the basic fact that the infection and fatality rates were basically the same for the 39 US states that imposed mask mandates versus the 11 that did not.

    The conflation of case fatality rate (CFR) with infection fatality rate (IFR) in the mainstream media made the disease appear far more deadly than it actually was. The actual chance of young and healthy adults dying from Covid-19 was minuscule.

    Social distancing became de rigueur among the ruling classes, as well as the upper-middle chattering class effete liberals (and sadly, many leftists) even as the chance of moderate to severe illness in health young or even middle-aged people was almost nil. The specter of the postmodern alienated, affluent Western subject, with all their bundles of anxieties and neuroses, began to unspool, implode; a process of involution nurturing the solipsistic narcissism inherent in late capitalism.

    The sociopathic tendencies of our elites, heightened and distilled through centuries of class war in Western culture, spilled out into the open. The upper-middle professional classes, alert to the tendencies of their overlords’ desires to distance themselves from the rabble, were eager to parrot the diktats of their rulers. The upper-class winners condemned themselves to a path of neo-Victorian purity politics. The clean must be segregated from the dirty. The educated believers in “science” are clearly rational; the anti-vax hordes certainly must be acting out of pure self-interest and resentment.  Needless to say, little to no self-examination was made of the panicked overreaction of the well-to-do liberal authoritarians, which frankly fell within a spectrum of agoraphobic and hypochondriac behavior.

    The death rates were complete junk science, overestimated for the sake of juicing up the atmosphere of pandemonium, not to mention the monetary rewards for hospitals and healthcare corporations. As many know by now, “dying with” Covid became conflated with “dying from” the virus, with doctors pressured to include Sars-CoV-2 on death certificates.

    Pushing the experimental vaccine onto healthy children and young adults was completely unnecessary, and harmful. The risks of heart problems outweighed the negligible benefits of the vaccine for the young. This was obvious from the beginning and the medical establishment continued its role as a propaganda arm of Big Pharma rather than objectively viewing the facts. One study showed a laughable, embarrassing efficacy of 12% for 5-11 year olds.

    UN Estimate of Extreme Hunger, Food Insecurity, and Starvation

    Shortly after the lockdowns began in March 2020, the UN World Food Program put out a warning:

    The number of people facing acute food insecurity (IPC/CH 3 or worse) stands to rise to 265 million in 2020, up by 130 million from the 135 million in 2019, as a result of the economic impact of COVID-19, according to a WFP projection. The estimate was announced alongside the release of the Global Report on Food Crises, produced by WFP and 15 other humanitarian and development partners.

    In effect, the government and private architects of lockdowns were fully prepared to sacrifice hundreds of millions of younger, poorer minorities in less-developed countries to shield older, richer, whiter populations in developed nations from the very low potential of sickness, and yes, possible death. While many leftists are quick to point out economic “sacrifice zones” where labor violations are the norm and economic exploitation is rampant, they were mainly silent regarding the potential of mass death, starvation, and the explosion of extreme poverty due to lockdown policies. In fact, many leftists gleefully supported lockdowns and restrictions against the unvaccinated; and were either completely unaware or feigned ignorance of the economic devastation they unleashed.

    The Africa  Paradox

    The obvious data sets to look at regarding the efficacy of the experimental vaccines would be the West, with very high levels of vaccination, versus Africa, which had extremely low percentages. While obviously many countries had incomplete information due to lack of resources, it becomes obvious that the vaccines had zero effect on transmission or reduction in deaths. In fact, the mortality rates in African nations are so low that experts simply shrug them off. A holistic view would put the excess deaths from “Covid-19” squarely on the unhealthy lifestyles, toxic food supply, the unregulated chemical industries, and stressful conditions endemic to Western living.

    Agamben’s Laments

    Right off the bat, Giorgio Agamben questioned the motives behind the lockdowns, rightly pointing out that the fear of death and the elevation of science as the new religion had reduced communities and governments to quantifying basic survival – “bare life” – as more valuable than tangible human freedoms. As he put it in a March 2020 blog post:

    Fear is a bad advisor, but it brings up many things you pretended not to see. The first thing that the wave of panic that has paralyzed the country clearly shows is that our society no longer believes in anything but bare life. It is clear that Italians are willing to sacrifice practically everything, normal living conditions, social relationships, work, even friendships, affections and religious and political convictions at the risk of falling ill. Bare life – and the fear of losing it – is not something that unites men, but blinds and separates them.

    In May 2020, Agamben expands on the notion of medicine as a modern cult- and its many parallels with Christian dogmas.

    It is immediately evident that we are dealing here with a cultic practice and not with a rational scientific requirement. By far the most frequent cause of mortality in our country is cardio-vascular disease and it is known that these could decrease if a healthier lifestyle were practiced and if one adhered to a particular diet. But it had never occurred to any doctor that this form of life and diet, which they recommended to patients, would become the subject of legal legislation, which decreed ex lege [as a matter of law] what one must eat and how one must live, transforming the whole existence into a health obligation. Precisely this has been done and, at least for now, people have accepted as if it were obvious to give up their freedom of movement, work, friendships, love, social relationships, their religious and political convictions.

    Even the mealy-mouthed World Health Organization was forced to admit in October 2020 that lockdowns were extremely detrimental to poor and minority communities globally and should be used as a “very, very last resort”. This did not stop governments and medical advisors from clamoring for more restrictions and shutdowns for seventeen more months, even as Agamben and many others, including many experts who signed the Great Barrington Declaration, were speaking out against political overreach.

    Latour’s Dress Rehearsal: Right for the Wrong Reasons

    In a widely cited article from March 2020, French sociologist Bruno Latour asked an interesting question regarding the lockdowns: “Is This a Dress Rehearsal?” The problem in his formulation, of course, is that he believes governments innocently imposed the lockdown protocols in response to a clear and present danger; as well as his belief that governments will, in the future, impose lockdowns in response to climate change with reductions in carbon emissions in mind. Rather, we should realize that governments, colluding with the mega rich and multinational corporations, imposed lockdowns in order to profit off the collapse and resurgence of the stock markets, discipline the public in order to accept draconian “new normal” policies, and accelerate the process of biometric IDs, all-encompassing surveillance, a drop in living standards, and advance a social credit system based on rewards and punishments.

    The old panem et circenses method of distracting the masses can no longer hold together an increasingly polarized society breaking into “post-truth” enclaves where distrust and paranoia spawn out of late-capitalist alienation and exploitation. A society in which two of the biggest overarching political narratives are as ridiculous as Q-Anon and Russiagate has no business dismissing the obvious conspiracy and collusion involved in promulgating an exaggerated and manufactured pandemic.

    Latour is correct in claiming that this is a sort of dress rehearsal. Sadly, like many a typical liberal, he assumes governments had our best interest at heart, and are reacting to objective facts and medical realities. In the near future, governments will probably enact travel restrictions and lockdowns not only to reduce carbon emissions, but rather to train citizens to accept food rations, lack of fossil fuels due to high prices and supply issues, lower living standards, and lack of goods and provisions. In this process of disciplining and punishing masses, many will be forced to accept whatever government edicts are enacted, at the risk of job loss, social isolation, or worse, just as we witnessed during the pandemic. The next lockdown could be designed and pre-planned precisely to stave off protests, rebellions, and revolutions which will spring up as the rot in capitalism deepens.

    Medical Tyranny? WHO’s asking?

    A recent report shows that a private foundation set up to finance the World Health Organization, called the WHO Foundation, explains that 40% of donations came from anonymous donors. The potential for conflicts of interest is inevitable, as obviously only individuals and groups connected to Big Pharma would want to anonymize where their slush funds go to.

    A global Pandemic Treaty is being formulated by the WHO in order to force nations to accept the next pandemic, if global elites are so foolish as to try and institute another round of medical authoritarianism.

    Much like 9/11, the lead-up to the Covid-19 “event” as well as its early stages remain clouded in secrecy, misinformation, and a web of lies. We were all shown images of dead Chinese citizens lying in the streets, although it’s unclear if this was from the virus, or even from the city of Wuhan or Hubei province in some cases. We were told the virus originated in a wet market in the city center, although now we know that link has never been proven, and was most likely thrown out as a hypothesis to satisfy public opinion, but more likely was a cynical intelligence ploy, a classic case of misdirection, especially since we know now that a secretive US medical intelligence unit admitted to tracking Covid in November 2019, and possibly much earlier.

    When a global pandemic was declared by the World Health Organization on March 11, 2020, there were around 118,000 global cases and under 5,000 declared deaths. Relatively speaking those numbers were quite low and there was no reason to declare Sars-CoV-2 a public health emergency based on the figures. The estimated death rates were pulled completely out of thin air by a complete fraud, Neil Ferguson of the Imperial College of London, who broke lockdown rules which he helped to implement.

    PCR tests were declared the gold standard even though Kary Mullis, one of its inventors, declared publicly that the tests were not made to prove the existence of active infections. Further, the cycling for the tests was deliberately set too high, which resulted in untold amounts of false positive cases. Death rates miraculously shot up for “Covid-19” because doctors and coroners were pressured to list the disease as a cause of death even without a positive test; any “suspected case” could be listed. Flu, pneumonia, and every other respiratory disease magically disappeared and Covid filled in the gap, boosting the figures.

    Not to mention, the effect of declaring a global pandemic necessarily induced a stress response from the global population, which, along with the late-winter (March-April) time frame in the northern hemisphere, definitely contributed to the excess deaths. In fact, many established medical organizations freely admit that the lockdowns were responsible for a significant percentage (many say up to one third) of excess deaths, yet somehow have managed to absolve themselves of responsibility for clamoring for the lockdowns like trained seals. Along with the loss of jobs, home confinement, and lack of community, it should be noted that just as yelling fire in a crowded movie theater is almost certain to cause some sort of violent event, screaming “pandemic” through a 24/7 news cycle will do the same.

    Much like the daily reporting in the aftermath of 9/11, with nightly news explaining the nation’s risk of terror attacks as red, orange, or yellow, the daily cases, hospitalizations, and deaths; we all remember the 24/7 circus designed to frighten the population and maintain obedience. In this deliberately instilled, panic-stricken environment, the ruling class fundamentally altered the landscape: following a short downturn in the stock market, the digital economy and tech firms quickly rebounded and boomed- the tech sector, Big Pharma, web services companies, and basically all major corporations tangentially related to providing services on the internet struck gold.

    Within weeks, the need for a vaccine was trotted out. Many seasonal viruses come and go within months, yet somehow the medical establishment was able to figure out that only a vaccine would be able to stop this disease. The pharmaceutical companies were simply trying to profit off a new media-hyped and establishment-protected exaggerated pandemic. The fact that so many corners were cut, with no long-term studies, all to market unproven mRNA technology did not seem to faze at least half of the public, who openly clamored for lockdowns, vaccines, passports, and authoritarian measures which would be unthinkable a few years prior.

    Ridiculous masking mandates came into effect- masking outdoors was mandatory in many cities globally. No scientific basis was ever presented. Vaccine passports were likewise implemented even though natural immunity was found to be 27 times greater in some instances. Were health authorities simply trying to be overly cautious, or were there more sinister agendas at play? Were institutional medical practices imposed simply to make profits for pharmaceutical corporations?

    The simple fact that an unproven, dangerous vaccine was pushed and mandated at various levels- and that it was swallowed so comfortably by so many- simply shows how effective modern propaganda can be. No guns were needed- but you could lose your job, standing in the community, your friends, family, and social relations. A vast social experiment was conducted and anyone who dared to question “the science”, instead of blindly placing trust in a capitalist health system where profits have always taken precedence over people’s interests, was demonized.

    The frenzy around Covid-19 may indeed have had a bit of luck, at least here in the US. It was, of course, President Trump that downplayed the virus at the start. Therefore, anyone else aligning with his views on Covid was seen as a repugnant narcissist, an uncaring dullard willing to put corporate profits over human life. Imagine an alternate universe where Trump or a right-wing, authoritarian, US presidential figure like him took the virus extremely seriously, with Chinese-style lockdowns. Would people still have clamored for mandatory shots, and for friends, family, and co-workers to be excommunicated from society? Probably not, but we’ll never know.

    Vaccine passports threatened to segregate society based on a frankly fascist vision of the clean versus unclean. Anti-vaccine activists and regular people who refused to take an experimental injection were wrongly vilified. As many pointed out, the lack of reduction of transmission in the vaccinated made the whole prospect of compulsory vaccination pointless, unscientific, counterproductive, and just plain wrong.

    In November 2021, the conflict came to a head as Biden, speaking to the unvaccinated, remarked: “We’ve been patient. But our patience is wearing thin. And your refusal has cost all of us.” He proposed a plan for weekly testing or vaccination of all workers in every US company with over 100 employees, as well as a mandate for around 17 million health care workers.

    The Postmodern Subject: Manufacturing the Hyperreal

    The parallels between 9/11 and Covid-19 go far beyond their initial propaganda campaigns. Ultimately, part of the reason contemporary propaganda is so effective lies in the psychological structure of postmodern consciousness. Safety, stability, and security are seen as the final end products of mass civilization. Even one of the great charlatans of the 1990s, Francis Fukuyama, was astute enough to note the parallels between the postmodern subject and Nietzsche’s notion of the “last man”.

    Today, the veneer of idealistic concepts such as freedom, democracy, and equality which were supposed to undergird and inspire the collective to greater heights is wearing off in the face of massive global inequality, environmental disasters, climate catastrophe, and vicious media propaganda campaigns. As material living standards stagnate and crumble even in the developed world, increasing numbers of people are forced to compete for the same resources, perpetuating a scarcity-based mindset in the populace. Nearly all socioeconomic questions are framed as zero-sum, binary, black-and-white contests between good and evil where little nuance or questions of morality are allowed into the public arena.

    In this fragile social environment, it’s not surprising that citizens flock to ready-made narratives and propaganda campaigns. Ruling class propaganda is swallowed uncritically, precisely because it obfuscates, masks, and numbs the pain of living in late-stage capitalist collapse. One of the reasons Western liberals and even most of the “Left” fell for the farce that was the over-hyped, medical global Psy-op we call the Covid-19 pandemic is because the postmodern subject has now delved so far into the hyperreal; where symbols, social relations, and even science become cheap imitations of themselves. This is precisely why so many people, at the beginning of the lockdowns in March 2020, remarked that they “felt like they were living in a movie.” Media-induced pseudo-events can no longer be distinguished from severe medical emergencies today, just as twenty two years ago the mass panic after 9/11 produced the same fog of war and irrational hatred of the other.

    Imbued with meaning and purpose, the mask-wearing, jab-taking, “papers-please”, vaccine passport-bearing citizen could now feel a common cause with others in the community; artificially induced feelings of well-being conjured up through media organs and distilled into catchy slogans like “trust the science”. The sign-value of “doing the right thing” became a potent force; and this was weaponized by the establishment to suit various agendas.

    Many of these agendas were, in fact, actual conspiracies to: establish a permanent biosecurity state; set up a soft version of martial law where people’s movements are restricted and tracked; manufacture a false narrative of safe vaccines to bankroll a new industry for mRNA technologies, create a pathway to health passports, digital IDs, central bank digital currencies, and social credit systems; destroy the working class and middle class small businesses, and psychically prepare the global populace for a fall in living standards, a fall in access to goods, services, and resources, as well as rationing; provide an excuse to ban protests; continue the broad militarization of society, as well as the implementation of a global regime of ideological compliance and obedience.

    Big Pharma, Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and the military and intelligence communities were colluding to fleece the poor and working classes- the fact that one can’t find a smoking gun for each of these interlocking and moving parts of the economy and government doesn’t refute this basic fact. All the while, corporate America continued enriching the one percent who gained trillions during the pandemic. Medical-authoritarian edicts were issued without any actual science behind them. Surveillance and population control have always been at the forefront of elite agendas for managing 21st century life. Global flows of people, information, goods, and revolutionary thought can no longer be stage-managed by tyrannical capitalist elites as conditions deteriorate around the planet. A show must be put on every ten to twenty years.

    The many faces and branding strategies of the global elite come into full view: the “new normal”, “own nothing and be happy”, “mask up”, “follow the science”, and the “lockstep” scenario for implementing planetary tyranny are seen by the ruling class as necessary steps to secure profits and control in increasingly unstable economic and political landscapes. Their techno-feudal dreams are our nightmares as the drudgery of capitalist labor and the vagaries of imperial war continue on. Our masters offer little respite for the masses of humanity, as they’ve imposed a totalizing spectacle. Cult-like behavior dominated after 9/11; overblown fears of terrorism and anti-Muslim racism permeated the country, just as a year or two ago, overblown fears of the virus and authoritarian-based dislike and instant dismissal of anyone skeptical of Big Pharma and the government continued to dominate.

    Even as the narrative has shifted, and the farce that was the reaction to a relatively mild virus receded, the potential for propaganda and fear campaigns against the global collective remains. It is precisely the qualities of postmodernity, such as the end of meta-narratives, de-realization of the subject, hyperreality, the nature of the spectacle, and pseudo-events, guided by ruling class interests, and imposed on us by capitalism, which allow for the recurrence of these paradigm-shifting forces to dominate social life. The parallels of two of the biggest geopolitical events of the 21st century, 9/11 and the Covid-19 health scare, reveal the foundations of global regimes of cruelty, domination, and oppression. And there certainly isn’t much “new” or “normal” about any of it.


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

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • A year prior to Italy’s 2022 elections, Giorgia Meloni was invited to join the Aspen Institute, a Washington based strategic think tank with close relations to the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), the Atlantic Council and the military industrial complex: 

    “The Aspen institute is also involved in the arms industry, with links to arms manufacturing giants such as Boeing and Lockheed Martin. It has typically supported the US’s ‘democracy-defending’ or ‘democracy-propagating, humane and civilized’ wars.”

    Prominent US politicians including Madeleine Albright, Condolezza Rice as well as Victoria Nuland have actively collaborated with the Aspen Institute.

    The Aspen Institute is  generously funded by the Gates Foundation, the Rockefellers, Carnegie and the Ford Foundation, not to mention Goldman Sachs, which over the years has played a key role in the “selection” of Italian politicians.

    It is worth noting that on February 20, 2023, Joe Biden made an unannounced visit to Kiev, meeting up with President Zelensky. And on the following day Italy’s Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni promptly followed suit, traveling to Kiev to meet up with the corrupt Ukrainian president.

    “She affirmed Italian support for Ukraine and said that her government intends to supply Spada and Skyguard air defence systems to the Ukrainian army”.

    Is Italy’s Prime Minister Meloni an “Instrument”, Political Asset of Washington? The answer is obvious.

    Timeline
    PM Giorgia Meloni Arrives in Washington, July 26, 2023
    PM Meloni had arrived in Washington prior to the Coup d’Etat in Niger (26th of July), i.e. a day prior to the Biden-Meloni meeting in the Oval Office.

    There was no White House record of a discussion or exchange pertaining to the crisis in Niger.

    Bloomberg in a July 26, 2023 report confirmed that private conversations had already been scheduled:

    One suspects that in addition to China, the Niger Coup d’Etat was also discussed behind closed doors, –e.g. with Victoria Nuland and Christina Segal Knowles.

    27 July 2023: PM Meloni meets President Biden in the Oval Office.

    Rome aligns with Washington implying an almost unconditional stance with respect to the war in Ukraine: 

    “Ukraine (and Italy’s new voice). PM Meloni and President Biden reiterated their support for Ukraine against Russia’s war of aggression and vowed to “provide political, military, financial, and humanitarian assistance to Ukraine for as long as it takes, with the aim to reach a just and lasting peace.” Later, at the presser, the Italian leader noted that Rome’s posture on the conflict “is extremely respected and held in high regard” by the US.

    Oval Office 

    PRESIDENT BIDEN: “And as NATO Allies, the transatlantic partnership is the cornerstone of our shared security. And the Italian troops are playing a critical role in Europe, in the Mediterranean, and beyond.

    Italy and the United States are also standing strong with Ukraine. And I compliment you on your very strong support in defending against Russian atrocities. …

    PM MELONI: Thank you. I am very pleased to be here today to testify the deep friendship that bonds the United States and Italy.

    … Moreover, after the Russian aggression against Ukraine, for all together we decided to defend the international law. And I’m proud that Italy, from the beginning, played its part in it. We did it simply because supporting Ukraine means defending the peaceful coexistence of people and states everywhere in the world.”

    PM Meloni also (unconditionally) endorsed Washington’s stance pertaining to Africa, which broadly consists in “dollarizing” the entire continent (including francophone Africa) while concurrently imposing IMF-World Bank “strong economic medicine”.

    PM MELONI: … And on the other hand, we also need to be fair with nations that feel they have been exploited of their resources and that they show distrust towards the West. President Biden knows I take care a lot about Africa, about the role that we can play in these countries that can help us, building with them a new relation based on a new approach, which is a peer-to-peer approach. Also to fight illegal migration and all the problems that we face. It’s all things that we will discuss in the G7 presidency of Italy next year.

    Among those present in the Oval Office on July 27, 2023 were: Victoria Nuland, Deputy National Security Advisor for International Economic Affairs, and National Security Council Director for International Economics, Christina Segal-Knowles.

    Victoria Nuland Travels to Niamey, August 7, 2023

    Victoria Nuland arrived in Niger on August 7, 2023 on an unannounced visit in the immediate wake of the coup d’Etat.

    Nuland did not meet General Abdourahamane Tiani who had been declared head of the ruling military Junta on July 28, 2023.

    It is worth noting that Tiani studied in Washington D.C at the National Defense University’s (NDU) College of International Security Affairs (CISA). CISA is the U.S. Department of Defense’s  “flagship for education and building of partner capacity in combating terrorism, irregular warfare, and integrated deterrence at the strategic level.”

    Nuland’s meetings were with a team led by General Barmou.

    “The Secretary asked me to make this trip – as you may know, I was in the neighborhood last week and then in Jeddah – because we wanted to speak frankly to the people responsible to this challenge to the democratic order to see if we could try to resolve these issues diplomatically, if we could get some negotiations going, …

    And then we met with the self-proclaimed chief of defense of this operation, General Barmou, and three of the colonels supporting him.  I will say that these conversations were extremely frank and at times quite difficult because, again, we were pushing for a negotiated solution.”  (emphasis added)

    Tacitly acknowledged by Nuland, both General Abdourahamane Tiani and General Barmou in terms of their military profile and background are “friends of America”. Barmou also undertook his military training in the U.S. at Fort Moore, Columbus, Georgia and at the National Defense University (ND) which operates under the Guidance of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. General Barmou also collaborated with U.S. Special Forces. In the words of the Wall Street Journal:

    “At Center of Niger’s Coup Is One of America’s Favorite Generals: Brig. Gen. Moussa Salaou Barmou, long courted by Washington as a partner against Islamist extremism, has emerged as the main diplomatic channel between the U.S. and the junta (emphasis added)

    “Speaking during a question and answer session [August 8 report],  Victoria Nuland, confirmed in so many words that the Coup d’Etat was undertaken on behalf of the U.S.: 

    “With regard to the – to us, interestingly, General Barmou, former Colonel Barmou, is somebody who has worked very closely with U.S. Special Forces over many, many years.”

    Ms Nuland stated this following a crucial first meeting of U.S. officials with members of the military junta in Niger in a significant diplomatic push to restore democratic rule to the country.

    Ms Nuland said the U.S. was pushing for a negotiated solution in Niger and went “through in considerable detail the risks to aspects of our cooperation that he has historically cared about a lot.”

    “So we are hopeful that that will sink in,” added the U.S. undersecretary.

    While noting several regional meetings are going on to negotiate with coupists to release President Mohamed Bazoum and step aside, Ms Nuland said the U.S. would continue to watch closely with allies and partners needed to make the negotiations successful.

    “If there is a desire on the part of the people who are responsible for this to return to constitutional order, we are prepared to help with that. We are prepared to help address concerns on all sides,” Ms Nuland stated. (emphasis added)

    Let us be under no illusions, The architects of the coup “against the democratically elected government of Mr Bazoum” were acting on behalf and in coordination with Washington.

    According to a carefully researched article by Nick Nurse, “At Least Five Members of Niger Junta Were Trained by the US”.

    The unspoken objective is “Paris out of Africa.”

    Our Message to the People of Africa:

    While “France never stopped looting Africa, now the tables are turning”, in favor of the most oppressive and tyrannical form of US. neocolonialism, which must be forcefully opposed. 

    Niger “Regime Change” on Behalf of Uncle Sam. “Paris Out of Africa”

    Washington’s unspoken foreign policy objective is to remove France from Africa.

    Niger is strategic. It produces 5% of the global supply of uranium, which is in part exported to France for use in its nuclear energy facilities.

     

    USAFRICOM has a military base in Niger. The US military has been routinely collaborating with their Nigerien counterparts

    The unspoken objective of Victoria Nuland’s mission was to ultimately to “negotiate”, of course unofficially Niamey’s “alignment” with Washington against Paris:

    “The United States flies drones out of a base in the country’s arid heartland. French peacekeepers, effectively chased out of Mali, withdrew to outposts in Niger last year. Now, their status [France] and role in a country run by the junta’s transitional regime remains up in the air.” (WP, August 9, 2023, emphasis added)

    “Divide and Rule”: Propaganda Against France’s President François Macron

    Amply documented, Wall Street and the Financial Establishment, in liaison with the White House controls several (corrupt) European heads of State and heads of government, including Germany’s Chancellor Scholz, France’s President Macron, Italy’s Prime Minister Meloni and the President of the European Commission, Ursula von Der Leyen, among others.

    The US is at war with both Europe and Africa. It’s an act of economic warfare. Washington is also quite deliberately creating political divisions within the European Union.

    With regard to both Ukraine and Africa, Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni is aligned with Washington. Despite her fake humanitarian rhetoric, she has casually endorsed America’s hegemonic agenda in Africa, including the dollarization of the entire continent:

    PM Meloni: “President Biden knows I take care a lot about Africa, about the role that we can play in these countries that can help us.”

    Washington is currently involved in a “soft coup” against French colonialism, coupled with a smear campaign (with the support of PM Meloni) against France’s president Macron. 

    In the video below, which was recently released, Italy’s PM Meloni rightfully focusses on the exploitation of child labourers in Burkina Faso’ gold industry, while casually placing the blame on France’s President Macron for the payments system in CFA francs coordinated by the French Treasury.

    What she fails to mention is that the gold industry in Burkina Faso is “dollarized” and controlled primarily by Canadian mining companies. See also here. There is not a single French colonial company involved in gold mining.

    Video: “You Messed Up Macron”

    Annex
    A Brief Note on the History of U.S.- France Relations 

    There is a long history of US-France relations going back the Louisiana purchase (1803), The Monroe Doctrine (1823),  the  Berlin Conference (1884-1885) organized by Germany’s Chancellor Otto van Bismarck. The U.S was politely excluded from participating in the colonial scramble for Africa. (Most of those former colonial powers have been progressively shoved out of Africa, starting in the 1970s).

    The Wars against Indochina and Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos (1946-1975), Charles de Gaulle “Pulls the Plug on NATO” (1966-67), NATO Headquarters move from Paris to Brussels (1967).

    Since the early 1990s, Washington has extended its sphere of influence: the entire African continent is currently in the stranglehold of a dollar denominated debt which has led to mass poverty, not to mention the imposition of “strong economic medicine”  by the IMF-World Bank. The U.S has numerous military bases throughout the continent.

    There are many other dimensions. Washington’s current objective is to eventually eliminate “francophone countries” and exclude France from the African Continent.

    Rwanda in 1990 is the model. The president of Rwanda Juvenal Habyarimana dies in an air crash. A former Belgian colony largely within the political sphere of influence of France was from one year to the next  transformed into a de facto English speaking colony dominated by the U.S, French was eventually scrapped as an official language. Major General Kagame –(who subsequently became Vice-President and then President) was instrumental in leading the military invasion from Uganda. He does not speak a word of French.

    The civil war in Rwanda and the ethnic massacres were an integral part of US foreign policy, carefully staged in accordance with precise strategic and economic objectives.

    Major General Paul Kagame had been head of military intelligence in the Ugandan Armed Forces; he had been trained at the U.S. Army Command and Staff College (CGSC) in Leavenworth, Kansas which focuses on warfighting and military strategy. Kagame returned from Leavenworth to lead the RPA, shortly after the 1990 invasion.

    Prior to the outbreak of the Rwandan civil war, the RPA was part of the Ugandan Armed Forces. Shortly prior to the October 1990 invasion of Rwanda, military labels were switched. (Michel Chossudovsky, The Globalization of Poverty, Chapter 7)

    *****

    On a personal note

    In a United Nations mission to Rwanda in 1996-97, the author together with Pierre Galand submitted the following report to the Government of Rwanda:

    • Michel Chossudovsky and Pierre Galand, L’usage de la dette exterieure du Rwanda, la responsabilité des créanciers, mission report, United Nations Development Program and Government of Rwanda, Kigali, 1997.

    We were subsequently advised by Vice President Paul Kagame that the report had to be submitted in English. My  response to Vice President Paul Kagame: “You should have told us that, and we would have drafted the report in English, We suggest that you get it translated”.

  • The original source of this article is Global Research.
  • This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Because there is so much personal anguish, unhappiness, and human mental and physical suffering in the world, many people often wonder how they might personally change to find happiness, contentment, or some elusive something. Or even how to change other people, as if that arrogant illusion could ever work.

    This question of significant personal change is usually couched within the context of narrow psychological analyses.  This is very common and is a habit of mind that grows stronger over the years.  People are reduced to their family upbringings and their personal relationships, while the social history they have lived through is dismissed as irrelevant.

    The United States is very much a psychological society.  Sociological and historical analyses are considered insignificant to people’s identities.  It’s as if economics, politics, culture, and propaganda are beside the point.

    Yes, it is often admitted that circumstances, such as illness, death, divorce, unemployment, etc. affect people, but such circumstances are not considered central to who people are and whom they become.  These matters are rarely seen contextually, nor are connections made.  They are considered inessentials despite the fact that they are always connected to larger social issues – that biography and history are intertwined.

    In writing about what he termed the sociological imagination, C. Wright Mills put it clearly when he described it as “the idea that the individual can understand his own experience and gauge his own fate only by locating himself within his period, that he can know his own chances in life only by becoming aware of those of all individuals in his circumstances.  In many ways it is a terrible lesson; in many ways a magnificent one.”

    Without learning it, one cannot know who one is or whom one might become if one chose to change and were not just blown by the winds of fate.

    We now live in a digital world where the uncanny nature of information pick up sticks is the big game. Uncanny because most people cannot grasp its mysterious power over their minds.

    What was true in 1953 when Ray Bradbury penned the following words in Fahrenheit 451, is exponentially truer today:

    Cram them full of non-combustible data, chock them so damn full of ‘facts’ that they feel stuffed, but absolutely ‘brilliant’ with information. Then they’ll feel they’re thinking, they’ll get a sense of motion without moving. . . . Don’t give them any slippery stuff like philosophy or sociology to tie things up with. That way lies melancholy.

    That it is all noise, all signal – no silence.  That it prevents deep reflection but creates the habit of mental befuddlement that is consonant with the mental derangement of the mainstream media’s 24/7 news reports.

    When almost everything you hear is a lie of one sort or another, it becomes barely possible to keep your wits about you.

    These bits of bait are scattered all over the mind’s floor, tossed by an unknown player, the unnameable one who comes in the night to play with us.  Their colors flood the mind, dazzle and razzle the eye.  It is screen time in fantasy-land.

    This summer’s two hit movies – “Oppenheimer” and “Barbie” – while seemingly opposites, are two sides of this same counterfeit coin.  Spectacles in The Society of the Spectacle as Guy Debord put it:

    The spectacle is a social relation between people that is mediated by an accumulation of images that serve to alienate us from a genuinely lived life. The image is thus an historical mutation of the form of commodity fetishism.

    “Oppenheimer,” while concentrating on the man J. Robert Oppenheimer who is called “the father of the atomic bomb,” omits the diabolic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as if there were no innocent victims, while “Barbie” plays the coy game of satirizing the doll that celebrates women as sex objects while advertising its same sex doll status.  It’s just great “fun.”  Colorful salt water taffy for a summer hoot.  “Little Boy” meets sexy sister in the land of dreams where existential crises lead to expanded consciousness.  Yes, Hollywood is the Dream Factory.

    There is so much to attend to, multi-colored tidbits begging to be touched carefully, to grab our full consideration as we delicately lift them into the air of our minds.  So many flavors.  Call it mass attention disorder order or paranoia (beside the mind) or digital dementia.  The names don’t matter, for it is a real condition and it is widespread and spreading madly.  Everyone knows it but represses the truth that the country has become a comic book travesty sliding into quicksand while bringing the world down with it.

    “Oppenheimer” plays while a mumbling and bumbling U.S. President Biden pushes the world toward nuclear annihilation with Russia over Ukraine.

    “Barbie” struts on her stilettos while men receive guidance from the CDC on “chest feeding” and millions of young people are not sure what sex they are.

    What’s up?

    It’s all noise, all signal – no silence.

    The instinct of self-defense has disappeared.  “Not to see many things, not to hear many things, not to permit many things to come close,” this, Nietzsche told us, is the instinct of self-defense.  But we have let all our defenses down because of the Internet, cell phones, and the digital revolution.  We have turned on, tuned in, and dropped into computerized cells whose flickering bars note signal strength but not mental bondage.  Not the long loneliness of distant signals barely heard, but “Cause” what Rodriquez sings for us:

    Cause my heart’s become a crooked hotel full of rumours
    But it’s I who pays the rent for these fingered-face out-of-tuners
    and I make 16 solid half hour friendships every evening

    It’s all noise, all signal – no silence.

    I recently had the arduous task of reviewing nearly fifty years of a writer’s personal journals.  The thing that stood out to me was the repetitive nature of his comments and analyses of people he knew and the relationships he had.  His political, literary, and historical comments were insightful, and his keen observations into the decades long diminution of the belief in existential freedom captured well the growing domination of today’s deterministic ethos with its biological emphasis and its underlying hopeless nihilism. But it was also very clear that the people he wrote about were little different after forty to fifty years.  Their situations changed but they did not – fundamentally.  They were encased in long-standing carapaces that protected them from change and choices that would force them to metamorphosize or undergo profound metanoias. Most of them saw no connection between their personal lives and world events, nor did they seem to grasp what William James, in writing about habits, said, “if we suffer the wandering of our attention, presently it will wander all the time. Attention and effort are … but two names for the same psychic fact.”

    The notebooks, of course, were one man’s observations.  But they seemed to me to capture something about people generally.  In the notes I took, I summarized this by the words “social addiction,” a habit of living and thinking that has resulted in vast numbers of people locked in their cells, confused, totally bamboozled, and in despair.  This condition is now widely recognized, even by the most unreflective people, for it is felt in the gut as a dazed death-in-life, a treading of water waiting for the next disaster, the next bad joke passing for serious attention.  It is impossible to fail to recognize, if not admit, that the United States has become a crazy country, mad and deluded in the worst ways and leading the world to perdition on a fool’s dream of dominance and delusions.

    The psychoanalyst Allen Wheelis, an intriguing writer who questioned his own profession, put it well in his 1973 book How People Change:

    Often we do not choose, but drift into those modes which eventually define us. Circumstances push and we yield. We did not choose to be what we have become, but gradually, imperceptibly, became what we are by drifting into the doing of those things we now characteristically do. Freedom is not an objective attribute of life; alternatives without awareness yield no leeway… Nothing guarantees freedom. It may never be achieved, or having been achieved, may be lost. Alternatives go unnoticed; foreseeable consequences are not foreseen; we may not know what we have been, what we are, or what we are becoming. We are the bearers of consciousness but of not very much, may proceed through a whole life without awareness of that which would have meant the most, the freedom which has to be noticed to be real. Freedom is the awareness of alternatives and of the ability to choose. It is contingent upon consciousness, and so may be gained or lost, extended or diminished.

    He correctly warned that insight does not necessarily lead to change.  It may help initiate it, but in the end the belief in freedom and the power of the will is necessary.  This has become harder in a society that has embraced biological determinism as a result of decades of propaganda.  Freedom has become a slogan only.  We have generally become determined to be determined.

    To realize that one has choices is necessary and that not to decide is to decide.  Decisions (from Latin de = off and caedere = to cut) are hard, for they involve deaths, the elimination of alternatives, the facing of one’s own death(s) with courage and hope.  The loss of illusions.  This too has become more difficult in a country that has jettisoned so much of the deep human spirituality that still animates many people around the world whom the U.S. government considers enemies.

    Such decisions also involve the intellectual honesty to seek out alternative voices to one’s fixed opinions on a host of public issues that affect everyone’s lives.

    To recognize that who we are and who we become intersect with world events, war, politics, the foreign policies of one’s country, economics, culture, etc.; that they cannot be divorced from the people we say we are.  That none of us are islands but part of the main, but when that main becomes corporate dominated mainstream news pumped into our eyes and ears day and night from little machines, we are in big trouble.

    To not turn away from what the former CIA analyst Ray McGovern calls this propaganda machine – the Military-Industrial-Congressional-Intelligence-Media-Academic-Think Tank Complex (MICIMATT) – is a choice by default and one of bad faith in which one hides the truth from oneself while knowing one is doing so.

    To not seek truth outside this complex is to deny one’s freedom and to determine not to change even when it is apodictic that things are falling apart and all innocence is being drowned in a sea of lies.

    It’s all noise, all signal – no silence.

    Change begins with desire, at the personal and public level.  It takes courage to face the ways we have all been wrong, missed opportunities, shrunk back, lied, refused to consider alternatives.  Everyone senses that the U.S. is proceeding down a perilous road now.  Everything is out of joint, the country heading for hell.

    I recently read an article by Timothy Denevi about the late writer Joan Didion who, together with her husband John Gregory Dunne, was at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel in Honolulu in June 1968 when Senator Robert F. Kennedy, who was assassinated in Los Angeles a few days previously, had died.  The thing that struck me in the article was what Didion described as the sickening indifference of so many vacationers to the news about RFK’s death and funeral.  Because television reception was sketchy in Hawaii, Didion and Dunne, not Kennedy supporters, were only able to watch a three-hour ABC taped special on June 8 that covered the assassination, funeral, and train ride of the body to Arlington Cemetery as millions of regular people kept vigil along the tracks.  A television had been set up on a large veranda where guests could watch this taped show.  But few vacationers were interested; the opposite, actually.  It angered them that this terrible national tragedy was intruding into their vacations.  They walked away.  It seemed to Didion and Dunne that something deep and dark was symbolized by their selfish indifference.  As a result, Didion suffered an attack of vertigo and nausea and was prescribed antidepressants after psychiatric evaluation.  She felt the 1960s “snapping” as she too snapped.

    I think those feelings of vertigo and nausea are felt by many people today.  Rightly so.  The U.S.A. is snapping.  It is no longer possible to remain a normal person in dark times like these, no matter how powerfully that urge tempts us.  Things have gone too far on so many fronts from the Covid scam with all its attendant deaths and injuries to the U.S. war against Russia with its increasing nuclear risks, to name only two of scores of disasters.  One could say Didion was a bit late, that the snapping began in Dallas, Texas on November 22, 1963 when President Kennedy was assassinated by the CIA.  As Billie Joel sings, “J.F.K. blown away, what more do I have to say?”  And why was he assassinated?  Because he changed dramatically in the last year of his life to embrace the role of peacemaker despite knowing that by doing so he was accepting the real risk that he would be killed.  He was courage and will personified, an exceptional example of radical change for the sake of the world.

    So I come back to my ostensible subject: Do people change?

    The short answer is: Rarely.  Many play at it while playing dumb.

    Yet is does happen, but only by some mixture of miracle and freedom, in an instant or with the passing of time where meaning and mystery can only exist.  Where we exist.  “If there is a plurality of times, or if time is cyclic,” the English writer John Berger muses, “then prophecy and destiny can coexist with freedom of choice.”  Time always tells.

    The last entry in the writer’s notebooks that I reviewed was this:

    I read that Kris Kristofferson, whose music I love, has said that he would like the first three lines of Leonard Cohen’s “Bird on a Wire” on his tombstone:

    Like a bird on the wire
    Like a drunk in a midnight choir
    I have tried in my way to be free

    It seemed apposite.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Edward Curtin.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • In January 2010, the then US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, doing what she does best, grasped a platitude and ran with it in launching, of all things, an institution called the Newseum.  “Information freedom,” she declared, “supports the peace and security that provide a foundation for global progress.”

    The same figure has encouraged the prosecution of such information spear carriers as Julian Assange, who dared give the game away by publishing, among other things, documents from the State Department and emails from Clinton’s own presidential campaign in 2016 that cast her in a rather dim light.  Information freedom is only to be lauded when it favours your side.

    Who regulates, let alone should regulate, information disseminated across the Internet remains a critical question.  Gone is the frontier utopianism of an open, untampered information environment, where bright and optimistic netizens could gather, digitally speaking, in the digital hall, the agora, the square, to debate, to ponder, to dispute every topic there was.  Perhaps it never existed, but for a time, it was pleasant to even imagine it did.

    The shift towards information control was bound to happen and was always going to be encouraged by the greatest censors of all: governments.  Governments untrusting of the posting policies and tendencies of social media users and their facilitators have been, for some years, trying to rein in published content in a number of countries.  Cyber-pessimism has replaced the cyber-utopians.  “Social media,” remarked science writer Annalee Newitz in 2019, “has poisoned the way we communicate with each other and undermined the democratic process.”  The emergence of the terribly named “fake news” phenomenon adds to such efforts, all the more ironic given the fact that government sources are often its progenitors.

    To make things even murkier, the social media behemoths have also taken liberties on what content they will permit on their forums, using their selective algorithms to disseminate information at speed even as they prevent other forms of it from reaching wider audiences.  Platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, heeding the call of the very screams and bellows of their own creation, thought it appropriate to exclude or limit various users in favour of selected causes and more sanitised usage.  In some jurisdictions, they have become the surrogates of government policy under threat: remove any offending material, or else.

    Currently under review in Australia is another distinctly nasty example of such a tendency.  The Communications Legislation Amendment (Combating Misinformation and Disinformation) Bill 2023 is a proposed instrument that risks enshrining censorship by stealth.  Its exposure draft is receiving scrutiny from public submissions till August.  Submissions are sought “on the proposed laws to hold digital platform services to account and create transparency around their efforts in responding to misinformation and disinformation in Australia.”

    The Bill is a clumsily drafted, laboriously constructed document.  It is outrageously open-ended on definitions and a condescending swipe to the intelligence of the broader citizenry.  It defines misinformation as “online content that is false, misleading or deceptive, that is shared or created without an intent to deceive but can cause and contribute to serious harm.”  Disinformation is regarded as “misinformation that is intentionally disseminated with the intent to deceive or cause serious harm.”

    The bill, should it become law, will empower the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) to monitor and regulate material it designates as “harmful online misinformation and disinformation”.  The Big Tech fraternity will be required to impose codes of conduct to enforce the interpretations made by the ACMA, with the regulator even going so far as proposing to “create and enforce an industry standard”.  Those in breach will be liable for up to A$7.8 million or 5% of global turnover for corporations.

    What, then, is harm?  Examples are provided in the Guidance Note to the Bill.  These include hatred targeting a group based on ethnicity, nationality, race, gender, sexual orientation, age, religion or physical or mental disability.  It can also include disruption to public order or society, the old grievance the State has when protestors dare differ in their opinions and do the foolish thing by expressing them.  (The example provided here is the mind of the typical paranoid government official: “Misinformation that encouraged or caused people to vandalise critical communications infrastructure.”)

    John Steenhoff of the Human Rights Law Alliance has identified, correctly, the essential, dangerous consequence of the proposed instrument.  It will grant the ACMA “a mechanism what counts as acceptable communication and what counts as misinformation and disinformation.  This potentially gives the state the ability to control the availability of information for everyday Australians, granting it power beyond anything that a government should have in a free and democratic society.”

    Interventions in such information ecosystems are risky matters, certainly for states purporting to be liberal democratic and supposedly happy with debate.  A focus on firm, robust debate, one that drives out poor, absurd ideas in favour of richer and more profound ones, should be the order of the day.  But we are being told that the quality of debate, and the strength of ideas, can no longer be sustained as an independent ecosystem.  Your information source is to be curated for your own benefit, because the government class says it’s so.  What you receive and how you receive, is to be controlled paternalistically.

    The ACMA is wading into treacherous waters.  The conservatives in opposition are worried, with Shadow Communications Minister David Coleman describing the draft as “a very bad bill” giving the ACMA “extraordinary powers.  It would lead to digital companies self-censoring the legitimately held views of Australians to avoid the risk of massive fines.”  Not that the conservative coalition has any credibility in this field.  Under the previous governments, a relentless campaign was waged against the publication of national security information.  An enlightened populace is the last thing these characters, and their colleagues, want.

  • Quote memes like this can be found all over the internet. The problem is, many of them, like this one, aren’t real quotes.

    The internet is a great place for information. But it is also a great place for misinformation. Just because something is on a meme or an internet quote site, does not mean it is actually true. A great resource on this is QuoteInvestigator, but they are not comprehensive. The first quotes covered here have not been investigated on their site.

    Exhibit A

    “You probe with bayonets: if you find mush, you push. If you find steel, you withdraw”

    ― Vladimir Ilich Lenin

    This “quote” was recently used by Disney in their TV series Secret Invasion.

    “The key thing about the Russians is you have to project strength. There’s an old Lenin quote, Vladimir, not John. ‘When you find flesh, you push. When you find steel, you stop.’ You gotta be steel, sir.”

    Colonel Rhodes, Marvel Secret Invasion

    The problem is, Lenin never said this. The closest thing he said is:

    “We said among ourselves that we must probe with bayonets whether the social revolution of the proletariat in Poland had ripened.”

    – Lenin, quoted in The Unknown Lenin: From the Secret Archive,pg. 98

    This is clearly not the same quote. So where did this misattributed quote come from? Fortunately for us, Barry Popik did an investigation into this in 2015. The result was finding that the first instance of the quote was given by Joseph Alsop.

    Political newspaper columnist Joseph Alsop wrote in 1975, “They (Soviets—ed.) merely follow Lenin’s advice to probe with bayonets any situation that looks mushy, withdrawing only when the bayonets meet steel.”

    Considering that the actual “probe with bayonets” quote from Lenin was not even available outside of the Soviet Union in 1975, it would appear that Alsop simply made it up. This was then taken up in What They Said in 1977: The Yearbook of World Opinion by Alan F. Pater and Jason R. Pater.

    It then took on a life of its own it was used by Richard Nixon in both his autobiography Memoirs of Nixon and his 1984 book The Real War. It was more recently picked by GOP presidential candidate Scott Walker during a debate in 2015.

    And — and that has put our national security at risk. If I am president, he won’t think about that. You know, Putin believes in the old Lenin adage: you probe with bayonets. When you find mush, you push. When you find steel, you stop.

    Under Obama and Clinton, we found a lot of mush over the last two years. We need to have a national security that puts steel in front of our enemies. I would send weapons to Ukraine. I would work with NATO to put forces on the eastern border of Poland and the Baltic nations, and I would reinstate, put in place back in the missile defense system that we had in Poland and in the Czech Republic. – Scott Walker, GOP debate 2015

    I have included the full quote due to its relevance to current events in Ukraine. Warmongers are going to warmonger. Imagine thinking that Hillary Clinton’s foreign policy was too soft…

    Even though it has been attributed to Lenin since 1975, it is quite clear he never said it. The concept behind the quote actually comes from Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, a text that is a couple millennia older than Lenin. In this old work on military strategy can be found:

    Military tactics are like unto water; for water in its natural course runs away from high places and hastens downwards. So in war, the way is to avoid what is strong and to strike at what is weak.

    Whether or not that is where the modern day version of the quote came from, the essence is the same.

    Exhibit B

    Great quote – except Castro never said it.

    Here is quote that has been widely disseminated on social media after the start of the Russian military operation in Ukraine in February 2022. For example, Fiorella Isabel tweeted in April 2022:

    More than 30 years ago Fidel said: “The next war in Europe will be between Russia and fascism, except that fascism will be called democracy.”

    The People’s Party tweeted the same thing on May 8, 2022. Fidel said a lot during his long life (that the US tried to cut short) but there is nothing to show that he ever said this. A quick search shows that the only time this quote has been used has been in 2022. It cannot be found in any of Fidel’s writings or speeches. It was dated to 1992 by Fiorella in her tweet (30 years ago) but Fidel’s speeches in 1992 turn up nothing.

    The earliest evidence of it online comes from a post on Quora.com from Hoang Phan who claims:

    For those wondering if this is real, yes. Fidel said this in conversation with Max Lesnik Menéndez who was his good friend & publicly stated several years ago that Fidel told him that with the defeat of the USSR, war would be inevitable & said above quote in Spanish.

    You won’t find this online because any revolutionary or anti imperialist text about Fidel is highly taken off searches. But if you read anything Marx has said you can find it. Also many people claim Fidel correctly predicted several events of the last few decades.

    In fact during an interview in Habana, Cuba, where he was for the “Festival De Cine LatinoAmericano De La Habana,” presenting his film “Snowden,” filmmaker Oliver Stone insisted that the Cuban leader predicted “everything that happened since 2001.”

    It is in fact easy to find revolutionary and anti imperialist texts by Fidel. Search engines do not suppress revolutionary texts. Searching (on multiple search engines) for anything Max Lesnik Menendez said regarding this comes up with nothing, as documented by Arley Barroso for Arbol Invertido. As she explains (translation by Google):

    In this regard, the German investigative journalism blog Correctiv wrote to the UCI in July 2022 requesting to verify the authenticity of the quote, to which they had received no response.

    They also contacted Max Lesnick, via e-mail from Radio Miami (the station of which he is director) with the same request, without receiving an answer until then.

    To date (February 25, 2023), the media has not published any entry that allows us to infer that the UCI or Menéndez responded to it.

    A review of Max Lesnick’s Twitter profile, with the keywords Fidel, Russia, Democracy and Fascism, also does not yield any reference to Fidel mentioning this phrase to him at some point.

    Unless any other evidence shows up, it appears this quote was simply made up in 2022 by Quora blogger Hoang Phan. There are no other sources backing it up.

    Exhibit C

    Great quote, but it’s not what he said.

    “Capitalism tends to destroy its two sources of wealth: nature and human beings.” – Karl Marx

    This one is an attempt to convey what Marx said in a shorter amount of space, but it is still a false quote.

    What Marx actually wrote, in Chapter 15 of Capital Vol 1 was:

    Capitalist production, therefore, develops technology, and the combining together of various processes into a social whole, only by sapping the original sources of all wealth — the soil and the labourer.

    While the meaning is essentially the same, everyone should know that Marx could never put anything so succinctly!

    Other Examples

    A couple other examples which have been investigated by the excellent QuoteInvestigator include:

    The Capitalists Will Sell Us the Rope with Which We Will Hang Them Not Lenin

    There are decades when nothing happens, and there are weeks when decades happen – Not Lenin

    Bonus Real Quotes

    Here are a few real quotes that might seem unbelievable, but are in fact true.

    “As that old expression goes, ‘women hold up half the sky.’” – Joe Biden, quoting Chairman Mao Tse-Tung

    “I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy. I mean, that’s a storybook, man.” – Joe Biden, on Barack Obama

    “You should vote for Trump”- Joe Biden to immigration activists

    “Play the radio, make sure the television, excuse me, make sure you have a record player on at night, make sure that kids hear words, a kid coming from a very poor school, or a very poor background, will hear four million fewer words spoken by the time they get there.” – Joe Biden

    And then there’s this:

    That’s our president, unfortunately. How anyone could listen to this and still vote for him is incredible.

    Post originally published at the author’s own Substack blog, An Appeal to Reason.

    This post was originally published on Real Progressives.

  • So, the quadrennial simulation of democracy in the USA is getting underway, and personally, I couldn’t be happier. It’s been a challenging few years for unincorporated political satirists like myself. The roll-out of the new global-capitalist totalitarianism hasn’t been particularly funny. In fact, it has been extremely not funny. Squeezing a little humor out of it has been like trying to suck a golf ball through a garden hose.

    Not that the New Normal Reich is history … on the contrary, it is just getting started. Yes, the shock-and-awe campaign is over. It’s been over for the better part of a year. We are deep into the mistakes-were-made/limited-hangout phase of the changeover. Nothing can stop or reverse it now. The implementation of the new official (i.e., Orwellian) reality is a fait accompli. What actually happened has been memory-holed forever, supplanted by stories of censorious “bad apples,” “overreactions,” lab leaks, and so on. Those who are old enough will recall this phase from the aftermath of the US invasion of Iraq. It’s going pretty much by the numbers.

    Which … fine. That “reality” stuff was ruining my shtick. No one wants to be told that they’re the victim of an elaborate PSYOP, which is what I’ve been doing for the past three years, with one demographic after another. First, I alienated most of my friends and colleagues, and even family members, by challenging “The Science” (which has now been debunked) and opposing the transformation of the planet into a pathologized-totalitarian police state. Then, when I warned people about Elon Musk and the whitewashing of Twitter, or X, or whatever we are calling his Chinese-style “everything app,” which, if Elon has his way, we’re all going to “live on” in the visibility-filtered, advert-saturated, dystopian, global-capitalist future … well, that pretty much did it for the rest of my audience.

    Not you, of course … the other rest of my audience. See, part of the genius of the New Normal Reich is how it has completely polarized society. It has systematically divided the masses into two irreconcilable warring camps, both of which demand absolute conformity to their dogma from their respective members. That isn’t to imply that there’s parity between them. The one camp, “the New Normals,” is backed by state and corporate power. The other camp, “the anti-New Normals,” is not. It’s no secret where my sympathies lie.

    The problem, for me, is, I don’t do well in camps. Any kind of camps. I’m not a camp person. I have an aversion to self-appointed leaders, or an oppositional-defiant disorder, or something. Or maybe I’ve just seen too many movements congeal into irrelevant countercultural ghettos where people blow off steam in a virtual vacuum and get preyed on by hucksters and ten-cent gurus … or 240-billion-dollar gurus.

    So, screw it, I’m going back to comedy, or at least I’m going to give it a try, and the upcoming US election season should provide me with the perfect material!

    For example, this piece in The New Republic about the horror a new Trump term would bring. It’s basically a “Return of the Revenge of the Curse of the Bride of the Son of Hitler”-type piece … you know, like one of those 1970s Hammer horror films with Christopher Lee.

    That’s right, he’s back … Trumpenstein, the monster! It’s the Second Coming of Literal Hitler! Vladimir Putin’s personal cock holster! The pussy-grabbing Destroyer of Worlds! According to Brynn Tannehill and The New Republic, it is “goodbye NATO … goodbye democracy!” Hello to the new-and-improved Trumpian Reich!

    To folks who know their 20th-Century history, the story-line will be eerily familiar. Like Hitler returning from Landsberg prison, where he wrote Mein Kampf after the “Beer Hall Putsch”

    [Trump] is coming back with the entire conservative apparatus at his back, having spent four years in the wilderness methodically planning how to permanently alter the political and legal landscape of the country to favor an anti-democratic minority.

    Apparently, Trump’s evil master plan this time revolves around reinstituting “Schedule F” for federal employees, which would allow him to fire anyone with “policy-making authority” and replace them with hate-crazed Nazi fanatics. Brynn explains the utter horror this will lead to.

    … a Trump administration would replace vast swathes of the federal government bureaucracy with sycophants and ideological fellow travelers bent on implementing pro-corporate, pro-religious, and anti-minority agendas. This weaponizes the entire federal bureaucracy against women and LGBTQ people.

    Shortly thereafter, the genocide will begin.

    The right intends to use every power of the government to eradicate anything it considers woke, particularly transgender people.”

    According to Brynn, once Trump has mass-murdered all the transgender people, and the gay people, and women, and presumably the Jews, and African-Americans, and whoever else he’s planning to mass-murder, he will fire and replace all the generals and admirals, arrest all his political and personal enemies, and declare himself American Führer for life!

    And so on. I think you get the idea. The most powerful propaganda machine in the history of propaganda is revving up again. It’s going to be a year-long Two Minutes Hate, with Donald Trump playing the part of Goldstein. The message is, Trump, and his master, Putin, and THE FORCES OF UNSPEAKABLE HITLERIAN EVIL, and Covid, and global boiling, and whatever, are slouching toward Washington to DESTROY DEMOCRACY, and, this time, they’re not screwing around! The only way to prevent the Trumpocalypse will be to visibility-filter the hell out of everything (except, of course, for free-speech Twitter), lock down everyone when things get unruly, and just basically go full-blown totalitarian again. It won’t be very difficult to set in motion. All they will need to do is get Rachel Maddow to shriek “IMMINENT COVID GLOBAL-BOILING INSURRECTION!” and the New Normal legions will strap on their masks and start clicking heels and following orders.

    Seriously, they’re already breaking out the Trump-is-Literally-Hitler routine, and the official election season hasn’t even started!

    Selfishly speaking, I can’t wait for it to begin. The global-capitalist ruling classes are not going to let him win again, but they’re clearly preparing to whip the masses into a full-blown frenzy of ass-puckering PARANOIA and MINDLESS HATRED of anyone even marginally deviating from official ideology, and I plan to milk that show for as many laughs as possible. I may not be able to stop what’s coming, but, in the immortal words of a very drunk Jim Morrison, I just want to get my kicks before the whole shithouse goes up in flames.

    Of course, I’ll probably be doing that in my new accommodations in German prison, where I’ll be serving time for comparing the roll-out of the New Normal to the rise of Nazi Germany. For those of you who think I’m joking, I am not. I am under criminal investigation in Berlin for comparing New Normal totalitarianism to Nazism, which, comparing anything to the Nazis is strictly prohibited in Germany … unless, of course, you’re comparing Trump to the Nazis, in which case, that’s fine …


    … or, as the Germans like to say, in Ordnung!

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Over five hundred and twenty-five days ago, between the evening of February 13 and afternoon of February 14, 2022, four men were arrested for their participation in Freedom Convoy protests at the Alberta border town of Coutts.

    They were charged with conspiracy to commit murder of police officers in support of a plot to overthrow the Government of Canada. They have been dubbed the ‘Coutts Four.’

    The accused are self-employed fisherman Chris Carbert, who ran a landscaping and fencing business with nine employees. A Lethbridge, Alberta, resident, 42-year-old Carbert is a single father who has been raising his son since the boy was nine-months-old.

    Another Lethbridge resident, and best friend of Chris Carbert since public school, is 49-year-old Chris Lysak. He is an electrician and father of two girls.

    A third member of the ‘Coutts Four’ accused of conspiracy to commit murder is 41-year-old Jerry Morin. He is a lineman who grew up near Vulcan, Alberta. The CBC states he resided in Olds, Alberta, at the time of his arrest. The fourth accused of these serious charges is Anthony “Tony” Olienkick. Tony, age 40, took part of the clean-up in High River, Alberta, after the 2013 floods.[1] He has a gravel truck and is self-employed, and the CBC has reported his home is in Claresholm, Alberta.

    The Coutts Four have been denied bail. They have remained in custody for over 525 days with a trial date yet to be set. More pretrial motions will be heard between July 25 to 28 by the crown and defence lawyers at the Lethbridge court house. Since the Magna Carta was signed in 1215, kingdoms and democracies have allowed those charged with a crime to be presumed innocent until proven guilty. With that provision has come the right to be granted bail and to a speedy trial. When citizens are accused of a crime and left to rot in prison without having their day in court, their spirits can be broken and be persuaded to agree to plead guilty even when they are innocent.

    Bail Is Granted to Those Accused of Having Committed Murder, and Lesser Charges in Canada

    In Canada, when someone is charged with committing a crime, they are released on bail. This includes for those charged with murder. For example, on September 2021, 31-year-old Umar Zameer was released on bail after being charged with first-degree murder of Toronto Police Constable Jeffrey Northrup.[2] In April 2022, Marlena Isnardy was released on bail after while awaiting her trial for the charge of murdering 27-year-old Matthew Cholette in Kelowna, British Columbia.[3] A case of double murder in the city of Mission in the Fraser Valley of British Columbia, concerned the deaths of Lisa Dudley and her boyfriend Guthrie McKay. Accused of first-degree murder, Tom Holden was released on bail.[4] And in March 2023, 22-year-old Ali Mian was released on bail as he awaited trial to answer to charges of second-degree murder in the shooting death of an armed intruder, 21-year-old Alexander Amoroso-Leacock.[5]

    But the Coutts Four are not granted bail

    Meanwhile others charged of first and second-degree murder are out on bail. What is going on here? Does the RCMP have a case that proves the accused pose a danger, if released on bail, and plan to violently overthrow of the government? Or, are their applications for bail being denied as part of political theatre within a larger government narrative to justify invocation of the Emergencies Act?

    In 1166 the Assize of Clarendon ruling under England’s King Henry II established the tradition of habeas corpus (in Latin: “that you have the body”) which gave those charged with a crime a right to appear in court to defend themselves. The 1166 judgment declared, “No Freeman shall be taken or imprisoned, or be disseized of his Freehold, or Liberties, or free Customs, or be outlawed, or exiled, or any other wise destroyed; nor will We not pass upon him, nor condemn him, but by lawful judgment of his Peers, or by the Law of the land.”[6] And, in the Magna Carta, section 38 states “No bailiff (legal officer) shall start proceedings against anyone [not just freemen, this was even then a universal human right] on his accusation alone (on his own mere say-so), without trustworthy witnesses having been brought for the purpose.”[7] Habeas corpus rights are part of the British legal tradition inherited by Canada. The rights exist in the common law and have been enshrined in section 10(c) of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which states that “[e]veryone has the right on arrest or detention … to have the validity of the detention determined by way of habeas corpus and to be released if the detention is not lawful.” While section 9(c) of the Charter states that a protected right of Canadian citizens is “freedom from arbitrary detention or imprisonment.”[8]

    Former Toronto Police Sergeant Detective, Donald Best, points out that it is almost unheard of in Canada for an accused to be denied bail.

    Does the denial of bail mean the four must be guilty? Consider the way the RCMP gathered evidence.

    The Mounties alleged that other unknown persons were still at large and connected to the plot to overthrow the government.

    Yet, the RCMP didn’t fingerprint and DNA test the firearms and other items that might have originated with ‘other unknown’ suspects. If you are an investigator, you want to identify who else might be involved in a plot. If you have a weapon, getting the fingerprints and DNA evidence can point to the identities of other persons that are suspects in the larger plot. Yet, the RCMP didn’t bag each item where it was found, and protect each item for its secure transit to a forensic lab. Best wrote on his website, “Failure of police officers to adhere to fundamentals of exhibits collection and protection doesn’t just potentially weaken the prosecution’s case, it can also deny exculpatory evidence to the defense. Many times, I have seen otherwise good officers get ‘tunnel vision’ about a suspect or an investigation, and begin to pay attention only to evidence that supports their theory of the case and the crime. These officers become so focused that they will even deliberately exclude evidence that doesn’t support their vision of events.”

    Best points out in the RCMP photo of the cache of weapons ‘discovered’ by the Mounties, “Items have been arranged on the floor with five of the long-guns rather precariously leaning against the table for display. No (investigator) would normally position or store firearms in such a manner where a bump of the table might cause them to fall…” A photo of the cache of weapons “had a national impact and was used by both the media and the government as justification for invoking the Emergencies Act, and the police operations to arrest and clear Freedom Convoy protesters in Ottawa.”[9]

    Background

    In January 2022 Canadian mainstream media and politicians described an unruly mob headed for Ottawa. On January 26, 2022, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau told Canadians there was a “fringe minority” with “unacceptable views” coming to Ottawa in a “so-called freedom convoy.”[10] Protesters began arriving in Ottawa on January 28, with the majority arriving the following day.


    Source: OffGuardian

    Protest leaders worked with Ottawa Police Service Police Liaison Teams to ensure emergency lanes in downtown Ottawa remained open. On two occasions, an Ontario court ruled the protests in Ottawa could proceed. The second ruling, on February 16, 2022, took into account the protesters adhering to the February 7 injunction against honking of horns. There was no looting, no acts of actual physical violence, no smashing of windows. Numbers of police remarked about the lack of criminality. Nonetheless, inflammatory rhetoric coming from politicians and the media depicted the protesters as “terrorists,” “mercenaries,” “hillbillies,” “white supremacists,” “Nazis,” “insurrectionists,” “an unruly mob,” and more.[11]

    Protest leaders held press conferences welcoming an opportunity to meet with government leaders, including public health officials. They wanted to have a discussion about the pandemic measures.

    Could dialogue lead to a breakthrough, a win-win? Even when unions and management are in tough negotiations during a strike, there can be a breakthrough with an unexpected way forward to resolve matters. Face-to-face dialogue was always a first step to learn if there was a way forward. A 73-page plan by the Ontario Provincial Police included recommendations that the federal government enter into dialogue with the protesters. The government did so in 2020 when First Nations protesters disrupted rail service, ferry sailings, pipeline construction and blockaded an Ontario highway. But in 2022, the Liberal government was in no mood for dialogue. Policing agencies and even the Ontario Attorney-General had suggested the federal government engage in dialogue with the protesters. But the protesters were depicted as impossible, unreasonable people, incapable of participating in discussion.

    *****
    On the 31st of January 2022, the prime minister of Canada, Justin Trudeau addressed the nation regarding the Freedom Convoy protest movement at a Press Conference from an undisclosed location which was broadcast live. 

    He portrayed the protesters as violent people, racists and more.

    On the 2nd of February, he added another layer with a tweet. (Below, See this)

    Are the protesters really what he claims them to be?

    I was there for four days with my camera, I never saw or witnessed anything close to what he describes. 

    Is it possible this is all made up? If it is, what is the purpose? (Jean Francois Girard)

    VIDEO

    At 4:30 p.m., February 14, Justin Trudeau invoked the Emergencies Act to crush the protest. Bank accounts of some hundreds of protesters were frozen.

    Yet, in an effort to defuse the situation in downtown Ottawa, on February 12, 2022 protest leaders came to an agreement with the City of Ottawa to remove seventy-five percent of protest vehicles from the city between February 14th and 16th. By 12PM, February 14, 102 vehicles had been removed, according to Serge Arpin, City of Ottawa Chief of Staff to the Mayor.[12] There were other Freedom Convoy protests that emerged during the Ottawa protests. Yet, in relation to the justification to invoke the Emergencies Act, in Windsor, Ontario, protesters and police reached an agreement to clear the blockade at the Ambassador Bridge by late on February 13th. The charges against protesters in Coutts, Alberta, across from Sweetgrass, Montana, were dealt with under the existing laws of the land on the February 14.

    “Comments made publicly, by public figures and in the media (about Ottawa protests) … were not premised in fact” – Supt. Patrick Morris (Ontario Provincial Police Intelligence)

    After the Emergencies Act was invoked, it triggered a mandatory inquiry as prescribed in 1988 legislation passed in Parliament. A Public Order Emergency Commission (POEC) was held over six weeks in Ottawa during the fall of 2022. But the justification for invoking the Emergencies Act began to unravel as police and intelligence officers gave testimony. At 1:00 PM on February 14, 2022, prior to the Emergencies Act invocation, an Ontario Provincial Police (OPP) “Operational Intelligence Report” described  the Ottawa protest. “The mood today was again calm, festive, and family oriented. Speakers were again telling people to walk away from agitators and thanked the police for remaining calm. Many of the speakers were promoting love and peaceful protest, some even taking quotes from the Bible. Speakers were also wishing everyone a happy Valentine’s.” The memo noted there were “children on Wellington Street playing hockey.”[13]

    Supt. Patrick Morris, “the foremost authority in the Province of Ontario regarding Intelligence” with the OPP testified before the POEC. He said of the protest, “ … the lack of violent crime was shocking …. If there was an actual threat, then there would have been an investigation, and if it was an actual threat, I assume the Ottawa Police Service would have laid a charge for uttering threats.”

    Morris testified,

    I was concerned by the politicization and I was concerned by hyperbole and I was concerned by the affixing of labels without evidence to individuals’ movements et cetera.” Morris elaborated in his testimony that his letter reflected his concern about “comments made publicly, by public figures and in the media that I believed were not premised in fact …. I was leading the criminal intelligence collection of information and the production of criminal intelligence in relation to these events. So, I believed I was in a unique situation to understand what was transpiring. So, when I read accounts that the State of Russia had something to do with it; Or that this was the result of American influence, either financially or ideologically; Or that Donald Trump was behind it; Or that it was un-Canadian; Or that the people participating were un-Canadian and that they were not Canadian views and they were extremists; I found it to be problematic, because what I ascertained from my role … I did not see validation for those assertions …. I did not see information that substantiated what was being said publicly and via the media. And I found that the subjective assertions sensationalized … and exacerbated conflict …. So the labelling was problematic to me.

    Morris further stated in a letter before the POEC, “I do not know where the political figures are acquiring information on intelligence on the extent of extremist involvement.” He was emphatic, “I want to be clear on this. We produced no intelligence to indicate these individuals would be armed. There has been a lot of hyperbole around that.”[14]

    OPP Commissioner Thomas Carrique, with a certificate from the University of St. Andrews in Terrorism Studies, also testified. He agreed that, “based on all OPP intelligence and the intelligence provided by the RCMP and federal intelligence agencies to the OPP…there was no credible threat to the security of Canada.” Carrique confirmed it “would be my understanding” that in order to invoke the Emergencies Act, there needs to be a “credible threat.” He agreed that the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms protected citizens’ rights to assemble and protest. He agreed that this includes protesting government policies. Carrique also concurred that the trucks that were arriving in Ottawa in late January 2022 “did so at the direction of police officers.”[15]

    Incendiary Allegations Made About Coutts Early into the Protest

    If the comments made publicly by politicians and the media about the protests in Ottawa were “problematic, being controlled and one-sided,” was this also the case in Coutts? On February 1, 2022 Alberta Premier Jason Kenney spoke to the press and residents of the province. He stated that he’d “received reports in the last hour of people allied with the protesters assaulting RCMP officers, including in one instance trying to ram members of the RCMP, later leading to a collision with a civilian vehicle in the area. This kind of conduct is totally unacceptable. Assaulting law enforcement officers who are simply doing their job to maintain public safety and the rule of law is completely unacceptable. And without hesitation, I condemn those actions …. ”[16]

    But in a documentary titled Trucker Rebellion: The Story of the Coutts Blockade, Rebel News reporters Kiane Simone and Sydney Fizzard learned that Premier Kenney’s statements were not accurate. Simone spoke on his cell phone with RCMP Corporal Curtis Peters. The officer clarified, “There were no physical altercation(s) between RCMP officers and protesters. Yesterday, when we had protesters go around and breach the road block set up on Highway 4 to the north, there was some public safety concerns and officer safety concerns that took place there. Vehicles travelled through, drove through fields to get around the road block and then onto Highway 4. They were travelling southbound on Highway 4 in the northbound lanes. And that was happening at the same time we had a few vehicles leaving the protest and travelling northbound in the northbound lanes. So, we had a traffic-meeting head-on on the double-lane highway there. And we did have a collision take place. A head-on collision occurred as a result of all this between a person trying to reach the blockade and a person who was just travelling north on the highway. And fortunately, it was a relatively minor collision. But a confrontation which led to an assault took place as a direct result of that collision.”

    Kiane Simone asked, “was that an assault on an RCMP officer?” Peters replied, “No. That was an assault between two civilians, between a protester and a civilian.” Kian Simone pressed, “So, Jason Kenney’s statement was not true at the press conference.” RCMP Corporal Peters emphasized, “I can tell you what I just told you, sir. You can have my name. It’s Corporal Curtis Peters. I’m the spokesperson here. My badge number is 5-2-9-5-7.”[17]

    The Coutts Four in the Headlines

    On February 14, 2022 the RCMP issued a press release regarding arrests in Coutts. It included a photo of an RCMP vehicle in the background, and a table in the foreground. Leaning against, on and below the table were weapons the RCMP said it “discovered” in “three trailers associated to this criminal organization.” The weapons they seized included 13 long guns, several handguns, multiple (three) sets of body armour, a machete, and high-capacity magazines. The press release did not name any of the individuals or the charges against them.[18] Global News carried the story later that day, and a reporter spoke to Alberta RCMP Supt. Roberta McHale. She said, “There was a heavy stash of weapons and these weapons were brought by people who had the intent on causing harm.” She announced that the RCMP were investigating a range of charges, including conspiracy to commit murder. McHale added, “This was a very complex, layered investigation, and some people might ask why it took so long. These investigations aren’t necessarily easy.”[19]

    On February 17, 2022 the Toronto Star ran this headline: “Father of accused in alleged Coutts blockade murder conspiracy says son was radicalized online, as others dispute RCMP narrative.” Mike Lysak, whose son Chris is one of the Coutts Four, was reported to have expressed his frustration watching his son “fall further and further into an online world of COVID-19 misinformation.” The Toronto Star claimed Mike Lysak said his son had become involved in the Diagolon group.[20] But, Granny Mackay, a guest on the Good Morning with Jason podcast, rejects that narrative. She has let me know that after the Toronto Star ran their story, Mike Lysak was upset. He said the newspaper twisted his words.

    Global News had reported on February 15 about tweets by the Canadian Anti-Hate Network which stressed that RCMP had seized “a plate carrier with Diagolon patches.” The tweets described Diagolon as “an accelerationist movement that believes a revolution is inevitable and necessary to collapse the current government system.” Deputy Director for Anti-Hate, Elizabeth Simmons, warned about Diagolon. “A lot of them claim to be ex-military and … have some kind of military training.” She added, “this is a very anti-Semitic group. It’s rife with neo-Nazis.” She pointed to the February 3, 2022 arrest in Nova Scotia of Jeremy MacKenzie on firearms charges.[21]

    A Global News story on February 3, 2022 described Jeremy MacKenzie as the “creator of Diagolon.” An RCMP warrant to search MacKenzie’s home in Pictou, Nova Scotia on January 26, 2022 referred to a video where MacKenzie spoke about “Diagolona.” RCMP contended that MacKenzie intended to create a new nation from Alaska to Florida made up of the provinces and states with the fewest pandemic restrictions. MacKenzie, a Canadian Armed Forces veteran of the Afghanistan War, attended some of the Freedom Convoy protest in Ottawa. But his firearms charges are not related to the Freedom Convoy. MacKenzie had a firearms license, but it was alleged he had an over-capacity magazine.[18] At the time the news story was reported, the Freedom Convoy protests were less than a week old. But, the headline, “Man who attended Ottawa protest convoy arrested on firearms charges,” inferred that the people protesting on Parliament Hill were violent. And now, here were followers of Jeremy MacKenzie in Coutts who were allegedly also violent.[22]

    Radio-Canada reported on February 17, 2022 about the names of those who were charged. Chris Carbert and Chris Lysak were described as people who have ties to Jeremy MacKenzie, of the “American-style militia movement” Diagolon, a “neo-fascist, white supremacist” and “violent insurrectionist movement.” The news story contended it was the aim of Diagolon to “establish a white nationalist state … that would run diagonally from Alaska through westerns Canada’s provinces, all the way south to Florida.” The news story cited a Facebook post in October 2021 by Carbert where he said he was “prepared to die in protest of government mandates.” Carbert apparently posted, “I’ll likely be dead soon and likely will be front page news … I will die fighting for what I believe is right and I mean this.” He added in another post, “I won’t live long. I’ve come to terms with this.” Radio-Canada stated that “Carbert has prior convictions for assault, drug trafficking and two drunk driving convictions.” However, Granny Mackay has learned from Chris Carbert that he was never convicted of assault. Another man picked a fight with him in a bar. Carbert was given a conditional sentence. He has no record of an assault conviction. The drug charge in question concerns getting some ecstasy for a friend when he was in his early 20s. Both happened prior to 2004. Jerry Morin posted on February 13, 2022 “This is war. Your country needs (you) more than ever now.”[23]

    On April 25, 2022 the CBC reported that crown prosecutors Aaron Rankin and Matt Dalidowicz stated that the plan was to try all four men in one trial. Daldiowicz told the CBC that the cases for Carbert, Olienick and Morin were “moving quickly.” But there were complications with the Lysak case.[24] The Lethbridge Herald reported on June 10, 2022 that three of the Coutts Four had been denied bail, with Jerry Morin awaiting his bail hearing.[25]

    In early September 2022, some of the contents of the Information To Obtain search warrant by RCMP Constable Trevor Checkley was made public in the press. The warrant in question was the one granted by an Alberta judge to allow RCMP officers to search properties. This was due to Checkley’s urgent request and belief that a serious crime was about to be committed. In the ITO, Checkley swore before the judge, “I have reasonable grounds to believe that (Tony) Olienick, (Chris) Carbert and (Jerry) Morin were part of a group that participated in the Coutts blockade and brought firearms into the Coutts blockade area with the intention of using those firearms against police.” The officer attested that “I believe (these protesters were) arming themselves for a standoff against police.”[26]

    On November 30, 2022 the Calgary Herald ran the attention-getting headline “Some Coutts protesters wanted to alter Canada’s political system.” Allegedly, in conversations with undercover officers, RCMP Constable Trevor Checkley stated Anthony “Olienick described (Christopher) Lysak as a hitman, sniper and gun-fighter.” Checkley emphasized that Jerry “Morin said it was World War Three and that stripping freedoms and making everyone slaves was warfare.”[27] The next day, the CBC ran a story about how the Coutts Four were making calls while in custody directly to their bosses in “the extremist network called Diagolon.” It was inferred that bosses outside of Coutts who were directing the Coutts Four to agitate for a new order.[28]

    On the Good Morning with Jason podcast, a woman named Danielle who has attended the pretrial motions in June 2023 spoke about the media coverage. A regular guest on the Good Morning with Jason show, Danielle observed “ever since Christmas (2022) mainstream media has been very, very quiet about this. Global News hasn’t reported a single thing on it (since December 2022). There’s been absolute crickets.” Jason Lavigne spoke to a staff member of the Western Standard in Alberta, who is also a friend. In addition to the publication ban requested by the defense to protect the jury pool process, there is also some sort of gag order related to the media. Lavigne’s contact at the Western Standard, who he spoke with in July 2023, is not at liberty to discuss this any further.[29]

    Coutts Protests, Arrests, on the A-list to Justify Invocation of Emergencies Act

    Testimony by numbers of government officials at the POEC pointed to the protests at Coutts as being on the A-list of events triggering the Emergencies Act. Clerk of the Privy Council, Janice Charette, raised the alarm about the protests in Coutts in the context of discussing the conversation about whether to invoke the Emergencies Act. “We were seeing the results of the law enforcement activity and what was happening at Coutts and we were seeing the size of the stash of firearms and ammunition that were found in Coutts amongst the protesters. So, this was new and I would say relevant information in terms of just the nature of the threat that we were worried about in terms of the risk for serious violence.”[30] Charette testified that “the situation at Coutts was more complex … It looked like it was getting fixed, then it was not getting fixed; looked like it was getting fixed, then it was not getting fixed …. The quantity of weapons and ammunition that was discovered by the RCMP conducting that law enforcement activity was more than I would have expected. So that, to me, indicated a seriousness and a scale of the illegal activity that was either contemplated at Coutts or people were ready to engage in at Coutts … that was beyond … my prior expectations …. ” When discussing the Freedom Convoy protests across Canada, including Coutts, Janice Charette warned of insurrectionist intentions. “There was talk of overthrowing the government and installing a different government with a governor general …. ” [31]

    Deputy Clerk of the Privy Council, Nathalie Drouin, was asked if she knew that the protesters in Coutts intended to leave the area. “Well, I was not aware of that. No, that’s not true. I have heard about the potential breakthrough in Coutts. …prior to the enforcement action, we didn’t know about the cache.”[32] Prime Minister Justin Trudeau explained one of the reasons invoking the Emergencies Act was on the table “was (the) presence of weapons at Coutts …. ” Trudeau complained that once Premier Jason Kenney removed “a number of mandates” in Alberta, “the occupation at Coutts seemed to be emboldened … ‘Let’s keep going.’” Trudeau also revealed under cross examination that he had been considering invoking the Emergencies Act in response to the Freedom Convoy protests “from the very beginning.”[33]

    National Security Advisor to the Prime Minister, Jody Thomas, reflected in the decision-making process on the road to invoking the Emergencies Act. Regarding “acts of serious violence,” can that include “the violence that people … of Ottawa were experiencing on the streets, … the inability of the Town of Coutts to function, is that a line? … There is a spectrum of activity and behaviour and threat in there that we need to understand …. ”[34]

    One of the Liberal cabinet ministers who cited the situation in Coutts as a catalyst in the A-list of reasons to invoke the Emergencies Act was Public Safety Minister Marco Mendicino. He testified that “not knowing exactly how it was that the operation in Coutts was going to play out at that time, and bearing in mind the sensitivities, the fact that the situation was combustible, that the individuals that were involved in Coutts were prepared to go down with a fight that could lead to the loss of life, that if that had happened and that occurred, it still remains an open question in my mind as to whether or not it would have triggered other events across the country. And so that’s why I – in my mind, it was very much – it was a threshold moment.”[35]

    In her testimony before the POEC, Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland spoke about the protests in Coutts as accelerating the sense that the government had to respond decisively to the Freedom Convoy. She recalled that on February 12, 2022 when “we heard from the RCMP Commissioner about concerns that there were serious weapons in Coutts. …that really raised the stakes in terms of my degree of concern about what could be happening in this sort of whack-a-mole copycat situation across the country.” [36] Minister of Emergency Preparedness, Bill Blair, also echoed this view in his testimony before the POEC on November 21, 2022.

    The mayor of Coutts, Jimmy Willet, also testified before the POEC on November 9, 2022. A text was entered as evidence from Mayor Willett to CTV reporter Bill Graveland. In it the mayor described the protesters in Coutts as “Domestic Terrorists.” But told Graveland in the text “You need to find someone in a protected position to call these guys what they are, Domestic Terrorists. Won’t be me. They are right outside my window. I would be strung up, literally. Just a thought.” He stated that his wife saw some protesters “moving heavy hockey bags” and said “it’s guns.”[37] Why the mayor’s wife presumed the hockey bags contained guns has not been followed up by any reporters.

    Jeremy MacKenzie and Diagolon

    On Tom Marazzo’s Meet Me in the Middle podcast in June 20, 2023, Jeremy MacKenzie spoke about his February 3, 2022 arrest in Nova Scotia. “They tried to play it up that I was in hiding. I had lawyers who were trying to talk to these people. What is going on. They flew four RCMP officers on their own planes and flew it from Saskatchewan to Halifax, where I spent six days in solitary confinement. And then flew me out to Saskatchewan in chains and ankle and arms and belly chains. And then I did two and a half months in jail in Saskatchewan before I could get bail. I have no criminal record. Never convicted of anything. And there was a murder while I was there, a woman stabbed another woman at a dance club. She was out on bail the next day. But, I’m too dangerous to be let out. And if it wasn’t for my lawyers and my legal team, I’d probably still be in there … on a common assault charge.” The common assault charge relates to an incident in Saskatchewan in November 2021, and not anything connecting MacKenzie to the Freedom Convoy protests. He told Tom Marazzo on the podcast that sixteen months after the protests in the winter of 2022, “I still to this day have not been asked a single question by the RCMP or CSIS … regarding any of this (Diagolon).” MacKenzie asserted that the government of Canada needed a scapegoat to justify invoking the Emergencies Act.[38]

    At the POEC, MacKenzie testified from his prison cell in Saskatchewan Correctional Centre. MacKenzie confirmed that in January 2021 he drew a diagonal line on his cell phone from Alaska, through Alberta and Saskatchewan, through the Dakotas, down to Texas and across to Florida and named it Diagolon. It became a brand name for followers on his podcasts. He made a plastic goat figurine, named Philip, the vice-president of Diagolon. Philip, he explained to his viewers was a demonic time-travelling, cocaine addict. He pointed out that the official narrative about Diagolon as “militia” and “extremist, has come from the largely government-funded Canadian Anti-Hate Network. MacKenzie observed how Anti-Hate posts scary articles about Diagolon which both the media and the police take at face value.[39] While in Ottawa, Jeremy MacKenzie posted that he wanted any of his followers at Freedom Convoy protests “If there’s a speed limit (go) slower than that. Don’t even litter. Don’t sit. Don’t even throw a snowball. Don’t give anyone any excuse to point at you and say, ‘Look what you’ve done.’”[40]

    In his testimony, MacKenzie confirmed that he had met Chris Lysak in person at a meet-and-greet in Saskatchewan in the summer of 2021, and at a BBQ where people were having steak on the grill. MacKenzie spoke to Lysak sometime after the charges for conspiracy to commit murder. He confirmed that the patches on some tactical vests looked like Diagolon patches. But that anyone could have made them and sold them. “I really can’t speak to their origins,” stated MacKenzie. Though he did not claim that the RCMP might have planted the Diagolon patches on the tactical vests discovered among the weapons cache in Coutts, MacKenzie stated “law enforcement (in) Canada has a history of things like this taking place. It’s not outside the realm of possibility … Could it be planted? … I would leave that open to possibility.”[41] During POEC testimony, it was confirmed that Jeremy MacKenzie has no criminal record.

    A reasonable person might conclude that an organization whose vice-president is a plastic goat figurine that does time-travelling and has a narcotics addiction should not be taken seriously. Anymore, than a friend at a bar having one too many announces “one day I’ll be Prime Minister.” How might the United States government view an attempt to trigger the secession of 26 states from Alaska, and Idaho across to the Atlantic coast from Virginia to Florida?

    But police and intelligence in Canada in 2021-2022 took every statement on Jeremy MacKenzie’s podcasts at face value. If Jeremy MacKenzie read the story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears, would Canadian law enforcement issue an all-points-bulletin to be on the lookout for a little girl with blonde hair on charges of breaking and entering, and damaging personal property of the Bear family?

    What Sparked the Protests?

    As I have written in previous articles, the Freedom Convoy protests began in response to the Canadian government ending the truck driver exemption from vaccination in order to cross the Canadian border. [42] Truck drivers had enjoyed an exemption since the start of the pandemic were hailed as heroes by Prime Minister Trudeau. No data about COVID-19 spread and truck drivers was presented to the House of Commons Health Committee in January 2022. The infection fatality rate for Covid-19 was about 0.25%.[43]


    Source: Children’s Health Defense

    For truck drivers entering the United States, Labor Secretary Marty Walsh clarified the Biden Administration’s new regulations. “The ironic thing is most truckers are not covered by this, because they’re driving a truck, they’re in a cab, they’re by themselves, they wouldn’t be covered by this,” Walsh said. Though often framed as equivalent to Canadian mandates for truck drivers, American mandates were less restrictive. The US Administration mandate exempted workers “who do not report to a workplace where other individuals such as coworkers or customers are present.”[44] And there were no vaccine requirements for truck drivers entering Mexico. Canadian truck drivers were not being deprived of making a living due to regulations in the United States. During the pandemic, with other nations concerned about healthy economies and supply chains, Canada was an outlier in its vaccine restrictions for truck drivers.

    Original Search Warrant Listed Only Mischief Over $5,000, No Mention of Weapons or Conspiracy to Commit Murder

    A Search Warrant was issued on February 13, 2022 to RCMP Constable Trevor Checkley. The search was granted, effective 10PM, February 13th, due to the officer’s sworn oath that he had reasonable grounds to suspect “Mischief Over $5,000.” The warrant was not issued on “weapons charges” or “conspiracy to commit murder.” The search stated officers could search for “Documents and data related to planning organization and operations of the protest group’s security for the Coutts blockade.” A question the lawyers for the Coutts Four need to determine is if it is legitimate to have a search warrant for a minimum charge; if the RCMP believes a far more serious crime is about to unfold, but not name it in the search. Donald Best, a former Sergeant (Detective) with the Toronto Police, highlights that in order to get a search warrant, there are affidavits and likely photos presented to the judge to support the Information To Obtain search. [45]

    Behaviour of Those Arrested Resembled Ordinary Citizens, Not Domestic Terrorists

    On the Good Morning with Jason podcast, a local woman named Danielle, summarized the arrests of the Coutts Four. The first person to get arrested was Christopher Lysak at 9PM, on February 13, 2022, “in front of Smuggler’s” Saloon, in Coutts. This was in front of many other protesters. When Anthony Olienick learned that Lysak might have been arrested, “he began videotaping and posting online saying he wished the cops would put their guns down and come and have coffee with us.” What Olienick did not do was head off and grab a bunch of guns and start a standoff with the police. Then Olienick was arrested about 9:50 PM. This was “in amongst the protesters.” Danielle reports that “Chris Carbert was sleeping in his trailer when they (RCMP) did the raid on the property …. He also knew the other two had been arrested.” Yet, Carbert chose to go to bed. He didn’t try to overthrow the government. He was arrested around 12:30 AM on February 14, 2022. Later that day, after having gone to work in Calgary, Jerry Morin was arrested by the RCMP about 12PM. At the time of his arrest, Morin knew the other three had been arrested. All of the Coutts Four were unarmed when they were arrested. None of them were running or hiding.

    Retired police sergeant Donald Best flags several problems with the timeline of arrests. “This is all politically driven. They (several Liberal cabinet ministers) knew about it in Ottawa before the warrant went down. We saw that from the Commission (POEC). … that means the politicians on the political side of this were involved in the creation of, and the timeline, and the date and time of execution; and if all that is true, and I believe it is … these men deserve to see their day in court. And they deserve to be out with an ankle bracelet, or whatever.[46]

    Commenting on the cache of weapons displayed by the RCMP on February 14, 2022, local gun owner Zach Schmidt made these observations. “This is not what I would be choosing if I were to hypothetically (try) to take down the RCMP.” There were about 50 RCMP vehicles in the Coutts vicinity and so about a hundred officers …. This just looks like someone’s basement was raided. Numbers of the guns are rifles that would be better for hunting deer. There are no sniper rifles, no precision rifles. They’re just run-of-the-mill hunting guns …. ” Donald Best added, “When the RCMP were investigating the multiple shooting in Nova Scotia (in 2022), the lead investigators refused to release the types and photos of the weapons involved. Why? Because they’re in the middle of an investigation. They want to know where they came from. Contrast that with the RCMP action in Coutts.”[47]

    There are some instances in the past where the RCMP have created a threat, or impeded ongoing investigations. On July 1, 2013 there were reports that a plot to bomb the British Columbia legislature had been averted by the RCMP. Offices acting undercover, with the support of over 200 staff working to prevent the plot, saved the day and caught the plotters red-handed. Or so the public was led to believe. When the case went to court it turned out that the RCMP was in the spotlight, and uncomfortably so. The CBC headline reported, “RCMP entrapment of B.C. couple in legislature bomb plot was ‘travesty of justice,’ court rules: John Nuttall-Amanda Korody’s convictions had been stayed due to entrapment, abuse of process.”[48]

    In her verdict, Justice Catherine Bruce wrote, “Simply put, the world has enough terrorists. We do not need the police to create more out of marginalized people who have neither the capacity nor the sufficient motivation to do it themselves.” Bruce made clear that the RCMP had not foiled a pre-existing plan. The couple in the RCMPs crosshairs were not terrorists. They were not people with capacities that terrorists might want to recruit. Said Bruce, “This is truly a case where the RCMP manufactured the crime.”[49]

    Writing for The Tyee, Bill Tieleman asked:

    Why did the RCMP create the July 1, 2013 B.C. Legislature bomb plot and train and equip a hapless, methadone-addicted, developmentally challenged couple to undertake terrorist actions? And why did the RCMP also break Canada’s laws in doing so? Money. Lots and lots of money. John Nuttall and Amanda Korody were freed Friday after three years in jail thanks to a stunning decision that saw a respected judge condemn the RCMP in the strongest terms possible, while overturning a jury’s guilty verdict on terrorism changes because the Surrey couple were “entrapped” by police, who also committed an “abuse of process.”…

    So why did the RCMP take such obviously reprehensible actions? What was their motivation in turning two sad, naïve recovering heroin addicts who barely left their basement apartment into Canada’s most famous terrorists? To get government money for its huge operations. The RCMP has a $2.8-billion annual budget and more than 29,000 employees. It depends on the federal government for its funding – and counterterrorism dollars depend on results, as I wrote in The Tyee in 2013 after covering the first court appearances of Nuttall and Korody. The RCMP is also competing with the Canadian Security Intelligence Service for financial support, so it is highly motivated to show public success. And in the RCMP’s Departmental Performance Report one of the major “expected results” is “Terrorist criminal activity is prevented, detected, responded to and denied.”

    In the absence of real terrorist plots to foil, the case of Nuttall and Korody indicated the RCMPs work can include manufacturing plots in order to foil them. From the success of these sting operations, the RCMP gets favorable media coverage and a subsequent boost in future yearly budgets. As long as they don’t get caught. [50]

    In the past, the RCMP have engaged in policing to advance the political agendas of those in the federal government. The Halifax Examiner ran this headline in June 2022: “RCMP Commissioner Brenda Lucki tried to ‘jeopardize’ mass murder investigation to advance Trudeau’s gun control efforts.” The paper reported:

    “RCMP Commissioner Brenda Lucki “made a promise” to Public Safety Minister Bill Blair and the Prime Minister’s Office to leverage the mass murders of April 18/19, 2020 to get a gun control law passed.” RCMP in Nova Scotia were left out of the loop regarding numbers of victims and release of information. The article detailed how “Contravening the agreed protocol, throughout the early hours of Sunday evening, RCMP Commissioner Brenda Lucki agreed to a number of one-on-one interviews with reporters. At 7:36PM, CBC News quoted Lucki as stating there were 13 victims; at 7:40PM, CTV reported Lucki had said 14 victims; and at 7:56PM, the Canadian Press quoted Lucki as having confirmed 17 dead, including the gunman. The public and the press corps were both confused and alarmed.

    “So how does it happen that Commissioner Lucki …. ?” Mass Casualty Commission lawyer Krista Smith started to ask Communications director Lia Scanlan during an interview last February. “I don’t know, ask National Headquarters,” retorted Scanlan. “The commissioner (Lucki) releases a body count that we (Communications) don’t even have. She went out and did that. It was all political pressure. That is 100% Minister Blair and the Prime Minister. And we have a Commissioner that does not push back.” [51]

    During the FLQ Crisis in the fall of 1970, the RCMP was found to have engaged in illegal activities. As the McDonald Commission Report of 1981 found, the RCMP forged documents, was involved in the theft of the membership list of the Parti Quebecois, several break-ins, illegal opening of mail, and the burning a barn in Quebec.[52] The McDonald Commission recommended revisions to the War Measures Act. These were tabled by Perrin Beatty in Parliament in July 1988 as the Emergencies Act.

    Discrepancies in Disclosure Pointed to During Pretrial Motions

    Pretrial motions were heard at the Lethbridge, Alberta courthouse between June 12 and 29. At one point, there was an animated discussion between the judge, lawyers for the accused, and the Crown. One of those attending was a local woman named Danielle, who spoke to Jason Lavigne on his podcast on July 13, 2023. She described how “the Crown kept talking about the solicitor-client privilege.” A lawyer for one of the accused stopped them after a while. This lawyer said ‘Listen. This might not be the case that there’s evidence of unlawful activity. We’re talking about disclosure that has been discovered.’” Danielle described how the Crown had dumped thousands of pages of disclosure at the last minute on the defence. There was mention of “inadvertent disclosure” on a number of occasions. Danielle told Jason Lavigne, “I don’t believe they (defence lawyers) were supposed to have found it. I think she kind of found it. And she got excited that she found it. And then everybody got a lot more excited after the content of that was more apparent to them. Again, we’re not privy to exactly what’s in that conflict of disclosure. The Crown mentioned that due to the content, the disclosure conflicted not only about the disclosure. It is also in regards to two of the crown prosecutors …. This application (by the defence) coming up, (two) Crown prosecutors are going to have to be witnesses. So, they (the prosecutors who are representing the case for the Crown) are going to be part of the hearing.” This opens up the possibility that some Crown prosecutors may be defendants at some point in relation to this case.

    Danielle described to Jason the importance of this moment during the pretrial motions. The defence made an application to the court during disclosure. It related to the cross examination of one of the witnesses as the case against the accused was being built. Danielle, stated, “There were notes. There were scribbled notes in one book. And there were scribbled notes in another book from the scribes that were hired for this person (witness). And there was also another scribe that had been hired that had … typed notes. … it was discovered that the typed notes were never submitted to the defence counsel. However, the witness had testified “I’ve given the Crown everything that I have.” So, it was discovered that there was a large pile of typed notes. What was problematic is the content of the scribbled notes, and the content of the typed notes contain crucial discrepancies. The defence was excited about this inadvertent discovery. What can explain these discrepancies? Were the typed notes exculpatory evidence helpful to the defense? [53]

    Another guest on the Good Morning with Jason podcast Margaret “Granny” Mackay has also attended the pretrial motions in June. She also witnessed the astonishing developments in the court house that Danielle described to viewers of the podcast on July 13, 2023.

    On the Good Morning with Jason podcast on July 24, Danielle discussed notes she took from the pretrial motions on June 29. That day one of the Crown prosecutors agreed to recuse themselves from the case. [54]

    A Facebook group has sprung up under the name Alberta Political Prisoners. The RCMP and the Crown present themselves as having a solid case to convict the four accused on conspiracy to commit murder. But this may not be the case. It’s plausible that the case for the Crown is thin at best, as has been the case for the Trudeau governments justification for invoking the Emergencies Act. After over five hundred days without bail, more people are starting to pay attention to this case that’s been largely ignored by the media.

    Chris Carbert has been leading a Bible study in the remand centre early into his custody. Jerry Morin has been leading other inmates in yoga classes. One of the guards told Morin after he’d been in custody for a few weeks, “This is weird. We were expecting a lot of different behaviour from you. We thought that you were a white supremacist.”[55] The four men in custody on conspiracy charges are looking less like insurrectionists, and more like political prisoners in Justin Trudeau’s Canada.

  • Published on Global Research. This article was originally published on Propaganda in Focus.
  • ENDNOTES

    [1] “High River residents grateful for yard cleanup months after flood,” CBC, June 1, 2014. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/high-river-residents-grateful-for-yard-cleanup-months-after-flood-1.2661368

    [2] Lieberman, Caryn, “Suspect charged in connection with death of Toronto officer granted bail,” Global News, September 22, 2021.https://globalnews.ca/news/8212220/umar-zameer-bail-jeffrey-northrup-toronto-police/

    [3] Geleneau, Jacqueline, “Kelownna woman charged with murder released on bail,” Kelowna Capital News, April 28, 2022.https://www.kelownacapnews.com/news/kelowna-woman-charged-with-murder-released-on-bail/

    [4] “Accused in Mission double murder released on bail,” CBC, October 17, 2013.https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/accused-in-mission-double-murder-released-on-bail-1.2101838

    [5] McDonald, Catherine, “Milton, Ont. Man accused of murdering armed intruder released on bail,” Global News, March 2, 2023.https://globalnews.ca/news/9523161/milton-man-home-invasion-shooting-bail/

    [6] Henderson, Ernest F, “Assize of Clarendon, 1166,” in Select Historical Documents of the Middle Ages, (London, George Bell and Sons, 1896). https://avalon.law.yale.edu/medieval/assizecl.asp

    [7] Magna Carta, 1215, Section 38 https://magnacarta.cmp.uea.ac.uk/read/magna_carta_1215/Clause_38

    [8] “Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms,” Constitution Act of 1982, 1982. https://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/const/page-12.html

    [9] Best, Donald, “Denying Bail to Coutts Four is a Political Decision and Act,” Donaldbest.ca, July 8, 2023 https://donaldbest.ca/denying-bail-to-the-coutts-four-is-a-political-decision-and-act/

    [10] Gilmore, Rachel, “’Fringe minority’ in truck convoy with ‘unacceptable views’ don’t represent Canadians: Trudeau,”Global News, January 26, 2022. https://globalnews.ca/news/8539610/truckerconvoy-covid-vaccine-mandates-ottawa/

    [11] Farrow, Anna, “I Saw A Mob; It Wasn’t the Truckers,”Catholic Register, January 31, 2022 https://www.catholicregister.org/opinion/guestcolumnists/item/33985-i-saw-a-mob-it-wasn-ttruckers

    [12] “Mr. Serge Arpin, Sworn,” Public Order Emergency Commission, Ottawa, October 17, 2022, 194-329. https://publicorderemergencycommission.ca/files/d ocuments/Transcripts/POEC-Public-HearingsVolume-3-October-17-2022.pdf

    [13] Wilson, Pete, “Police Called Convoy Protest ‘Calm, Festive’ on Same Day Emergencies Act Was Invoked: Internal Memo,” Epoch Times, November 3, 2022. https://www.theepochtimes.com/police[called-convoy-protest-calm-festive-on-same-dayemergencies-act-was-invoked-internalmemo_4839848.html](https://www.theepochtimes.com/police-called-convoy-protest-calm-festive-on-same-day-emergencies-act-was-invoked-internal-memo_4839848.html)

    [14] “Supt. Patrick Morris, Sworn,” Public Order Emergency Commission, Ottawa, October 19, 2022, 184-305. https://publicorderemergencycommission.ca/files/d ocuments/Transcripts/POEC-Public-HearingsVolume-5-October-19-2022.pdf

    [15] “TDF Litigation Director questions OPP Supt. Carson Pardy,” The Democracy Fund, October 21, 2022. https://www.thedemocracyfund.ca/tdf_litigation_di rector_questions_opp_pardy

    [16] Joannou, Ashley, “Kenney calls for calm, says RCMP officers assaulted at Coutts border,”Edmonton Journal, February 2, 2022. https://edmontonjournal.com/news/local-news/kenney-calls-for-calm-says-rcmp-officers-assaulted-at-coutts-border-crossing

    [17] Simone, Kiane and Fizzard, Sydney,Trucker Rebellion: The Story of the Coutts Blockade, Rebel News, August 19, 2022. https://rumble.com/v1glv1z-trucker-rebellion-the-story-of-the-coutts-blockade.html

    [18] “Alberta RCMP make arrests at Coutts Border Blockade,” RCMP, February 14, 2022. https://www.rcmp-grc.gc.ca/en/news/2022/alberta-rcmp-make-arrests-coutts-border-blockade

    [19] Gibson, Caley, “RCMP arrest 13 people, seize weapons and ammunition near Coutts border blockade,” Global News, February 14, 2022. https://globalnews.ca/news/8618494/alberta-coutts-border-protest-weapons-ammunition-seized/

    [20] Leavitt, Kieran and Mosleh, Omar, “Father of accused in alleged Coutts blockade murder conspiracy says son was radicalized online, as others dispute RCMP narrative,”Toronto Star, February 17, 2022. https://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2022/02/17/father-of-accused-in-alleged-coutts-blockade-murder-conspiracy-says-son-was-radicalized-online-as-others-dispute-rcmp-narrative.html

    [21] Tran, Paula,“Anti-hate experts concerned about possible neo-fascist involvement at Alberta trucker convoy,” Global News, February 15, 2022. https://globalnews.ca/news/8621125/canadian-anti-hate-network-concerned-diagolon-coutts-border-protest-diagolon/

    [22] Bell, Stewart, “Man who attended Ottawa protest convoy arrested on firearms charges,” Global News, February 3, 2022. https://globalnews.ca/news/8593064/ns-man-ottawa-convoy-protest-firearms-charge/

    [23] “The Coutts 13: New details on the men and women arrested at border blockade,” Radio-Canada, February 17, 2022. https://ici.radio-canada.ca/rci/en/news/1862953/the-coutts-13-new-details-on-the-men-and-women-arrested-at-border-blockade

    [24] Grant, Meghan,“4 men accused of conspiring to murder RCMP officers to be tried together: prosecutors: Chris Lysak, Chris Carbert, Anthony Olienick, Jerry Morin charged after Coutts protests,” CBC, April 25, 2022. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/coutts-border-protest-conspiracy-to-murder-trials-1.6430369

    [25] Shurtz, Delon, “Bail denied for accused in Coutts conspiracy case,”Lethbridge Herald, June 10, 2022. https://lethbridgeherald.com/news/lethbridge-news/2022/06/10/bail-denied-for-accused-in-coutts-conspiracy-case/

    [26] Martin, Kevin, “Arming for a standoff against police,” Regina Leader-Post, Regina, SK, September 8, 2022. https://www.pressreader.com/canada/regina-leader-post/20220908/281711208483474

    [27] Martin, Kevin, “Some Coutts protesters wanted to alter Canada’s political system,”Calgary Herald, November 30, 2022. https://calgaryherald.com/news/crime/some-coutts-protesters-wanted-to-alter-canadas-political-system-court-documents-say

    [28] Ward, Rachel and Grant, Meghan, “Bosses of Alberta men accused in plot to murder Mounties still under investigation, court docs suggest,” CBC, December 1, 2022. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/coutts-protest-blockade-border-ito-documents-unsealed-1.6670025

    [29] Lavigne, Jason, “The Coutts Four | Day 515,” Good Morning with Jason podcast, July 13, 2023. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w4wdeUOWqnQ&t=44s

    [30] “Ms. Janice Charette, Sworn, Ms. Nathalie Drouin, Affirmed,” Public Order Emergency Commission, Ottawa, November 18, 2022, p. 163. https://publicorderemergencycommission.ca/files/documents/Transcripts/POEC-Public-Hearings-Volume-26-November-18-2022.pdf

    [31] Ibid, pp. 183-184.

    [32] Ibid, pp. 296-297.

    [33] “Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Affirmed,” Public Order Emergency Commission, Ottawa, November 25, 2022, 52, 76, 42. https://publicorderemergencycommission.ca/files/documents/Transcripts/POEC-Public-Hearings-Volume-31-November-25-2022.pdf

    [34] “Ms. Jody Thomas, Sworn,” Public Order Emergency Commission, Ottawa, November 17, 2022, p. 225. https://publicorderemergencycommission.ca/files/documents/Transcripts/POEC-Public-Hearings-Volume-25-November-17-2022.pdf

    [35] “Minister Marco Mendicino, Sworn,” Public Order Emergency Commission, Ottawa, November 22, 2022, p. 168. https://publicorderemergencycommission.ca/files/documents/Transcripts/POEC-Public-Hearings-Volume-25-November-17-2022.pdf

    [36] “Deputy PM Chrystia Freeland, Sworn,” Public Order Emergency Commission, Ottawa, November 24, 2022, https://publicorderemergencycommission.ca/files/documents/Transcripts/POEC-Public-Hearings-Volume-30-November-24-2022.pdf

    [37] “Mayor Jimmy Willett, Sworn,” Public Order Emergency Commission, Ottawa, November 9, 2022, pp. 29, 31-32. https://publicorderemergenncycommission.ca/files/documents/Transcripts/POEC-Public-Hearings-Volume-20-November-9-2022.pdf

    [38] Tom Marazzo, “Jeremy MacKenzie Interview,” Meet Me in the Middle podcast, June 21, 2023.https://rumble.com/v2v7xfk-tom-marazzo-jeremy-mackenzie-pt-1-excerpt-2-meet-me-in-the-middle-podcast.html

    [39] “Mr. Jeremy Mitchell MacKenzie, Affirmed,” Public Order Emergency Commission, Ottawa, November 4, 2022, pp. 151-152, 157, 218. https://publicorderemergencycommission.ca/files/documents/Transcripts/POEC-Public-Hearings-Volume-17-November-4-2022.pdf

    [40] Ibid, p. 164.

    [41] Ibid, p. 176-193.

    [42] McGinnis, Ray, “Justin Trudeau and the Politics of the Possible,” Propaganda in Focus, December 14, 2022. https://propagandainfocus.com/justin-trudeau-and-the-politics-of-possible-the-emergencies-act-inquiry-in-canada-and-the-triumph-of-propaganda/

    [43] Ioannidis, John P. and Axfors, Catherine, “Infection Fatality Rate of Covid-19 in community-dwelling populations with emphasis on the elderly: An overview,” Stanford University, Stanford, CA, December 23, 2021.  https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.07.0[8.21260210v2.full.pdf](https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.07.08.21260210v2.full.pdf)

    [44] Kimball, Spencer, ““Labor secretary says most truck drivers are exempt from Covid mandate, handing industry a win,” CNBC, November 5, 2021. https://www.cnbc.com/2021/11/05/labor-secretary-says-most-truck-drivers-are-exempt-from-covid-mandate-handing-industry-a-win-.html

    [45] Lavigne, “The Coutts Four | Day 515,” (See note 29).

    [46] Lavigne, “The Coutts Four | Day 515,” (See note 29).

    [47] Lavigne, Jason, “The Coutts Four | Day 506,” Good Morning with Jason, July 4, 2023. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HR9C2w2DXso

    [48] Proctor, Jason, “RCMP entrapment of B.C. couple in legislature bomb plot was ‘travesty of justice,’ court rules: John Nuttall-Amanda Korody’s convictions had been stayed due to entrapment, abuse of process,” CBC, December 19, 2018. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/johnnuttall-amanda-korody-2018-1.4952431

    [49] Proctor, Jason, “Terrorists or targets? Appeal Court to decide fate of B.C. couple accused in bomb plot,” CBC, December 18, 2018. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/nuttall-korody-entrapment-terrorism-1.4951447

    [50] Tieleman, Bill, “BC Terror Trial Verdict a Scathing Indictment of RCMP Management,” The Tyee, August 2, 2016.  https://thetyee.ca/Opinion/2016/08/02/BC-Terror-Trial-Verdict/

    [51] Henderson, Jennifer, “RCMP Commissioner Brenda Lucki tried to ‘jeopardize’ mass murder investigation to advance Trudeau’s gun control efforts,” Halifax Examiner, June 21, 2022. https://www.halifaxexaminer.ca/policing/rcmpcommissioner-brenda-lucki-tried-to-jeopardize-massmurder-investigation-to-advance-trudeaus-gun-controlefforts/

    [52] McDonald, D.C.,Commission of Inquiry Concerning Certain Activities of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police – second report, volume 2: freedom and security under the law, Privy Council Office, 1981. https://publications.gc.ca/site/eng/471402/publication.html

    [53] Lavigne, “The Coutts Four | Day 515” (See note 29).

    [54] Lavigne, Jason, “The Coutts Four | Day 526,” Good Morning with Jason, July 24, 2023. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jSUplSQ3PDA

    [55] Lavigne, Jason, “The Coutts Four | Day 509,” Good Morning with Jason, July 7, 2023. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ac00IscReIs&t=3215s

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • There’s a meme that circulated on social media a while back that perfectly sums up the polarized, manipulated mayhem, madness and tyranny that is life in the American police state today:

    If you catch 100 red fire ants as well as 100 large black ants, and put them in a jar, at first, nothing will happen. However, if you violently shake the jar and dump them back on the ground the ants will fight until they eventually kill each other. The thing is, the red ants think the black ants are the enemy and vice versa, when in reality, the real enemy is the person who shook the jar. This is exactly what’s happening in society today. Liberal vs. Conservative. Black vs. White. Pro Mask vs. Anti Mask. The real question we need to be asking ourselves is who’s shaking the jar … and why?

    Whether red ants will really fight black ants to the death is a question for the biologists, but it’s an apt analogy of what’s playing out before us on the political scene and a chilling lesson in social engineering that keeps us fixated on circus politics and conveniently timed spectacles, distracted from focusing too closely on the government’s power grabs, and incapable of focusing on who’s really shaking the jar.

    This controversy over Jason Aldean’s country music video, “Try That In a Small Town,” which is little more than authoritarian propaganda pretending to be respect for law and order, is just more of the same.

    The music video, riddled with images of militarized police facing off against rioters, implies that there are only two types of people in this country: those who stand with the government and those who oppose it.

    Yet the song gets it wrong.

    You see, it makes no difference whether you live in a small town or a big city, or whether you stand with the government or mobilize against it: either way, the government is still out to get you.

    Indeed, the government’s prosecution of the January 6 protesters (part of a demographic that might relate to the frontier justice sentiments in Aldean’s song) is a powerful reminder that the police state doesn’t discriminate when it comes to hammering away at those who challenge its authority.

    It also serves to underscore the government’s tone-deaf hypocrisy in the face of its own double-crossing, double-dealing, double standards.

    Imagine: the very same government that violates the rights of its citizenry at almost every turn is considering charging President Trump with conspiring against the rights of the American people.

    It’s so ludicrous as to be Kafkaesque.

    If President Trump is indicted over the events that culminated in the Capitol riots of January 6, 2021, the government could hinge part of their case on Section 241 of Title 18 of the U.S. Code, which makes it a crime for two or more people to “conspire to injure, oppress, threaten or intimidate” anyone “with intent to prevent or hinder his free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege” the person enjoys under the U.S. Constitution.

    That the government, which now constitutes the greatest threat to our freedoms, would appoint itself the so-called defender of our freedoms shows exactly how farcical, topsy-turvy, and downright perverse life in the American police state has become.

    Unfortunately, “we the people” are partially to blame for allowing this double standard to persist.

    While we may claim to value freedom, privacy, individuality, equality, diversity, accountability, and government transparency, our actions and those of our government rulers contradict these much-vaunted principles at every turn.

    Even though the government continues to betray our trust, invade our privacy, and abuse our rights, we just keep going back for more.

    For instance, we claim to disdain the jaded mindset of the Washington elite, and yet we continue to re-elect politicians who lie, cheat and steal.

    We claim to disapprove of the endless wars that drain our resources and spread thin our military, and yet we repeatedly buy into the idea that patriotism equals supporting the military.

    We claim to chafe at taxpayer-funded pork barrel legislation for roads to nowhere, documentaries on food fights, and studies of mountain lions running on treadmills, and yet we pay our taxes meekly and without raising a fuss of any kind.

    We claim to object to the militarization of our local police forces and their increasingly battlefield mindset, and yet we do little more than shrug our shoulders over SWAT team raids and police shootings of unarmed citizens.

    And then there’s our supposed love-hate affair with technology, which sees us bristling at the government’s efforts to monitor our internet activities, listen in on our phone calls, read our emails, track our every movement, and punish us for what we say on social media, and yet we keep using these very same technologies all the while doing nothing about the government’s encroachments on our rights.

    By tacitly allowing these violations to continue and legitimizing a government that has long since ceased to operate within the framework of the Constitution, we not only empower the tyrant but we feed the monster.

    This is exactly how incremental encroachments on our rights, justified in the name of greater safety, become routine, wide-ranging abuses so entrenched as to make reform all but impossible.

    The tactics follow the same script: first, the government lures us in with a scheme to make our lives better, our families safer, and our communities more secure, and then once we take the bait, they slam the trap closed and turn “we the people” into Enemy Number One.

    Despite how evident it is that we are mere tools to be used and abused and manipulated for the power elite’s own diabolical purposes, we somehow fail to see their machinations for what they truly are: thinly veiled attempts to expand their power and wealth at our expense.

    So here we are, caught in a vicious cycle of in-fighting and partisan politics, all the while the government—which never stops shaking the jar—is advancing its agenda to lockdown the nation.

    As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, until we can face up to that truth and forge our own path back to a world in which freedom means something again, we’re going to be stuck in this wormhole of populist anger, petty politics and destruction that is pitting us one against the other.

    In that scenario, no one wins, whether you live in a small town or big city.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.