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To: The State of Israel, AIPAC and the International Zionist Movement
I write as an American citizen. You have stolen my country, and I want it back.
I did not ask for my country to be complicit in the ongoing genocide and attempted eradication of the people of Gaza and Palestine. I do not want to be complicit in the genocide of anyone. I do not want this crime to stain the name of the United States of America whenever it is spoken for the next century and for all eternity, and to bring shame upon me and my descendants, and to all others who hold American citizenship.
The American people are as yet only partially aware of this crime. This is because you have been very successful in exerting a powerful influence on the media, the government, and other pillars of American society. I’m not saying you have done anything illegal. You may have, but you clearly prefer to use legal means as much as possible. And it is possible. US law allows anyone with the necessary means to own media, and – within very broad limits – to control who gets elected to government office and who gets appointed to other public offices.
For better or worse, this is the American way, and it can be made better or worse than it is. But you have abused and corrupted it. You have strangled the political process so that any candidate who criticizes Israel and opposes aid to Israel cannot be elected, because you control the funding as well as the funders in a system which depends entirely on private campaign funds, and where corporations and other wealthy associations are permitted to participate.
You have also strangled academic freedom to debate or protest Israel on American campuses through control of funding, resulting in harassment and removal of faculty and punishment of students. You have hijacked American film, news organizations, and other media so that only the information and views that you permit are widely available to the public.
You use such influence to pass laws at all levels, requiring allegiance to Israel in order to obtain licenses and permits. You apply censorship to social media to prevent free expression of views, information and opinion that might reflect negatively on Israel. You mobilize posting of libel and slander against persons and businesses that criticize Israel and defend Palestinians and their allies.
Your job, and that of the Israeli Ministry of Strategic Affairs and Public Diplomacy, and the global network of sayanim (collaborators) is to assure, by these and any other available means, that Israel dominates all narratives, all public policy and decision making, and that all actions in both the public and private sphere are to the benefit of Israel. You have been enormously successful in capturing almost unlimited military and financial support from the US government, in controlling U.S. government policy, and in shaping American minds to accept and support a massive civilian genocide, including starvation and infection of hundreds of thousands and ultimately probably millions of innocent people.
How can this happen? The American people have spoken and protested in many ways and in large numbers, and polls show that, in spite of your manipulations of US society, a majority of Americans do not support continued aid to Israel, and want an immediate ceasefire. Members of Congress have been deluged with letters, phone calls and email messages.
But part of the system of controlling our government includes your parallel organization of shadow “advisors” or “minders” whose job it is to remain in the face of our elected and appointed officials, and to “recommend” what to say and how to vote, and to provide draft legislation and public announcements that the official can introduce and promote on behalf of Israel. Otherwise, you will threaten to find someone to replace her/him in the next election cycle.
I feel helpless appealing to my members of Congress for anything that you oppose, no matter how many of my fellow citizens might join me. But I now realize that my members of Congress feel the same way. They really don’t have a choice any more than I do. In effect, therefore, they are mere avatars for you and your allies. You are our government.
What can I do about this? I’m not sure, but a start might be to require AIPAC and other actors on behalf of Israel to register as foreign agents under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, like all other representatives of foreign governments. Israel is a foreign government, isn’t it? As I recall, that was last tried by Sen. J. William Fulbright’s committee in 1963, but when Lyndon B. Johnson came to the presidency by assassination that year, the option faded. But, of course, it’s never too late.
Second, we can overturn Citizens United, by whatever legal means necessary, if possible. Even better, we can prohibit or severely curtail private financing of elections, overturning Citizens United in the process, but going beyond, to eliminate some of the most obvious sources of public corruption. We can also legislate greater protection for free speech and the press, punish use of private donations to deny free speech and other civil rights, and enact similar measures.
The problem with all such remedies, of course, is how to get them passed by institutions that are already under your corrupt control. I’m not sure I have an answer for that, but someone else might. Because even genocide will not save Israel, which is not defeating – and cannot defeat – Hamas. Perhaps Hamas and its allies will liberate both Palestine and the United States.
The post Open Letter to Israel: I Want My Country Back first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
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Al Jazeera headlined with: “Von der Leyen’s re-election consolidates Europe’s shift to the right: The German technocrat’s second term at the helm of the European Commission will focus on business, conservative values and external security threats.”
With respect to democracy and the transparency of the process that underpins Von der Leyen’s re-election, BBC noted: “Ursula von der Leyen has been re-elected as president of the European Commission following a secret ballot among MEPs.”
The post Alternative Views: EU Presidential Election first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
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Anyone who imagines there is something resembling academic freedom in the US, or elsewhere in the West for that matter, needs to read this article in the Intercept on an extraordinary – or possibly not so extraordinary – episode of censorship of a Palestinian academic. It shows how donors are the ones really pulling the strings in our academic institutions.
Here’s what happened:
1. The prestigious Harvard Law Review was due to publish its first-ever essay by a Palestinian legal scholar late last year, shortly after Hamas’ October 7 attack in Israel. Hurrah (finally) for academic freedom!
2. However, the essay, which sought to establish a new legal concept of the Nakba – the mass expulsion of Palestinian civilians from their homeland in 1948 to create what would become the self-defined Jewish state of Israel – was pulled at the last moment, despite the fact the editors had subjected it to intense editorial checks and scrutiny. The Harvard Review got cold feet – presumably because of the certainty the essay would offend many of the university’s donors and create a political backlash.
3. Editors at the rival Columbia Law Review decided to pick up the baton. They asked the same scholar, Rabea Eghbariah, to submit a new, much longer version of the essay for publication. It would be the first time a Palestinian legal scholar had been published by the Columbia Law Review too. Hurrah (finally) for academic freedom!
4. Aware of the inevitable pushback, 30 editors at the Review spent five months editing the essay, but did so in secret and mostly anonymously to protect themselves from reprisals. The article was subjected to unprecedented scrutiny.
5. Alerted to the fact that the essay had been leaked and that pressure was building from powerful figures associated with Columbia university and the Washington establishment to prevent publication, the editors published the article this month, unannounced, on the Review’s website. Hurrah (finally) for academic freedom!
6. But within hours, the Review’s board of directors, comprising law professors and alumni, some with official roles in the federal government, demanded that the essay be taken down. When the editors refused, the whole website was pulled offline. The homepage read “Website under maintenance.”
7. Hurrah for… the Israel lobby (again).
If even the academic community is so browbeaten by donors and the political establishment that they dare not allow serious academic debate, even over a legal concept, what hope is there that politicians and the media – equally dependent on Big Money, and even more sensitive to the public pressure of lobbies – are going to perform any better.
University complicity in the Gaza genocide – brought out of the shadows by the campus protests – highlights how academic institutions are tightly integrated into the political and commercial ventures of western establishments.
The universities’ savage crackdown on the student encampments – denying them any right to peacefully protest complicity in genocide by the very institutions to which they pay their fees – further underscores the fact that universities are there to maintain the semblance of free and open debate but not the substance. Debate is allowed but only within strictly controlled, and policed, parameters.
Academic institutions, politicians and the media speak as one on the Gaza genocide for a reason. They are there not promote a dialectics in which truth and falsehood can be tested through open discussion, but to confer legitimacy on the darkest agendas of the establishment they serve.
Our public debates are rigged to avoid topics that would be difficult for western elites to counter, like their current support for genocide in Gaza. But the very reason we have a genocide in Gaza is because lots of other debates we should have had decades ago have not been allowed to take place, including the one Eghbariah was trying to raise: that the Nakba that began in 1948 and has continued ever since for the Palestinian people needs its own legal framework that incorporates apartheid and genocide.
Israel’s genocide in Gaza was made possible precisely because western establishments avoided any meaningful scrutiny of, or engagement with, the events of the Nakba for more than 75 years. They pretended either that the ethnic cleansing of 1948 never happened, or that it was the Palestinians’ choice to ethnically cleanse themselves.
In the decades that followed, western establishments pretended that the illegal colonisation of Palestine by Jewish settlers and the reality of apartheid rule faced by Palestinians – hidden under the rubric of a “temporary occupation” – either weren’t happening, or could be solved through a bogus, bad-faith “peace process”.
There was never accountability, there was no truth or reconciliation. The western establishment are still furiously avoiding that debate 76 years on, as Eghbariah’s experiences at the hands of the Harvard and Columbia Law Reviews prove.
We can only pray we don’t have to wait another three-quarters of a century before western elites consider acknowledging their complicity in the genocide of Gaza.
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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.
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The recent decision by the United States Department of Justice to open an investigation into the killing last May of Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh is not a game-changer but important and worthy of reflection, nonetheless.
Based on the long trajectory of US military and political support of Israel, and Washington’s constant shielding of Tel Aviv from any accountability for its illegal occupation of Palestine, one can confidently conclude that there will not be any actual investigation.
A real investigation into the killing of Abu Akleh could open up a Pandora’s box of other findings pertaining to Israel’s many other illegal practices and violations of international – and even US – law. For example, the US investigators would have to look into the Israeli use of US-supplied weapons and munitions, which are used daily to suppress Palestinian protests, confiscate Palestinian land, impose military sieges on civilian areas and so on. The US Leahy Law specifically prohibits “the US Government from using funds for assistance to units of foreign security forces where there is credible information implicating that unit in the commission of gross violations of human rights.”
Moreover, an investigation would also mean accountability if it concludes that Abu Akleh, a US citizen, was deliberately killed by an Israeli soldier, as several human rights groups have already concluded.
That, too, is implausible. In fact, one of the main pillars that define US-Israeli relationship is that the former serves the role of the protector of the latter at the international stage. Every Palestinian, Arab or international attempt at investigating Israeli crimes has decisively failed simply because Washington systematically blocked every potential investigation under the pretense that Israel is capable of investigating itself, alleging at times that any attempt to hold Israel accountable is a witch hunt that is tantamount to antisemitism.
According to Axios, this was the gist of the official Israeli response to the US decision to open an investigation into the murder of the Palestinian journalist. “Our soldiers will not be investigated by the FBI or by any other foreign country or entity,” outgoing Israeli Prime Minister Yair Lapid said, adding: “We will not abandon our soldiers to foreign investigations.”
Though Lapid’s is the typical Israeli response, it is quite interesting – if not shocking – to see it used in a context involving an American investigation. Historically, such language was reserved for investigations by the United Nations Human Rights Council, and by international law judges, the likes of Richard Falk, Richard Goldstone and Michael Lynk. Time and again, such investigations were conducted or blocked without any Israeli cooperation and under intense American pressure.
In 2003, the scope of Israeli intransigence and US blind support of Israel reached the point of pressuring the Belgian government to rewrite its own domestic laws to dismiss a war crimes case against late Israeli Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon.
Moreover, despite relentless efforts by many US-based rights groups to investigate the murder of an American activist, Rachel Corrie, the US refused to even consider the case, relying instead on Israel’s own courts, which exonerated the Israeli soldier who drove a bulldozer over the body of 23-year-old Corrie in 2003, for simply urging him not to demolish a Palestinian home in Gaza.
Worse still, in 2020, the US government went as far as sanctioning International Criminal Court (ICC) Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda and other senior prosecution officials who were involved in the investigation of alleged US and Israeli war crimes in Afghanistan and Palestine.
All of this in mind, one must then ask questions regarding the timing and the motives of the US investigation.
Axios revealed that the decision to investigate the killing of Abu Akleh was “made before the November 1 elections in Israel, but the Justice Department officially notified the Israeli government three days after the elections.” In fact, the news was only revealed to the media on November 14, following both Israel and US elections on November 1 and 7, respectively.
Officials in Washington were keen on communicating the point that the decision was not political, and neither was it linked to avoiding angering the pro-Israeli lobby in Washington days before the US elections nor to influencing the outcomes of Israel’s own elections. If that is the case, then why did the US wait until November 14 to leak the news? The delay suggests serious backdoor politics and massive Israeli pressure to dissuade the US from making the announcement public, thus making it impossible to reverse the decision.
Knowing that a serious investigation will most likely not take place, the US decision must have been reasoned in advance to be a merely political one. Maybe symbolic and ultimately inconsequential, the unprecedented and determined US decision was predicated on solid reasoning:
First, US President Joe Biden had a difficult experience managing the political shenanigans of then-Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during his time as vice president in the Obama Administration (2009-2017). Now that Netanyahu is poised to return to the helm of Israeli politics, the Biden Administration is in urgent need of political leverage over Tel Aviv, with the hope of controlling the extremist tendencies of the Israeli leader and his government.
Second, the failure of the Republican so-called ‘Red Wave’ from marginalizing Democrats as a sizable political and legislative force in the US Congress has further emboldened the Biden Administration to finally reveal the news about the investigation – that is if we are to believe that the decision was indeed made in advance.
Third, the strong showing of Palestinian and pro-Palestinian candidates in the US Mid-term Elections – in both national and state legislative elections – further bolsters the progressive agenda within the Democratic Party. Even a symbolic decision to investigate the killing of a US citizen represents a watershed moment in the relationship between the Democratic Party establishment and its more progressive grassroots constituencies. In fact, re-elected Palestinian Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib was very quick to respond to the news of the investigation, describing it as “the first step towards real accountability”.
Though the US investigation of Abu Akleh’s murder is unlikely to result in any kind of justice, it is a very important moment in US-Israeli and US-Palestinian relationships. It simply means that, despite the entrenched and blind US support for Israel, there are margins in US policy that can still be exploited, if not to reverse US backing of Israel, at least to weaken the supposedly ‘unbreakable bond’ between the two countries.
The post Symbolic but Significant: Why the Decision to Investigate Abu Akleh’s Murder is Unprecedented first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
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Privately-operated non-profit and for-profit charter schools have been around for 30 years 1 and are legal in 45 states, Washington DC, Puerto Rico, and Guam. To date, five states have been able to fend off these segregated outsourced schools that siphon billions of public dollars a year from under-funded public schools.
About 3.3 million students are currently enrolled in approximately 7,400 charter schools across the country, which make up less than eight percent of all schools in the country. 2 At 1,300, California is the state with the most privately-operated charter schools.
According to the U.S. Department of Education, 3,100 charter schools run by unelected individuals closed between 2000–01 through 2017–18. That is a very high number of closures, especially in an 18-year time span. On average, that is about 172 privately-operated charter school closures per year.
It is not clear why, but the data chart from the federal government does not include the number of privately-operated charter schools that closed between 2018-19 through 2020-21. It also excludes the number of privately-operated charter schools that closed between 1991-92 through 1995–96, as well as the number of privately-operated charter schools that closed between 2001–02 through 2003–04. The U.S. Department of Education provides data for only 18 of the 30 years that privately-operated charter schools have existed. About 11 years of data is left out. The three main reasons why privately-operated charter schools close are: financial malfeasance, mismanagement, and poor academic performance. Corruption, fraud, racketeering, and embezzlement are rampant in the charter school sector from coast to coast. News of arrests of charter school employees appears in the news nearly every week.
Assuming, conservatively speaking, that about 172 charter schools close every year on average, when 172 is multiplied by the 11 years outside the 2000-01 through 2017-18 time frame provided by the U.S. Department of Education, we get an additional 1,892 charter schools closed. This brings the grand total of closed charter schools to about 4,992 charter schools over a 30-year period. This is a reasonable estimate. No matter how you slice it, though, that is a lot of failed and closed charter schools—and in a short period of time. Does this sound like success? Should such a phenomenon continue to be endorsed, expanded, and celebrated? Great instability has haunted the segregated and deregulated charter school sector for three decades and upended the lives of thousands of poor and low-income black and brown families. If the last 30 years is any guide, hundreds more charter schools will fail and close in the coming years, leaving even more families out in the cold and more public schools without much-needed public dollars.
Supplementary Note
It is helpful to recall that, besides widespread corruption, nepotism, and failure in the deregulated charter school sector, privately-operated charter schools, on average, have fewer nurses and more inexperienced teachers than public schools, and they usually pay both less than their public school counterparts. Several states do not even require charter school teachers to be certified and many charter school teachers have no employer-provided retirement plan. Moreover, non-profit and for-profit charter schools frequently engage in discriminatory enrollment practices and typically oppose any efforts by teachers to unionize. Charter schools also tend to offer fewer programs, resources, and services than public schools. And while the academic performance of many brick-and-mortar charter schools is unimpressive, the academic track record for cyber charter schools remains abysmal. In addition, all charter schools are run by unelected individuals and many spend millions of dollars on advertising (just like a private business). Last but not least, accountability, oversight, and transparency remain stubborn problems in the segregated charter school sector.
- Minnesota established the nation’s first charter school law in 1991 and opened the nation’s first charter school in 1992.
- It is worth noting that student wait lists at charter schools are frequently inflated and unreliable. In fact, many seats regularly go empty at many charter schools.
This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Shawgi Tell.This post was originally published on Radio Free.
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When sex offenders can move more freely around New York City than someone who has chosen natural immunity, it’s time to get some things off my chest. And who better to talk with than the person I trust the most? To follow… is a self-interview.
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Mickey Z.: How’s it going with the mandate?
Mickey Z.: Coercion is not consent, my friend. And if my hometown is so concerned about our collective health, why don’t they mandate a safe, affordable home for everyone? How about meaningful jobs that pay a living wage? Mandate less crime and more libraries.
MZ: I get the idea.
MZ: If they wanna control what goes into our bodies, why not insist that organic produce be made available at affordable prices and be consumed every single day?
MZ: I see what you mean.
MZ: Mandate that all lawns be turned into organic vegetable gardens. Did you know that lawn is the single most irrigated crop in God’s Country
?
MZ: You’ve made your point.
MZ: Mandate people not commenting on social media until they’ve done some fuckin’ research. The next person who repeats the “ivermectin is horse dewormer” nonsense trope is the one who needs to be isolated from society.
MZ: Wait… you’re not gonna defend ivermectin, are you?
MZ: I’m not defending anything except adding facts to the conversation. Equine ivermectin — as the name implies — is made for horses. The FDA approved another kind of ivermectin for humans. It’s meant to treat infections in the body that are caused by certain parasites and was awarded a Nobel Prize in Medicine in 2015.
MZ: What has that got to do with COVID-19?
MZ: You might wanna pose that question to the National Institutes for Health (NIH). They endorsed several studies showing ivermectin can be effective for treating Covid. For example, the American Journal of Therapeutics published a study that found: “Meta-analyses based on 18 randomized controlled treatment trials of #ivermectin in COVID-19 have found large, statistically significant reductions in mortality, time to clinical recovery, and time to viral clearance. Furthermore, results from numerous controlled prophylaxis trials report significantly reduced risks of contracting COVID-19 with the regular use of ivermectin. Finally, the many examples of ivermectin distribution campaigns leading to rapid population-wide decreases in morbidity and mortality indicate that an oral agent effective in all phases of COVID-19 has been identified.”
If you’re interested in more reality, click here and here and here. Read those links closely and then congratulate yourself for knowing more about ivermectin than any corporate media outlet or reporter — from Fox to CNN.
MZ: If ivermectin works, why is it being badmouthed by the mainstream?
MZ: Possibly because, according to the FDA, the only way the Covid “vaccines” could qualify for emergency use authorization is if “certain statutory criteria have been met.” For example: “no adequate, approved, and available alternatives.” If doctors prescribe ivermectin, the jabs aren’t needed and thus don’t rake in billions for Big Pharma (and set the stage for endless boosters). Follow the money.
MZ: Is this why you’re calling this the“Covid Twilight Zone”?
MZ: It’s one of many reasons. The biggest might be the charade of PCR tests.
MZ: Please elaborate.
MZ: The polymerase chain reaction (PCR) test works by converting the virus’s RNA into DNA (coronaviruses don’t have DNA). The PCR process makes millions of copies of the manufactured DNA by running it through “cycles” in a process called amplification. The more cycles run, the more the DNA can be copied. If no copies can be made, theoretically, no virus is present. The test provides a yes-no answer rather than any indication of how much virus was found, how old the virus is, or whether or not the virus is even capable of infectivity.
The test is so flawed that in Tanzania, it returned positive results for a goat and a piece of fruit!
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
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In response to the events of September 11, 2001, the emergency use authorization (EUA) concept was created. The ostensible idea was to empower the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to allow the use of potentially life-saving products (e.g. medicines, etc.) after a terrorist attack. However, the EUA designation was not put into effect until late 2020 — for the COVID-19 “vaccines.”
The squashing of civil liberties in The Land of the Free
is hardly a novel idea. For just a few (of endless) examples, one may recall Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (1996), Espionage and Sedition Act (1917), National Defense Authorization Act (2011), or the FBI Counterintelligence Program, COINTELPRO (technically 1956-1971, but probably still going). Also, the interned Japanese-Americans in the 1940s just might have something to say about FDR’s concept of “freedom.” Doling out and taking away rights is essentially a side quest for America’s power elite.
A common theme of these power grabs involves exploiting a crisis. Two decades ago, the Bush-Cheney Administration used the guise of “emergency” to reshape the country’s psyche. Steps that seemed like temporary precautions are now deemed permanent and normal. These include a wide range of changes like the Transportation Security Administration, three-ounce bottles of liquid, full-body scanners, a “No Fly” list, and the completely laughable concept of taking off your shoes before going through security (soon to be rendered fully obsolete thanks to foot scanners).
All of the above (and so much more) would’ve once seemed like details from a bad, futuristic novel. Today, they exist without comment. The powers-that-be have effectively conditioned us to accept whatever is imposed upon us. And, post-9/11, that included the “Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act,” a.k.a. the USA PATRIOT Act.
This totalitarian salvo includes what the ACLU called “a host of alarming and unconstitutional anti-speech provisions” and was been condemned by three state legislatures and almost 250 municipalities across the United States.
Adele Welty declared the PATRIOT Act to be “a serious threat to the exercise of our Constitutional rights.” Welty’s son Timothy lost his life in the WTC collapse — one of the 343 firefighters who died that day. She later testified before the New York City Council and said, in part: “[The USA PATRIOT Act] undermines our Fourth Amendment right to privacy and expands the ability of the government to use wiretaps and computer surveillance and to look at confidential medical, financial, business and educational records.”
Such talk of rights and overreach sounds quaint to today’s ears. Like the internet or cellphones, the USA PATRIOT Act is just something that’s passed down to new generations without examination, thought, or even conscious awareness. That’s part of what made it so easy for the elites to use the COVID-19 pandemic to garner even more control and wealth.
Twenty years later, we’ve come full circle to see the emergency use authorization of an experimental gene therapy being forced upon a compliant population. If you scare enough people for a long enough time, they’ll believe anything. They’ll even trust their abusers to help them. It’s trauma bonding on a macro scale.
That’s how they got us to line up in our socks for a flight. One alleged shoe bomber event happens, a frenzy is created, and Americans happily surrender rights for the illusion of safety. Today’s thugs in charge use a faulty PCR test to inflate Covid numbers, impose useless and psychologically damaging mitigation tactics like masks and distancing, and then tell us how lucky we are that they’re here to save us with a magic shot. But, if the shot doesn’t work or causes injury, you can’t sue them.
Here in New York City, we’re living under a vaccine mandate — almost 20 years to the day of 9/11. Unvaccinated adults can’t attend movies, work out at gyms, visit museums, or dine in restaurants. It’s to protect everyone, of course. Except that unjabbed children under 12 can go anywhere they want. Why? Because science, of course. To question this decree is to expose yourself as a potential domestic terrorist. But the authorities won’t have to find you. Your friends and neighbors will gladly turn you in — to protect everyone, of course. Remember: We’re all in this together! (Even the ACLU is now in favor of mandates.)
Meanwhile, the majority of black and Latino adults in the Big Apple have wisely avoided the shots. Thus, this mandate is limiting the ability of People of Color to live their lives and make a living. Sounds like “structural racism” to me. Not a peep has been heard from Black Lives Matter or any other #woke organization. Some call it coincidence.
There’s a direct line from the anti-anarchist Palmer raids to the smashing of labor unions to the Red Scare to FISA to today’s demonization of anyone who questions the patently insane Covid narrative. There’s also a direct line running through all those, um, helpful citizens who gleefully support the repressive tactics imposed by a cabal of Corporate and State actors.
Unless and until everyday people break free of the programming, there will be more experimental drugs, more invasive technologies, more surveillance, more artificial intelligence, and more transhumanism. You’ll never stop lining up to be scanned, injected, genetically modified, and “enhanced.” There is only one hope and one path away from this dystopian future vision: rediscover the subversive of thinking for yourself.
The post COVID-19 and 9/11 (Never Forget?) first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
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Thanks to corporate media, anything outside the accepted parameters of debate (e.g. CNN vs. Fox, NY Times vs. Wall Street Journal) is considered beyond the pale. Thus, when I wish to introduce you to what the transhumanists in charge have planned for you, by default, I sound like a fringe weirdo in a tinfoil hat. This highly efficient system keeps the rabble in line by encouraging each of us to do the enforcing of such censorship. We willingly limit our own access to information — in the name of “justice” or “science,” of course.
With that in mind, I offer you a 2-minute video on “smart dust” in the hope you have enough attention span and open-mindedness to focus that long:
Keep in mind that the above video is already five years old. In tech years, that might as well be a century. As far back as 2013, MIT was talking about “How Smart Dust Could Spy On Your Brain.” Smart dust (or “neural dust”) is already here, already in use, and will soon be a daily part of your life — whether you ask for it or not. Are you okay with that?
Smart Dust is comprised of “many small wireless microelectromechanical systems (MEMS). MEMS are tiny devices that have cameras, sensors, and communication mechanisms to transmit the data to be stored and processed further. They generally range from 20 micrometers up to a millimeter in size. They are usually connected to a computer network wirelessly and are distributed over a specific area to accomplish tasks, usually sensing through RFID (radio-frequency identification) technology.”
You can probably see what they’ve been given the nickname of “dust.” In fact, they can even be distributed via tiny, unmanned aircraft that would serve as crop dusters of sorts. Without being detected, they’d spray the virtually invisible motes over a large area and collect information that way. They are so small, you’d never know they were there — perhaps gathering info on you. How small? The prototype smart dust currently measures 0.8 millimeters x 3 millimeters x 1 millimeter can be only 1 cubic millimeter or less in size — possibly as small as 100 microns per side.
Some of you, I’m certain, are already embracing this sci-fi kind of idea as yet another fine example of “science.” Before you get too misty-eyed about such “progress,” please allow me to remind you that smart dust was developed by (surprise, surprise) the U.S. military. More specifically, it is the brainchild of the notorious DARPA — Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. These are the same folks who brought you mind-control weapons, cyborg insects, synthetic blood, mechanical elephants, programmable shape-shifting matter, and so much more.
So, go back and re-read the details above and recognize how easily smart dust could be weaponized. Even better, accept the reality that step one (as always) was weaponizing smart dust. And now, digest the fact that those well-intentioned and good-hearted souls in the military want to implant smart dust inside you… for your own good, of course.
“Neural dust represents a radical departure from the traditional approach of using radio waves for wireless communication with implanted devices,” said Doug Weber, a DARPA program manager. “The soft tissues of our body consist mostly of saltwater. Sound waves pass freely through these tissues and can be focused with pinpoint accuracy at nerve targets deep inside our body, while radio waves cannot. Indeed, this is why sonar is used to image objects in the ocean, while radar is used to detect objects in the air. By using ultrasound to communicate with the neural dust, the sensors can be made smaller and placed deeper inside the body, by needle injection or other non-surgical approaches.”
I’ve already told you about the Internet of Bodies. And I’ve also already told you about the Pentagon’s openly-discussed plan to insert microchips inside us to “protect” us. With smart dust, they could just let the technology waft down from the sky and have you unknowingly inhale it. Why is no one talking about this? I ask you to re-visit my opening paragraph for that answer. To even talk about smart dust is to be dismissed as a “conspiracy theorist.” Once again, those in power have trained the public to do the policing for them. Somewhere, Goebbels is drooling.
All of the above has become easier to employ thanks to the pandemic. To explain that, we need to meet Klaus Schwab — the founder and Executive Chairman of the World Economic Forum (WEF), and author of a book called The Fourth Industrial Revolution. Here’s how the WEF explains this concept:
The First Industrial Revolution used water and steam power to mechanize production. The Second used electric power to create mass production. The Third used electronics and information technology to automate production. Now a Fourth Industrial Revolution is building on the Third, the digital revolution that has been occurring since the middle of the last century. It is characterized by a fusion of technologies that is blurring the lines between the physical, digital, and biological spheres.
To repeat: “a fusion of technologies that is blurring the lines between the physical, digital, and biological spheres.” This is transhumanism. It’s an ideology that proposes that technology can and must “enhance” the human mind and body and they are already working to “prove” this theory. Men like Schwab believe we must connect the physical, digital, and biological domains via steps like “implantable technologies such as smart tattoos, smart dust, smart pills, and other implantable smart functionalities.” They want to turn your heartbeat into your digital ID. Schwab and his ilk also support work going on in areas like designing human genomes, and simulating, monitoring, or even influencing brain activity, both in medical and non-medical applications. (P.S. Elon Musk is also currently setting up a company that links brains and computers.) Click here to watch Schwab telling Charlie Rose about his plans to edit your genes.
Most people would’ve probably cast a wary side-eye at such suggestions — until Covid-19. For 18 months, the powers-that-be have successfully scared the population into believing anything they decree. They’ve also coerced and manipulated billions into allowing novel nanotechnology to be injected into them without a second thought. Never mind thinking, the masses are lining up to serve as unpaid PR people for the experimental jab.
With such widespread and enthusiastic compliance, there seems to be little to stand in the way of Schwab, the World Economic Forum, DARPA, Big Pharma, and the transhumanist agenda. They are counting on you going along without asking too many questions. But there’s the catch. You still can demand and reclaim autonomy over your mind and body. For starters, all you need to do is a little self-loving homework to see what they have planned for you and then… just say no. Unless, of course, you’d prefer having your consciousness uploaded to the cloud.
The post Smart Dust: A Tiny Part of What They’ve Got Planned For You first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
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We’ll know our disinformation is complete when everything the America public believe is false.
— William Casey, CIA Director, February 1981
All propaganda succeeds because it satisfies needs that it has first created. If you follow the daily rat-a-tat mainstream news reports and react to them, you will be caught in a labyrinth that has been set to entrap you. You will keep finding that your mind will be like a bed that is already made up and your daylight hours filled with nightmares. What you assume are your real needs will be met, but you will swiftly tumble into the free-floating anxiety that the media has created to keep you on edge and confused. They will provide you with objects – Covid-19, the U.S. “withdrawal” from Afghanistan, the Russian and Chinese “threats,” the need to crack down on domestic dissidents, 9/11, etc. (an endless panoply of lies) – that you can attach your anxiety to, but they will be no help. They are not meant to; their purpose is to befuddle; to make you more anxious by wondering if currently there is any contrast between the real world and the apparent one. The corporate mainstream media serve phantasmagoria on a 24/7 basis, all shifting like quicksand. For anyone with a modicum of common sense, this should be obvious. But then again, as Thoreau put it:
The commonest sense is the sense of men asleep, which they express by snoring.
Perhaps some health expert will soon recommend that 24 hours of sleep a day is optimal, but maybe I am dreaming or being redundant.
For many decades, the corporate mainstream media and the CIA have been synonymous. They were married down in hell and now daily do the devil’s work up above. Now that news is conveyed primarily through digital media via the internet, their power to induce electronic trances has increased exponentially. Linguistic and visual mind control is their raison d’être. Fear is their favorite tactic. And since the fear and anxiety of death is the archetypal source of all anxiety, death becomes a core element in their fear-mongering.
In a recent powerful article, Canadian independent journalist Eva Bartlett, a brave and free war correspondent who has reported from inside Syria and Gaza, has shown how the ongoing Covid-19 “fear porn” spewed out by the media has dramatically increased people’s anxiety levels and thrown so many into a perpetual state of near panic. This, of course, is not an accident.
Fear immobilizes people and drives them into a cataleptic state where clear thinking is impossible. They become hypnotized in a “private” space that is actually social, an instantaneous identification with the media news reports that are addressed to millions but feel personal and greatly exacerbate the great loneliness that lies at the core of high-tech society.
As I have said before, the new digital order is the world of teleconferencing and the online life, existence shorn of physical space and time and people. A world where shaking hands is a dissident act. A haunted world of masked specters, distorted words and images that can appear and disappear in a nanosecond. A magic show. A place where, in the words of Charles Manson, you can “get the fear,” where fear is king. A locus where, as you stare at the screens, you are no longer there since you are spellbound.
In a high-tech society, loneliness is far more prevalent than in the past. The technology has imprisoned people behind their screens and now the controlling forces are intent on closing this mechanistic circle if they can. They call it The Great Reset.
They have spent decades using technology to invade and pare down people’s inner private space where freedom to think and decide resides.
They have repeated ad nauseam the materialistic mantra that freedom is an illusion and that we are amazing machines determined by our genes and social forces.
They have reiterated that the spiritual and transcendent realms are illusions.
And they have pushed their transhuman agenda to assert more and more power and control.
This is the essence of the corona crisis and the push to vaccinate everyone.
Drip by drip, year by year, they have cultivated the necessary preconditions and predispositions for this technological fascism with its nihilistic underpinnings to succeed.
When the inner dimension of existence is lost, there is no way to critique the outer world, its politics, and social structure. Dissent becomes a useless passion when people instantly identify with the social. Human nature doesn’t change but social structures and technology do and they can be used to try to destroy people’s humanity. Herbert Marcuse put it clearly long before the latest digital technology:
This immediate, automatic identification (which may have been characteristic of primitive forms of association) reappears in high industrial civilization; its new ‘immediacy,’ however, is the product of a sophisticated, scientific management and organization. In this process, the “inner” dimension of the mind in which opposition to the status quo can take root is whittled down. The loss of this dimension, in which the power of negative thinking – the critical power of Reason – is at home, is the ideological counterpart to the very material process in which advanced industrial society silences and reconciles the opposition.
Once upon a time, people sat together and talked. They even touched and shared their thoughts and feelings. They conspired in a most natural way apart from the prying eyes and ears of the electronic spies. Now so many sit and check their cell phones. They “connect,” thinking they are with it while not knowing they have been lured into another dimension where frenetic passivity reigns and trance states are the rule.
“Propaganda is the true remedy for loneliness,” said Jacques Ellul in his masterpiece, Propaganda. He was being simultaneously accurate and facetious. For propaganda provides a doorway to pseudo-community, a place to lose oneself in the group, to satisfy the need to believe and obey in mass technological society where emotional emptiness and lack of meaning are widespread and the need to fill up the empty self is dutifully met by propaganda, which is a drug by any other name, indeed the primary drug. The empty-self craves fulfillment, anything to consume to fill the void that a consumer culture dangles everywhere. Think alike, buy alike, dress alike – and you will be one big happy community. It is all abstract, of course, even as its rational character is irrational, but that doesn’t matter a whit since the fear of “not going along” and appearing dissident plagues people.
Now we have endless digital propaganda that is the “remedy” for loneliness. Ah, all the lonely people, keeping their masks in a jar by the side of the door together with Eleanor Rigby. They think they know what their masks are for but don’t know why they are lonely or that they have been played with. Masks upon masks are donned to ward off the fear that is pumped out through the electronic airwaves. It is doubtful that many ever heard of William Casey or can imagine the breadth and depth of the propaganda that he and his current protégés in the intelligence agencies and corporate media dispense daily.
“When everything the American people believes is false.” Casey must be smiling in hell.
A grim submissiveness has settled over the lives of millions of hypnotized people in so many countries. Grim, grim, grim, as Charles Dickens wrote of his 1842 visit to the puritanical Shaker religious sect in western Massachusetts. He said:
I so abhor, and from my soul detest, that bad spirit, no matter by what class or sect it may be entertained, which would strip life of its healthful, graces, rob youth of its innocent pleasures, pluck from maturity and age their pleasant ornaments, and make existence but a narrow path to the grave….
And yet, the fundamental things still do apply, as time goes by. Love, glory, loneliness, beauty, fear, faith, and courage. Lovers and true artists, fighters both, resist this machine tyranny and its endless lies because they smell a rat intent on destroying their passionate love of the daring adventure that is life. They feel life is an agon, an arena for struggle, “a fight for love and glory,” a case of do-and-die. They have bull-shit detectors and see through the elites’ propaganda that is used to literally kill millions around the world and to kill the spirit of rebellion in so many others. And they know that it is in the inner sanctuary of every individual soul where resistance to evil is born and fear is defeated. They know too that the art and love must be shared and this is how social solidarity movements are created.
Listen. The fight is on. “This Has Gotta Stop.“
The post The Incantational Bewitchment of Propaganda first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
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In The Covidian Cult (Part I) and (Part II), I characterized the so-called “New Normal” as a “global totalitarian ideological movement.” Since I published those essays, more and more people have come to see it for what it is, not “insanity” or “an overreaction,” but, in fact, a new form of totalitarianism, a globalized, pathologized, depoliticized form, which is being systematically implemented under the guise of “protecting the public health.”
In order to oppose this new form of totalitarianism, we need to understand how it both resembles and differs from earlier totalitarian systems. The similarities are fairly obvious — the suspension of constitutional rights, governments ruling by decree, official propaganda, public loyalty rituals, the outlawing of political opposition, censorship, social segregation, goon squads terrorizing the public, and so on — but the differences are not obvious.
Whereas 20th-Century totalitarianism (i.e., the form most people are generally familiar with) was more or less national and overtly political, New Normal totalitarianism is supranational, and its ideology is much more subtle. The New Normal is not Nazism or Stalinism. It is global-capitalist totalitarianism, and global capitalism doesn’t have an ideology, technically, or, rather, its ideology is “reality.” When you are an unrivaled global ideological hegemon, as global capitalism has been for the last 30 years or so, your ideology automatically becomes “reality,” because there are no competing ideologies. Actually, there is no ideology at all … there is only “reality” and “unreality,” “normality” and “deviations from the norm.”
Yes, I know, reality is reality … that’s why I’m putting all these terms in scare quotes, so, please, spare me the lengthy emails conclusively proving the reality of reality and try to understand how this works.
There is reality (whatever you believe it is), and there is “reality,” which dictates how our societies function. “Reality” is constructed (i.e., simulated), collectively, according to the ideology of whatever system controls society. In the past, “reality” was openly ideological, regardless of which “reality” you lived in, because there were other competing “realities” out there. There aren’t anymore. There is only the one “reality,” because the entire planet — yes, including China, Russia, North Korea, and wherever — is controlled by one globally hegemonic system.
A globally hegemonic system has no need for ideology, because it doesn’t have to compete with rival ideologies. So it erases ideology and replaces it with “reality.” Reality (whatever you personally believe it is, which, of course, is what it really is) is not actually erased. It just doesn’t matter, because you do not get to dictate “reality.” Global capitalism gets to dictate “reality,” or, more accurately, it simulates “reality,” and in so doing simulates the opposite of “reality,” which is equally if not more important.
This global-capitalist-manufactured “reality” is a depoliticized, ahistorical “reality,” which forms an invisible ideological boundary establishing the limits of what is “real.” In this way, global capitalism (a) conceals its ideological nature, and (b) renders any and all ideological opposition automatically illegitimate, or, more accurately, non-existent. Ideology as we knew it disappears. Political, ethical, and moral arguments are reduced to the question of what is “real” or “factual,” which the GloboCap “experts” and “fact checkers” dictate.
Also, because this “reality” is not a cohesive ideological system with fundamental values, core principles, and so on, it can be drastically revised or completely replaced more or less at a moment’s notice. Global capitalism has no fundamental values — other than exchange value, of course — and thus it is free to manufacture any kind of “reality” it wants, and replace one “reality” with a new “reality” any time that serves its purposes, like stagehands changing a theatrical set.
For example, the “Global War on Terror,” which was the official “reality” from 2001 until it was canceled in the Summer of 2016, when the “War on Populism” was officially launched. Or, now, the “New Normal,” which replaced the “War on Populism” in the Spring of 2020. Each of which new simulations of “reality” was rolled out abruptly, clumsily even, like that scene in 1984 where the Party switches official enemies right in the middle of a Hate Week speech.
Seriously, think about where we are currently, 18 months into our new “reality,” then go back and review how GloboCap blatantly rolled out the New Normal in the Spring of 2020 … and the majority of the masses didn’t even blink. They seamlessly transitioned to the new “reality” in which a virus, rather than “white supremacists,” or “Russian agents,” or “Islamic terrorists,” had become the new official enemy. They put away the scripts they had been reciting verbatim from for the previous four years, and the scripts they had been reciting from for the previous 15 years before that, and started frantically jabbering Covid cult-speak like they were auditioning for an over-the-top Orwell parody.
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Which brings us to the problem of the Covidian cult … how to get through to them, which, make no mistake, we have to do, one way or another, or the New Normal will become our permanent “reality.”
I called the New Normals a “Covidian Cult,” not to gratuitously insult or mock them, but because that is what totalitarianism is … a cult writ large, on a societal scale. Anyone who has tried to get through to them can confirm the accuracy of that analogy. You can show them the facts until you’re blue in the face. It will not make the slightest difference. You think you are having a debate over facts, but you are not. You are threatening their new “reality.” You think you are struggling to get them to think rationally. You are not. What you are is a heretic, an agent of demonic forces, an enemy of all that is “real” and “true.”
The Scientologists would label you a “suppressive person.” The New Normals call you a “conspiracy theorist,” an “anti-vaxxer,” or a “virus denier.” The specific epithets don’t really matter. They are just labels that cult members and totalitarians use to demonize those they perceive as “enemies” … anyone challenging the “reality” of the cult, or the “reality” of the totalitarian system.
The simple fact of the matter is, you can’t talk people out of a cult, and you can’t talk them out of totalitarianism. Usually, what you do, in the case of a cult, is, you get the person out of the cult. You kidnap them, take them to a safe house or wherever, surround them with a lot of non-cult members, and deprogram them gradually over the course of several days. You do this because, while they are still inside the cult, you cannot get through to them. They cannot hear you. A cult is a collective, self-contained “reality.” Its power flows from the social organism composed of the cult leaders and the other cult members. You cannot “talk” this power away. You have to physically remove the person from it before you can begin to reason with them.
Unfortunately, we do not have this option. The New Normal is a global totalitarian system. There is no “outside” of the system to retreat to. We can’t kidnap everyone and take them to Sweden. As I noted in Part I of this series, the cult/society paradigm has been inverted. The cult has become the dominant society, and those of us who have not been converted have become a collection of isolated islands existing, not outside, but within the cult.
So we need to adopt a different strategy. We need to make the monster show itself, not to those of us who can already see it, but to the New Normal masses, the Covidian cultists. We need to make Jim Jones drop the peace-and-love crap, move into the jungle, and break out the Kool-Aid. We need to make Charles Manson put down his guitar, cancel orgy-time, and go homicidal hippie. This is how you take down a cult from within. You do not try to thwart its progress; you push it toward its logical conclusion. You make it manifest its full expression, because that is when it implodes, and dies. You do not do that by being polite, conciliatory, or avoiding conflict. You do that by generating as much internal conflict within the cult as you can.
In other words, we need t0 make GloboCap (and its minions) go openly totalitarian … because it can’t. If it could, it would have done so already. Global capitalism cannot function that way. Going openly totalitarian will cause it to implode … no, not global capitalism itself, but this totalitarian version of it. In fact, this is starting to happen already. It needs the simulation of “reality,” and “democracy,” and “normality,” to keep the masses docile. So we need to attack that simulation. We need to hammer on it until it cracks, and the monster hiding within in appears.
That is the weakness of the system … the New Normal totalitarianism will not work if the masses perceive it as totalitarianism, as a political/ideological program, rather than as “a response to a deadly pandemic.” So we need to make it visible as totalitarianism. We need to force the New Normals to see it as what it is. I do not mean that we need to explain it to them. They are beyond the reach of explanations. I mean that we need to make them see it, feel it, tangibly, inescapably, until they recognize what they are collaborating with.
Stop arguing with them on their terms, and instead directly attack their “reality.” When they start jabbering about the virus, the variants, the “vaccines,” and all the other Covid cult-speak, do not get sucked into their narrative. Do not respond as if they were rational. Respond as if they were talking about “Xenu,” “body thetans,” “Helter Skelter,” or any other cultoid nonsense, because that it is exactly what it is. Same goes for their rules and restrictions, the “face coverings,” the “social distancing,” and so on. Stop arguing against them on the grounds that they don’t work. Of course, they don’t work, but that is not the point (and arguing that way sucks you into their “reality”). Oppose them because of what they are, a collection of bizarre compliance rituals performed to cement allegiance to the cult and create a general atmosphere of “deadly pandemic.”
There are many ways to go about doing this; i.e., generating internal conflict. I have been doing it my way, others are doing it theirs. If you’re one of them, thank you. If you’re not, start. Do it, however, and wherever you can. Make the New Normals face the monster, the monster they are feeding … the monster they have become.
The post The Covidian Cult (Part III) first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
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Both chronic stress and manipulative abuse can lead to an impairment of cognitive functioning. Whenever humans experience ongoing anxiety, their prefrontal cortex will generate increasingly higher levels of cortisol. Cortisol is a stress hormone that helps us deal with threats and danger. If stress — real or perceived — becomes chronic, we can get stuck in this state of high alert. The brain cannot differentiate between real and fake news. It initiates and sustains the body’s stress response for as long as you feel anxious, tense, worried, or scared.
- The projected overall 2021 poverty rate is 13.7 percent of Americans.
- 78 percent of American workers are living paycheck to paycheck.
- Roughly 30 million Americans are without health insurance.
- Americans collectively hold about $81 billion in medical debt.
- Approximately 325,000 Americans (age 12 or older) are sexually assaulted each year — about 1 every 93 seconds. As for those under 12, 1 in 5 girls and 1 in 20 boys is a victim of reported child sexual abuse. Keyword: reported.
- The top three causes of death in the U.S. would be mostly preventable in a society that included economic stability, access to quality health care, protection of the environment, an emphasis on healthy eating habits, and even a modicum of humanity. Instead, each year, heart disease kills about 650,000, cancer kills 600,000, and the third leading cause of death is (wait for it) medical error — taking out at least 250,000 Americans per year. The powers-that-be test their corporate medicines and procedures on us while granting themselves immunity from liability.
According to the American Psychological Association:
- 63 percent of Americans reported that the future of the nation is a significant source of stress
- 62 percent were stressed about money
- 61 percent were stressed about work
- 51 percent were stressed about violence and crime
- 43 percent were stressed about health care
Fifty-six percent said that the mere act of staying informed by following the news causes them intense stress. Three out of four Americans reported experiencing at least one stress symptom in the last month — and this survey was taken BEFORE the pandemic and ensuing lockdowns.
Prices go up. Rents go up. The number of billionaires goes up. Everything goes up… except wages and quality of life. I could go on but you get the idea. Everyday life in the Home of the Brave
— by definition — keeps the vast majority of its residents in a state of deep distress and high anxiety.
High anxiety = high cortisol. High cortisol negatively impacts our executive functioning, e.g.:
- Inability to pay attention
- Decrease in visual perception
- Feeling agitated and unorganized
- Memory loss
- Loss of emotional regulation and rational thinking
This explains why so many of us jammed into supermarkets to fight each other for the right to hoard inordinate amounts of toilet paper when the dangerous and unnecessary pandemic lockdowns were implemented.
When stress is chronic and cortisol is raging, we make exponentially more mistakes. We struggle to complete tasks, we lose concentration, we forget basic information, and we repeat ourselves in conversation. Since life itself in this corrupt culture is a source of relentless anxiety, most of us live in an altered state of inefficiency and confusion. However, this reality is so normalized that it’s become invisible and we often think we’ve got it good. After all, look at all these neat gadgets we own and get to stare at all day, every day.
Think about it: We’re alive because our ancestors were the ones who used anxiety and hyper-vigilance to survive. The more casual or reckless early humans weren’t around long enough to pass on their genes. So, here we are — hard-wired with a hair-trigger fight-or-flight response — and we’re stuck in a world in which simple acts like breathing air or visiting a doctor are unhealthy or possibly lethal. Translation: We are the ideal subjects for a grand social experiment.
If you were a member of the elite class — or the proverbial 1% — wouldn’t you prefer that the masses were pliable, easily controlled, and happy to settle for crumbs? Why wouldn’t you rig circumstances in such a way as to keep billions of potential challengers off-balance, frightened, and divided? What better way to maintain power and control than to implement an insidious form of group manipulation? It’s what cult leaders do. It’s what domestic abusers do. It’s what dictators do. And what are those in power if not abusive and narcissistic sociopaths?
I know, the easiest and most alluring path for you right now is to dismiss this as a “conspiracy.” I get it. Life seems far more palatable if you choose denial. It feels so much simpler if you choose to believe those on top are not abusing you. You may even tell yourself that people never do things like create an oppressive, unfair system just to keep their fellow humans subdued and passive. If that’s your premise, let’s explore it for a few minutes.
Would the folks who run things in God’s Country
ever coerce people through abusive behaviors? You might want to ask the detainees at the U.S. prison in Guantanamo Bay. As reported by the New York Times, the U.S. hired “two C.I.A. contract psychologists” to create a program that used “violence, isolation and sleep deprivation on more than 100 men in secret sites, some described as dungeons.” Tactics included waterboarding and cramming men into small confinement boxes. The idea here was to induce so much chronic stress, it would break their resistance.
Human Rights Watch has documented other devious and abusive red-white-and-blue techniques paid for by your hard-earned tax dollars; e.g., mock execution by asphyxiation, stress positions, hooding during questioning, deprivation of light and auditory stimuli, and use of detainees’ individual phobias (such as fear of dogs) to induce debilitating stress.
The Land of the Free
incarcerates more people than any other nation in the world. The Center for Constitutional Rights reports that such prisoners are “repeatedly abused by their guards, fellow prisoners, and an ineffective and apathetic system. They suffer beatings, rape, prolonged solitary confinement, meager food rations, and frequently-denied medical care.” All in the name of punishment and pacification.
Perhaps the best comparison for America’s brutal molding of its citizens is domestic abuse. The United Nations defines domestic abuse as “a pattern of behavior in any relationship that is used to gain or maintain power and control over an intimate partner.” Read that again: a pattern of behavior in any relationship that is used to gain or maintain power and control.
Abusers, says the UN, use actions or threats of action to influence others. This includes any behaviors that frighten, intimidate, terrorize, manipulate, hurt, humiliate, blame, injure, or wound someone. Are you frightened by the lack of financial stability? Are you terrorized by the threat of sexual assault or injury by medical error? Does the possibility of eviction, homelessness, and poverty manipulate you into making choices you abhor, choices that violate your deepest values and individual freedoms?
If you declare “the system is broken,” just about everyone will agree with you for one reason or another. But what if it’s not broken? What if it’s running exactly as it’s designed to run? A minuscule percentage of humans make the rules and thus reap virtually all the material rewards. The rest of us suppress our desires, our individuality, and our dreams in the name of survival — in its most meager sense. We’re wounded and intimidated into submission, too programmed and fearful to even think about rebellion… let alone solidarity with all the other victims.
Pro tip: All it takes to flip the script is for each of you to change your mind. Demand more pleasure instead of less pain. It doesn’t have to be like this. In fact, it can’t be like this if we take off the blinders and see the ugliness of reality.
“To ask serious questions about the nature and behavior of one’s own society is often difficult and unpleasant,” writes Noam Chomsky. “Difficult because the answers are generally concealed, and unpleasant because the answers are often not only ugly but also painful. To understand the truth about these matters is to be led to action that may not be easy to undertake and that may even carry a significant personal cost.”
Truths like those discussed in this article are ugly and painful but that’s why the big lies are invented in the first place. On that note, I leave you with this from the English Romantic poet, Percy Bysshe Shelley:
The post The System Isn’t Broken, It’s Fixed first appeared on Dissident Voice.Rise like Lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number –
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you
Ye are many – they are few.— The Mask of Anarchy, 1819
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
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Perhaps you have been already convinced by reading articles on this site about the devastating effects of the ongoing rollout of massive numbers of 4G/5G so-called small cells (short for cell towers) throughout cities in the U.S. If you’re not up to speed about why you should be extremely, extremely alarmed, you can read my previous article on the subject (“The 5G Juggernaut, Coming Soon to a Utility Pole Outside Your Home“)
Assuming you are now aware that this rollout will have devastating impacts on our quality of life, and the-well being of the planet, how can you take action to fight it? Two bills have been introduced in the CA legislature to essentially remove any local government oversight of the telecoms, and will be catastrophic if passed. These are AB 537 and SB 556. This article explains how you can be effective in convincing legislators to oppose these bills, but this same advice applies to lobbying legislators in any state.
My advice is based on my past experience as a lobbyist representing a statewide human rights organization when, on more than one occasion, a tiny group of us were able to win extraordinary victories against bills being strongly pushed by powerful corporate interests. I also worked as a legislative assistant to a city council person, giving me an inside look at the dynamics of local government, and was very involved in the successful 2017 campaign in California to defeat a similar 5G greenlighting bill.
Mindset is important. If your mindset is “The government is totally against us, we live in a corporatocracy and I just need to register my outrage, but I know we’re not going to win,” your lobbying efforts are unlikely to succeed. If your mindset is “Legislators definitely don’t share my values, but maybe I can trick them into supporting us, by greatly watering down what I believe into a more palatable ‘mainstream’ message,” No, this is not going to convince them to take the action you’re hoping for. Or “What if I come up with an assertion that is so powerful that the person I’m talking to will be absolutely overwhelmed, and whether or not I provide them with supporting arguments and documentation is not really important?”– Uh, no.
There is no question that anti-5G lobbyists are up against huge forces that have almost unlimited funds to bribe legislators with donations, and pay full time lobbyists to perpetuate their propaganda.
In my opinion, there is only one way to win when the odds are so stacked against us, and that is to connect with the person that you’re communicating with as a fellow human being, who is trying to make sense of a world where all our usual assumptions about normality have been turned upside down. A fellow/sister human who cares as deeply as you do about the health and well-being of their children, family, and friends, and who has a strong interest in the future of California, and does not want the state destroyed by catastrophic wildfires which could result from this massive, unregulated cell tower rollout.
Ask yourself what argument is going to overcome all the years of telecom and mainstream propaganda they’ve been programmed with? Maybe explaining that their child could get a brain tumor — or they might not even be able to have children
— as a result of the ever-increasing close proximity radiation that this legislation would create? Or perhaps giving them documented information about the extreme fire risks posed by locating these very powerful small cell towers everywhere. (You can see a lot of the documented evidence of 5G fire dangers in this article I wrote, which describes the woeful lack of fire protection provided by Berkeley lawmakers when they crafted their city’s small cell ordinance.)
Although the industry likes to describe them as “small” cells, the equipment can be quite large, adding greatly to the aesthetic deterioration of California cities and towns. And the radiation can often be just as powerful as the traditional 3G/4G macro towers, now with the added very strong EMF (electromagnetic field) pollution that is caused by the 5G antennas. 5G is not replacing 4G, it is adding on to it.
It’s important to do your homework, so you are familiar with what the bill you are lobbying about says, and can provide backup documentation for your assertions.
It should go without saying that you need to adhere to the truth 100% of the time. The truth about the planned rollout of thousands of 5G cell towers directly outside our homes is so horrendous that we don’t have to exaggerate anything, or slant the truth to get a desired effect.
An example of activists of being less than accurate was the flyer, posted on many webpages, which noted that for many years, telecoms had not been able to get insurance for small cells. They could only get insurance if there was an exclusion for “EMF pollution” (i.e., all the people that can be expected to get deathly ill as a result of having powerful 4G/5G antennas outside their bedroom windows). Then there’s other information indicating that small cells present very serious fire risks. Somehow these two arguments got combined into one shorter message, that telecoms can’t get insurance for small cells due to extreme fire dangers. Since many legislators might not even know what EMF pollution is, that makes for a much more impressive message, since everyone who lives in California is worried about wildfires. The only small problem is that that argument is not true.
If you’re going to contact legislators, it’s essential to make sure that your arguments relate to the particular bill that you’re contacting them about. Do not use a generic “5G is terrible” message. Telecoms have full-time lobbyists that will be sure to point out any factual errors in your arguments. Legislative aides and committee staff will also note errors. No point in your trying to give them information that can’t be backed up — aside from the fact that some readers of this kind of messaging will just have an intuitive sense that there’s something off about your argument.
Activists may have read somewhere that they should be certain to avoid mentioning health impacts, or even ANY harmful impacts caused by close-proximity cell towers, when talking to legislators. There is a huge amount of scientific evidence showing extremely harmful health impacts of living near a cell tower and/or being exposed to wireless radiation — cancer clusters, strokes, heart disease, Alzheimer’s, etc. That is one of the most effective arguments you can use, since small cells will increase the level of radiation exponentially.
Because this dictum has gone out so widely to anti 5G activists, that any mention of health should be strenuously avoided, I reached out to several of the top anti-5G attorneys regarding this issue. They all said there is no reason for activists to censor themselves about detrimental heath impacts of cell towers when contacting state legislators.
As one of these attorneys explained it, according to federal law, the only time you cannot talk publicly about health and environmental impacts is before a local governing body that is deciding whether or not a particular cell tower is going to be placed. (You can feel free to say whatever you want when speaking to city council members privately.) If the telecom applicant can show in court that the denial of their permit was based on health concerns, the telecom wins the right to put in their tower.
Please don’t confuse that nuanced issue of local zoning procedure with what kind of issues you can and should bring up when lobbying state legislators.
Aside from the federal law which restricts local siting decisions based on health, there are other federal laws and court decisions that require governments to ensure the safety of communities from harmful effects of cell tower radiation, such as the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and Fair Housing Act, which do not allow laws or regulations that deny access by EMF-disabled people to their own homes or services in their community. There is a DC Court of Appeals decision (Keetoowah Tribes vs FCC) that said national environmental laws also must be considered in the siting of all small cells.
Even the California Supreme Court issued an opinion (T Mobile West vs. City and County of SF) that cities cannot evade their responsibility to protect public safety regarding cell tower placement. Here’s a relevant quote from that opinion:
Under the California Constitution, cities and counties “may make and enforce within [their] limits all local, police, sanitary, and other ordinances and regulations not in conflict with general laws…. local police power includes broad authority to determine, for purposes of public health, safety, and welfare, the appropriate uses of land within a local jurisdiction’s borders.”
As a people’s lobbyist, you are not required to be able to debate the finer points of all these laws, regulations, and court decisions. Even though all the attorneys consulted agreed that none of these laws or court opinions represent a gag order for lobbyists, for strategic reasons, it’s always a good idea to bring up other issues, in addition to health and environmental impacts, when opposing 5G legislation. There are many other crucially important reasons to oppose this uncontrolled rollout, some of which I’ve described in my article which I linked to previously. More can be found here and here.
You will be on very strong ground legally and ethically if you base your discussion of health impacts on how these bills violate the ADA, that is, the rights of people who have electro-sensitivity (sometimes abbreviated to ES). However I believe it’s a mistake to make the whole issue of health impacts solely related to people who are already disabled by this condition. Many legislators probably don’t believe that such a thing exists, and even if they believe it does, that is a very small segment of the population, compared to the huge number who are being deprived of adequate high-speed internet access — the problem these bills claim to fix.
It’s excellent to bring up the ADA, but cell tower health impacts affect everyone, not just this small group who are already experiencing ES. As the former President of Microsoft Canada, Frank Clegg, explains it:
Everyone can develop ES. People are not born with ES but develop it as a result of exposure to radiation from wireless sources…. As with other conditions, a person may have a disposition towards a certain condition and therefore may develop it sooner than another person with the same exposure. The increasingly high prevalence of ES makes it clear that the attempts to suggest that those who suffer from the condition are a small fraction of the population that is ‘sensitive’ or that their response to radiation deviates from that of the general population, are false.
(Frank Clegg is now devoting much of his time to countering telecoms’ lies about the safety of 5G as you can see here.)
Even the former Prime Minister of Denmark, who is also the former Director-General of the World Health Organization, Dr. Gro Harlem Brundtland, developed very strong sensitivity to EMFs.
The health impacts are not just the numerous discomforts experienced by those who are EMF sensitive — such as severe head pain and pressure, heart pain and palpitations, sleep disturbances, dizziness, ear pressure or ringing, brain fog, burning skin, constant nose bleeds, etc. The health impacts the legislators need to know about, in addition to the symptoms of EMF sensitivity, are the ones documented in peer-reviewed journals, showing serious diseases like cancer resulting from wireless radiation.
You may be thinking, I don’t have time to track down all these scientific articles about the health impacts of wireless radiation. Luckily, Environmental Health Trust has done an exhaustive job of collecting all the documentation about health impacts, and many other issues related to stopping 5G, which you can find here.
The health effects of cell tower radiation was probably the winning argument (among many) that was used in 2017, when opponents of SB 649 kept bringing up the fact that firefighters were exempted in the bill from having a cell tower near their station, resulting from their fierce objections due to their past experiences of major neurological deterioration as a result of such towers. There is a similar exemption for fire stations in this current 5G streamlining bill, AB 537. If firefighters are protected, what about children, the elderly, and all the rest of us? In what upside down universe does that make sense?
So, no, it’s not true that you have to avoid any mention of health impacts when lobbying state representatives.
You may have been told legislators have short attention spans, so you need to make your message very short and catchy. They are not going to read a long letter with a lot of research attached.
Not true. They might not read every long letter, especially if it’s filled with rambling thoughts and unsupported assertions, but if your letter is well organized and accurately addresses what the bill says, their aides/staff will look it over, since it’s their job to know all the facts related to the bill. Some even appreciate that you are helping them do their job, and activists’ research will influence how they write up the bill.
Your task as a lobbyist is to explain all the reasons why the bill will be extremely bad for California. Yes, it’s good to choose your words carefully, but if it takes you more than one page to explain all the reasons, that’s OK. It’s also totally fine to focus on one or two key points, as long as you can back up your arguments with some form of documentation, and can explain how they relate to the bill.
As far as choosing which issues to focus on, don’t limit yourself to a neutral and non-controversial argument; e.g., local control by the cities is an important principle that should be upheld, or 5G next to people’s houses will reduce property values. Legislators are already aware that these bills greatly restrict or eliminate local control, and many cities will be writing to strongly remind them of that fact.
You are trying to transform the legislator’s entire worldview about the supposed miraculous benefits of saturating our lives with wireless radiation. A neutral message like “someone’s property values could go down” is not likely to convince them. (Is it even true that someone’s property values will go down from having a small cell tower in front of their house, if every third house in that community has a small cell in front of it, as the authors of these bills intend?)
This brings me to the very prevalent use of “talking points,” which are very condensed messages that can be used by members of groups to attempt to sway legislators. There is a school of thought which says the main goal in lobbying the legislator is to get the largest number of people possible to call into their office and/or wait in line at a hearing to give a “me too” statement. The “me too” statement only allows them to present name, organization, if any, and a yes or no position on the bill. And since the main goal is to get large numbers of people to call in, you don’t want to burden potential citizen-lobbyists with a lot of details about the bill. It’s better, this theory goes, to just give them some sound bites that then can be repeated endlessly by everyone who calls in.
There is some truth in this approach, which is if you can get a large enough number of people from the legislator’s own district to call in, they might be responsive to the sentiments of their constituents — but probably not responsive enough to overcome the power of the telecoms to establish the discussion parameters about why this bill is so necessary.
If there is a group of activists who all live in the same legislator’s district, they should set up a meeting with the legislator, or if that’s not possible, the top aide working on the bill. That would have a much greater impact, as opposed to all the activists in that district calling in with the same few, identical talking points.
One problem with talking points is that they make it less likely you will be able to make an authentic connection with the aide. They’ve heard it all before, maybe ten or twenty times before, and their goal will be to get you off the phone as quickly as possible.
Another problem with talking points is that they’re not always true. What?? I saw it on a flyer or I saw it on a website, so it must be true! I’ve already talked about the issue of wrong information being widely circulated. I think it’s like the game of telephone we played as kids. The first person in the circle whispers something to the next person, who whispers it to the next person, and by the time it reaches the last person, the original message has been changed into something totally different.
You need to ask yourself, does this argument make sense? Can I find any information to back it up?
Regarding what I described as the telecoms setting the “parameters of discussion,” they claim that due to the Covid-19 crisis, when people in low income and rural communities are unable to receive high-speed internet access, their ability to access government programs, education for their kids, and to earn money for their survival, is severely threatened. Providing high-speed access to these groups should be the main concern of legislators who are trying to help their constituents.
All other arguments seem to pale against that urgent need — unless you can get into a real conversation with the aide, and explain the fallacy of that position. Of course, we agree that all under-served communities need to have high-speed internet. However, corded internet connections (such as Ethernet, DSL and cable) are just as fast or faster, and they don’t have the downsides of EMF pollution and extreme fire risks. Point out that there’s nothing in the bill that requires telecoms to actually serve under-served communities.
The much-touted promise of 5G to provide faster connections and download speeds has not held up in practice, according to investigators from PC Mag, who did tests of 5G vs. 4G speeds. 5G also does not work in very hot weather. You can explain that by removing local control, the bill also removes the ability of the local government to negotiate with telecoms to provide access for everyone.
Instead of trying to manipulate, or bombard with robo-calls, the person you’re trying to convince, what if you just tried to educate them? As I previously noted, humanity right now is facing unprecedented threats. Rather than this piece of proposed legislation providing a solution, you can tell them how this bill will increase environmental and public health disasters a hundredfold.
What is the point of giving everyone in California internet access (not that we’re saying these bills WILL do that) — if at the same time you are putting in thousands of extremely fire-prone installations throughout neighborhoods? To put it another way, what good is it for a family to have fast home internet, if they don’t have a home?
These fires can be caused by overloading utility poles, frequent use of smart meters (which are a documented fire hazard) on the small cells, lack of built-in fire safety features, lack of state-required fire safety inspections and reports, and the temporary or permanent use of backup generators containing fire-prone substances, such as diesel fuel or lithium batteries.
Thousands and thousands of these terribly risky installations will be put in right next to people’s homes, or kids’ schools, or facilities for the elderly, so there will be no time for people to escape in a disaster.
On April 19. 2021, fire safety consultant Susan Dana Foster was the first opposition witness regarding SB 556, a 5G bill to greatly reduce the involvement of local governments in the 5G rollout, in a hearing of the Senate Committee on Energy, Utilities, and Communications. She was providing refutation to the testimony of the Verizon representative. She explained that firefighters cannot put out electrical fires, such as would occur at a 4G/5G small cell, because putting water on those fires would cause electrocution.
All they can do is wet the ground next to the fire in short bursts. They have to wait for the power to be shut off, which for various reasons that she explained, could take from ten minutes to up to two hours. She also describes how the telecoms have been successful in evading the usual government electrical codes at the federal, state, and county level.
During that hands-off period for firefighters, that could last up to two hours, strong winds could spread the original electrical fire much, much further. In a state like California, where massive wildfires are already causing immense destruction to life and property, these provisions seem like a recipe for unimaginable disaster.
One thing I would strongly urge when trying to find out accurate info about a bill, is to read the official analysis and summary of the bill you are going to be speaking or writing to legislators about. These official analyses are a gold mine of information, and sometimes sound like they could have been written by a fellow activist. (Of course, sometimes they also sound like they could have been written by telecom spokesperson.)
You need to familiarize yourself with the lingo. The term “deemed approved” is one you will see over and over again in these bills. It means if the city is unable to respond to a telecom application within a very short time period (called a shotclock), then their application is automatically accepted without the need for city approval.
Another important term is collocations. This refers to the telecoms’ ability to keep adding more and more antennas, which they would prefer to do without local government oversight. You can find all the information you need about each bill, including what committee it’s headed to, here.
Another good site to know about is the California Legislature Position Letter Portal, which allows you to send a letter to the entire committee where the bill is headed, by just going through their easy registration steps. It’s also helpful to send a copy to your representatives in the Assembly and Senate.
In a few committees, the letters sent through the official portal do not reach the individual committee members, which is why it is good to also send it to them individually. You might even consider using snail mail if you are unable to reach individual legislators through their email.
Sometimes when calling their office you may be told that the legislator only wants to hear from district constituents. You can tell them that as a resident of California, you are a constituent, since their decisions on this committee will affect everyone in the state.
To sum up, while I’m not saying that large numbers of people calling legislators’ offices with talking points is never of benefit, in my experience, the only truly effective way to win the legislator’s or aides support is to get them to understand the deeper reasons this bill will be devastating to so many people. It actually only takes one citizen-lobbyist to have that kind of conversation.
Your underlying message should be: Don’t vote against this bill because we’re asking you to. Vote against it because you care about the well-being and safety of your family and community, and about the people of California, and will do whatever is necessary to protect them from the catastrophic impacts of this technology that is running amok.
The post Taking Action Against 5G: Advice from a People’s Lobbyist first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
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It is well-documented that charter schools intensify segregation on the basis of ability, language, race, and socioeconomic status. Charter school demographics frequently do not reflect the demographics of public schools in their communities. This is because privately-operated non-profit and for-profit charter schools routinely engage in selective enrollment practices even though they are “schools of choice” ostensibly “open to all.” Families may “choose” a charter school but the charter school ultimately decides who is admitted, who stays, and who doesn’t. Public schools, on the other hand, accept all students at all times. They are also more accountable and transparent than privately-operated non-profit and for-profit charter schools.
The latest report on federally-funded segregation in the charter school sector comes from the award-winning veteran educator Carol Burris of the Network for Public Education (NPE). Carol has produced several well-researched reports in the past couple of years on extensive fraud, waste, and abuse in the crisis-prone charter school sector. She has focused mainly on the federal Charter Schools Program (CSP) which annually funnels hundreds of millions of public dollars to charter schools operated by unelected individuals. The program is authorized by the Every Student Succeeds Act.
Despite many attempts, the federal government has largely ignored multiple public demands to end this state-organized corruption to pay the rich. This is despite the fact that president Joe Biden promised to ban for-profit charter schools and support efforts to bring more accountability to charters. Instead, the Biden administration has stuck to spending $440 million on the Charter Schools Program this year, which is a default win for privately-operated charter schools. Since 1994 the federal government has funneled about $4 billion in public funds to these segregated contract schools through the Charter School Program. Through her previous work, Carol showed that millions of dollars were sent to many charter schools that either never opened or operated only for a few years and then closed, leaving many families high and dry.
In her latest investigation, Carol shows how public money from the federal Charter Schools Program is being used in North Carolina to strengthen segregation through the mechanism of charter schools. These are alternatively known as “white-flight academies.” Among other things, Carol notes that the justification for the use of many grant monies from the federal Charter Schools Program is often weak and makes no sense. Many disturbing details and cases can be found here. For example, 11 charter schools in North Carolina that received CSP funds “have significant overrepresentation of White students or a significant underrepresentation of Black students compared with the population of the public school district in which they are located.” So much for the worn-out assertion by charter school advocates that charter schools are about the civil rights of minority students.
Sadly, there is no shortage of such examples in many cities across the country. It is not easy to find charter schools that are diverse and integrated. In Rochester, New York, for example, the Genesee Community Charter School is not only known for being predominantly white and wealthy, but also for resisting any attempts to diversify and integrate. The New York State Board of Regents has repeatedly criticized the privately-operated charter school for maintaining a student body that is much wealthier and whiter than the Rochester City School District. The same can be said about the notorious Success Academies charter school chain in New York City. Many of these charter schools, it should also be noted, rely heavily on anachronistic Skinnerian behaviorist practices to enforce student obedience.
Another troubling twist in the evolution of privately-operated charter schools is the growing use by religious organizations, churches, Catholic schools, and private schools of the charter school mechanism to further segregate communities. This is another expression of the accelerated neoliberal restructuring of state arrangements by powerful private interests to seize public funds in the context of a continually failing economy. In the neoliberal period, public authority is increasingly being usurped to serve privileged private interests in the sphere of education. Private entities of various kinds are eager to fund their operations through the seizure of public funds that belong to the public sector. This parasitic appropriation of public funds by non-transparent and non-diverse private or religious entities usually goes hand in hand with offering fewer services and programs as well (e.g., transportation services and food programs). And more often than not, to make-up for “cost reductions,” parents are pressured or required to donate time and/or money to these private entities.
Privatized education arrangements are rarely about serving all students, let alone equally. More than anything else, such arrangements reflect and fortify the stratification found in society. They reinforce various inequalities. They do not reduce exclusion and segregation. They are the opposite of unitary public school systems that have emerged around the world to educate all students as part of a modern nation-building project.
Modern societies based on mass industrial production cannot survive without large, public, free, universal, school systems. Modern societies should not reduce a social necessity and public good like education to a commodity or treat parents and students as consumers who fend-for-themselves in an increasingly chaotic and anarchic education marketplace. A system of winners and losers ensures inequality and belongs in the past.
The post Public Money Used to Increase Segregated Charter Schools first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
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Sold under the pretence of a quest for optimising well-being and ‘happiness’, capitalism thrives on the exploitation of peoples and the environment. What really matters is the strive to maintain viable profit margins. The prevailing economic system demands ever-increasing levels of extraction, production and consumption and needs a certain level of annual GDP growth for large firms to make sufficient profit.
But at some point, markets become saturated, demand rates fall and overproduction and overaccumulation of capital becomes a problem. In response, we have seen credit markets expand and personal debt increase to maintain consumer demand as workers’ wages have been squeezed, financial and real estate speculation rise (new investment markets), stock buy backs and massive bail outs and subsidies (public money to maintain the viability of private capital) and an expansion of militarism (a major driving force for many sectors of the economy).
We have also witnessed systems of production abroad being displaced for global corporations to then capture and expand markets in foreign countries.
The old normal
Much of what is outlined above is inherent to capitalism. But the 1980s was a crucial period that helped set the framework for where we find ourselves today.
Remember when the cult of the individual was centre stage? It formed part of the Reagan-Thatcher rhetoric of the ‘new normal’ of 1980s neoliberalism.
In the UK, the running down of welfare provision was justified by government-media rhetoric about ‘individual responsibility’, reducing the role of the state and the need to ‘stand on your own two feet’. The selling off of public assets to profiteering corporations was sold to the masses on the basis of market efficiency and ‘freedom of choice’.
The state provision of welfare, education, health services and the role of the public sector was relentlessly undermined by neoliberal dogma and the creed that the market (global corporations) constituted the best method for supplying human needs.
Thatcher’s stated mission was to unleash the entrepreneurial spirit by rolling back the ‘nanny state’. She wasted little time in crushing the power of the trade unions and privatising key state assets.
Despite her rhetoric, she did not actually reduce the role of the state. She used its machinery differently, on behalf of business. Neither did she unleash the ‘spirit of entrepreneurialism’. Economic growth rates under her were similar as in the 1970s, but a concentration of ownership occurred and levels of inequality rocketed.
Margaret Thatcher was well trained in perception management, manipulating certain strands of latent populist sentiment and prejudice. Her free market, anti-big-government platitudes were passed off to a section of the public that was all too eager to embrace them as a proxy for remedying all that was wrong with Britain. For many, what were once regarded as the extreme social and economic policies of the right became entrenched as the common sense of the age.
Thatcher’s policies destroyed a fifth of Britain’s industrial base in just two years alone. The service sector, finance and banking were heralded as the new drivers of the economy, as much of Britain’s manufacturing sector was out-sourced to cheap labour economies.
Under Thatcher, employees’ share of national income was slashed from 65% to 53%. Long gone are many of the relatively well-paid manufacturing jobs that helped build and sustain the economy. In their place, the country has witnessed the imposition of a low taxation regime and low-paid and insecure ‘service sector’ jobs (no-contract work, macjobs, call centre jobs – many of which soon went abroad) as well as a real estate bubble, credit card debt and student debt, which helped to keep the economy afloat.
However, ultimately, what Thatcher did was – despite her rhetoric of helping small-scale businesses and wrapping herself in the national flag – facilitate the globalisation process by opening the British economy to international capital flows and allowing free rein for global finance and transnational corporations.
Referring to the beginning of this article, it is clear whose happiness and well-being counts most and whose does not matter at all as detailed by David Rothkopf in his 2008 book Superclass: The Global Power Elite and the World They Are Making. Members of the superclass belong to the megacorporation-interlocked, policy-building elites of the world and come from the highest echelons of finance, industry, the military, government and other shadow elites. These are the people whose interests Margaret Thatcher was serving.
These people set the agendas at the Trilateral Commission, Bilderberg, G-7, G-20, NATO, the World Bank and the World Trade Organization.
And let us not forget the various key think tanks and policy making arenas like the Council on Foreign Relations, the Brookings Institute and Chatham House as well as the World Economic Forum (WEF), where sections of the global elite forge policies and strategies and pass them to their political handmaidens.
Driven by the vision of its influential executive chairman Klaus Schwab, the WEF is a major driving force for the dystopian ‘great reset’, a tectonic shift that intends to change how we live, work and interact with each other.
The new normal
The great reset envisages a transformation of capitalism, resulting in permanent restrictions on fundamental liberties and mass surveillance as livelihoods and entire sectors are sacrificed to boost the monopoly and hegemony of pharmaceutical corporations, high-tech/big data giants, Amazon, Google, major global chains, the digital payments sector, biotech concerns, etc.
Under the cover of COVID-19 lockdowns and restrictions, the great reset is being rolled out under the guise of a ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution’ in which smaller enterprises are to be driven to bankruptcy or bought up by monopolies. Economies are being ‘restructured’ and many jobs and roles will be carried out by AI-driven technology.
The WEF says the public will ‘rent’ everything they require: stripping the right of ownership under the guise of a ‘green economy’ underpinned by the rhetoric of ‘sustainable consumption’ and ‘climate emergency’.
At the same time new (‘green product’) markets are being created and, on the back of COVID, fresh opportunities for profit extraction are opening up abroad. For instance, World Bank Group President David Malpass has stated that poorer countries will be ‘helped’ to get back on their feet after the various lockdowns that have been implemented in response to the Covid-19 crisis. This ‘help’ will be on condition that neoliberal reforms and the undermining of public services are implemented and become further embedded.
Just a month into the COVID crisis, the IMF and World Bank were already facing a deluge of aid requests from developing countries. Scores of countries were asking for bailouts and loans. Ideal cover for rebooting the global economy via a debt crisis and the subsequent privatisation of national assets and the further ‘structural adjustment’ of economies.
Many people waste no time in referring to this as some kind of ‘Marxist’ or ‘communist’ takeover of the planet because a tiny elite will be dictating policies. This has nothing to do with Marxism. An authoritarian capitalist elite – supported by their political technocrats – aims to secure even greater control of the global economy. It will no longer be a (loosely labelled) ‘capitalism’ based on ‘free’ markets and competition (not that those concepts ever really withstood proper scrutiny). Economies will be monopolised by global players, not least e-commerce platforms run by the likes of Amazon, Walmart, Facebook and Google and their multi-billionaire owners.
Essential (for capitalism) new markets will also be created through the ‘financialisation’ and ownership of all aspects of nature, which is to be colonised, commodified and traded under the fraudulent notion of protecting the environment.
The so-called ‘green economy’ will fit in with the notion of ‘sustainable consumption’ and ‘climate emergency’. A bunch of billionaires and their platforms will control every aspect of the value chain. Of course, they themselves will not reduce their own consumption or get rid of their personal jets, expensive vehicles, numerous exclusive homes or ditch their resource gobbling lifestyles. Reduced consumption is meant only for the masses.
They will not only control and own data about consumption but also control and own data on production, logistics, who needs what, when they need it, who should produce it, who should move it and when it should be moved. Independent enterprises will disappear or become incorporated into the platforms acting as subservient cogs. Elected representatives will be mere technocratic overseers of these platforms and the artificial intelligence tools that plan and determine all of the above.
The lockdowns and restrictions we have seen since March 2020 have helped boost the bottom line of global chains and the e-commerce giants and have cemented their dominance. Many small and medium-size independent enterprises have been pushed towards bankruptcy. At the same time, fundamental rights have been eradicated under COVID19 government measures.
Politicians in countries throughout the world have been using the rhetoric of the WEF’s great reset, talking of the need to ‘build back better’ for the ‘new normal’. They are all on point. Hardly a coincidence. Essential to this ‘new normal’ is the compulsion to remove individual liberties and personal freedoms given that, in the ‘green new normal’, unfettered consumption will no longer be an option for the bulk of the population.
It has long been the case that a significant part of the working class has been deemed ‘surplus to requirements’ – three decades ago, such people were sacrificed on the altar of neo-liberalism. They lost their jobs due to automation and offshoring. They have had to rely on meagre state welfare and run-down public services.
But what we are now seeing is the possibility of hundreds of millions around the world being robbed of their livelihoods. Forget about the benign sounding ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution’ and its promised techno-utopia. What we are witnessing right now seems to be a major restructuring of capitalist economies.
With AI and advanced automation of production, distribution and service provision (3D printing/manufacturing, drone technology, driverless vehicles, lab grown food, farmerless farms, robotics, etc), a mass labour force – and therefore mass education, mass welfare, mass healthcare provision and entire systems that were in place to reproduce labour for capitalist economic activity – will no longer be required. As economic activity is restructured, labour’s relationship to capital is being transformed.
In a reorganised system that no longer needs to sell the virtues of excessive individualism (consumerism), the levels of political and civil rights and freedoms we have been used to will not be tolerated.
Neoliberalism might have reached its logical conclusion (for now). Making trade unions toothless, beating down wages to create unimaginable levels of inequality and (via the dismantling of Bretton Woods) affording private capital so much freedom to secure profit and political clout under the guise of ‘globalisation’ would inevitably lead to one outcome.
A concentration of wealth, power, ownership and control at the top with large sections of the population on state-controlled universal basic income and everyone subjected to the discipline of an emerging biosecurity surveillance state designed to curtail liberties ranging from freedom of movement and assembly to political protest and free speech.
Perception management is, of course, vital for pushing through all of this. Rhetoric about ‘liberty’ and ‘individual responsibility’ worked a treat in the 1980s to help bring about a massive heist of wealth. This time, it is a public health scare and ‘collective responsibility’ as part of a strategy to help move towards near-monopolistic control over economies by a handful of global players.
And the perception of freedom is also being managed. Once vaccinated many will begin to feel free. Freer than under lockdown. But not really free at all.
The post From 1980s Neoliberalism to the ‘New Normal’ first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
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In whose interest did the creation of the Cold War serve and continues to serve? Cynthia Chung addresses this question in her three-part series.
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In 1998, the Nazi War Crimes and Japanese Imperial Government Records Interagency Working Group (IWG), at the behest of Congress, launched what became the largest congressionally mandated, single-subject declassification effort in history. As a result, more than 8.5 million pages of records have been opened to the public under the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act (P.L. 105-246) and the Japanese Imperial Government Disclosure Act (P.L. 106-567). These records include operational files of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the CIA, the FBI and Army intelligence. IWG issued three reports to Congress between 1999 and 2007.
This information sheds important light and confirms one of the biggest-kept secrets of the Cold War – the CIA’s use of an extensive Nazi spy network to wage a secret campaign against the Soviet Union.
This campaign against the Soviet Union, which began while WWII was still raging, has been at the crux of Washington’s tolerance towards civil rights abuses and other criminal acts in the name of anti-communism, as seen with McCarthyism and COINTELPRO activities. With that fateful decision, the CIA was not only given free reign for the execution of anti-democratic interventions around the world, but anti-democratic interventions at home, which continues to this day.
With the shady origin of the Cold War coming to the fore, it begs the questions; ‘Who is running American foreign policy and intelligence today? Can such an opposition be justified? And in whose interest did the creation of the Cold War serve and continues to serve?’ This paper is part one of a three-part series which will address these questions.
Allen Dulles, the Double Agent who Created America’s Intelligence Empire
Allen Dulles was born on April 7th, 1893 in Watertown, New York. He graduated from Princeton with a master’s degree in politics in 1916 and entered into diplomatic service the same year. Dulles was transferred to Bern, Switzerland along with the rest of the embassy personnel shortly before the U.S. entered the First World War. From 1922 to 1926, he served five years as chief of the Near East division of the State Department.
In 1926, he earned a law degree from George Washington University Law School and took a job at Sullivan & Cromwell, the most powerful corporate law firm in the nation, where his older brother (five years his senior) John Foster Dulles was a partner. Interestingly, Allen did not pass the bar until 1928, two years after joining the law firm; however, that apparently did not prevent him in 1927 from spending six months in Geneva as “legal adviser” to the Naval Armament Conference.
In 1927 he became Director of the Council on Foreign Relations (whose membership of prominent businessmen and policy makers played a key role in shaping the emerging Cold War consensus), the first new director since the Council’s founding in 1921. He became quick friends with fellow Princetonian Hamilton Fish Armstrong, the editor of the Council’s journal, Foreign Affairs. Together they authored two books: Can We Be Neutral? (1936) and Can America Stay Neutral? (1939). Allen served as secretary of the CFR from 1933-1944, and as its president from 1946-1950.
It should be noted that the Council on Foreign Relations is the American branch of the Royal Institute for International Affairs (aka: Chatham House) based in London, England. It should also be noted that Chatham House itself was created by the Round Table Movement as part of the Treaty of Versailles program in 1919.
By 1935, Allen Dulles made partner at Sullivan & Cromwell, the center of an intricate international network of banks, investment firms, and industrial conglomerates that helped rebuild Germany after WWI.
After Hitler took control in the 1930s, John Foster Dulles continued to represent German cartels like IG Farben, despite their integration into the Nazi’s growing war machine and aided them in securing access to key war materials.1
Although the Berlin office of Sullivan & Cromwell, (whose attorneys were forced to sign their correspondence with “Heil Hitler”) was shut down by 1935, the brothers continued to do business with the Nazi financial and industrial network; such as Allen Dulles joining the board of J. Henry Schroder Bank, the U.S. subsidiary of the London bank that Time magazine in 1939 would call “an economic booster of the Rome-Berlin Axis.” 2
The Dulles brothers’, especially Allen, worked very closely with Thomas McKittrick, an old Wall Street friend who was president of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS). Five of its directors would later be charged with war crimes, including Hermann Schmitz, one of the many Dulleses’ law clients involved with BIS. Schmitz was the CEO of IG Farben the chemical conglomerate that became notorious for its production of Zyklon B, the gas used in Hitler’s death camps, and for its extensive use of slave labour during the war. 3
David Talbot writes in his “The Devil’s Chessboard”:
The secretive BIS became a crucial financial partner for the Nazis. Emil Puhl – vice president of Hitler’s Reichsbank and a close associate of McKittrick – once called BIS the Reichsbank’s only ‘foreign branch.’ BIS laundered hundreds of millions of dollars in Nazi gold looted from the treasuries of occupied countries.
The Bank for International Settlements is based in Switzerland, the very region that Allen Dulles would work throughout both WWI and WWII.
The Office of Strategic Services (OSS) was formed on June 13, 1942 as a wartime intelligence agency during WWII. This was a decision made by President Franklin Roosevelt. William J. Donovan was chosen by Roosevelt to build the agency ground up and was created specifically for addressing the secret communication, decoding and espionage needs that were required for wartime strategy; to intercept enemy intelligence and identify those coordinating with Nazi Germany and Japan.
The OSS was the first of its kind, nothing like it had existed before in the U.S., it was understood by Roosevelt that such an agency held immense power for abuse in the wrong hands and it could never be allowed to continue once the war against fascism was won.
Allen Dulles was recruited into the OSS at the very beginning. And on November 12th, 1942 was quickly moved to Bern, Switzerland where he lived at Herrengasse 23 for the duration of WWII. Knowing the shady role Switzerland played throughout WWII with its close support for the Nazi cause and Allen Dulles’ close involvement in all of this, one should rightfully be asking at this point, what the hell were Donovan and Roosevelt thinking?
Well, Dulles was not the only master chess player involved in this high stakes game. “He was a dangle,” said John Loftus, a former Nazi war crimes investigator for the U.S. Justice Department. They “wanted Dulles in clear contact with his Nazi clients so they could be easily identified.” 4 In other words, Dulles was sent to Switzerland as an American spy, with the full knowledge that he was, in fact, a double agent, the mission was to gain intel on the American, British and French networks, among others, who were secretly supporting the Nazi cause.
One problem with this plan was that the British MI6 spy William Stephenson known as the “Man Called Intrepid” was supposedly picked to keep tabs on Dulles5; little did Roosevelt know at the time how deep the rabbit hole really went.
However, as Elliott would write in his book As He Saw It, Roosevelt was very aware that British foreign policy was not on the same page with his views on a post-war world:
You know, any number of times the men in the State Department have tried to conceal messages to me, delay them, hold them up somehow, just because some of those career diplomats over there aren’t in accord with what they know I think. They should be working for Winston. As a matter of fact, a lot of the time, they are [working for Churchill]. Stop to think of ’em: any number of ’em are convinced that the way for America to conduct its foreign policy is to find out what the British are doing and then copy that!” I was told… six years ago, to clean out that State Department. It’s like the British Foreign Office….
As the true allegiance of BIS and Wall Street finance became clear during the war, Roosevelt attempted to block BIS funds in the United States. It was none other than Foster Dulles who was hired as McKittrick’s legal counsel, and who successfully intervened on the bank’s behalf.6
It should also be noted that Bank of England Governor Montague Norman allowed for the direct transfer of money to Hitler, however, not with England’s own money but rather 5.6 million pounds worth of gold owned by the National Bank of Czechoslovakia.
With the end of the war approaching, Project Safehaven, an American intelligence operation thought up by Roosevelt, was created to track down and confiscate Nazi assets that were stashed in neutral countries. It was rightfully a concern that if members of the Nazi German elite were successful in hiding large troves of their wealth, they could bide their time and attempt to regain power in the not so distant future.
It was Allen Dulles who successfully stalled and sabotaged the Roosevelt operation, explaining in a December 1944 memo to his OSS superiors that his Bern office lacked “adequate personnel to do [an] effective job in this field and meet other demands.” 6
And while Foster worked hard to hide the U.S. assets of major German cartels like IG Farben and Merck KGaA, and protect these subsidiaries from being confiscated by the federal government as alien property, Allen had his brother’s back and was well placed to destroy incriminating evidence and to block any investigations that threatened the two brothers and their law firm.
“Shredding of captured Nazi records was the favourite tactic of Dulles and his [associates] who stayed behind to help run the occupation of postwar Germany,” stated John Loftus, former Nazi war crimes investigator for the U.S. Justice Department 7
It is without a doubt that Roosevelt was intending to prosecute the Dulles brothers along with many others who were complicit in supporting the Nazi cause after the war was won. Roosevelt was aware that the Dulles brothers and Wall Street had worked hard against his election, he was aware that much of Wall Street was supporting the Germans over the Russians in the war, he was aware that they were upset over his handling of the Great Depression by going after the big bankers, such as J.P. Morgan via the Pecora Commission, and they hated him for it, but most of all they disagreed with Roosevelt’s views of a post war world. In fact, they were violently opposed to it, as seen by his attempted assassination a few days after he won the election, and with General Smedley Butler’s exposure, which was broadcasted on television, of how a group of American Legion officials paid by J.P. Morgan’s men 8 approached Butler the summer of 1933 to lead a coup d’état against President Roosevelt, an attempted fascist takeover of the United States in broad daylight.
Roosevelt was only inaugurated March 4, 1933, thus it was clear, Wall Street did not have to wait and see what the President was going to do, they already had a pretty good idea that Roosevelt intended to upset the balance of imperial control, with Wall Street and the City of London as its financial centers. It was clear Wall Street’s days would be marked under Roosevelt.
However, Roosevelt did not live past the war, and his death allowed for the swift entry of a soft coup, contained within the halls of government and its agencies, and anyone who had been closely associated with FDR’s vision was pushed to the sidelines.
David Talbot writes in his The Devil’s Chessboard:
Dulles was more instep with many Nazi leaders than he was with President Roosevelt. Dulles not only enjoyed a professional and social familiarity with many members of the Third Reich’s elite that predated the war; he shared many of these men’s postwar goals.
The True Origin Story of the Cold War
In L. Fletcher Prouty’s book The CIA, Vietnam and the Plot to Assassinate John F. Kennedy, he describes how in September 1944, while serving as a captain in the United States Army Air Forces and stationed in Cairo, he was asked to fly what he was told to be 750 U.S. Air crewmen POWs who had been shot down in the Balkans during air raids on the Ploesti oil fields. This intel was based off of his meeting with British Intelligence officers who had been informed by their Secret Intelligence Service and by the OSS.
Prouty writes:
We flew to Syria, met the freight train from Bucharest, loaded the POWS onto our aircraft, and began the flight back to Cairo. Among the 750 American POWs there were perhaps a hundred Nazi intelligence agents, along with scores of Nazi sympathetic Balkan agents. They had hidden in this shipment by the OSS to get them out of the way of the Soviet army that had marched into Romania on September 1.
This September 1944 operation was the first major pro-German, anti-Soviet activity of its kind of the Cold War. With OSS assistance, many followed in quick succession, including the escape and carefully planned flight of General Reinhart Gehlen, the German army’s chief intelligence officer, to Washington on September 20, 1945.
In Prouty’s book, he discusses how even before the surrender of Germany and Japan, the first mumblings of the Cold War could be heard, and that these mumblings came particularly from Frank Wisner in Bucharest and Allen W. Dulles in Zurich, who were both strong proponents of the idea that the time had come to rejoin selected Nazi power centers in order to split the Western alliance from the Soviet Union.
Prouty writes:
It was this covert faction within the OSS, coordinated with a similar British intelligence faction, and its policies that encouraged chosen Nazis to conceive of the divisive “Iron Curtain” concept to drive a wedge in the alliance with the Soviet Union as early as 1944—to save their own necks, to salvage certain power centers and their wealth, and to stir up resentment against the Russians, even at the time of their greatest military triumph.
The “official history” version has marked down the British as the first to recognise the “communist threat” in Eastern Europe, and that it was Winston Churchill who coined the phrase “Iron Curtain” in referring to actions of the communist-bloc countries of Eastern Europe and that he did this after the end of WWII.
However, Churchill was neither the originator of the phrase nor the idea of the Iron Curtain.
Just before the close of WWII in Europe, the German Foreign Minister Count Lutz Schwerin von Krosigk made a speech in Berlin, reported in the London Times on May 3, 1945, in which he used the Nazi-coined propaganda phrase “Iron Curtain,” which was to be used in precisely the same context by Churchill less than one year later.
Following this German speech, only three days after the German surrender, Churchill wrote a letter to Truman, to express his concern about the future of Europe and to say that an “Iron Curtain” had come down. 9
On March 4 and 5, 1946, Truman and Churchill traveled from Washington to Missouri, where, at Westminster College in Fulton, Churchill delivered those historic lines: “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an Iron Curtain has descended across the continent.”
The implications of this are enormous. It not only showcases the true origin of the source that trumpeted the supposed Cold War threat coming from Eastern Europe, the very Nazi enemy of the Allies while WWII was still being waged, but also brings light to the fact that not even one month after Roosevelt’s death, the Grand Strategy had been overtaken. There would no longer be a balance of the four powers (U.S., Russia, Britain and China) planned in a post war world, but rather there would be an Iron Curtain, with more than half of the world covered in shadow.
The partners in this new global power structure were to be the United States, Great Britain, France, Germany, and Japan, three of the WWII victors and two of the vanquished. It did not matter that Russia and China fought and died on the side of the Allies just moments prior.
With Ho Chi Minh’s Declaration of Independence on September 2nd, 1945, the French would enter Vietnam within weeks of WWII ending with the United States joining them a few months after Churchill’s Iron Curtain speech. And thus, in little over a year after one of the bloodiest wars in history, the French and the Americans set off what would be a several decades long Indochinese war, all in the name of “freedom” against a supposed communist threat.
Prouty writes:
As soon as the island of Okinawa became available as the launching site for [the planned American invasion of Japan], supplies and equipment for an invasion force of at least half a million men began to be stacked up, fifteen to twenty feet high, all over the island. Then, with the early surrender of Japan, this massive invasion did not occur, and the use of this enormous stockpile of military equipment was not necessary. Almost immediately, U.S. Navy transport vessels began to show up in Naha Harbor, Okinawa. This vast load of war materiel was reloaded onto those ships. I was on Okinawa at that time, and during some business in the harbor area I asked the harbormaster if all that new materiel was being returned to the States.
His response was direct and surprising: ‘Hell, no! They ain t never goin’ to see it again. One-half of this stuff, enough to equip and support at least a hundred and fifty thousand men, is going to Korea, and the other half is going to Indochina.’
The Godfather of the CIA
“And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free”.
– The inscription chosen by Allen Dulles for the Lobby of CIA Headquarters from John 8:31-32
On September 20th, 1945, President Truman disbanded the OSS a few weeks after the official end of WWII. This was the right thing to do, considering the OSS was never intended to exist outside of wartime and President Roosevelt would have done the same thing had he not passed away on April 12th, 1945. However, Truman was highly naïve in thinking that a piece of paper was all that was required. Truman also had no understanding of the factional fight between the Roosevelt patriots who truly wanted to defeat fascism versus those who believed that it was always about war with the Soviet Union, and would even be open to working with “former” fascists in achieving such a goal.
Truman thought of the OSS as a homogenous blob. He had no comprehension of the intense in-fighting that was occurring within the United States government and intelligence community for the future of the country. That there was the OSS of Roosevelt, and that there was the underground OSS of Allen Dulles.
Soon thereafter, on September 18th, 1945, the CIA was founded, and was to be lamented by Truman as the biggest regret of his presidency. Truman had no idea of the type of back channels that were running behind the scenes, little did he know at the time but would come to partially discover, the disbanding of the OSS which took control away from William J. Donovan as head of American intelligence opened the door to the piranhas. The FDR patriots were purged, including William J. Donovan himself, who was denied by Truman the Directorship of the CIA. Instead Truman foolishly assigned him the task of heading a committee studying the country’s fire departments.
In April 1947, Allen Dulles was asked by the Senate Armed Services Committee to present his ideas for a strong, centralized intelligence agency. His memo would help frame the legislation that gave birth to the CIA later that year.
Dulles, unsatisfied with the “timidity” of the new CIA, organised the Dulles-Jackson-Correa Committee report, over which Dulles, of course, quickly assumed control, which concluded its sharply critical assessment of the CIA by demanding that the agency be willing to essentially start a war with the Soviet Union. The CIA, it declared, “has the duty to act.” The agency “has been given, by law, wide authority.” It was time to take full advantage of this generous power, the committee, that is Dulles, insisted.
Dulles, impatient with the slow pace of the CIA in unleashing chaos on the world, created a new intelligence outpost called the Office of Policy Coordination in 1949. Frank Wisner (who worked as a Wall Street lawyer for the law firm Carter, Ledyard & Milburn and was former OSS, obviously from the Dulles branch) was brought in as OPC chief, and quickly brought the unit into the black arts of espionage, including sabotage, subversion, and assassination 10 By 1952, the OPC was running forty-seven overseas stations, and its staff had nearly three thousand employees, with another three thousand independent contractors in the field.
Dulles and Wisner were essentially operating their own private spy agency.
The OPC was run with little government oversight and few moral restrictions. Many of the agency’s recruits were “ex” Nazis.11 Dulles and Wisner were engaged in a no-holds-barred war with the Soviet bloc with essentially no government supervision.
As Prouty mentioned, the shady evacuation of Nazis stashed amongst POWs was to be the first of many, including the evacuation of General Reinhart Gehlen, the German army’s chief intelligence officer, to Washington on September 20, 1945.
Most of the intelligence gathered by Gehlen’s men was extracted from the enormous population of Soviet prisoners of war – which eventually totaled four million – that fell under Nazi control. Gehlen’s exalted reputation as an intelligence wizard derived from his organization’s widespread use of torture.12
Gehlen understood that the U.S.-Soviet alliance would inevitably break apart (with sufficient sabotage), providing an opportunity for at least some elements of the Nazi hierarchy to survive by joining forces with the West against Moscow.
He managed to convince the Americans that his intelligence on the Soviet Union was indispensable, that if the Americans wanted to win a war against the Russians that they would need to work with him and keep him safe. Therefore, instead of being handed over to the Soviets as war criminals, as Moscow demanded, Gehlen and his top deputies were put on a troop ship back to Germany! 12
Unbelievably, Gehlen’ spy team was installed by U.S. military authorities in a compound in the village of Pullach, near Munich, with no supervision and where he was allowed to live out his dream of reconstituting Hitler’s military intelligence structure within the U.S. national security system. With the generous support of the American government, the Gehlen Organization –as it came to be known – thrived in Pullach, becoming West Germany’s principal intelligence agency. 12 And it should have been no surprise to anyone that “former” SS and Gestapo officials were brought in, including the likes of Dr. Franz Six. Later, Six would be arrested by the U.S. Army counterintelligence agents. Convicted of war crimes, Six served a mere four years in prison and within weeks of his release went back at work in Gehlen’s Pullach headquarters!. 13
For those who were able to believe during the war that the Russians were their true enemies (while they died for the same cause as the Americans by the millions in battle) this was not a hard pill to swallow; however, there was pushback.
Many in the CIA vehemently opposed any association with “former” Nazis, including Admiral Roscoe Hillenkoetter, the CIA’s first director, who in 1947 strongly urged President Truman to “liquidate” Gehlen’s operation. It is not clear what stood in the way of this happening, but to suffice to say, Gehlen had some very powerful support in Washington, including within the national security establishment with primary backing from the Dulles faction. 13
Walter Bedell-Smith, who succeeded Hillenkoetter as CIA Director, despite bringing Allen Dulles in and making him deputy, had a strong dislike for the man. As Smith was getting ready to step down, a few weeks after Eisenhower’s inauguration, Smith advised Eisenhower that it would be unwise to give Allen the directorship of the agency. 14 (18) Eisenhower would come to deeply regret that he did not heed this sound advice.
With the Eisenhower Nixon victory, the culmination of years of political strategizing by Wall Street Republican power brokers, the new heads of the State Department and the CIA were selected as none other than Foster and Allen Dulles respectively; and they would go on to direct the global operations of the most powerful nation in the world.
It is for this reason that the 1952 presidential election has gone down in history as the triumph of “the power elite.”15
- David Talbot, Devil’s Chessboard, pg 21.
- Ibid., pg 22.
- Ibid., pg 27.
- Ibid, pg 26.
- Ibid, pg 23.
- Ibid., pg 28.
- Ibid., pg 29.
- Ibid., pg 26.
- L. Fletcher Prouty, The CIA, Vietnam and the Plot to Assasinate John F. Kennedy, pg 51.
- David Talbot, The Devil’s Chessboard, pg 128.
- Ibid., pg 128.
- Ibid., pg 228.
- Ibid., pg 229.
- Ibid., pg 174.
- C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite, February 15, 2000.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
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At a glance, it may appear that the split of Arab political parties in Israel is consistent with a typical pattern of political and ideological divisions which have afflicted the Arab body politic for many years. This time, however, the reasons behind the split are quite different.
As Israel readies for its fourth general elections within two years, scheduled for March 23, Israel’s Palestinian Arab voters seem to be in a position of power, slated to become the kingmaker in the country’s future coalition government. But something peculiar has happened. The Joint List, which has successfully united the Arab vote in Israel in previous elections, suffered a major setback with the split of the United Arab List (Raam) on February 4.
Raam is the political arm of the Southern Branch of the Islamic Movement in Israel. In April 2019, it entered the elections in a joint coalition with the National Democratic Alliance (Balad) Party. In September 2019 and, again, in March 2020, it contested in the general elections as part of the Joint List, an Arab alliance, which, in addition to al-Balad, included the Democratic Front for Peace and Equality (Hadash) and the Arab Movement for Renewal (Ta’al).
Despite their ideological divides and different socio-economic visions, Arab parties in Israel have felt that their unity is more urgent than ever before. There are reasons for this.
Israel has been rapidly moving to the right, where ultra-nationalist and religious groups now represent mainstream Israeli politics. The center, which temporarily unified under the banner of Kahol Lavan (Blue and White), has actively promoted a similar discourse to Israel’s traditional right of yesteryears. Finally, the left has disintegrated, to play an unprecedentedly marginal role with little or no impact on Israeli politics.
As the Israeli right has grown emboldened in recent years, various anti-Arab legislations were passed by the right-dominated Knesset (Parliament). The most obvious example is the ‘Nation-State Law’, which elevated the exclusive identity of Israel as a Jewish State, while devaluing Palestinian Arab rights, religions and language.
In the September 2019 elections, Arab unity finally paid dividends, as the Joint List won 13 of the Knesset’s 120 contested seats. In April 2020, united Arab parties performed even better, emerging, for the first time in Israel’s history, as the country’s third-largest political bloc after Likud and Kahol Lavan.
Clearly, Arab parties were ready to engage in the political process, not as marginal forces but active participants. Ayman Odeh, the head of the Joint List, had made several overtures to Benny Gantz, leader of the centrist Kahol Lavan. Odeh had reasoned that, with the help of the Joint List, a centrist-led coalition would finally be ready to dislodge right-wing Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, from power.
Gantz refused to allow Arab parties into his government coalition, preferring instead to seek common ground with his archenemy, Netanyahu. Both formed a unity government in May 2020, which only lasted for seven months.
By refusing to incorporate the Joint List, Gantz took the first step in destroying his own promising centrist coalition, which then included Yesh Atid and Telem. Leaders of the latter two factions officially split soon after Gantz agreed to the Netanyahu union. In the coming March elections, Yesh Atid will be contesting independently, while Telem decided to refrain from entering the election fray altogether so as, reportedly, not to further splinter the opposition’s votes.
From a strategic point of view, this would have been the most opportune moment for the Arab Joint List to finally translate its electoral victories into political success. There is a growing realization that a coalition government in Israel, even if formed, would remain unsustainable without Arab support. Consequently, the country’s leading political camps are openly jockeying to court the Arab vote.
Indeed, Netanyahu, who, in 2015 used fear mongering to rally the right behind him by saying that Arab voters were “heading to the polling stations in droves,’ is now turning around. During a visit to the Arab city of Nazareth on January 13, he claimed that his previous comments were misinterpreted. In other Arab towns, he boasted about his record in support of Arab communities and in fighting the coronavirus pandemic. His anti-Arab rhetoric is currently at an all-time low.
The centrist, Yair Lapid, of Yesh Atid has also shown willingness to work with Arab politicians, stating on January 17 that “It was a loss that we did not do it in the current Knesset,” referring to Gantz’s rejection of Arab endorsement and exclusion of Arabs from the coalition government.
Yet, instead of taking advantage of their electoral success, the Joint List, once again, splintered, or precisely, an important party, Raam, has exited the coalition. This time, however, the fragmentation was not an outcome of ideological differences but the result of the bewildering position of Raam’s leader, Mansour Abbas.
In February, Abbas had indicated his willingness to join a Netanyahu-led coalition. He justified his shocking turnabout with unconvincing political platitudes as one “needs to be able to look to the future, and to build a better future for everyone,” and so on.
The fact that Netanyahu is largely responsible for the despairing outlook of Israel’s Arabs’ future seems entirely irrelevant to Abbas, who is inexplicably keen on joining any future political alliance even if it includes Israel’s most chauvinistic political actors.
Israeli right-wing newspaper, The Jerusalem Post, sums up Abbas’ devastating blow to Arab unity just before the elections, with this headline, “Meet Mansour Abbas, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s unlikely ally”.
According to a recent poll conducted by Israel’s Channel 13, Abbas’ Raam party could potentially control 4 Knesset seats following the March elections. Also plausible, Raam might fail to achieve the required 3.25 percent threshold, thus receiving no political representation whatsoever. Either way, Abbas’ obvious self-serving folly could cost Arab parties a historic and unmatched opportunity to assert themselves as a decisive political force that could challenge Israeli racism and Palestinian Arab marginalization.
Now that all electoral alliances have been finalized, Mansour Abbas has clearly made the wrong choice and, no matter the outcome, he has already lost.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
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At a glance, it may appear that the split of Arab political parties in Israel is consistent with a typical pattern of political and ideological divisions which have afflicted the Arab body politic for many years. This time, however, the reasons behind the split are quite different.
As Israel readies for its fourth general elections within two years, scheduled for March 23, Israel’s Palestinian Arab voters seem to be in a position of power, slated to become the kingmaker in the country’s future coalition government. But something peculiar has happened. The Joint List, which has successfully united the Arab vote in Israel in previous elections, suffered a major setback with the split of the United Arab List (Raam) on February 4.
Raam is the political arm of the Southern Branch of the Islamic Movement in Israel. In April 2019, it entered the elections in a joint coalition with the National Democratic Alliance (Balad) Party. In September 2019 and, again, in March 2020, it contested in the general elections as part of the Joint List, an Arab alliance, which, in addition to al-Balad, included the Democratic Front for Peace and Equality (Hadash) and the Arab Movement for Renewal (Ta’al).
Despite their ideological divides and different socio-economic visions, Arab parties in Israel have felt that their unity is more urgent than ever before. There are reasons for this.
Israel has been rapidly moving to the right, where ultra-nationalist and religious groups now represent mainstream Israeli politics. The center, which temporarily unified under the banner of Kahol Lavan (Blue and White), has actively promoted a similar discourse to Israel’s traditional right of yesteryears. Finally, the left has disintegrated, to play an unprecedentedly marginal role with little or no impact on Israeli politics.
As the Israeli right has grown emboldened in recent years, various anti-Arab legislations were passed by the right-dominated Knesset (Parliament). The most obvious example is the ‘Nation-State Law’, which elevated the exclusive identity of Israel as a Jewish State, while devaluing Palestinian Arab rights, religions and language.
In the September 2019 elections, Arab unity finally paid dividends, as the Joint List won 13 of the Knesset’s 120 contested seats. In April 2020, united Arab parties performed even better, emerging, for the first time in Israel’s history, as the country’s third-largest political bloc after Likud and Kahol Lavan.
Clearly, Arab parties were ready to engage in the political process, not as marginal forces but active participants. Ayman Odeh, the head of the Joint List, had made several overtures to Benny Gantz, leader of the centrist Kahol Lavan. Odeh had reasoned that, with the help of the Joint List, a centrist-led coalition would finally be ready to dislodge right-wing Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, from power.
Gantz refused to allow Arab parties into his government coalition, preferring instead to seek common ground with his archenemy, Netanyahu. Both formed a unity government in May 2020, which only lasted for seven months.
By refusing to incorporate the Joint List, Gantz took the first step in destroying his own promising centrist coalition, which then included Yesh Atid and Telem. Leaders of the latter two factions officially split soon after Gantz agreed to the Netanyahu union. In the coming March elections, Yesh Atid will be contesting independently, while Telem decided to refrain from entering the election fray altogether so as, reportedly, not to further splinter the opposition’s votes.
From a strategic point of view, this would have been the most opportune moment for the Arab Joint List to finally translate its electoral victories into political success. There is a growing realization that a coalition government in Israel, even if formed, would remain unsustainable without Arab support. Consequently, the country’s leading political camps are openly jockeying to court the Arab vote.
Indeed, Netanyahu, who, in 2015 used fear mongering to rally the right behind him by saying that Arab voters were “heading to the polling stations in droves,’ is now turning around. During a visit to the Arab city of Nazareth on January 13, he claimed that his previous comments were misinterpreted. In other Arab towns, he boasted about his record in support of Arab communities and in fighting the coronavirus pandemic. His anti-Arab rhetoric is currently at an all-time low.
The centrist, Yair Lapid, of Yesh Atid has also shown willingness to work with Arab politicians, stating on January 17 that “It was a loss that we did not do it in the current Knesset,” referring to Gantz’s rejection of Arab endorsement and exclusion of Arabs from the coalition government.
Yet, instead of taking advantage of their electoral success, the Joint List, once again, splintered, or precisely, an important party, Raam, has exited the coalition. This time, however, the fragmentation was not an outcome of ideological differences but the result of the bewildering position of Raam’s leader, Mansour Abbas.
In February, Abbas had indicated his willingness to join a Netanyahu-led coalition. He justified his shocking turnabout with unconvincing political platitudes as one “needs to be able to look to the future, and to build a better future for everyone,” and so on.
The fact that Netanyahu is largely responsible for the despairing outlook of Israel’s Arabs’ future seems entirely irrelevant to Abbas, who is inexplicably keen on joining any future political alliance even if it includes Israel’s most chauvinistic political actors.
Israeli right-wing newspaper, The Jerusalem Post, sums up Abbas’ devastating blow to Arab unity just before the elections, with this headline, “Meet Mansour Abbas, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s unlikely ally”.
According to a recent poll conducted by Israel’s Channel 13, Abbas’ Raam party could potentially control 4 Knesset seats following the March elections. Also plausible, Raam might fail to achieve the required 3.25 percent threshold, thus receiving no political representation whatsoever. Either way, Abbas’ obvious self-serving folly could cost Arab parties a historic and unmatched opportunity to assert themselves as a decisive political force that could challenge Israeli racism and Palestinian Arab marginalization.
Now that all electoral alliances have been finalized, Mansour Abbas has clearly made the wrong choice and, no matter the outcome, he has already lost.
The post Ready to Work with Netanyahu: Mansour Abbas Splinters Arab Vote in Israel first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.