Actually, I limit my exposure to daily media considerably. My experience as a journalist, when there was still some conventional meaning assignable to that term, began in school. I had become the news editor of the school paper. Whereas previously the monthly student production was devoted to athletic events and other entertainments, I introduced reporting on issues both in the school and those off the school grounds that nonetheless were relevant for pupils and the routines to which we were all subject. My model in those days was The Economist, still published in the UK and reasonably free from cant. Our school paper received several prizes from the journalism school at the state university that I would later attend. There, I tried to write for the university paper. However the closer one got to the ambitious professionals, the less interest in substance was to be found. The pinnacle of my experience was a two-year tour as an accredited freelance journalist in the UN Headquarters, New York. That was back in the ancient 80s when the regime over which Ronald Reagan nominally presided made its ownership of the United Nations more explicit than it had been since using it to cover its war against Korea (and China). I attended innumerable press conferences including those held by such luminaries as Margaret Thatcher, Rajiv Gandhi, Roland Dumas and some figures from states that receive less attention.

It was the year when then New Zealand prime minister David Lange accused France of state terrorism before the entire General Assembly—a speech French foreign minister Dumas told me he had not heard. 1985 was a jubilee in which the United Nations organisation celebrated that it had reached 45 years of age. Heads of state and government accumulated in the East Side nest donated by the Rockefeller dynasty to house that august preserver of the world’s peace and prosperity—as the United States defined. There was still a Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and a German Democratic Republic. The CIA was still waging counter-insurgency throughout Central America and all was Right in the world. That is to the extent one still could imagine what Left meant.

Through accident or design, I travelled to Brazil the following year and studied the process of apparent return to civilian rule after the 1964 military coup the US initiated. In 1989, I drove to Berlin for a common weekend visit only to find that by 10 November the last meaningful preservative of Eastern European sovereignty was to be removed. In 1991, I was again surprised. I had booked my flight to South Africa before the announcement of Nelson Mandela’s release. What I witnessed in the first half of that year was prescient. Twenty years later, the book I wrote about that experience has been re-published. Whether it will get any more notice today is anyone’s guess.

In other words, I have been fortunate enough to enjoy proximity to noteworthy political personalities, remarkable historical events, and those whose ostensible task was to report on them for many years. As I have said to my sporting friends, I prefer observant participation to the spectacles. My cricketing skills are minimal. Yet I would rather play than just watch. Of course I am no politician, “playing” for me is personal observation, not following what others tell me is important.

This year the war commenced among the imperial powers of the Western peninsula of Eurasia, led by the British Empire and its vassals, has been waged for more than a century, 120 years to be precise. In his 1947 book, The Future in Perspective, German historian Sigmun Neumann called the era 1914-1945 the “second Thirty Years War”. Perhaps we should call the era in which we live the “second Hundred Years War”. That would still only cover a small part of the events of the past century. Given the present situation the most comprehensive designation I can imagine is the “second Fourth Crusade”.

In 2001, the latent policies that had shaped the previous ten decades of malice and belligerence were articulated in the language most closely resembling the decrees of Innocent III. By 2020 those policies had become manifest in every aspect of Western political, military, economic and social practice. The Global War on Terror was successfully transformed from an episodic campaign against brown people associated with Islam to a general campaign to reduce the world’s population and subordinate the East, beginning with the successor to Orthodoxy in the Christian world. An incident in Wuhan in 2019 was exploited to create conditions for an expanded version of the Opium Wars against China—a war concealed by duplicity and hypocrisy that puts the Arrow incident to shame.

The journalism to which so much reference is made—as to its virtues and failings—is scarcely able to imagine, let alone report, the era in which we live. Journalism as it has been taught and imitated dwells on the immediate or the fiction of the immediate to be exact. With the contraction of memory and the dissolution of the traditional forms of time and space, the journalist responds by limiting the scope of an already truncated perceptual scheme.

Although the war being waged by Ukraine against Russia is based on consistent Western policies and methods, the bulk of the discussion and the reporting that feeds it focusses either on the battlefield (now called battlespace in military jargon) or on the relationships between Russia and Ukraine and NATO. At the beginning of Russia’s Special Military Operation, the Russian government stated that one of its key objectives is the de-Nazification of Ukraine. The journalistic response in the West has been mainly to ignore the substance upon which this aim is based. Of course there are references among the reasonably sane to the embarrassing or criminal inclusion of formations in the Ukrainian military that are “neo-Nazi”, the most notorious of these is the Azov Division/ Battalion. Although the US/ NATO spokespersons assert that these are not neo-Nazi elements, it has been necessary to downplay the appearance of NS insignia (not foreign to elements of US Forces either) in order to retain this fiction. A recent RIAS video, obtained from Italian journalists embedded in the Ukrainian units that invaded Kursk, shows a Ukrainian soldier wearing a fatigue cap with an NS badge. Shocked attention is given to the SS runes on the cap — see screenshot below.

To illustrate how the journalistic microscope functions, the shock is focused on the rune “bacillus”. However the petri dish in which this bacillus was found is largely ignored. The SS runes may catch the superficially informed as formally objectionable national socialist (NS) symbols that make a good cause look bad. For those that oppose the war they may see this as proof that the Ukrainian regime is unscrupulous, willing to use anyone to fight its war. From this follow conclusions like, the NS symbols should be prohibited and purged (without addressing why they are worn in the first place) or the Ukrainian war is wrong because it is being fought by neo-Nazis.

If the microscope is abandoned and higher magnification is applied, then we find a curious confirmation of the foregoing description of continuous war against the East. First of all, the cap badge the soldier is wearing is that of the SS-Leibstandart “Adolf Hitler”. This formation was an element of the II SS Panzer Gruppe, commanded by Paul Hausser, which waged the 1943 battle of Kursk in which the German Wehrmacht and SS paramilitary divisions were defeated. The Azov Battalion/ Division adopted the standard of the Waffen SS-Division “Das Reich” (also once under Hausser’s command). This could be interpreted as evidence that the vanguard of the Ukrainian Armed Forces is essentially composed of the reconstituted Waffen-SS. The organisation, training and operational deployment of these units is entirely consistent with the manner in which the Waffen-SS was created and deployed in the war against the Soviet Union, a war that only ended with latter’s dissolution.

These are not neo-Nazi formations. They are fascist units created by the same forces that armed and deployed German military might against the Soviet Union in 1941. They were created from the legacy of the SS units rescued and conserved by the Anglo-American Empire since 1944. Seen in this way these insignia are the inheritance of the regimental history they claim as their own. The British Imperial Government and the United States Government both organized the rescue of at least 1,000 paramilitary men of the Waffen-SS Division Galizia in Italy. With the services of the Gehlen Org (the precursor to the Bundesnachrichtendienst, Federal Germany’s CIA franchise) and the ODESSA, Waffen-SS officers and men were provided with all manner of escape to safe havens, e.g. in North and South America. Officially the SS was declared to be a criminal organisation under the Basic Law for the Federal Republic of Germany after 1945. Even the display of insignia associated with the NSDAP (Nazi Party) and its infrastructure was made a crime. Occasionally, conspicuous trials were held, when unavoidable, to preserve the myth of Western innocence in the creation of the NS regime and conceal its complicity in Operation Barbarossa.

SS-Oberst-Gruppenführer and Waffen-SS Generaloberst (deemed by the NSDAP regime equivalent to general officer rank in the regular army) Paul Hausser, in his capacity as spokesman for the Hilfsgemeinschaft auf Gegenseitigkeit (HIAG), a benevolent organisation (and lobby) devoted to the promoting the interests of Waffen-SS veterans, pled until his death in 1972 for the rehabilitation of the Waffen-SS; that they be treated on a par with the Wehrmacht veterans. Regular soldiers retained their pension and other benefits. These were denied to members of the Waffen-SS because in the view of the established military they were not soldiers and their organisation had been declared criminal as a whole. The law was cynically applied like much of so-called “de-Nazification” since civil servants who obtained “Persilscheine”, certificates of de-Nazification named after the leading laundry detergent Persil, were not only retained in office but continued their careers, even if they had been NSDAP members. German journalist Bernt Engelmann in his Roman à clef, Grosses Bundesverdienstkreuz (1974) and his 1975 Schwarzbuch: Strauß, Kohl und Co. and 1986 Schwarzbuch. Das Kohl & Co-Komplott, traced the careful erection of West Germany’s regime by the US intelligence services using first generation NSDAP functionaries like Franz-Joseph Strauss and second-generation fascists nurtured by the Heidelberg SS clique around Fritz Ries, including Hans-Martin Schleyer, e.g., the galleon figure for the final assault on the Soviet Union, Helmut Kohl. The first years of this story, including the Gladio terrorist operations of the early 1980s, were dramatized by GDR television in the series Das Unsichtbare Visier in the 1970s and 1980s. It was not until the 1990s that the BBC aired a documentary showing that most of the European “left-wing terrorism”, including the Bologna railway station bombing and the murder of Aldo Moro, were under the direction of the NATO Gladio operation, based on the structures imported from the Gehlen Org. None of this is ever even mentioned when trying to explain the curiously self-destructive policies of the current Berlin government.

Hausser’s central argument, for which he also published in 1953 the book Waffen-SS im Einsatz (the Waffen-SS in battle) and in 1966 Soldaten wie andere auch (Soldiers like any other), was that the Waffen-SS was a true multi-national force which had honourably served in the defence of “European ideals.” Hausser’s personal defence was no doubt related to the fact that he had been a regular army officer prior to joining the SS. Until the end of the GDR and the Soviet Union, Hausser’s books and all those who followed in his train were attacked officially and in the German mass media for “historical revisionism”. In fact, as late as 1995, the so-called “Wehrmachtausstellung” produced by the Hamburg Institute for Social Research, caused a major scandal in military circles with documentary evidence to punch a huge hole in the “clean” Wehrmacht myth. It was also accused of incorrect attribution and captioning of photographs however the essential message was never fully rebutted. If the Waffen-SS was the vanguard of the West’s war of annihilation in the East, the Wehrmacht as a force was necessary for that war to be waged with due ferocity. While until 1990 historical revisionism was the technical term for defending the war in the East (against the Soviet Union), Hausser’s version of history has become the official doctrine of Berlin and Brussels. Today’s Ukrainian Armed Forces are praised as a multi-national force defending Europe. If one listens to any high imperial official, especially Mr Stoltenberg and Ms von der Leyne (NATO and EU, i.e. military and civil households of the Anglo-American Empire), the Ukrainian Armed Forces, commanded nominally from Kiev, are fighting “Europe’s fight”. HM’s Canadian Government in Ottawa even applauded the prior service of a Waffen-SS veteran because he too had been fighting for such ideals as a young man in SS paramilitary uniform. The barely implied declaration is that Russia is not Europe and certainly has no European “ideals”.

Since the Anglo-American Empire and its vassals in western Eurasia are fully committed to Ukraine, it can be no surprise therefore that they are also fully committed to the IDF slaughter and conquest of Palestine, in absolute defence of European “ideals”. The declared “war of annihilation” (how else can one characterize the boldly proclaimed objectives of the Tel Aviv regime?) underway since 2023 is merely the “sacred right of self-defence”—with which no other state in the region is endowed. It takes enormous strains of the intellect not to compare the rhetoric today with that in NSDAP-ruled Germany from 1939 until 1945. However, the legions of scribes and megaphone operators in journalism assembled are obviously up to the task. Would anyone dare to compare the more than fifty standing ovations the head of that regime received in a joint session of the US Congress with the news reel footage of Reichstag sessions? Would anyone even understand such a comparison were it made?

Two of the great propaganda slanders of the past hundred years are that the leader of the Soviet Union started the war to expand communism throughout the world—provoking the defensive-offensive response of the West through (its proxy) the National Socialist regime in Germany. Another version of that slander is that Stalin and Hitler were essentially the same, intending to divide the European peninsula between them. The other is that the Grand Mufti of Palestine, Amin al-Husseini, represented the nascent Arab war against Jews. These and other fabrications or distortions of the historical record are in part preserved by the overwhelming control of the world’s mass media and educational/ indoctrination system by the Anglo-American (in widest sense of that term) Establishment. The Establishment history of the past century either exaggerates casualties/ fatalities on its own side or minimises/ ignores them on the side of the victims of Western aggression. One only has to consider the Normandy farce and the refusal of “Western allies” to commemorate the Russian victory over the fascist invasion—not incursion. (Here note that journalists report about the Russian “invasion” of Ukraine but not about the Ukrainian “incursion”.)

The Soviet Union, which bore the brunt of Western (Nazi) invasion at a cost of more than 20 million dead plus untold destruction, rightly demanded war crimes trials in London. Britain and the US reluctantly conceded. However in Nuremberg the Soviet Union had to be content with the trial of NS officials for crimes against Jews and not war crimes against the citizens of the Soviet Union. By 1967, everyone in the world knew the number “six million”, while scarcely anyone knew about the 20 million plus in the Soviet Union. This omission was so egregious that after a major, prime time 26-episode British documentary about the war between 1941 and 1945, entitled World at War (1973), with narration by Lawrence Olivier, had been broadcast throughout the English-speaking West with almost no mention of the Eastern front, massive protest by the Soviet Union forced the production and broadcast in 1978 of The Unknown War, another twenty episodes, narrated by Bruce Lancaster, to show where the war was really fought and won (episode 7 describes the Battle of Kursk). At least twenty million deaths in China were not counted at all. In a little country like Portugal a typical bookstore has more books on display about the Western theatre of that war, in which Portugal was neutral, and the NSDAP than books about its own national history.

To this day the only casualties that are universally recognized from that phase of the “second Hundred Years War” are six million non-combatant forced labourers in the occupied East—where the war was fiercest. That fundamental disproportionality is also an essential part of the overall distortion and deception (along with a variety of serious commercial and criminal enforcement penalties) which prevents the daily journalist and his readership from seeing the “second Fourth Crusade” being waged from the Baltic Sea to the Gulf of Aden. It prevents them from recognizing the age in which we live and the conditions that have made it what it is.

In an article titled, “The Crusade is Over” (The Unz Review, 7 September 2023), Laurent Guyénot argues that the Christian crusade constituted an innovation. He writes:

The Crusade introduced a new way of individual salvation: penitential warfare. God, speaking through His vicar on earth, now granted full remission of sins (thence a place in Heaven) to whoever would swear to travel to the Holy Land and kill infidels or be killed by them. According to the historian Orderic Vitalis, writing around 1135, “the pope urged all who could bear arms to fight against the enemies of God, and on God’s authority he absolved all the penitent from all their since from the hour they took the Lord’s cross”.

This idea survived even in the Protestant deviation. The Church militant hymn, The Son of God goes forth to war is just one gory example.

When the Global War on Terror was proclaimed, the rechristening of the second Hundred Years War as the second Fourth Crusade, penitential warfare needed no mention. On the contrary, the justification offered by all those who preached the crusade was that something or some people embodying “radical Islam” or “Islamists” had sworn to fight the West to the death. A powerful propaganda strategy has always been to accuse the target of the acts, omissions, or policies one is covertly pursuing. Thus the target is seen as the author of the very aggression launched against him.

Negotiation, both overt and covert, can be used to amplify this drama of guilt and enmity as the target is deceived into acts he believes will end hostilities, which are then shaped to enhance them. Analyst-participants like Scott Ritter—to mention someone everyone probably recognises—have been eyewitness to these deceits, even if late in recognizing them. With such overwhelming control over the world propaganda media for a century now, it is almost impossible for targets to expose the deceptions to which they have been subject. The few journalists who notice and try to report them are no better situated to alter the signal to noise ratio in favour of the defence.

Details reported may help to correct errors of fact. However, without a fundamental orientation, including a critical, cultural historical point of view—one that necessarily extends beyond the horizon of daily news or even intensive analysis—it is very easy to remain a captive of marketing and info-fashion. New things—newly reported or learned—excite but without context obstruct rather than promote information. Joseph Weizenbaum, in his continued critique of AI before he died, insisted on the distinction between data and information. Information is the product of judgement. Data can be anything. Weizenbaum insisted that judgement can and ought only to be exercised by humans—not machines. Journalism functions as a soft machine. It generates data and packages it so that it appears without judgement or is saturated with judgements. Transfats were developed to enhance the shelf life of processed foods. Transfacts enhance the credibility of processed synthetic data. Like a drug it induces a kind of euphoria (dysphoria) called “being informed”. The actual exercise of judgement requires a level of sobriety that standard journalism—regardless of ideological orientation—was not designed to sustain.

A great many terms used in reporting or discussing what happened, happens or may happen in our world are unanalysed. “Interests” is perhaps one of the worst but there are many others. To illustrate just how useless this term is consider the following substitution: “the person whom one has seized in the process of setting fire to one’s home, or perhaps with a douse of petrol to one’s self, was merely pursuing his interests.” This is not an absurd use. Another version of this is that a person who engages in a cash transaction on a public thoroughfare and is robbed in the process must expect that there are people who have an interest in theft where they believe it is possible. It is only the occasional enforcement of the criminal code that makes it probably safe to say that these kinds of “interest” are generally termed “criminal” and subject to punishment. However, once the word is applied to corporate or state entities, these actions are beyond judgement. The same applies to such terms as “right of self-defence” or “national security”. This shorthand is readily absorbed as a mark of sophistication when it is really a screen to obscure activities from scrutiny.

While the objective blockade of Gaza that has been in place for two decades, only to be intensified by the centrally managed mass murder of the population that commenced October 2023, is occasionally mentioned, the compulsion to produce “news” leads to notices of IDF homicidal attacks on every form of food, medical or other relief to the besieged as if these were weather reports. A recent report that the WHO, a private-public partnership (euphemism for fascist parastatal), will launch an experimental polio inoculation campaign on the IDF’s targets of annihilation ought to remind people of the use to which Africans have been put by pharmaments manufacturers with misanthropic funds, or even the medical experiments conducted against captives during the war in the 20th century. Alas, not even the enormous fallout from the 2021-22 global injection terror is compared.

Journalists swim in a cesspool with just enough water to distort their vision, especially their sense of distance. The “news” demands the appearance of unique data, unusual events or angles. Supposedly repetition is bad for the “news”. What is really meant is that “news” is based on titillation, combining voyeurism, desire, fear and what the Germans call Schadensfreude (enjoying when others are injured, a kind of abstract vengefulness). Of course, repetition is essential to the effect of the “news”. Redundancy in signalling serves to amplify a message as well as to squelch noise (undesired signals/ messages). The inability to accurately assess distance and engage critically is also aggravated by the addiction to unanalysed jargon, sometimes due to the journalist’s ignorance or laziness, but also because of infection with the culture of the powerful and their agents. This culture is transmitted not only by education but also by the rewards and punishments, the seduction and promotion, as both Philip Agee and the late Udo Ulfkotte explained, when one belongs to the scrivener guild at court. The economic and social privilege that accrues when one has been permitted into anterooms of power is hard to dismiss. The proximity to authority lends the charisma of authority. Even the opposition scribe can become complicit in this spectacle, out of vanity or because his benefits accrue (even if the ultimate sources are concealed). That is part of the power of pageantry and the miracle of philanthropy. Salvation is promised if one is willing to take up the cross or pay someone else to do so. The warriors have always had their chroniclers. At the end of the day all we have on which to base our judgements—and judgements we must make—are the legacies, the chronicles and the wasteland.

This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.