From 2015: US bioweapons labs, billions in research is a ‘real problem’ – Russian security chief

The head of Russia’s Security Council has warned of “a real problem” posed by the growing number of US-controlled laboratories that produce biological weapons. Nikolay Patrushev estimated that Washington allocates “tens of billions of dollars” to this research.

Source: US bioweapons labs, billions in research is a ‘real problem’ – Russian security chief — RT News

RT News

Oct 31, 2015

31 Oct, 2015

Nikolai Patrushev, Secretary of the Russian Security Council. © Sergey Guneev / RIA Novosti

 

The head of Russia’s Security Council has warned of “a real problem” posed by the growing number of US-controlled laboratories that produce biological weapons. Nikolay Patrushev estimated that Washington allocates “tens of billions of dollars” to this research.

Speaking after Russia’s Security Council meeting, Patrushev mentioned the threat stemming from biological weapons laboratories that operate on the territories of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS).

“There are also other problems, such as the production of military-oriented biological weapons and the very large funding allocated to this,” Patrushev said. “This is tens of billions of dollars. Additionally, the number of laboratories under US jurisdiction or control has increased 20 times.”

What is more worrying is that some of such laboratories “operated and operate” on CIS soil, said Patrushev.

“This is why the problem is real,” he said.

The head of the Security Council has also mentioned the chemical weapons issue, saying that Russia will dispose of its remaining arsenal by 2020 – eight years earlier than the US.

“We are putting into practice a program to get rid of chemical weapons. Russia will dispose of these weapons by 2020. It was expected that the US will also destroy these weapons by that time, but according to today’s plans, it will carry out the disposal by 2028,” Patrushev told journalists.

In June, the Russian Foreign Ministry accused the US of encircling Russia with bioweapons labs, as well as obstructing international efforts to eradicate biological weapons.

One of Russia’s particular concerns is the Richard G. Lugar Center for Public and Animal Health Research, a research facility for high-level biohazard agents, located near Tbilisi, Georgia, a CIS member, and Russia’s neighbor.

“American and Georgian authorities are trying to cover up the real nature of this US military unit, which studies highly dangerous infectious diseases. The Pentagon is trying to establish similar covert medico-biological facilities in other countries [in Russia’s neighborhood],” the Russian ministry said in June.

At the time, Moscow also blamed the US for derailing “decades of international effort to strengthen” the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention (BTWC), a 1972 international treaty aimed at eradicating bioweapons worldwide.

World Conquest: The United States’ Global Military Crusade (1945- )

The article provides an incisive historical perspective on America’s “long war” against humanity, which is being carried out under a fake humanitarian mandate.

Source

GR Editor’s Note

The following article by professor Eric Waddell was first published more than 16 years ago by Global Research in December 2003 in the immediate wake of the invasion and occupation of  Iraq by US and British forces, with a postscript added in 2007. 

The article provides an incisive historical perspective on America’s “long war” against humanity, which is being carried out under a fake humanitarian mandate.

Let us be under no illusions as to the intent of the US and its allies.

We are dealing with World Conquest under the disguise of a “Global War on Terrorism”. 

Michel Chossudovsky, January 2020

---

World Conquest: The United States’ Global Military Crusade (1945-)

by Prof. Eric Waddell

The United States has attacked, directly or indirectly, some 44 countries throughout the world since August 1945, a number of them many times. The avowed objective of these military interventions has been to effect “regime change”. The cloaks of “human rights” and of “democracy” were invariably evoked to justify what were unilateral and illegal acts.

The aim of the United States is to protect and reinforce national interests rather than to create a better world for all humankind. It is an “imperial grand strategy” of global dimensions designed to ensure unlimited and uninhibited access, notably to strategic resources, notably energy, and to markets. Rather than to establish a direct colonial presence, the preferred strategy is to create satellite states, and this requires constant, and often repeated, military interventions in countries around the world, irrespective of their political regime.

Democratically elected governments are as much at risk as dictatorships. In recent years, the tendency has been for such direct interference to increase since less of these countries are prepared to act as willing allies. Indeed, events of 2003 would suggest that the number of unconditional and powerful U.S. allies is now reduced to three: Great Britain, Australia and Israel. The US strategy is characterised, wherever possible, by invasion and the setting up of friendly (puppet) governments. Attention is focussed, by preference, on relatively small and weak countries, the aim being to achieve rapid victory.

Historically, this process of US domination of the World has been characterized by:

(i) direct military intervention with nuclear or conventional bombs and missiles,

(ii) direct military intervention with naval or ground forces,

(iii) indirect military intervention through command operations and

(iv) the threat of recourse to nuclear weapons.

Broadly speaking, three historical phases can be identified:

– 1945-49: The U.S.-Soviet struggle for European domination, terminating with the stabilisation of the frontier between the two blocs and the creation of NATO;

– 1950-89: The Cold War proper and, in the context of it, the emergence of the non-aligned group of nations;

Regime Change in the U.S.: Proposal from a Concerned Citizen

– 1990 on: The post-Cold War

The first period was characterized by a significant degree of US military intervention in Europe, the second by a concern to confine the Communist bloc within its frontiers and to prevent the emergence of pro-communist regimes elsewhere in the world, and the third, focused on gaining control over the former Soviet republics and in the oil-rich Middle East. The Middle East, Southeast Asia and the Caribbean/Central America reveal themselves to be Regional Theaters of concern throughout the post-2nd World War period.

click image to enlarge

The non-negotiable defense and promotion of “the American way of life” through global military interventions took form in the closing months of the 2nd World War and it came at great cost to much of the rest of the World’s population. Although Germany capitulated in May 1945 and the United Nations was created in the following month, the U.S. nevertheless chose to use nuclear weapons to bring Japan to its feet.

The dropping of two atomic bombs, respectively on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August of that year resulted in some 150,000 immediate deaths and tens of thousands of wounded. Such nuclear terrorism was quickly denounced by the international scientific community and no other nation has resorted to the use of such weapons of mass destruction. However, the U.S.A. regularly brandishes the threat of recourse to them, while under Bush they have been reinstated as an integral part of national discourse. But the story does not end with nuclear weapons, for the U.S.A. has also, over the past half-century, used chemical and biological weapons in its quest for global domination with, for example, recourse to Agent Orange in Viet Nam and blue mold, cane smut, African swine fever, etc. in Cuba. All such weapons of mass destruction are an integral part of the country’s arsenal.

In this context, the map of U.S. Military Interventions since 1945 only tells a part of the story. While the country’s global reach is apparent, the scale of military violence is not fully revealed. Up to 1,000,000 people were killed in the CIA command operation in Indonesia in1967, in what was, according to the New York Times, “one of the most savage mass slayings of modern political history”. Another 100,000 were killed in Guatemala, in the CIA-organized coup. And the map makes no mention of military interventions where the U.S. played a support (e.g. Rwanda and the Congo in the 1990s) as distinct from a lead role, or where U.S. arms were used by national military forces, as in East Timor where, in the hands of the Indonesian military, they were responsible for the death of some 200,000 people from 1967 on.

Interestingly, with regards to the international arms trade, it was President Reagan who announced, in 1981, that “The U.S. views the transfer of conventional weapons… as an essential element of its global defense posture and an indispensable component of its foreign policy.”

The U.S. Empire knows no limits. Its aim is political and military domination of the world. Under the US system of global capitalism, the demand for energy and other vital resources is unlimited.

America’s “Road Map to Empire” was not formulated by the Bush administration as some critics are suggesting. In fact, there is little that is “new” about the “Project for a New American Century”. It is just that the post-war rhetoric of human rights and social and economic development has diminished, to be replaced by the primary concern with global supremacy through military force. The imperial project was outlined in the immediate wake of the 2nd World War. It was part of the “Truman Doctrine” formulated in 1948 by George Kennan, Director of Policy and Planning at the U.S. State Department:

“We have 50 percent of the world’s wealth but only 6.3 percent of its population…. In this situation we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will allow us to maintain this position of disparity. We should cease to talk about the raising of living standards, human rights and democratization. The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts. The less we are then hampered by idealistic slogans, the better.”

Postscript 2007

In one sense little has changed since 2003. The next target for military intervention has already been clearly identified. It is Iran which so happens, according to the most recent US Government official energy statistics, to rank third among the world’s oil-rich nations, and to be the one with the largest increase in proven oil reserve estimates over the period 2005-2006.

In another sense however a new portrait is beginning to emerge, where a war-weary and increasingly vulnerable United States is moving to the creation of a Fortress North America which embraces its northern neighbour. Once again the logic is clear. Canada now ranks second, ahead of Iran and Iraq but behind Saudi Arabia, in terms of world oil reserves, thanks notably to the tar sands of Alberta. A minority government in Ottawa, dominated by Albertan interests, is consciously taking Canada into both the US energy and the military and strategic fold. In so doing, the country is joining the ranks of the United Kingdom and Australia as an unflinching US ally.

If global reach is becoming a too costly and hazardous endeavour then fortress North America becomes an increasingly attractive alternative, particularly when the minor partner is consenting and docile.

Eric Waddell is a distinguished author and professor of Geography based in Quebec City

ANNEX:  

MAP, for larger view click link below and enlarge

http://www.globalresearch.ca/audiovideo/USA_intervention_bleu.gif

 

The original source of this article is Global Research

Copyright © Eric Waddell, Global Research, 2020

Escobar: Why The New Silk Roads Are A “Threat” To US Bloc

Source

http://www.zerohedge.com

Authored by Pepe Escobar via The Saker blog,

Mon, 01/27/2020

 

Under the cascading roar of the 24/7 news cycle cum Twitter eruptions, it’s easy for most of the West, especially the US, to forget the basics about the interaction of Eurasia with its western peninsula, Europe.

Asia and Europe have been trading goods and ideas since at least 3,500 BC. Historically, the flux may have suffered some occasional bumps – for instance, with the irruption of 5th-century nomad horsemen in the Eurasian plains. But it was essentially steady up to the end of the 15th century. We can essentially describe it as a millennium-old axis – from Greece to Persia, from the Roman empire to China.

A land route with myriad ramifications, through Central Asia, Afghanistan, Iran and Turkey, linking India and China to the Eastern Mediterranean and the Black Sea, ended up coalescing into what we came to know as the Ancient Silk Roads.

By the 7th century, land routes and sea trade routes were in direct competition. And the Iranian plateau always played a key role in this process.

The Iranian plateau historically includes Afghanistan and parts of Central Asia linking it to Xinjiang to the east, and to the west all the way to Anatolia. The Persian empire was all about land trade – the key node between India and China and the Eastern Mediterranean.

The Persians engaged the Phoenicians in the Syrian coastline as their partners to manage sea trade in the Mediterranean. Enterprising people in Tyre established Carthage as a node between the Eastern and Western Mediterranean. Because of the partnership with the Phoenicians, the Persians would inevitably be antagonized by the Greeks – a sea trading power.

When the Chinese, promoting the New Silk Roads, emphasize “people to people exchange” as one of its main traits, they mean the millenary Euro-Asia dialogue. History may even have aborted two massive, direct encounters.

The first was after Alexander The Great defeated Darius III of Persia. But then Alexander’s Seleucid successors had to fight the rising power in Central Asia: the Parthians – who ended up taking over Persia and Mesopotamia and made the Euphrates the limes between them and the Seleucids.

The second encounter was when emperor Trajan, in 116 AD, after defeating the Parthians, reached the Persian Gulf. But Hadrian backed off – so history did not register what would have been a direct encounter between Rome, via Persia, with India and China, or the Mediterranean meeting with the Pacific.

Mongol globalization

The last western stretch of the Ancient Silk Roads was, in fact, a Maritime Silk Road. From the Black Sea to the Nile delta, we had a string of pearls in the form of Italian city/emporia, a mix of end journey for caravans and naval bases, which then moved Asian products to Italian ports.

Commercial centers between Constantinople and Crimea configured another Silk Road branch through Russia all the way to Novgorod, which was very close culturally to the Byzantine world. From Novgorod, merchants from Hamburg and other cities of the Hanseatic League distributed Asian products to markets in the Baltics, northern Europe and all the way to England – in parallel to the southern routes followed by the maritime Italian republics.

Between the Mediterranean and China, the Ancient Silk Roads were of course mostly overland. But there were a few maritime routes as well. The major civilization poles involved were peasant and artisanal, not maritime. Up to the 15th century, no one was really thinking about turbulent, interminable oceanic navigation.

The main players were China and India in Asia, and Italy and Germany in Europe. Germany was the prime consumer of goods imported by the Italians. That explains, in a nutshell, the structural marriage of the Holy Roman Empire.

At the geographic heart of the Ancient Silk Roads, we had deserts and the vast steppes, trespassed by sparse tribes of shepherds and nomad hunters. All across those vast lands north of the Himalayas, the Silk Road network served mostly the four main players. One can imagine how the emergence of a huge political power uniting all those nomads would be in fact the main beneficiary of Silk Road trade.

Well, that actually happened. Things started to change when the nomad shepherds of Central-South Asia started to have their tribes regimented as horseback archers by politico-military leaders such as Genghis Khan.

Welcome to the Mongol globalization. That was actually the fourth globalization in history, after the Syrian, the Persian and the Arab.    Under the Mongolian Ilkhanate, the Iranian plateau – once again playing a major role – linked China to the Armenian kingdom of Cilicia in the Mediterranean.

The Mongols didn’t go for a Silk Road monopoly. On the contrary: during Kublai Khan – and Marco Polo’s travels – the Silk Road was free and open. The Mongols only wanted caravans to pay a toll.

With the Turks, it was a completely different story. They consolidated Turkestan, from Central Asia to northwest China. The only reason Tamerlan did not annex India is that he died beforehand. But even the Turks did not want to shut down the Silk Road. They wanted to control it.

Venice lost its last direct Silk Road access in 1461, with the fall of Trebizond, which was still clinging to the Byzantine empire. With the Silk Road closed to the Europeans, the Turks – with an empire ranging from Central-South Asia to the Mediterranean – were convinced they now controlled trade between Europe and Asia.

Not so fast. Because that was when European kingdoms facing the Atlantic came up with the ultimate Plan B: a new maritime road to India.

And the rest – North Atlantic hegemony – is history.

Enlightened arrogance

The Enlightenment could not possibly box Asia inside its own rigid geometries. Europe ceased to understand Asia, proclaimed it was some sort of proteiform historical detritus and turned its undivided attention to “virgin,” or “promised” lands elsewhere on the planet.

We all know how England, from the 18th century onwards, took control of the entire trans-oceanic routes and turned North Atlantic supremacy into a lone superpower game – till the mantle was usurped by the US.

Yet all the time there has been counter-pressure from the Eurasian Heartland powers. That’s the stuff of international relations for the past two centuries – peaking in the young 21st century into what could be simplified as The Revenge of the Heartland against Sea Power. But still, that does not tell the whole story.

Rationalist hegemony in Europe progressively led to an incapacity to understand diversity – or The Other, as in Asia. Real Euro-Asia dialogue – the de facto true engine of history – had been dwindling for most of the past two centuries.

Europe owes its DNA not only to much-hailed Athens and Rome – but to Byzantium as well. But for too long not only the East but also the European East, heir to Byzantium, became incomprehensible, quasi incommunicado with Western Europe, or submerged by pathetic clichés.

The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), as in the Chinese-led New Silk Roads, are a historical game-changer in infinite ways. Slowly and surely, we are evolving towards the configuration of an economically interlinked group of top Eurasian land powers, from Shanghai to the Ruhr valley, profiting in a coordinated manner from the huge technological know-how of Germany and China and the enormous energy resources of Russia.

The Raging 2020s may signify the historical juncture when this bloc surpasses the current, hegemonic Atlanticist bloc.

Now compare it with the prime US strategic objective at all times, for decades: to establish, via myriad forms of divide and rule, that relations between Germany, Russia and China must be the worst possible.

No wonder strategic fear was glaringly visible at the NATO summit in London last month, which called for ratcheting up pressure on Russia-China. Call it the late Zbigniew “Grand Chessboard” Brzezinski’s ultimate, recurrent nightmare.

Germany soon will have a larger than life decision to make. It’s like this was a renewal – in way more dramatic terms – of the Atlanticist vs Ostpolitik debate. German business knows that the only way for a sovereign Germany to consolidate its role as a global export powerhouse is to become a close business partner of Eurasia.

In parallel, Moscow and Beijing have come to the conclusion that the  US trans-oceanic strategic ring can only be broken through the actions of a concerted block: BRI, Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU), Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), BRICS+ and the BRICS’ New Development Bank (NDB), the Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB).

Middle East pacifier

The Ancient Silk Road was not a single camel caravan route but an inter-communicating maze. Since the mid-1990s I’ve had the privilege to travel almost every important stretch – and then, one day, you see the complete puzzle. The New Silk Roads, if they fulfill their potential, pledge to do the same.

Maritime trade may be eventually imposed – or controlled – by a global naval superpower. But overland trade can only prosper in peace. Thus the New Silk Roads potential as The Great Pacifier in Southwest Asia – what the Western-centric view calls the Middle East.

The Middle East (remember Palmyra) was always a key hub of the Ancient Silk Roads, the great overland axis of Euro-Asia trade going all the way to the Mediterranean.

For centuries, a quartet of regional powers – Egypt, Syria, Mesopotamia (now Iraq) and Persia (now Iran) – have been fighting for hegemony over the whole area from the Nile delta to the Persian Gulf. More recently, it has been a case of external hegemony: Ottoman Turk, British and American.

So delicate, so fragile, so immensely rich in culture, no other region in the world has been, continually, since the dawn of history, an absolutely key zone. Of course, the Middle East was also a crisis zone even before oil was found (the Babylonians, by the way, already knew about it).

The Middle East is a key stop in the 21st century, trans-oceanic supply chain routes – thus its geopolitical importance for the current superpower, among other geoeconomic, energy-related reasons. But its best and brightest know the Middle East does not need to remain a center of war, or intimations of war, which, incidentally, affect three of those historical, regional powers of the quartet (Syria, Iraq and Iran).

What the New Silk Roads are proposing is wide-ranging, economic, interlinked integration from East Asia, through Central Asia, to Iran, Iraq and Syria all the way to the Eastern Mediterranean. Just like the Ancient Silk Roads. No wonder vested War Party interests are so uncomfortable with this real peace “threat.”

From Armageddon to Pharmageddon

Source

http://www.greenmedinfo.com

Written By:

Neville Raymond

December 31st 2019

This article is copyrighted by GreenMedInfo LLC, 2020
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How the use of violence to teach lessons has outlived its authority

For years I had been working on a book on how earth-shattering catastrophes had birthed our religious and political order, and how we can heal our wounded species by reparenting ourselves with our birthright of unconditional love. A year before finishing it, I decided to experiment with Twitter. Trying my hand at various topics, I stumbled on the subject of vaccines and discovered that the mainstream campaign to censor the truth about them left me with a lot to say.

So there I was, caught up in two different strands of thought. The first had to do with a religious and political structure forged in a cauldron of catastrophes, ten or fifteen thousand years ago. It was traditionally designed to be supported by three pillars. A body of laws enforced by punitive judgments. A penal system based on hell and damnation, torture, imprisonment and social death. And an infrastructure of war built for mass murder and mayhem. And then there was the second strand that had to do with one of ‘the great triumphs of modern medicine’ – vaccines.

When I was contacted for an interview by Demand the Truth, I hadn’t quite figured out how, or even if, these disparate strands of thought fit together. In the few days I had to prepare for the interview, I discovered what they have in common. They are both founded on the same teaching principle. And this teaching principle may just help us unravel the mystery of history.

Let’s take it step by step. Vaccines work on the theory of using dead or inactivated viruses – along with neurotoxic adjuvants and preservatives that would make a health inspector blanch – to teach the immune system to protect itself from disease. The problem, as we’ve discovered to our horror, is that vaccines instruct the immune system by catastrophically damaging it. In the course of training the body to fight disease, vaccines wage war on the immune system and wreak havoc on it with a range of afflictions – brain inflammation, cardiac arrest, central nervous system breakdowns, bowel disorders, and of course the very diseases we are being vaccinated for.

All this is not in dispute. Anyone who has studied vaccines will attest to the truth of it. The evil of vaccines can be summed up in two words: toxic teaching. The method of teaching employed by vaccines is to inflict all sorts of toxic violence on the body. Since the formal word for a teaching method is pedagogy, we could say vaccines represent a system of toxic pedagogy.

Toxic pedagogy is nothing new. For millennia the accepted method of teaching children was through violence. Parents hit children in the name of discipling them. Teachers cane children in the name of instructing them. Does all this violence make children better? Not in a million years! It traumatizes them. The scars on their bodies heal in a few days, the damage to their psyches lasts a lifetime. All this is common knowledge. Swiss psychologist Alice Miller helped pioneer the study of toxic pedagogy decades ago. All that remained was to trace its origins to a series of earth-battering catastrophes that decimated life on this planet thousands of years ago.

Anthropological records are abuzz with stories of gods almost annihilating the human race. Geological records abound with evidence of interplanetary comets and asteroids colliding with earth and laying waste to it. The problem is not with falling solar system debris per se. It is with the few who survived and went on to repopulate the species. They were so traumatized that they came to terms with these cataclysmic forces by personifying them as angry gods that passed a sentence of mass death on man. Infernal fire and brimstone from heaven were not the random outcome of astrophysical forces. They were symptomatic of gods of wrath, determined to teach an errant species the lesson of its life. And voila! We have the origin of toxic pedagogy – the grotesque idea that the way to teach man to behave properly is through violence and destruction of a literally cosmic order. Gods modeled this toxic pedagogy for man. Man in turn modeled it for his children. He unleashed thousands of years of violence and aggression against his own flesh and blood under the guise of punishing them, disciplining them, teaching them a lesson.

Now psychologists know how children cope with corporal punishment. Typically, they split off from the victimized part of themselves and learn to identify with their victimizers. Thus the violent things parents did to their children, their children grow up to do to their children. It is how violence cycles from generation to generation. But in the big picture, it is the so-called gods who got the cycle of generational abuse rolling. They are the originators of abuse on a cosmic scale. And so the usual coping mechanism by which the child breaks his sympathetic connection with the victimized self, and goes over to the side of the victimizing parent, is now replayed in a religious dimension between gods and humans. As man disowns his victimized self, he learns to treat human nature as an object of shame, contempt and mortification. And the gods – who are, after all, what we might call doomsday gods – are exalted as objects of reverence and veneration.

Counterintuitive as this seems, it reprises the process by which battered children divorce their abused selves and espouse the cause of their abusers. But when it happens in a collective arena, the consequences are far more extreme than when an abused child grows up to dominate a household as an abusive parent. By framing dreaded gods of destruction as objects of worship and devotion, religion gives birth to a class of institutional guardians who presume to rule over society as the incarnation of Doomsday Gods. These quasi-divine rulers exercise their authority by passing violent judgments on mankind. They gather the reins of power by setting up elaborate penal systems to crack down on man for an endless litany of sins and crimes. From ancient kings to modern commanders-in-chief, the primary function of these leaders is to wage war. To this end, they literally weaponize cosmic fireballs and celestial barrages of fire and brimstone – at least, as far as the state of technology enables them to do from age to age – and then they deploy these super-weapons to inflict death and destruction on errant members of the human race.

This is where we went wrong as a species. Humans are hardwired for unconditional love. Being nurtured and cherished is how we grow and thrive. But now we have a class of rulers that trade in the love that is man’s birthright for the death-dealing wrath of Doomsday Gods. Their function is to maintain social control and serve as bastions of law and order. But their mission is to do so by following in the toxic steps of the Doomsday Gods. They keep humanity in line by handing down a battery of punitive judgments. They correct the transgressions of fellow humans by impersonating Doomsday Gods and hurling doom and perdition from on high. First, as flaming arrows shot from bows and fiery boulders flung from trebuchets. Then, over the course of time, as cannonballs and cluster bombs and ballistic missiles raining down from the heavens.

Thus the arsenals of war are not born of human aggression. They are born of human beings coping with their terror of monster gods as children do, by trying to imitate them and instrumentalize their fiery wrath. The whole system of corporal punishment as a disciplinary tool – of capital punishment and warfare as methods of chastisement and correction – is not inborn in humanity. It is born of a faulty, utterly fallacious interpretation of cosmic catastrophes. Thus the gods did in the beginning. And thus humans (as quasi-gods) do over the course of history.

For millennia we put our health, wealth and welfare in the hands of these psychotic specimens of divinity. Thanks to the better angels of our nature, we are finally coming to our senses. We’re beginning to understand that our trust is completely misplaced in a class of pseudo-divine rulers who are more bound to grandiose delusions of godhead than bonded to the reality of their own flesh and blood. How can we entrust the administration of our laws, the governance of our lives, to those who channel the brute insentient forces of the universe, laboring under a delusion of being doom-dispensing gods? How can we delegate the burden of upholding social order to those who embody the forces responsible for a breakdown of cosmic order. How absurd is that?

Something profound was lost when the human spirit was acculturated to imitate the gods. We lost that loving feeling that is our main reason for being. We lost that integral connection with our inner child that is the mainspring of our empathic identification with the weak and small among us. That is what the Reparenting Movement sets out to recover. Our civilization went off the rails when, under the hammer blows of celestial catastrophes, our leaders split off from their humanity to identify with a syndicate of wrath-crazed gods. A Reparenting Revolution frees us from this mad misalliance. It creates havens of unconditional love where, by reconnecting with the violated self – the innocent victim of childhood abuse – we quit aligning with heavenly and/or earthly Father Figures that cycle and recycle the brute forces of cosmic violence and destruction.

In reparenting, we conjure up the Good Parent – the Loving Mother/Father we were always meant to have. We envision who we would have liked our Good Parent to be. We focus on what we would have liked our Good Parents to say. We call to mind how we would have liked our Good Parent to relate to us as children. We experience the grief, anger and anguish of never being treated that way – and by virtue of experiencing it all, we’re able to get it out of our system.

Deep in our DNA is an infallible blueprint of our birthright of love. Even if the Good Mother or Good Father is conjured up in our minds, our bodies respond as if they are actually present. We get to cry, scream, yell, and rage and do all the things we never got to do with our real parents. By modeling the Good Parent for each other, we deprogram ourselves from a cult of the Bad Parent that enslaved, exploited and exterminated us for ages. We refuse to embrace the various forms of toxic pedagogy that a majority of authority figures still practice to this day.

We are now at a crossroads of history. By realizing that violence against children is bad, we are ready to withdraw our trust from authority figures who have always used violence to teach us a lesson. And nothing brings this lesson home to us like vaccines. It turns out the pedagogy of the Needle is as toxic as that of the Rod. An entire book has been written on how the medical assault on the American brain has spawned an epidemic of social violence and criminality.^[1] The poisoned needle destroys our emotional intelligence, our capacity for prosocial interaction, by creating a raging inferno of inflammation in our brains. And the punitive rod destroys our capacity for fellow feeling, our ability to peacefully cooperate, by stimulating a cauldron of rage and aggression in our psyches. It is no wonder, then, that guardians of public health, armed with the needle, have failed us as miserably as guardians of public order armed with the rod?

It’s about time we come together to declare the age of institutional guardians over. Can we trust guardians of public order to save the world, when under the pretext of safeguarding it, they give ample proof of their compulsion to build up the means to destroy it? No more than we can trust guardians of public health to protect future generations, when under the guise of immunizing them, they give us abundant proof of their obsession to do our children a world of harm.

The thrust of progress from the Renaissance and Age of Enlightenment is towards greater autonomy, greater democratization. We abolished the Divine Right of Kings. Next up is to abrogate the Divine Right of Capital. But to truly emerge from our nonage – to genuinely co-create a world that works equally well for us all – we have to undergo two seminal shifts. One is to be disabused of our faith in truncheons and tanks as pedagogical tools to teach a lesson. Two is to realize the religion of power is as much a superstitious cult as the power of religion. Those playing god over us have always derived their power and authority from an irrational, nay, insane misreading of cosmic cataclysms! Because it is so alien to our psychobiology, the cult of authority only succeeds by brainwashing the mind and bulldozing the body. When we come from love, we are all on the same side. Love advocates for us. It empowers us to give voice to what ails the body and assails the soul. By definition, love is not something we fight. That which is imposed from above us can never be congruent with that which rises up within us – which is why it has to be rammed through with coercion and force. You want to stick it to me, better bring a Big Stick.

As it turns out, the sweeping distrust in authority figures caused by the toxic pedagogy of vaccines couldn’t come at a better time in our history. It’s just what the doctor ordered to give us the final push to topple an ideology of dominance and violence. For the idea of gods battering an evil species to death isn’t merely the template for corporal punishment. It is also the template for racism and genocide. Gods cleansing the earth of a polluted race is the model for Kurtz in the novel Heart of Darkness, and his demented clone in the film Apocalypse Now. When they cry, Exterminate all the brutes, they follow in the steps of the Doomsday Gods who did exactly that.

In this sense, it can be said that vaccines are a veiled form of imperialism. The poor immune system is looked on as a benighted entity to be instructed and improved. That’s the excuse for the needle going in to disrupt its intricate workings and ravage it with chronic ills. And that’s the way the body is exploited in perpetuity by the medical industrial complex. Just as there is no appreciation that humans are designed to thrive as a communal body, there is none that the body flourishes from coexisting with trillions of bacteria and viruses. Vaccination is based on a militaristic model of medicine. Viruses are stigmatized as the enemy. Zap the virus, cure the disease. Many biologists don’t even believe in the existence of viruses (which are free-floating bits of RNA). They believe a virus is only able to invade a cell and take it over because the cell is weakened by faulty diet, stress, lack of sleep, lack of exercise and of course, the chronic lack of love.

The same thing is true of the bad guys. There are no human enemies, just unloving attitudes that can be changed. You don’t want flesh-eating bacteria? Fine, just change the biological terrain. You don’t want mean, angry people preying on their kind? Fine, just change the psychosocial environment. Don’t abuse children. Don’t abandon or neglect them. Attend to all their needs, understand and empathize with them, free them to find the joy in existence. That’s the way to rule out antisocial behavior and make it impossible for evildoing to gain any traction.

The bottom line is humans are good. If it weren’t for being terrorized out of their wits by celestial catastrophes, personified as imaginary gods of wrath, humans would be happy to be led by the loving kindness of their nature. Give the body the kind of nourishment it needs, and there is no need for the Needle to protect society from various sorts of pathology. Give the psyche the kind of nurture it needs, and there is no need for all those extension of the Rod – like spears and arrows, assault rifles and missiles – to safeguard society from various forms of psychopathology.

In the end, the iconic image of Napalm Girl, running down the street, flailing outstretched arms, merges into the autistic boy, running around flapping his arms. Both are the casualties of a militaristic mindset, harking back to the brutal absurdity of a war the gods waged on our species. Sooner or later we have to remember our religion and politics still bears the imprint of a Day of Doom when gods destroyed the world to save it. Only then will we no longer be doomed to go on mindlessly destroying the global village to save it – or wrecking the human body to protect it.

---

References

[1] Vaccination, Social Violence and Criminality, Harris L. Coulter

Neville Raymond is the author of The Reparenting Revolution – From a Power-Based to a Love Based Society (2018) and The Genesis of Genocide – Breaking Through to the Heart of the Holocaust (2001).  His latest book, The Hand to Heart Book of Reparenting – Co-creating a World where the Human Race Falls in Love with Itself is due out in November 2019.

Iran apologized, but Trump and other US presidents will never say sorry for what they’ve done to Middle East

“We should contrast Iran’s mature handling of the disaster with the shoot-down of Iran Air Flight 655 in 1988 by a US warship in the Persian Gulf. All 290 people on board were killed when USS Vincennes, a guided-missile cruiser, fired off a surface-to-air warhead at the aircraft, claiming it had been mistaken for an enemy warplane. However, the Americans never formally apologized for the deaths.

After years of wrangling, the US paid out over $60 million in compensation to Iran under a ruling in 1996 by the International Court of Justice. Even then, Washington did not accept liability. “I will never apologize,” said former President HW Bush.”

Source

http://www.rt.com

Finian Cunningham

is an award-winning journalist. For over 25 years, he worked as a sub-editor and writer for The Mirror, Irish Times, Irish Independent and Britain’s Independent, among others.

11 Jan, 2020

Iranians mourn plane crash victims with vigil ©  YouTube, Ruptly

Commendably, Iran has apologized for shooting down the passenger jet and killing all 176 people on board. It shows integrity to take responsibility for the disastrous loss of life at a time of intense adversity.

Now, will other parties also show similar humility in admitting their role for creating precarious conditions where death seems an inevitable outcome? Specifically, can US President Donald Trump recognize that his administration’s policy of hellbent hostility towards Iran is driving up conflict and, ultimately, the loss of innocent lives?

The shoot-down of Flight 752 was a heartrending tragedy for countless families of several nationalities. Most of the dead were Iranians, which must add to the pain felt by that nation. But at least by owning up to the truth, the Iranian authorities have spared grieving victims from prolonged anguish of not knowing what happened.

The swift admission by Iran of its terrible error in shooting down the airliner – mistaken for an incoming enemy cruise missile – has taken critics of Iran by surprise. Two days after the plane came down, Western leaders and media were claiming it was an Iranian missile that caused it. Iranian aviation officials at first denied that, saying they believed it was a technical onboard problem, such as engine failure.

Critics of Iran were saying that “the regime” would stonewall the truth and hide behind obfuscation about what happened. Initial Iranian denials weren’t malicious. It was probably more a case of not knowing what happened in a situation of confusion and calamity. When the Iranians put their hand up to acknowledge it was one of their air defense units which had fired the missile, it took integrity and humility to admit fault.

ALSO ON RT.COMRouhani apologizes to Zelensky on behalf of Iran for downing Ukrainian jet

We should contrast Iran’s mature handling of the disaster with the shoot-down of Iran Air Flight 655 in 1988 by a US warship in the Persian Gulf. All 290 people on board were killed when USS Vincennes, a guided-missile cruiser, fired off a surface-to-air warhead at the aircraft, claiming it had been mistaken for an enemy warplane. However, the Americans never formally apologized for the deaths.

After years of wrangling, the US paid out over $60 million in compensation to Iran under a ruling in 1996 by the International Court of Justice. Even then, Washington did not accept liability. “I will never apologize,” said former President HW Bush.

There is also evidence that in the case of Flight 655, the captain of the USS Vincennes was reckless and aggressive in his behavior; and that the shoot-down was no accident. Captain William C Rogers and his crew were later awarded military medals of honor.

ALSO ON RT.COMPlane Wrong Blame Game: How attacks on Iranian & Russian airliners are forgotten

In the case of Flight 752 this week, the Iranians were on high alert for an expected American offensive following the missile attack only hours earlier by Iran on two US bases in Iraq. That attack was in revenge for the American drone assassination of Iran’s top military commander Major General Qassem Soleimani in Baghdad on January 3. The Iranians claim that following the missile attack on US bases, there were several reports among their air defense units of suspected incoming enemy planes. It was in this supercharged tension of pending war that the Iranians made the fatal error of hitting the airliner.

Admittedly, it seems ludicrous now that Iran did not take the precaution of closing down its airspace during those hours for normal commercial flights. That seems reprehensible negligence on the part of the Iranians, given the onerous circumstances.

Nevertheless, an objective bigger picture is required to fully comprehend the grief. There is an important distinction between fault and blame. The Iranians are at fault for having caused this horrendous tragedy.

They pulled the trigger. But there is little doubt as to who is ultimately to blame.

ALSO ON RT.COM‘I wish I was dead’: Senior IRGC commander accepts responsibility for downing Ukrainian jet, says it was mistaken for missile

President Trump has created a tinderbox situation in the Middle East with his “maximum pressure” campaign of hostility towards Iran. Scrapping the nuclear accord, reimposing crippling economic sanctions and relentless bellicose rhetoric defaming Iran as a “terror state” has pushed the region to the brink of all-out war. Remember, Trump has several times threatened Iran with total destruction, which infers a willingness to use nuclear weapons.

A build-up of American forces, including nuclear-capable B-52 bombers, in the Persian Gulf over the past year has been carried out under the tenuous claims of “defending US interests” from alleged Iranian aggression. The whole manic narrative is turning reality on its head as to who is the real aggressor.

The murder of Qassem Soleimani was the most critical assault yet on Iran’s national security in a mounting campaign of US provocation. There is no evidence to back up Trump’s claims that Soleimani was planning “imminent attacks” on US forces and diplomats in the region. The Americans point to the death of a US contractor last month from an attack on a base in Iraq as the work of Iranian-backed militia. It’s far from clear who carried out that attack. Some reports say it was a jihadist terror group linked to the Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL). In any case, the American response was disproportionate and suggests the contractor’s death was used as a pretext for ramping up the offensive on Iran.

On December 27, US warplanes killed at least 25 members of an Iranian-backed militia in Iraq and Syria. That sparked off violent protests at the American embassy in Baghdad on January 1. Trump and his officials were quick to accuse Soleimani for orchestrating the protests. Then two days later, the iconic military leader – seen as Iran’s second most senior figure after Ayatollah Khamenei – was blown to pieces by a US airstrike ordered personally by Trump.

The following slander from the Americans has been repugnant and gratuitous. Trump has called Soleimani “the world’s top terrorist”, and gloated over his death, saying, “we stopped him, cold.” Given that Soleimani was perhaps the most effective military strategist in Iraq and Syria in defeating the IS terror network illustrates the sickening distortion by Trump and his secretary of state Mike Pompeo. Indeed, the death of Soleimani has been a cause for celebration by the remnants of IS.

Iran is severely at fault for the shoot-down of the civilian airliner. The sense of shame and mortification expressed by the Iranian authorities is palpable. There is genuine remorse for the deaths of their own compatriots and several other nationals.

READ MORE: Now Iran & Iraq BOTH want the US to leave the Middle East, but it never will

But the blame for this horrific event lies in Washington and the Trump administration in particular. The relentless demonization and hostility towards Iran, the ongoing illegal aggression in myriad forms from sanctions to blatant military threats, and the cold-blooded murder of a national hero, Soleimani, has created a powder-keg. The downing of Flight 752 is the consequence. Should we be surprised? It is almost inevitable, given the reckless, destructive dynamics unleashed by Washington. Indeed, we may dread more such tragedies and deaths of innocents, even if an all-out war is not triggered.

One thing seems certain. We will not see any apology or conciliation from the US. Humility and responsibility are anathema to Washington’s arrogance.

What’s behind the West’s hatred of Iran?

Source

http://www.redressonline.com

By Stuart Littlewood

10th January 2020

Mossadeq’s great sin: he “broke the chains of slavery and servitude to colonial interests”. US and Britain are still smarting.

Nobody saw that coming. Trump ordering Qassim Soleimani’s execution, I mean.

Nobody thought even he was quite so stupid.

It follows his last year’s caper when the “cocked and loaded” drama-queen ordered military strikes against Iran’s radar and missile batteries in retaliation for their shooting down of a US spy drone. He changed his mind with only minutes to spare on account of a reminder that such lunacy might actually cost human lives.

Plus the fact that the drone was eight miles from the coast, well inside the 12 nautical miles considered to be Iran’s territorial waters under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, and it clearly represented a military threat and provocation. So he had no lawful claim of self-defense that would justify a military attack. The United Nations Charter allows only the use of military force in self-defense after an armed attack or with Security Council approval. So his proposed action would have been illegal as well as unwise, but none of that seemed to enter into his calculations then, or now.

Before that, we had Trump’s executive order in August 2018 re-imposing a wide range of sanctions against Iran after pulling the US out of the seven-party nuclear deal for no good reason, a spiteful move that annoyed the European Union and caused all sorts of problems for other nations. And he was going to impose extra sanctions aimed mainly at Iran’s oil industry and foreign financial institutions.

“If the ayatollahs want to get out from under the squeeze,” warned US National Security Adviser John Bolton, “they should come and sit down. The pressure will not relent while the negotiations go on.” To which Iran’s president, Hassan Rouhani, responded: “If you stab someone with a knife and then you say you want talks, then the first thing you have to do is remove the knife.”

United Nations Special Rapporteur Idriss Jazairy described the sanctions as “unjust and harmful… The reimposition of sanctions against Iran after the unilateral withdrawal of the United States from the Iran nuclear deal, which had been unanimously adopted by the Security Council with the support of the US itself, lays bare the illegitimacy of this action.”

The other parties to the nuclear deal – Russia, China, Germany, France, the UK, and the EU – vowed to stick with it and continue trading with Iran, with some EU foreign ministers saying Iran was abiding by the agreement and delivering on its goal when Trump withdrew and they deeply regretted the new sanctions. Trump, in turn, called Iran “a murderous dictatorship that has continued to spread bloodshed, violence and chaos”. The irony of such a remark was, of course, completely lost on him.

I read on 9 January that the EU “will spare no efforts” to keep the nuclear deal with Iran alive, though I doubt if Boris Johnson, passionate Zionist that he is, will be among them.

When it comes to aggression and dishonesty the US has form, and lots of it. Who can forget during the Iran-Iraq war the cruiser USS Vincennes, well inside Iran’s territorial waters, blowing Iran Air Flight 655 to smithereens and killing all 290 passengers and crew onboard? The excuse, which didn’t bear examination afterward, was that they mistook the Airbus A300 for an Iranian F-14 Tomcat manoeuvring to attack.

George H. W. Bush commented on a separate occasion: “I will never apologise for the United States – I don’t care what the facts are… I’m not an apologize-for-America kind of guy.” Trump seems to have caught the same disease. And, from the outside, the White House itself seems home to the sort of “murderous dictatorship” he describes.

The need to continually demonise Iran

When I say the West’s hatred of Iran, I mean primarily the US-UK-Israel axis. Ben Wallace, UK Defence Secretary filling in for Boris Johnson who had absented himself, has told Parliament: “In recent times Iran has felt its intentions are best served through… the use of subversion as a foreign policy tool. It has also shown a total disregard for human rights.” This is amusing coming from the British government and especially a Conservative one which adores Israel, the world’s foremost disregarder of human rights and international law.

Britain and America would like everyone to believe that hostilities with Iran began with the 1979 Islamic revolution. But you have to go back to the early 1950s for the root cause in America’s case, while Iranians have had to endure a whole century of British exploitation and bad behaviour. And the axis wants to keep this important slice of history from becoming part of public discourse. Here’s why.

In 1901 William Knox D’Arcy obtained from the Mozaffar al-Din Shah Qajar a 60-year oil concession to three-quarters of the country. The Persian government would receive 16 percent of the oil company’s annual profits, a rotten deal as the Persians would soon realise.

D’Arcy, with financial support from Glasgow-based Burmah Oil, formed a company and sent an exploration team. Drilling failed to find oil in commercial quantities and by 1908 D’Arcy was almost bankrupt and on the point of giving up when they finally struck it big. The Anglo-Persian Oil Company was up and running and in 1911 completed a pipeline from the oilfield to its new refinery at Abadan.

Just before the outbreak of World War I Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty, wished to convert the British fleet from coal. To secure a reliable oil source the British government took a major shareholding in Anglo-Persian.

In the 1920s and 1930s the company profited hugely from paying the Persians a miserly 16 percent and refusing to renegotiate terms. An angry Persia eventually canceled the D’Arcy agreement and the matter ended up at the Court of International Justice in The Hague. A new agreement in 1933 provided Anglo-Persian with a fresh 60-year concession but on a smaller area. The terms were an improvement but still didn’t amount to a square deal for the Persians.

In 1935 Persia became known internationally by its other name, Iran, and Anglo-Persian changed to Anglo-Iranian Oil. By 1950 Abadan was the biggest oil refinery in the world and the British government, with its 51 percent holding, had effectively colonised part of southern Iran.

Iran’s tiny share of the profits had long soured relations and so did the company’s treatment of its oil workers. Six thousand went on strike in 1946 and the dispute was violently put down with 200 dead or injured. In 1951 while Aramco was sharing profits with the Saudis on a 50/50 basis, Anglo-Iranian declared £40 million profit after tax and handed Iran only £7 million.

Iran by now wanted economic and political independence and an end to poverty. Calls for nationalisation could not be ignored. In March 1951 the Majlis and Senate voted to nationalise Anglo-Iranian, which had controlled Iran’s oil industry since 1913 under terms frankly unfavourable to the host country. Social reformer Dr Mohammad Mossadeq was named prime minister by a 79 to 12 majority and promptly carried out his government’s wishes, canceling Anglo-Iranian’s oil concession and expropriating its assets.

His explanation was perfectly reasonable…

Our long years of negotiations with foreign countries… have yielded no results this far. With the oil revenues we could meet our entire budget and combat poverty, disease and backwardness among our people. Another important consideration is that by the elimination of the power of the British company, we would also eliminate corruption and intrigue, by means of which the internal affairs of our country have been influenced. Once this tutelage has ceased, Iran will have achieved its economic and political independence.

M. Fateh, Panjah Sal-e Naft-e Iran, p. 525

For this he would be removed in a coup by MI5 and the CIA, imprisoned for three years then put under house arrest until his death.

Britain was determined to bring about regime change, so it orchestrated a worldwide boycott of Iranian oil, froze Iran’s sterling assets and threatened legal action against anyone purchasing oil produced in the formerly British-controlled refineries. The Iranian economy was soon in ruins.  Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?

America was reluctant at first to join Britain’s destructive game but Churchill (prime minister at this time) let it be known that Mossadeq was turning communist and pushing Iran into Russia’s arms at a time when Cold War anxiety was high. That was enough to bring America’s new president, Dwight Eisenhower, onboard and plotting with Britain to bring Mossadeq down.

Chief of the CIA’s Near East and Africa division, Kermit Roosevelt Jr, played the lead in a nasty game of provocation, mayhem and deception. Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi signed two decrees, one dismissing Mossadeq and the other nominating the CIA’s choice, General Fazlollah Zahedi, as prime minister. These decrees were written as dictated by the CIA.

In August 1953, when it was judged safe for him to do so, the Shah returned to take over. Mossadeq was arrested, tried, and convicted of treason by the Shah’s military court. He remarked:

My greatest sin is that I nationalised Iran’s oil industry and discarded the system of political and economic exploitation by the world’s greatest empire… I am well aware that my fate must serve as an example in the future throughout the Middle East in breaking the chains of slavery and servitude to colonial interests.

His supporters were rounded up, imprisoned, tortured or executed. Zahedi’s new government reached an agreement with foreign oil companies to form a consortium to restore the flow of Iranian oil, awarding the US and Great Britain the lion’s share – 40 percent going to Anglo-Iranian. The consortium agreed to split profits on a 50-50 basis with Iran but refused to open its books to Iranian auditors or allow Iranians to sit on the board.

The US massively funded the Shah’s government, including his army and his hated secret police force, SAVAK. Anglo-Iranian changed its name to British Petroleum in 1954. Mossadeq died on 5 March 1967.

The CIA-engineered coup that toppled Mossadeq, reinstated the Shah and let the American oil companies in, was the final straw for the Iranians. The British-American conspiracy backfired spectacularly 25 years later with the Islamic revolution of 1978/9, the humiliating 444-day hostage crisis in the American embassy and a tragically botched rescue mission.

Smoldering resentment for at least 70 years

And all this happened before the Iran-Iraq war when the West, especially the US, helped Iraq develop its armed forces and chemical weapons arsenal which were used against Iran. The US, and eventually Britain, leaned strongly towards Saddam in that conflict and the alliance enabled Saddam to more easily acquire or develop forbidden chemical and biological weapons. At least 100,000 Iranians fell victim to them.

This is how John King, writing in 2003, summed it up:

The United States used methods both legal and illegal to help build Saddam’s army into the most powerful army in the Mideast outside of Israel. The US supplied chemical and biological agents and technology to Iraq when it knew Iraq was using chemical weapons against the Iranians. The US supplied the materials and technology for these weapons of mass destruction to Iraq at a time when it was know that Saddam was using this technology to kill his Kurdish citizens. The United States supplied intelligence and battle planning information to Iraq when those battle plans included the use of cyanide, mustard gas and nerve agents. The United States blocked UN censure of Iraq’s use of chemical weapons. The United States did not act alone in this effort. The Soviet Union was the largest weapons supplier, but England, France and Germany were also involved in the shipment of arms and technology.

And while Iranian casualties were at their highest as a result of US chemical and biological war crimes, what was Trump doing? He was busy acquiring the Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Trump Castle, his Taj-Mahal casino, the Plaza Hotel in Manhattan – oh, and he was refitting his super-yacht Trump Princess. What does he know, understand or care about Iran and the Iranian people today?

On the British side our prime minister, Boris Johnson, was at Oxford carousing with fellow Etonians at the Bullingdon Club. What does he know or care?

The present Iranian regime, like many others, may not be entirely to the West’s liking but neither was Mossadeq’s fledgling democracy nearly 70 years ago. If Britain and America had played fair and allowed the Iranians to determine their own future instead of using economic terrorism to bring the country to its knees, Iran might have been “the only democracy in the Middle East” today.

So hush! Don’t even mention the M-word: MOSSADEQ.

On the Brink of War?

Are we on the brink of a Third World War? There are signs that demand that we ask this question. Three clusters of signs compel us to probe a question that could well determine the future of our civilization.

Are we on the brink of a Third World War? There are signs that demand that we ask this question. Three clusters of signs compel us to probe a question that could well determine the future of our civilization.

One, the nature of the event itself — the reckless assassination of the Iranian general, Qassem Sulaimani, on the orders of the president of the United States of America, Donald Trump, on 3^rd January 2020 at Baghdad airport — and the fears it has generated of a full-scale war between the two countries and other actors.

Two, the events that have preceded and followed the 3^rd of January murder that portend the danger of a much bigger conflict  in the world’s most tumultuous region.

Three, the tussle for power and influence in West Asia between various actors and their protectors and allies which only needs a trigger to set the entire region ablaze.

The Assassination

While the Trump administration has tried to justify the killing of Qassem Sulaimani in terms of his role in combating the American military presence in West Asia, it is indisputably true that he was also instrumental in the defeat of Al-Qaeda and Daesh and their affiliates in both Iraq and Syria — groups which the US leadership formally regarded as “terrorists.”   If Qassem had an iconic stature in Iran and certain other countries in the region it was because of his success against terrorists inasmuch as his resistance to the Americans whom he saw as occupiers.

In any case, it is doubtful if it was Qassem’s position against the US presence that was the primary factor in his assassination. Isn’t it possible that Trump was hoping that the assassination of a major figure from Iran — since Iran has been depicted as a demon in the US media — would lessen the adverse impact of his impending impeachment?  Besides, if he is perceived as a tough leader willing to eliminate a foreign opponent, wouldn’t it boost his chances of re-election in the presidential polls at the end of this year?

The Context.

Qassem’s killing should be seen in the context of deteriorating US-Iran relations since Trump withdrew from the Iran plus six nation nuclear agreement in 2018. He intensified his pressure upon Iran in a multitude of ways. Sanctions were increased manifold. Drone surveillance over Iranian territory became more pronounced. A US drone which had allegedly violated Iranian air-space was shot down by Iran on 20^th January 2019. A tit-for-tat pattern in US-Iran confrontation developed often on Iraqi soil. The US for instance attacked a militia base in Iraq on 29^th December 2019 which prompted pro-Iranian Iraqis to retaliate by occupying the US embassy in Baghdad on the 31^st of December. Tit-for-tat confrontation arising from the targeting of Iran by the US has heightened the danger of an all-out war.

Tussle for Power

Perhaps a greater danger stems from the tussle for power within West Asia itself. Saudi Arabia, because of its immense oil wealth and its revered status as the land that situates Mekkah and Medina, has for a long while regarded itself as the leader of the Muslim world. The Islamic Revolution in Iran of 1979 was perceived as a challenge to its status partly because it had overthrown a monarchical structure and rejected US hegemony over the region. Besides, the vast majority of Iranians are Shia in contrast to Saudi Arabia’s adherence to Wahabi teachings. The uneasiness between the two states did not create any severe friction until the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq in 2003 which led eventually to the rise of the majority Shia population through the ballot-box. The empowerment of the Shia in Iraq, and their links to Shia Iran were interpreted by the Saudi elite as a threat to their position. Soon, they also witnessed the strengthening of the minority Shia component of Syria largely because of a war imposed upon the land through the machinations of some regional actors backed by the US and its allies. It is because of these reasons — and not the military manoeuvres of Qassem Sulaimani alone —– that the Shias and Iran have become more influential in West Asia.

The increasing influence of Iran has also incensed Israel. Since the 1979 Revolution when the Iranian leadership stated unequivocally its commitment to the liberation of the Palestinian people, Israel has been antagonistic towards Iran. It has worked closely with the US elite to undermine Iran on a variety of fronts. It is their common enmity towards Iran that has now helped to forge a bond between the Israeli and Saudi elites.

It is this struggle for power, Saudi and Israeli elites on one side, and Iran and some of its allies on the other, which has exacerbated the potential for a huge conflict in the region.  Needless to say, the US role in this power struggle, as protector and defender of Israel and Saudi Arabia against Iran has heightened the danger of war as never before.

Apart from these three clusters of signs, there are other factors which may also point in the direction of a possible war. They are related to the global economy and global political power. The irreversible shift in global power from the US and the West to China and certain other actors is causing much consternation in Washington DC and London among other capitals. It signals the end of the epoch of Western dominance. Is a world war a way of preventing that change from taking place?

While the danger of a world war is real, we must also recognise that people everywhere do not want a war. A lot of governments have condemned the brazen assassination of Qassem as a gross violation of international law. In fact, some members of the US House of Representatives and the US Senate regard the authorisation of the murder by the US president as a stark transgression of US law.

For critics of US foreign policy outside the US in particular, Trump’s abuse of power is characteristic of a government which more often than not has behaved as if established law and civilised norms do not apply to it. US ‘exceptionalism’ is one of the main reasons why the global movement against hegemony has become so much stronger in the last three decades. 

They know as others do that war, a creature of hegemony, is a terrible scourge. It is not just a question of millions dying. Much of civilization as we know it will also be eliminated especially since one of the protagonists is convinced that destroying cultural sites in a war is legitimate.

Iran which had suffered so much from a war imposed upon it in the eighties and has not initiated a war for the last 250 years is opposed to a military confrontation with the US. This is why avenging Qassem’s death for the Iranian leadership does not mean starting a war. It is a rational leadership which will focus upon driving the US military forces out of West Asia through politics and diplomacy. 

If it succeeds in achieving this, it would have transformed the region and the world for the well-being of human beings everywhere.              

Dr Chandra Muzaffar is the president of the International Movement for a Just World (JUST).

The original source of this article is Global Research

Copyright © Dr. Chandra Muzaffar, Global Research, 2020

The Art of Doublespeak: Propaganda and Mind Control

Source

http://www.darkmoon.me

Edward Curtin
The Unz Review
December 10, 2019

In the 1920s, the influential American intellectual Walter Lippman argued that the average person was incapable of seeing or understanding the world clearly and needed to be guided by experts behind the social curtain.

In a number of books he laid out the theoretical foundations for the practical work of Edward Bernays, who developed “public relations” (aka propaganda) to carry out this task for the ruling elites. Bernays had honed his skills while working as a propagandist for the United States during World War I, and after the war he set himself up as a public relations counselor in New York City.

There is a fascinating exchange at the beginning of Adam Curtis’s documentary, The Century of Self, where Bernays, then nearly 100 years old but still very sharp, reveals his manipulative mindset and that of so many of those who have followed in his wake. He says the reason he couldn’t call his new business “propaganda” was because the Germans had given propaganda a “bad name,” and so he came up with the euphemism “public relations.” He then adds that “if you could use it [i.e. propaganda] for war, you certainly could use it for peace.” Of course, he never used PR for peace but just to manipulate public opinion (he helped engineer the CIA coup against the democratically elected Arbenz government in Guatemala in 1954 with fake news broadcasts). He says “the Germans gave propaganda a bad name,” not Bernays and the United States with their vast campaign of lies, mainly aimed at the American people to get their support for going to a war they opposed (think weapons of mass destruction). He sounds proud of his war propaganda work that resounded to his credit since it led to support for the “war to end all wars” and subsequently to a hit movie about WWI , Yankee Doodle Dandy, made in 1942 to promote another war, since the first one somehow didn’t achieve its lofty goal.

As Bernays has said in his book Propaganda,

The American motion picture is the greatest unconscious carrier of propaganda in the world today.

He was a propagandist to the end. I suspect most viewers of the film are taken in by these softly spoken words of an old man sipping a glass of wine at a dinner table with a woman who is asking him questions. I have shown this film to hundreds of students and none has noticed his legerdemain. It is an example of the sort of hocus-pocus I will be getting to shortly, the sly insertion into seemingly liberal or matter-of-fact commentary of statements that imply a different story. The placement of convincing or confusing disingenuous ingredients into a truth sandwich – for Bernays knew that the bread of truth is essential to conceal untruth.

In the following years, Bernays, Lippman, and their ilk were joined by social “scientists,” psychologists, and sundry others intent on making a sham out of the idea of democracy by developing strategies and techniques for the engineering of social consensus consonant with the wishes of the ruling classes.

Their techniques of propaganda developed exponentially with the development of technology, the creation of the CIA, its infiltration of all the major media, and that agency’s courting of what the CIA official Cord Meyer called in the 1950s “the compatible left,” having already had the right in its pocket. Today most people are, as is said, “wired,” and they get their information from the electronic media that is mostly controlled by giant corporations in cahoots with government propagandists. Ask yourself: Has the power of the oligarchic, permanent warfare state with its propaganda and spy networks increased or decreased over your lifetime. The answer is obvious: the average people that Lippman and Bernays trashed are losing and the ruling elites are winning.

This is not just because powerful propagandists are good at controlling so-called “average” people’s thinking, but, perhaps more importantly, because they are also adept – probably more so – at confusing or directing the thinking of those who consider themselves above average, those who still might read a book or two or have the concentration to read multiple articles that offer different perspectives on a topic. This is what some call the professional and intellectual classes, perhaps 15-20 % of the population, most of whom are not the ruling elites but their employees and sometimes their mouthpieces. It is this segment of the population that considers itself “informed,” but the information they imbibe is often sprinkled with bits of misdirection, both intentional and not, that beclouds their understanding of important public matters but leaves them with the false impression that they are in the know.

Recently I have noticed a group of interconnected examples of how this group of the population that exerts influence incommensurate with their numbers has contributed to the blurring of lines between fact and fiction. Within this group there are opinion makers who are often journalists, writers, and cultural producers of some sort or other, and then the larger number of the intellectual or schooled class who follow their opinions. This second group then passes on their received opinions to those who look up to them.

There is a notorious propaganda outfit called Bellingcat, started by an unemployed Englishman named Eliot Higgins, that has been funded by The Atlantic Council, a think-tank with deep ties to the U.S. government, NATO, war manufacturers, and their allies, and the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), another infamous U.S. front organization heavily involved in so-called color revolution regime change operations all around the world, that has just won the International Emmy Award for best documentary.

The film with the Orwellian title, Bellingcat: Truth in a Post-Truth World, received its Emmy at a recent ceremony in New York City. Bellingcat is an alleged group of amateur on-line researchers who have spent years shilling for the U.S. instigated war against the Syrian government, blaming the Douma chemical attack and others on the Assad government, and for the anti-Russian propaganda connected to, among other things, the Skripal poisoning case in England, and the downing of flight MH17 plane in Ukraine. It has been lauded by the corporate mainstream media in the west. Its support for the equally fraudulent White Helmets (also funded by the US and the UK) in Syria has also been praised by the western corporate media while being dissected as propaganda by many excellent independent journalists such as Eva Bartlett, Vanessa Beeley, Catte Black, among others. It’s had its work skewered by the likes of Seymour Hersh and MIT professor Theodore Postol, and its US government connections pointed out by many others, including Ben Norton and Max Blumenthal at The Gray Zone. And now we have the mainstream media’s wall of silence on the leaks from the Organization for the Prohibition on Chemical Weapons (OPCW) concerning the Douma chemical attack and the doctoring of their report that led to the illegal U.S. bombing of Syria in the spring of 2018. Bellingcat was at the forefront of providing justification for such bombing, and now the journalists Peter Hitchens, Tareq Harrad (who recently resigned from Newsweek after accusing the publication of suppressing his revelations about the OPCW scandal) and others are fighting an uphill battle to get the truth out.

Yet Bellingcat: Truth in a Post-Truth World won the Emmy, fulfilling Bernays’ point about films being the greatest unconscious carriers of propaganda in the world today.

Who presented the Emmy Award to the film makers, but none other than the rebel journalist Chris Hedges. Why he did so, I don’t know. But that he did so clearly sends a message to those who follow his work and trust him that it’s okay to give a major cultural award to a propaganda outfit. But then, perhaps he doesn’t consider Bellingcat to be that.

Nor, one presumes, does The Intercept, the billionaire Pierre Omidyar owned publication associated with Glen Greenwald and Jeremy Scahill, and also read by many progressive-minded people. The Intercept that earlier this year disbanded the small team that was tasked with reviewing and releasing more of the massive trove of documents they received from Edward Snowden six years ago, a minute number of which have ever been released or probably ever will be. As Whitney Webb pointed out, last year The Intercept hosted a workshop for Bellingcat. She wrote:

The Intercept, along with its parent company First Look Media,recently hosted a workshop for pro-war, Google-funded organization Bellingcat in New York. The workshop, which cost $2,500 per person to attend and lasted five days, aimed to instruct participants in how to perform investigations using “open source” tools — with Bellingcat’s past, controversial investigations for use as case studies…Thus, while The Intercept has long publicly promoted itself as an anti-interventionist and progressive media outlet, it is becoming clearer that – largely thanks to its ties to Omidyar – it is increasingly an organization that has more in common with Bellingcat, a group that launders NATO and U.S. propaganda and disguises it as “independent” and “investigative journalism.”

Then we have Jefferson Morley, the editor of The Deep State, former Washington Post journalist, and JFK assassination researcher, who has written a praiseworthy review of the Bellingcat film and who supports Bellingcat. “In my experience, Bellingcat is credible,” he writes in an Alternet article, “Bellingcat documentary has the pace and plot of a thriller.”

Morley has also just written an article for Counterpunch – “Why the Douma Chemical Attack Wasn’t a ‘Managed Massacre’” – in which he disputes the claim that the April 7, 2018 attack in the Damascus suburb was a false flag operation carried out by Assad’s opponents. “I do not see any evidence proving that Douma was a false flag incident,” he writes in this article that is written in a style that leaves one guessing as to what exactly he is saying. It sounds convincing unless one concentrates, and then his double messages emerge. Yet it is the kind of article that certain “sophisticated” left-wing readers might read and feel is insightful. But then Morley, who has written considerably about the CIA, edits a website that advertises itself as “the thinking person’s portal to the world of secret government,” and recently had an exchange with former CIA Director John Brennan where “Brennan put a friendly finger on my chest,” said in February 2017, less than a month after Trump was sworn in as president, that:

With a docile Republican majority in Congress and a demoralized Democratic Party in opposition, the leaders of the Deep State are the most—perhaps the only—credible check in Washington on what Senator Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) calls Trump’s “wrecking ball presidency.”

Is it any wonder that some people might be a bit confused?

“I know what you’re thinking about,” said Tweedledum; “but it isn’t so, nohow.”

“Contrariwise,” continued Tweedledee, “if it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it would be; but as it isn’t, it ain’t. That’s logic.”

As a final case in point, there is a recent book by Stephen Kinzer, Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb And The CIA Search For Mind Control, the story of the chemist known as Dr. Death who ran the CIA’s MK-ULTRA mind control project, using LSD, torture, electric shock therapy, hypnosis, etc.; developed sadistic methods of torture still used in black sites around the world; and invented various ingenious techniques for assassination, many of which were aimed at Fidel Castro. Gottlieb was responsible for brutal prison and hospital experiments and untold death and suffering inflicted on all sorts of innocent people. His work was depraved in the deepest sense; he worked with Nazis who experimented on Jews despite being Jewish himself.

Kinzer writes in depth about this man who considered himself a patriot and a spiritual person – a humane torturer and killer. It is an eye-opening book for anyone who does not know about Gottlieb, who gave the CIA the essential tools they use in their “organized crime” activities around the world – in the words of Douglass Valentine, the author of The CIA as Organized Crime and The Phoenix Program. Kinzer’s book is good history on Gottlieb; however, he doesn’t venture into the present activities of the CIA and Gottlieb’s patriotic followers, who no doubt exist and go about their business in secret.

After recounting in detail the sordid history of Gottlieb’s secret work that is nauseating to read about, Kinzer leaves the reader with these strange words:

Gottlieb was not a sadist, but he might well have been…. Above all he was an instrument of history. Understanding him is a deeply disturbing way of understanding ourselves.

What possibly could this mean? Not a sadist? An instrument of history? Understanding ourselves? These few sentences, dropped out of nowhere, pull the rug out from under what is generally an illuminating history and what seems like a moral indictment. This language is pure mystification.

Kinzer also concludes that because Gottlieb said so, the CIA failed in their efforts to develop methods of mind control and ended MK-ULTRA’s experiments long ago. Why would he believe the word of a man who personified the agency he worked for: a secret liar? He writes,

When Sydney Gottlieb brought MK-ULTRA to its end in the early 1960s, he told his CIA superiors that he had found no reliable way to wipe away memory, make people abandon their consciences, or commit crimes and then forget them.

SIDNEY  GOTTLIEB
Variously dubbed as a “mad scientist” — “The CIA’s scapegoat” — and “America’s Dr Mengele”

As for those who might think otherwise, Kinzer suggests they have vivid imaginations and are caught up in conspiracy thinking: “This [convincing others that the CIA had developed methods of mind control when they hadn’t] is Sydney Gottlieb’s most unexpected legacy,” he asserts. He says this although Richard Helms, the CIA Director, destroyed all MK-Ultra records.

He says that Allen Dulles, Gottlieb, and Helms themselves were caught up in a complete fantasy about mind control because they had seen too many movies and read too many books; mind control was impossible, a failure, a myth, he maintains. It is the stuff of popular culture, entertainment.

In an interview with Chris Hedges, interestingly posted by Jefferson Morley at his website, The Deep State, Hedges agrees with Kinzer. Gottlieb, Dulles, et al. were all deluded. Mind control was impossible. You couldn’t create a Manchurian Candidate; by implication, someone like Sirhan Sirhan could not have been programmed to be a fake Manchurian Candidate and to have no memory of what he did, as he claims. He could not have been mind-controlled by the CIA to perform his part as the seeming assassin of Senator Robert Kennedy while the real killer shot RFK from behind. People who think like this should get real.

Furthermore, as is so common in books such as Kinzer’s, he repeats the canard that JFK and RFK knew about and pressured the CIA to assassinate Fidel Castro. This is demonstrably false, as shown by the Church Committee and the Assassinations Record Review Board, among many others. That Kinzer takes the word of notorious liars like Richard Helms and the top-level CIA operative Samuel Halpern is simple incredible, something that is hard to consider a mistake. Slipped into a truth sandwich, it is devoured and passed on. But it is false. Bullshit meant to deceive.

But this is how these games are played. If you look carefully, you will see them widely. Inform, enlighten, while throwing in doubletalk and untruths. The small number of people who read such books and articles will come away knowing some history that has no current relevance and being misinformed on other history that does. They will then be in the know, ready to pass their “wisdom” on to those who care to listen. They will not think they are average.

But they will be mind controlled, and the killer cat will roam freely without a bell, ready to devour the unsuspecting mice.

Source

Deaths caused by British Empire should be condemned just like deaths under Stalin

RT.com

Tomasz Pierscionek

is a medical doctor and social commentator on medicine, science, and technology.

5 Dec, 2019

A family of semi-starved Indians who have arrived in Calcutta in search of food, November 22, 1943 ©  Getty Images / Keystone

Western historians who condemn the USSR for the deaths under Stalin​’s dictatorship should shed a spotlight on ​the millions who died under British rule​, including those in engineered famines across the Indian subcontinent.

The UK general election is a week away and a significant chunk of the country’s media, three-quarters of which is reportedly owned by a few billionaires, is hard at work digging up dirt on Jeremy Corbyn to prevent a Labour Party victory at all costs. However, this uphill task is becoming harder as recent polls show the frequently cited Conservative lead over Labour is rapidly decreasing. The possibility that Mr Corbyn will be Britain’s next prime minister, perhaps at the head of a minority government, is now grudgingly acknowledged.

When Corbyn launched Labour’s manifesto at the end of November, he pledged to conduct a formal enquiry into the legacy of the British Empire “to understand our contribution to the dynamics of violence and insecurity across regions previously under British colonial rule” and set up an organisation “to ensure historical injustice, colonialism, and role of the British Empire is taught in the national curriculum.”

ALSO ON RT.COMBloody jewel in crown of British Empire: How India was mistreated during colonial rule

The idea of teaching a population about the unsavoury aspects of its history, and in Britain’s case revealing how several of today’s geopolitical crises are rooted in the past folly and avarice-fuelled actions of its ruling class, is commendable.

It would be prudent to inform UK citizens about the British Empire’s divide and conquer tactics across the Indian subcontinent and Africa, the stirring up of Hindu-Muslim antagonism in the former, or the impact of the Sykes-Picot agreement that precipitated instability across the Middle East which continues to the present day. Doing so might enable the public to gain a better understanding of how past actions affect present realities, in turn making them more eager to hold contemporary politicians to account so past mistakes are not repeated. As Spanish philosopher George Santayana said: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

Some right-wingers may be quick to dismiss Corbyn’s manifesto promise as self-indulgent politically-correct onanism. Brexit Party leader Nigel Farage commented: “I don’t think I should apologise for what people did 300 years ago. It was a different world, a different time.” Yet, some of the violence perpetuated in the name of protecting the empire’s interests is not exactly ancient history, having occurred within living memory for some. The Malayan Emergency, Kenya’s Mau Mau uprising, the Suez Crisis, or the deployment of British troops to Northern Ireland are a few examples.

Segments of the intelligentsia may also feel unease at Corbyn’s manifesto promise, namely those academics who still view the British Empire as the UK’s legacy and ‘gift’ to the world. This includes those who, by extension, consider modern Britain (and the West in general) as bestowed with a cultural superiority that makes it the unchallenged arbiter of global affairs and the indisputable defender of ‘human rights’ and ‘democracy’, regardless of what these laudable terms have been corrupted into justifying. The invasion of Iraq, the destruction of Libya, and the civil wars in Syria and Ukraine are a few manifestations of Western intervention.

Some Western historians fall over themselves condemning the USSR for the millions who died under the dictatorship of Stalin, with a significant proportion of these victims perishing during famines. The people of the former Soviet Union need to come to terms with their history, just like any other country. In the meantime, Western historians should shine a spotlight closer to home. Engineered famines across the Indian subcontinent reportedly killed up to 29 million in the late 19th century and a further 3 million in 1943.

ALSO ON RT.COMWhat would it take for the UK to apologize for centuries of atrocities carried out under the British Empire?

The Indian subcontinent was only one of the regions under British rule and the deaths mentioned above do not include those violently killed by occupying forces. Unlike the USSR, which kept oppression confined within its borders and those of neighbouring countries under its sphere of influence, Britain together with the American Empire (to which it handed over the baton of imperialism after WWII) has interfered on pretty much every continent except Antarctica. In modern times we see the UK, now a vassal of the US-led NATO empire, condemn nations that refuse to submit to Western hegemony.

Apologists for Empire claim it brought ‘progress’ such as railways, infrastructure, education, cricket, as well as free trade and order (i.e. Pax Britannica). Irrespective of whether such ‘gifts’ were appreciated by occupied nations, this line of reasoning opens up a dangerous precedent. For example, supporters of Stalin overlook his despotism by crediting him with rapidly industrializing an underdeveloped nation that later played a major role in defeating Nazism, bestowing upon him an honour that instead belongs to millions of rank and file soldiers, officers, and commanders of the Red Army.

During the time of the British Empire, as was the case with other European empires and many dictatorships, the majority of working people were not personally enriched by the plunder of imperialism and their descendants are not to blame for the actions of the former ruling class. Nevertheless, learning one’s history is the first step to understanding the present, ensuring today’s leaders are held to account, and preventing the same mistakes from being repeated.

The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.

The Irishman, Scorsese’s Ode to Bullshit

Source

With permission from

http://www.veteranstoday.com

By Gordon Duff, Senior Editor

November 28, 2019

 

Where does one start.  Biggest sell-out in the world, Scorsese?  Overrated?  Bought?

The film is about Hoffa and his killing.  In the process, Scorsese writes away the Jewish mob, AKA the Kosher Nostra, the Purple Gang, Murder Incorporated, Allen Dulles, the real Richard Nixon, J. Edgar Hoover and mixes it all together with fiction and intent.

I don’t normally write movie reviews.  I grew up in Detroit, my dad was a Teamster organizer who grew up with Jimmie Hoffa, someone at our home often until mom decided dad would get an auto plant job instead of one making license plates.

Scorsese doesn’t film a second of it in Detroit, his Machus Red Fox, the Hoffa disappearance joint is dismal.  He writes out Tony Giacalone and also forgets who the head of the “Italian mob” worked for, Maxie Stern, down at the vending companies I will leave out.

Stern came up working with Josef “Legs” Lehman, Detroit enforcer and, curiously enough, brother of my grandmother, Marta Lehman.

My dad and “Jimmie” went to work for very German and very non-Jewish, non-Irish and non-Italian Josef at around age 12.

What began as a kidnap/ransom business eventually turned into running security for bootlegging on behalf of the Lansky-Purple Gang-Bronfman empire.  Boats ran from Bronfman’s Seagrams distillery to Wyandotte, just south of Detroit.  In 1926 my father was arrested in a shootout with State Police (I ended up one of them later on….ironicalness) and it took a while to get him out of lockup in Marquette.

The story revolves around Russell Bufalino, didn’t know him but knew the family, Detroit Italian Bakery, Home Juice Company, folks we would visit from time to time, I just knew them as family friends, nice people.

Key to the fiction is the war on the Kennedy family by the Kosher Nostra who is rewriting history.

Let’s establish a few facts.  Allen Dulles planned the Bay of Pigs as CIA director under Ike, and did it with help of Nixon who was going to be placed in the White House in a rigged election.

Joseph Kennedy didn’t rig the election with “the mob,” which is and always was Jewish, like in the film “Once Upon a Time in America.”

Kennedy and Bronfman were far from close and Bronfman was Meyer Lansky’s partner along with J. Edgar Hoover, Allen Dulles and Richard Nixon later using Spiro Agnew as a cutout.

Dulles and Nixon began together in 1946 when Nixon came home from the Navy (non-combatant/Quaker) to work with Dulles bringing war criminals into the US under Operation Paperclip.

The Bay of Pigs was a Nixon/Dulles/Bush deal run through Zapata oil, not out of Miami with featured David Ferrie running the boats out of New Orleans, not as depicted.  I know or rather knew everyone involved, they were all brought out to run cocaine later under Reagan.

Under Hoover, the FBI did the dirty work of the Jewish mob who owned the FBI.  Nothing has changed.

Now it’s Epstein and MEGA that are being camouflaged, providing cover for the ADL and AIPAC and blaming poor Woody Allen and the Pope.

The ADL is Murder Incorporated, shaking down top corporations under the guise of persecuting Palestinians, something prettymuch everyone loves to do.

As to the Hoffa death, as depicted accurate with the exception of those involved.  Few are alive today.

What is not such a great film, slow-moving with some decent bloodletting, is also a political smear job, covering up so much of the history which VT exposes.

BIOGRAPHY

Gordon Duff, Senior Editor

Senior Editor

Gordon Duff is a Marine combat veteran of the Vietnam War. He is a disabled veteran and has worked on veterans and POW issues for decades. Gordon is an accredited diplomat and is generally accepted as one of the top global intelligence specialists. He manages the world’s largest private intelligence organization and regularly consults with governments challenged by security issues.

Duff has traveled extensively, is published around the world and is a regular guest on TV and radio in more than “several” countries. He is also a trained chef, wine enthusiast, avid motorcyclist and gunsmith specializing in historical weapons and restoration. Business experience and interests are in energy and defense technology.

Gordon’s Archives – 2008-2014 Gordon’s YouTube Channel

http://www.youtube.com/user/gpduf

gpduf@aol.com

Fed’s Kashkari Says It’s Time For The Federal Reserve To Start Redistributing Wealth

Source

http://www.zerohedge.com

Sun, 11/24/2019

It may come as a surprise to some younger Americans, but the US did not always have income tax. In fact, one of the main catalysts behind the American Revolution and resulting War of Independence was the colonial protest against British taxation policy in the 1760s. Then, in the beginning, the independent nation collected taxes on imports, whiskey, and (for a while) on glass windows, even as states and localities collected poll taxes on voters and property taxes on land and commercial buildings. In addition, there were state and federal excise taxes. But all throughout, there was no official income tax for nearly a century and a half.

Yet while the United States imposed income taxes briefly during the Civil War and the 1890s, it was not until the 16th Amendment was ratified that the US permanently legalized a federal income tax in 1913. Incidentally, that was the same momentous year – just before the start of World War I – that another milestone event in US history took place: the birth of the Federal Reserve. Shortly thereafter, states also began collecting sales taxes in the 1930s.

Ever since then, the history of US taxation has been on of “optimal” outcomes, of progressive policies, and ultimately, of wealth redistribution according to whatever party or ideological bent was in control.

Yet no matter what one though of US tax policy, one thing was immutable: it was always and only in the hands of the Federal and State government to impose whatever taxation was deemed appropriate. For better or worse, tax was synonymous with politics.

That may be changing.

Fast forward to 2019, when after a decade of unprecedented inequality spurred by the Federal Reserve’s policies, which made the rich richer, and the poor and middle classes poorer to the point that just 1% of the US population now owns as much wealth as the middle and lower classes combined…

… the same “apolitical”, private Federal Reserve, which is owned by a handful of commercial banks and whose members have never been subject to election by the general population…

… now wishes to formalize its wealth redistribution agenda, and effectively become a political force which determines who gets richer and who gets poorer.

As Bloomberg News reports today (now that it can no longer report on the travails of either its boss, Michael Bloomberg or his challengers for the Democratic primary even if it still has free reign to bash Donald Trump each and every day), Neel Kashkari, the former Goldman employee who was instrumental in the drafting of TARP and the bailout of the US financial system, and outspoken dove at the Minneapolis Fed, said “monetary policy can play the kind of redistributing role once thought to be the preserve of elected officials.”  And as Bloomberg notes, “while that likely remains a minority view among U.S. central bankers, Kashkari has helped lay the groundwork for a shift in Fed communication this year.”

Needless to say, while Kashkari is all for deciding who gets what – arguably the most political of positions – he is very much against being subject to a periodic popular vote. Because, you know, the Fed knows best, and once you permit a democratic choice, the whole myth of an omnipotent Fed falls apart. As such, what Kashkari is proposing is despotism, pure and simple, one where a group of unelected career economists and various other bureaucrats has the final say on not only the price of money (determined by the Fed Funds rate), but also who ends up getting that money!

While the Fed sternly refuses to acknoleldge that the rotting cancer at the heart of its chronic inability to correctly diagnose the US economy (just over a year ago, we were a “long way away from neutral”… then just a few months later, the Fed flipped a U-turn and not only started slashing rates but launched QE4) is its inability to correctly measure inflation, and specifically admit that asset price inflation matters just as much as “economic” inflation…

… even as it chronically underestimates just how disproportionately more rising prices impact poorer Americans compared to richer ones (as we discussed previously here), it appears to be more than happy to propose expanding its role, and besides determining monetary policy, it is now generously willing to also opine on proper wealth distribution, read keeping rates low forever, and dooming all those who save to financial extinction.

Enter former Goldmanite and PIMCOite, Neel Kashkari, who believes he is the man best suited for the monumental task of singlehandedly deciding an outcome best left for the entire economy.

When Kashkari, a year into his job, launched an in-house effort in 2017 to examine widening disparities in the economy, yet clearly failing to realize the Fed’s own massive contribution to the record wealth inequality between the rich and poor, as it was the Fed’s policies that made those handful of Americans who owned financial assets richer than ever, while “redistributing” wealth away from savers and the rest of the American population, he was expecting to generate research that might inform lawmakers’ decisions, rather than the Fed’s.

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“We had historically said: distributional outcomes, monetary policy has no role to play,” Kashkari told Bloomberg in an October interview. “That was kind of the standard view at the Fed, and I came in assuming that. I now think that’s wrong.”

For those confused by this word salad, what Kashkari now thinks is that it is right for the Fed to have a role in deciding distribution outcome!

The Bloomberg article then launches into an extended report of just how Kashkari hopes to legitimize his effort of elevating the Fed to the rank of supreme US despot, an emperor’s circle of unelected, career economists who take central planning in the US to a level the USSR never even conceived of, and we are confident readers can go through it on their own, especially since it includes such phrases as “paradigm shift” which is what the Bloomberg writer decided to throw in to indicate just how above the average reader he himself is, what we will say is this: trickle-down economics has failed every single time.

And now, instead of finally admitting that this core premise behind its 106 years of failed monetary policies which have made the bubble-bust mentality the norm and which guarantee that the next crash may well wipe out not only the Fed itself but western civilization as we know it, the Fed’s proposal is a “modest” one – give it even more power to determine who is rich, and who is poor, and asks just one thing: trust it that this time it will get it right.

Of course, the real motive behind Kashkari’s modest proposal is even more nefarious: the eventual fusion of monetary and fiscal policy, which in turn will greenlight the direct monetization of US debt by some super-governmental authority, call it the Treasury or whatever – one which we are confident will also be headed by a group of people who will never be subject to a popular vote – in hopes of allowing the US to effectively issue unlimited amounts of debt, i.e., launch MMT, in the process sparking enough inflation to finally inflate away America’s staggering debt load.

This will go on as long as the US Dollar maintains its reserve status, a process that will be vastly accelerated should Kashkari’s proposal – which one can comfortably argue is far more aligned with what Putin could desire in terms of destroying America’s superpower status than anything Trump has done to date – get solid footing among the “intellectual elite” of the United States.

Of course, long before the collapse of the dollar, it will also result in civil war, because if there is one thing the Fed knows how to do – and we say this without jest of sarcasm – is to make the rich even richer and the poor poorer. However, it is safe to say that US society is already nearing its breaking point, and should the Fed officially (rather than just unofficially) enter the wealth redistribution process, that would without doubt be the straw that finally breaks the American camel’s back.

The Nephilim Bloodline Command Structure

Source

hendersonlefthook.wordpress.com

Nov 11, 2019

(Excerpted from Chapter 48: Nephilim Crown 5G Apocalypse)

The feudalist bloodlines which control the wealth, politics, “sciences”, military and mis-education on this planet go back at least 6,500 years to ancient Sumeria and Babylon. Their “royal” blood, is the Sangreal or Holy Grail and is indeed different from that of humans. They are hybrids of the Nephilim or fallen angels from the Book of Genesis. Others call them Annunaki. There blood is RH Negative, which less than 15% of the planet have. The highest concentrations occur in the Basque region of Spain and France.

The Sangreal is their biggest secret, guarded closely by their secret society minions. It also explains their obsession with genealogy, genome sequencing and DNA mapping.  At the very highest levels of the cabal, only the purest bloodline nobility become the Privy Council that “handles” every monarch in the world. The Latin “nobilitatis” means “high ranking”.

One very powerful bloodline is that of the Merovingian family, which claims to descend from Oannes, a Nephilim hybrid abomination mentioned in Babylonian texts which came from the sea and was half fish & half man. The Merovingians also claim to descend from the Tribe of Dan, which settled at the base of Mt. Zion, and to Jesus, whom they say was taken off the cross before death, married Mary Magdalene and had three children.

The Merovingians morphed into the French Bourbon kings and have intermarried, as all these bloodlines do, with the powerful Nephilim bloodline of the Hapsburgs. King Juan Carlos of Spain has the surname de Borbon y Borbon, indicating that he is the son of two Merovingian parents. Many of this bloodline suffer physical disfigurations, especially of the jaw. This comes from their obsession with inbreeding to protect the Nephilim blood.

The Merovingians also bred the Smith & Sinclair lineages. The latter is a powerful bloodline which has intermarried with the powerful Bruce lineage and overseas modern-day Freemasonry.

The Plantagenets are another powerful Nephilim or fallen angel bloodline, which intermarried with the Norse Viking Rollo bloodline when the latter moved into Normandy. These Norman hybrids then invaded the British Isles. Nearly every US President descends from the Plantagenet royals.

Other powerful Nephilim bloodlines include the Indian Khan family, founders of Sufism and funders of Islamic terror worldwide; the Chinese Li family, which controls the Triads mafia and claims dragon (“draco” or “watcher”) lineage and the Rothschild family, formerly the Bauers who started as accountants for the German House of Hesse.

According to the excellent research of both Fritz Springmeier and Gary Wayne, 13 Nephilim bloodline families sit at the very top of the terrestrial command structure. A Council of 33 answers to them and a Committee of 300, as described in former MI6 agent John Coleman’s seminal book of same name, answers to the Council of 33. At these level, all members are ennobled with the purest Nephilim RH Negative blood.

Next down the ladder is the Priory of Sion which is the force behind Zionism, since the plan is to crown a bloodline fallen angel anti-Christ as world king in Jerusalem to cement one world government and complete their Great Work of Ages. The Priory was founded in 1080 and consists of only very high percentage bloodline members. The Rosicrucians are the Luciferian spiritual drivers and are also on this level.

Below that are the operational arms. The Knights Templar, officially disbanded by the Catholic Church in 1307, have morphed into the Knights of Malta, who represent the Nephilim moles in the Vatican. Freemasons, Kabalists and Muslim Brotherhood agents run the military and political wing. The City of London and the Bank of International Settlements represent the banking arm. The Illuminati spew out spiritual corruption, creating dark energy and conducting sorcery.

The Royal Society runs the mis-education and fake science departments via their fractured from the whole and thus flawed “seven sacred sciences” formulation.  The Royal Society also controls the Protestant religious sects, which sprang from the Venetian bankers funding of Martin Luther and the Reformation.  Their job is to lie to humans as to the nature of reality and our origins. Sadly, most everything we think we “know” comes from these Luciferians.

Many will be hoodwinked when these Zionists or scions (grafted ones), announce the Second Coming of Jesus, possibly in concert with a fake alien invasion, to take the throne in the Third Temple on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. The king will actually be a Luciferian anti-Christ from one of the above-mentioned Nephilim bloodlines who will attempt to bring in a technology-driven New World Order total enslavement of humanity.

Dean Henderson is the author of six books: Big Oil & Their Bankers in the Persian Gulf: Four Horsemen, Eight Families & Their Global Intelligence, Narcotics & Terror Network, The Grateful Unrich: Revolution in 50 Countries, Stickin’ it to the Matrix, The Federal Reserve Cartel, Illuminati Agenda 21: The Luciferian Plan to Destroy Creation & Nephilim Crown 5G Apocalypse

A Century of Prohibition

A Century of Prohibition

Jeffrey Miron and Katherine Waldock, two academic analysts, estimate that legalizing currently illegal drugs would save Americans approximately $41 billion a year in federal and state government expenditures relating to drug enforcement. In the three decades since Mrs. Reagan uttered her dubious words of warning, the total costs of the war on drugs is estimated at $1 trillion.

http://www.counterpunch.org

by DAVID ROSEN

NOVEMBER 15, 2019

Photograph Source: Removal of liquor during Prohibition – Public Domain

We live in the shadow of the past; it haunts the present like the memory of a dead relative who can’t be forgotten or forgiven.  Prohibition is a dead historically moment that can’t be forgotten.

Prohibition was established with the adoption of the 18^th Amendment on January 16, 1919, and was implemented through the National Prohibition Act, popularly known as the Volstead Act.  It was first implemented when the so-called “Wartime Prohibition” took effect in May 1919 and took effect nationally with the adoption of the National Prohibition Act, popularly known as the Volstead Act. It went into effect on January 16, 1920 and remained the law-of-the-land until it was repealed 13 years with the adoption of the 21st Amendment – the only Amendment to be overturned.

Prohibition grew out of a century-long campaign to contain the forces that were perceived as threats to the nation’s moral order. It railed against vice in every form, be it alcohol consumption, gambling, prostitution, birth control or obscenity in the arts. The Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) and the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), among others, championed this movement. The Prohibition Party was founded in 1869 and was the first political party to accept women as members; the male-only Anti-Saloon League (ASL) was established in 1898. Anti-immigration proponents assailed Irish and German immigrants due to their alleged abuse of alcohol.

The temperance campaign gained legitimacy during World War I and in its aftermath.  It was one aspect of a deeper social crisis that culminated in not only the establishment of Prohibition but the adoption of the 19^th Amendment giving women the vote.  Often forgotten, the period witnessed social disruption amidst a wave of strikes, political bombings and what became known as the first Red Scare, one marked by the Palmer Raids and the deportation of nearly 300 “aliens,” including anarchists Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman.

Prohibition was in force from 1920 to 1933 and evolved through three overlapping phases. The first ran from 1920 to 1923, from the imposition of the 18^th Amendment until New York State repealed the Mullan-Gage Act, the state’s concurrent legislation.  The second phase was Prohibition’s glory days and lasted from 1923 to 1928, with innumerable swank speaks, celebrity culture and the wide-scale flaunting of the temperance law.  On the night of June 28, 1928, the third phase of Prohibition commenced and lasted until it was repealed on December 5, 1933. Each phase was characterized by a distinct speakeasy scene, attendant popular culture, gangster activities and the failed enforcement practices.  Taken together, speakeasies defined American nightlife during the Roaring ‘20s and speaks were the place to be.

There were two fundamental developments that resulted from Prohibition and its repeal.  First, the old-fashioned gangs of the 1920s morphed into organized crime syndicates that rule today’s underworld.  Anyone whose seen Francis Ford Coppola’s Godfather trilogy or Terence Winter’s Boardwalk Empire can glimpse the structural changes that came to redefine organized crime. Second, four years after the 18^th Amendment was repealed and Prohibition ended, Congress adopted the Marihuana Tax Act on August 2, 1937; in the 1930s, marijuana was spelled “marihuana.”  It made the possession and sale of marijuana illegal.

A half-century later, Nancy Reagan launched the postmodern prohibition movement.  In 1982, she gave her infamous “Just Say No” speech at the Longfellow Elementary School in Oakland, CA.  In a 1986 speech, she declared: “Today there’s a drug and alcohol abuse epidemic in this country, and no one is safe from it – not you, not me, and certainly not our children, because this epidemic has their names written on it.”

Mrs. Reagan’s original campaign sought to address an assortment of alleged youthful vices, including alcohol and drug abuse, peer violence and premarital sex.  Seeing an opportunity, a cabal of shrewd moralists, clever politicians and innovative entrepreneurs used the speech to formally launch the nation’s war on drugs.  They forged the new the police-corporate repression system, the domestic corollary to Pres. Dwight Eisenhower’s identified military-industrial complex.

Jeffrey Miron and Katherine Waldock, two academic analysts, estimate that legalizing currently illegal drugs would save Americans approximately $41 billion a year in federal and state government expenditures relating to drug enforcement. In the three decades since Mrs. Reagan uttered her dubious words of warning, the total costs of the war on drugs is estimated at $1 trillion.

The war on drugs proved as successful as the original campaign against alcohol.  Both were failures.  In similar fashion, comparable “wars” to suppress still other transgressive activities — including gambling, pornography and adult “consensual” sex work — proved far less then successful.  Still other battles against race mixing, erotic music and dance, abortion and homosexuality have been fought.  These diverse issues have defined the culture wars that, over the last half-century, deeply influenced American politics … and still do.

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In the 80 years since the passage of the 21^st Amendment repealed Prohibition lives on and has taken new forms.  U.S. federal, state and local regulators have embraced a mixed program of prohibition and/or regulation of what was consider unacceptable practices.  Such practices range from who — and how — people can drink alcoholic beverages to how and where one can gamble, which drugs one can imbibe and if one can engage in commercial sex.

During the ‘30s, hemp was popular and profitable, used for a variety of commercial purposes, including the smoking kind.  The Act sought to garner the federal government much-needed tax revenues without outlawing marihuana production or consumption.  In 1970, President Richard Nixon championed the Controlled Substances Act that superseded the Marihuana Act and launched the war on drugs — a decade before Mrs. Reagan’s speech.  In the decades since the adoption of the Marihuana Act and the Pres. Nixon and Mrs. Reagan, the war on drugs has dragged on and on and on. Today, marijuana for medical purposes is legal in 33 states and for recreational purposes in 14 states.

As marijuana consumption has been normalized, gambling and commercial sex have been mainstreamed. Gambling, one of the well-established rackets of Prohibition-era gangsters, has become a major commercial enterprise. In 1976, the federal Commission on the Review of National Policy toward Gambling recognized that gaming, like alcohol consumption, “is inevitable.  No matter what is said or done by advocates or opponents of gambling in all its various forms, it is an activity that is practiced, or tacitly endorsed, by a substantial majority of Americans.”  Such activities include state lotteries for every conceivable hustle; pari-mutuel betting on horses, greyhounds and jai-alai; sports bookmaking for every sport, from ping-pong to the Olympics; card games, keno and bingo; slot machines; and video poker, keno, blackjack and roulette machines. Casinos revenues were nearly $42 billion in 2018.  The rackets are big business; Al Capone and Owner Madden must be spinning in their graves.

Gambling might be a victimless crime; commercial sex is not.  As the old adage states, prostitution is the oldest profession and, sadly, it is still alive and well in the 21^st century.  Sex work is contradiction: morally, sex work is a sin because no one should sell their sexual being; socially, under capitalism, sex – the human body – is a commodity and people sell their sexual selves to survive

Since the nation’s founding, females (and sometimes males) have been selling their sexual labor for what is perceived to have value, be it money, food, trinkets or social opportunities.  Today, commercial sex is regulated in only one state, Nevada, and restricted to mostly rural areas.  Not surprising, prostitution takes place throughout the country and operates under various names.  Streetwalkers persist but are relegated to the poorest exchanges. Ever innovative, prostitution has long adopted to the latest technology.  In the ‘20s, the telephone refashioned the bordello into the call house.  In the 21^st century, the digital revolution is helping to mainstream commercial sex work.  In addition, commercial sex is also facilitated through massage parlors and “gentlemen’s” or strip clubs.  The dark side of prostitution is the recruitment of young girls (and some boys) and the forced sex slavery of foreign women that characterizes much of the commercial sex throughout the world.

Ongoing battles over “obscene” or indecent materials continue, promoted by the widespread availability risqué materials available through cable television and the Internet.  Efforts to limit “porn” through the 1996 Communications Decency Act have been repeatedly rejected by the courts.  Recent federal court decisions against the FCC relating to Janet Jackson’s “costume malfunction” and speaking the “F” word by Cher and Nicole Richie put such regulation in question.  However, one area of content suppression that continues to find widespread legal and popular support is the restriction of child pornography and the arrest of those caught either distributing or receiving such material.

Abortion and homosexuality, along with interracial sex and erotic music and dance, are very different kinds of “transgressions.”  They have each long been areas of bitter contestation, pitting moral conservatives and religious traditionalists against cultural secularist and political progressives.  A combination of personal valor (i.e., a willingness to challenge accepted moral or social conventions) and market forces (i.e., amoral cultural innovation) has redefined modern America cultural values.  In essence, these “wars,” whether fought over alcohol consumption or the latest sexy fashion, mark the shifting boundaries of acceptable individual conduct.

***

A century ago, Prohibition transformed alcohol consumption from an immoral practice into an illegal act, fostering the speakeasy and the reconfiguration of American moral values.  With the repeal of Prohibition, alcohol consumption became a regulated adult indulgence, illegal if it violated a local convention but nonetheless an all-American pleasure.  The original Roaring ‘20’s speak was a unique, unprecedented innovation of American entrepreneurialism, an iconic expression of popular culture.  During its short 13-year existence, it cultivated the full gamut of personal and social expressions that would come to define post-WW-II life, let alone 21^st century post-modernity.

America in 2019 is not what it was in 1919.  The new woman of old is the every-woman of today; the New Negro is today’s every American of color; the “pansy” of yesterday is just another person; the gangster persists along with the underground economy; and the cocktail continues to represent the radical sense of sensual pleasure that defines post-modern America.

Since the country’s founding four centuries ago, Americans have fought over what is acceptable moral conduct.  Some have battled to preserve traditional, to repress notions of radical erotic experience and expression; others have pushed the boundaries of acceptable pleasure.  This battle continues, continually reshaped by history and changes in moral values.  Today, the meaning of transgression is in flux, buffeted by differences between the legal and the popular notions of what is acceptable behavior.

More articles by:DAVID ROSEN

David Rosen is the author of Sex, Sin & Subversion:  The Transformation of 1950s New York’s Forbidden into America’s New Normal (Skyhorse, 2015).  He can be reached at drosennyc@verizon.net; check out www.DavidRosenWrites.com.

Cuba Was Never a Threat to “National Security”

Source

Of all the ludicrous aspects of the Cold War, among the most ridiculous was the notion that Cuba posed a threat to U.S. “national security.” For some 30 years, the U.S. deep state (i.e., the Pentagon, CIA, and NSA) maintained that Cuba was a communist “dagger” pointed at America’s neck and, therefore, was a grave threat to “national security.”

Through it all, hardly anyone ever asked a very simple but important question: What did they mean when they said that Cuba was a threat to “national security”?

Did they mean that the Cuban army was about to invade Florida, conquer the state, move up the Eastern Seaboard, and end up forcibly taking over the reins of the federal government, thereby enabling it to control the IRS and HUD?

If so, that’s absolutely ridiculous. Cuba has always been an impoverished Third World country, one with a very small military force. Even if it could have scrounged up a few transport boats to get a few dozen troops to Miami, they would have been quickly smashed by well-armed private American citizens. Anyone who really thinks that Cuba could have invaded and conquered the United States needs a serious dose of reality.

So, then what did they mean when they repeatedly told us that Cuba was a threat to “national security”?

Maybe they meant that Cuban leader Fidel Castro would export socialist ideas to the United States, where they would then infect the minds of the American people.

If so, that’s ridiculous because socialism was already taking over the minds of the American people, and long before Fidel Castro took power in Cuba. That’s what President Franklin Roosevelt’s Social Security scheme was all about — bringing socialism to America. That was some 25 years before Castro came to power!

Let’s not forget, after all, that Social Security did not originate with James Madison or Patrick Henry. It originated among German socialists near the end of the 1800s and then came to the United States in the 1930s. That’s why the Social Security administration has a bust of Otto von Bismarck, the Iron Chancellor of Germany, prominently displayed on its website. Bismarck introduced Social Security to Germany. He got the idea from German socialists.

U.S-Cuba Relations and the Long Road to Nowhere. “Regime Change is on the Table”

When President Lyndon Johnson enacted Medicare and Medicaid into law in the 1960s, it would be safe to say that he hadn’t gotten the idea from Fidel Castro. Socialism was gripping the minds of Americans independently of what was happening in Cuba. The fact is that the entire world was moving toward socialism. 

What about the Cuban Missile Crisis, when Castro invited the Soviet Union to install nuclear missiles in Cuba aimed at the United States? They were defensive in nature. The Pentagon and the CIA were pressuring President Kennedy to wage a war of aggression against Cuba, with the aim of installing another pro-U.S. dictator into power, such as Fulgencio Batista, the brutal and corrupt Cuban dictator who preceded Castro. A prime example was Operation Northwoods, the false and fraudulent scheme that the Joint Chiefs of Staff unanimously presented to Kennedy after the CIA’s Bay of Pigs disaster, with the aim of securing regime change in Cuba. (To Kennedy’s everlasting credit, he rejected it.)

To deter another U.S. attack or to defend against such an attack, Castro sought assistance from the Soviets. If the Pentagon and the CIA had not been pressuring Kennedy to attack Cuba, Castro would never have invited the Soviets to install those missiles. This was confirmed by the fact that once Kennedy promised that he would not permit the deep state to attack Cuba again, the Soviets took their missiles home.

Today, 30 years after the end of the Cold War, the U.S. deep state steadfastly maintains that Cuba continues to pose a threat to U.S. “national security.” That’s what the decades-old economic embargo that targets the Cuban populace with impoverishment and death is all about. 

But the fact is that Cuba has never posed a threat to U.S. “national security,” whatever definition one puts on that nebulous, meaningless term. The truth is that it has always been the U.S. government that has posed a threat to Cuban “national security,” as manifested by such illegal and wrongful actions as the CIA invasion at the Bay of Pigs, the decades-long cruel and brutal economic embargo against the Cuban people, the false and fraudulent Operation Northwoods, state-sponsored assassinations attempts against Castro, and acts of terrorism and sabotage within Cuba.

The truth is that the entire decades-long anti-Cuba campaign has always been nothing more than a fear-mongering racket by the U.S. deep state, one designed to assure ever-increasing budgets and power for the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA.

*

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

Jacob G. Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation. He was born and raised in Laredo, Texas, and received his B.A. in economics from Virginia Military Institute and his law degree from the University of Texas. He was a trial attorney for twelve years in Texas. He also was an adjunct professor at the University of Dallas, where he taught law and economics. In 1987, Mr. Hornberger left the practice of law to become director of programs at the Foundation for Economic Education. He has advanced freedom and free markets on talk-radio stations all across the country as well as on Fox News’ Neil Cavuto and Greta van Susteren shows and he appeared as a regular commentator on Judge Andrew Napolitano’s show Freedom Watch.

The original source of this article is The Future of Freedom Foundation

Copyright © Jacob G. Hornberger, The Future of Freedom Foundation, 2019

The ‘Greta Effect’: Are We Really This Time, for Certain Certain, Heading for the End Times?

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http://www.strategic-culture.org

Cynthia Chung

November 7, 2019

In a little less than a year and a half, Ms. Thunberg has garnered a great deal of media attention for her passionate pleas that the world finally take heed to the very real crisis of climate change affirming that if we fail to meet the requirements laid out for us by the IPCC we will most assuredly have no planet to live on 11 years from now. Ms. Thunberg has confidently and frequently stated this in almost every interview or speech she has made since her media blitz began.

This is of course very disturbing news indeed.

What is just as disturbing is that it is seemingly all up to the children around the world to take matters into their own hands, since all adults have apparently become the equivalent to the walking dead, with children being the supposed organisers behind these immense marches across Europe, Canada and the US, to save the planet from total annihilation. This regard for the adults in the west and their seeming encouragement of this regard of themselves is very disappointing, but hardly surprising when you realise that many of them are from the ‘Make Love Not War’ live in the moment movements from the 60s that used as one of their main slogans “Never trust anybody over 30”. Interestingly, these are the parents of the dejected youth of today, who seem to have all taught their children the same lesson: don’t trust adults. Apparently something really terrible happens to you once you turn 31 and either you have to accept the fact that you are now analogous to a sack of potatoes or maintain a 20 something year old mental state for your entire life in order to stay “relevant”.

‘Forever young’ justice warriors such as Jane Fonda are a model for us all on how to never mentally develop past the age of 30. At the age of 81, Jane has made the vow to get arrested once a week for 14 weeks until she has to film her tv show ‘Grace and Frankie’, where at that point she will have fulfilled her part in making the world a better and safer place and will have earned her entrance into sainthood. As Jane stated in an interview with Washington Post, “Greta said we have to behave like it’s a crisis…We have to behave like our houses are on fire”. Jane apparently has a strange understanding of what she would do if her house was on fire since she continues to fly frequently and supports the eating of meat, the two top “no-no’s” from Greta. Regardless, Jane is on a mission to send a message to everybody else that even though she does not follow what Greta asks, if others also do not, we will all die horrible deaths in 11 years. After all, Jane will be 92 at that point…but with the mind of a forever young 20 year old.

As Roger Hallam, co-founder of Extinction Rebellion, put it, “If we don’t work together, we are going to die together”. Bone-chilling words to be sure. The way things are going we might end up seeing baby boomer NATO Defense Ministers holding hands singing “We Are the World”, wait…that already happened in 2015.

However, it is no longer good enough to distrust anybody over 30, and those now leading the charge are just entering their teens since people in their 20s are becoming part of ‘the problem’ and are just not willing to do enough to save the planet. In a world that up until recently was obsessed with whether someone had a PhD title before they could make any public statement on the climate change subject, now could care less about academic titles and don’t even require a high school diploma to dictate world policy. Why? Well, because “all the science is already in” on climate change and now it is just about getting action done and since adults have been the problem that has got us to where we are today, it is only fitting that the children take matters into their own hands…right?

Before we dare to answer that question I thought I would share some interesting periods in history that may help provide a new perspective about the current situation we find ourselves in. Bare with me, I am past 30 years in age.

The Art of Prophesising

On January 23, 2019 Greta made the prediction: “The date is January 23, 2031. The world has just ended. No humans are left on the planet once known as ‘Earth’ ”.

Have we really come to a point where we are at the brink of the end times? I have spoken with a great many people who believe this to be the case. Whether they believe it will be in 11 years or 50 years, the consensus among the many is that we are certainly approaching the end of the world, something that used to be associated to the crazy guy who pulled out all his teeth so they could no longer hear his thoughts, holding up the sign “The End is Nigh” and babbling apocalyptic lines from the Book of Revelations…now the majority of us would look at that guy and say “You know, I think he has a point.”

But in all seriousness, are we truly living in the darkest period of humanity’s existence?

I will come back to that question because I truly do not take it lightly, but it should be known that there is not only a long list of false prophecies for the end of the world that had massive followings throughout history, but there are a lot of parallels to those periods and to that of our present day.

In 1345 the biggest financial collapse of history hit Europe. Food became increasingly hard to come by and water sanitation could not be maintained. It was not long after that the plague, carried by ships travelling from Asia, consumed a vulnerable Europe. During this time, many cities suffered up to a 50-70% mortality rate, killing much of the very young and old.

Many thought this to be the end of the world. There was no seeming solution to the problem and many believed that they were either being punished or had been abandoned by God, and since their condemnation seemed certain, took the path of living in the most hedonistic lifestyles imaginable as death and despair surrounded them. Others tried to buy their entrance into Purgatory with “indulgences” issued by the Church (somewhat reminiscent of today’s purchasers of carbon offsets). The basic idea was that one could reduce the amount of punishment one would undergo for committing a sin in exchange for money. This gave individuals, who could afford it, a way to partake in this end of world orgy-fest while avoiding their soul’s eternal damnation, or at least so they were told.

Others took matters a little more into their own hands to make it right with God. They set out onto the streets whipping themselves profusely. It was thought that if they punished themselves God would spare them from the plague, while others who had already contracted it thought it would move God to take the sickness back. These were known as the Flagellants, and they had a very large following. Later on they would blame the Jewish people for God’s wrath and resorted to the slaughter and burning alive of these groups of people in the hope that God would finally relent.

Another interesting period to take note of was during the Roman Republic. One of the most illustrious positions that one could hope for, outside of being Consul, was to be an Augur. This was an incredibly prestigious position within the Roman government that was usually assigned for life. An Augur was basically the interpreter of ominous and fortuitous signs, which included interpreting animal entrails (considered an exact science at the time), behaviour of birds and so forth to dictate future policy of the Republic.

There was also the period between the 4^th and 5^th Crusade known for its ‘Child Crusaders’. According to George Zabriskie Gray’s research on this subject, in 1212 a twelve year old boy named Stephen, from the village Cloyes in France claimed he had been selected by God to lead a Crusade of Children to rescue the Holy Land. He would recruit 30, 000 children to join him. Around the same time, a 10 year old boy named Nicholas, from Cologne, would also begin to preach and recruit children for the same mission. He too claimed that he had been selected by God and recruited a following of at least 20, 000 children. What little is known of the fate of these children is that the majority of them died of either starvation, were murdered or sold into slavery. Of the few thousand that actually set sail for Palestine, it is not known what happened to them, but only that they never arrived to the Holy Land.

And the list of examples goes on…

In Praise of Folly

So what is the point of all this? I think it is useful for us to have a memory of our past folly. And I think we are in the greatest danger of committing folly when we forget the foolish whims and beliefs of the past that were not just based on religious misconceptions but also on misconceptions of what passed for ‘science’. I think it is very dangerous when a population cannot even remember its recent ecstasies in folly in end of world prophecies such as the Y2K scare only 20 years ago, with a massive following of believers who were prepared for end times. This was a subject that was constantly being talked about on mainstream media and even by the governments of countries, President Clinton being no exception.

I think it is also very dangerous when there are absolute statements made such as “all the science is in” on a subject. Climate science is a relatively new science, and an extremely complicated one with many unknown variables. It is interesting that a group of scientists in this field have claimed that they know everything there needs to be known on this subject, when I don’t think we can say that for any other subject in the sciences to this date. Either climate science is far more simple than we thought or we are skipping steps.

What is also concerning is that although this grouping of climate scientists speak with such certainty about what the climate will be 10 years from now and what is influencing it, they are still unable to accurately predict the weather 2 weeks from now (let alone when a cold or hot front will be entering a region months or years from now). Meteorologists admit that their forecasts are at best an “educated guess” from measurements they take in change of atmospheric pressures. This does not even take into account the role of the Sun, which is an obvious contributor to global climate cycles, nor other factors within our galaxy such as supernova emissions of radiation and cosmic rays. Yet despite this lack of understanding we can be certain that climate scientists can with confidence predict the climate trend of the WORLD 10 or even 50 years from now!

We are told that the climate is completely chaotic now and unpredictable but moving towards a measurable point in the future. This confident prediction is being calculated by super computers. Computers that are ultimately limited to their programs’ parameters and variables. It is claimed that these computers can ‘learn’, can ‘problem solve’, but it still is operating within a human-made program and is thus limited to the assumptions of that program. A computer cannot decide to start taking into account the Sun’s role in climate change for instance. It does not even have a concept of what the Sun is. There seems to be an almost mystical faith being put into these super computers, likened to a shaman who shakes a bag of bones and dumps its contents out to form some random pattern that somehow will reveal our fate.

How can a computer have all the answers when we don’t even know all the variables let alone how they interact in order for it to calculate the outcome years from now? Well the answer is we obviously can’t. It is not an accurate prediction. Just like the Y2K scare.

I would further add that when a movement forms vehemently asserting that the end of the world is nigh, that is a reflection of the breakdown of that society. It is a reflection that the people of such a society no longer have faith in that society’s fitness for survival. I think it is no coincidence that the leading nations supporting the prophecy of Greta are largely first world western countries, countries that at one time enjoyed the highest standards of living but now are experiencing decay and economic collapse.

There are already answers to the clean energy crisis. Namely nuclear power, with fission power (and soon fusion) not only being the cleanest forms of energy but by far the most efficient and most powerful source of energy human civilization has ever had access to, making actions once impossible turn into the possible, such as long-distance space travel. The technology of the plasma torch has the capability to break down matter into its ionic components, this means that landfills could be cost-effectively broken down into their elemental forms which would thus turn them into resource mines. It is a wonder that those who seem to care so much about solving these problems never seem to bring up these very evident solutions.

So how did European civilization ultimately survive the mayhem of the Black Death? Fortunately there were those who did not believe that this was the end of the world and sought to not only rebuild but improve upon the conditions of the past. They did not believe that people needed to resort to some form of supplication to avoid the end of the world (somewhat reminiscent of today’s concept of all humans being innately polluters who must repent and minimise the negative effects of their mere existence). Rather those that brought Europe out of the Dark Ages believed that the avoidance of the end of the world could only come about through human intervention, which had the highest capacity for the good and depended on scientific discoveries that could only be brought about through the creative imaginings of an optimistic human mind.

Spreading Democracy the American Way

Source

List of US-Installed Democracies, Worldwide, 1776-2019

That’s the entire list. You can see that it’s blank. But how can that be? We all know that the US has freed dozens of nations from their evil and repressive governments, and installed loving democracies where people lived happily ever after, swamped with freedoms and overwhelmed with human rights. We know this because we’ve read and heard it hundreds, or maybe thousands, of times. It’s in all the US history books. We’ve seen it in so many movies and even read it in comic books when we were kids. It must be true. So why is the list empty? How can that be?

Sadly, the list is empty because everything we were told was a lie. It is often said that if you tell a lie five times, most people will believe it; the US as a “defender of democracy” is one of those lies. Almost any American can put together a list of 20 or 30 instances where the US removed a dictatorship, “freed” the people and installed a democracy, and that entire list will be nothing more than a fabricated fairy-tale since even a casual glance at the facts on the ground reveal something quite different. For all the talk about promoting democracy and freedom, there is no instance – NO instance – where the US has ever removed a dictatorship and replaced it with any kind of benevolent government, electoral democracy or otherwise. You may be aware of the statements by Major-General Smedley Butler who claimed that during his 33 years as a US Marine, he functioned simply as “a gangster for capitalism” and that all wars were bankers’ wars. On the topic of the US government installing democracies in the world, Butler himself denied such a thing had ever occurred, and said further, “The U.S. has routinely destroyed democracy throughout the globe while its leaders claimed to be spreading democracy.”

But if the US didn’t install “democracy” in all those places, what did they do? Well, while preaching democracy, freedom and human rights at home, the US government was actually running around the world installing dictatorships – about 50, at last count. Not only that, while boasting at home about defending democracy, the CIA and military were actually undermining and destroying functioning democracies and replacing them with dictatorships. Iran is one of the most obvious of these, where the CIA arranged the overthrow of the beloved leader of a perfectly-functioning electoral democracy and installed Shah Reza Pahlavi as one of the most brutal dictators in modern history. In 2000, U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright stated:

“In 1953 the United States played a significant role in orchestrating the overthrow of Iran’s popular Prime Minister, Mohammed Mossadegh. The coup was clearly a setback for Iran’s political development. And it is easy to see now why many Iranians continue to resent this intervention by America in their internal affairs”.

Yeah. No kidding.

Another typical example of American reverence for the sanctity of democracy is Greece, where in 1967 the US government arranged a CIA-backed military coup two days before the country’s elections. Papandreou’s government had been elected in 1964 with the first (and I believe the only) only majority government in the Greek history, but one that wasn’t sufficiently accommodating to American business and European bankers, and had to go.

To the US, Greece was just another undeveloped property to be plundered. When the Greek Ambassador complained to President Johnson that the American CIA and military action was contrary to the Greek parliament and violated the Greek constitution, Johnson’s response was to say “Fuck your parliament and fuck your constitution.” He added that US corporations had investment plans for Greece, and that “If your Prime Minister gives me any talk about democracy, parliament and constitutions, he, his democracy, his parliament and his constitution won’t last very long”. And in fact the US not only destroyed the Greek electoral government system but forced the new military dictatorship to pass legislation outlawing every other form of government. That’s democracy, American-style.

The US has repeatedly demonstrated it doesn’t much care what kind of government exists, so long as it is controllable and will do the bidding of the master. By US thinking, the two best kinds of government are: 1) dictators that you install and control (Suharto, Somoza, Shah Reza Pahlavi) and (2) democracies you can influence, bully, subvert, and control (The UK, Canada, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Ukraine, Romania, The Czech Republic). The worst kind is China’s one-party system that doesn’t easily lend itself to outside meddling and subversion.

All the US blathering about democracy is just jingoistic hypocrisy for the masses. Rather than spreading democracy and freedom, the US has always propagated fear, repression and death, sowing dissent and overthrowing legitimate governments, a reality twisted by the media to label the victims with blame for their oppression. The US preaches democracy, but overthrows democracies and installs, finances, and supports dictatorships by the dozen. This has been true since the day more than 100 years ago that the US sent its navy to hijack Hawaii so that Bob Dole’s relatives could obtain control of the sugarcane and pineapple plantations. It was true with the Dulles brothers and the United Fruit Company in Central America, and it has continued to this day in Afghanistan and Iraq. As usual, American hypocrisy at its finest.

The US has been promoting dictatorships, poverty, misery and serfdom with great success for nearly 100 years. We have a list below of about 50 countries where the US not only installed and financed a brutal dictator, but often and repeatedly sent in arms and troops to put down local rebellions and revolutions against those installed friendly dictators. An example is Nicaragua, where the US initiated a revolution and installed Somoza – a truly brutal psychopath. When the population finally rose up in arms (shovels and pitchforks, actually), overthrew Somoza and formed their own government, the US waged one of the most unconscionable secret wars in history against that poor country. The standard of living in Nicaragua fell by 90%; hundreds of thousands died of poverty and starvation, or were simply massacred by US-funded military rebels. That was their punishment for evicting their US master, a story that has been repeated in dozens of nations. There is no shortage of documentation of CIA-trained and funded “death squads” in Central and South America.

In most cases, the US overthrew governments for the purpose of installing a dictator who would be more compliant with US commercial interests – and it is commerce, not freedom, that has been the driving ideology behind US foreign policy, an ideology that has been consistent for many decades. A country that is obedient and compliant with US foreign policy interests will generally be permitted to survive, but countries acting outside that framework, in fact acting in their best interest rather than that of the US, will very quickly become a candidate for “regime change” – preceded by voluminous media attacks to sway the American public against that nation. In the old days, they used to be condemned as communists; today they are ‘terrorists’, but all else is the same. Any country that wanted to develop its economy by protecting local industries, by redistributing land to the poor, by initiating health care, education and social security programs, was almost always overthrown because it threatened American corporate and banking profits.

Polls Increasingly Confirming that America Is a Dictatorship

And in all of this worldwide promotion of democracy and freedom, countless millions have died at the hands of US troops. American actions in Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Nicaragua, Congo, Vietnam, Chile, Angola, and a panoply of countries around the world have directly or indirectly led to the deaths of tens of millions of people. “As an example, the CIA conspired with Belgian colonial forces in the assassination of Patrice Lumumba, the democratically elected but broadly pro-soviet leader of Congo, which led to the rise of a brutal dictator and eventually to a series of civil wars and famines which killed approximately 5 million people.”

And it isn’t only the deaths but the brutality and torture, much of it done with specific training received from the CIA – which has been active in torture methods for at least the past 60 years. Details of the ghastly and inhuman CIA torture manuals and prisons like Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay are public because the US can no longer control the dissemination of information as it once could. Some of those US-installed dictators are now gone, having been replaced with some form of representative government – but none of that is to the credit of the US. In all cases, those compliant, if murderous, dictators were overthrown by their own people – against the wishes of the US and in spite of US military and other support for the existing dictatorship.

It is not a secret that US imperialism has produced enormous profits and economic growth for the US while keeping those countries impoverished for more than 200 years. In fact, the major cause of US economic supremacy today, is precisely its active military and political colonisation of so much of the world – the actual plundering of so many countries, guaranteed by the installation of so many brutal military dictatorships – and all under the propaganda guise of protecting democracy and freedom in the world.

And this is all why the US has for so long been listed as the most hated nation in the world. Former US President Jimmy Carter said,

“We sent Marines into Lebanon, and you only have to go to Lebanon, to Syria or to Jordan to witness first-hand the intense hatred among many people for the United States because we bombed and shelled and unmercifully killed totally innocent villagers – women and children and farmers and housewives – in those villages around Beirut. As a result of that, we became kind of a Satan in the minds of those who are deeply resentful”.

And it isn’t only in Lebanon, Syria and Jordan; the US is bitterly hated throughout the Middle East, Africa, Asia and South and Central America. There are few parts of the world today where Americans are welcome as a people, and for very good reason.

Japan is the only quasi-exception to my empty list above, where the US did install a kind of participatory democratic government but, except for a recent brief period, Japan has functioned as a one-party state since the Second World War. And in any case, Japan is still very much a US military colony with less control over its domestic and foreign policies than most people imagine. More than one Japanese Prime Minister has attempted to force the US out of Okinawa, only to discover himself forced out of office instead. In Japan’s “democracy”, the Japanese are free to do whatever they want, so long as they do whatever the US orders them to do.

Many Americans today believe their government “saved” Iraq, setting the people free by removing a terrible dictator and bestowing real democracy. Sadly, that isn’t true, but let’s take a quick look. The so-called democratic government that was installed in Iraq is an irrelevant farce. One of the US government’s acts prior to forming this so-called democracy was to declare a succession of 100 laws called “Provisionary Orders” written by an American named Paul Bremer. These Provisionary Orders were written into Iraqi law prior to the US handover of the government, and they have the highest standing of all laws in Iraq. In fact, their standing is so high that they “cannot be removed by any subsequent Iraqi government”. They are perpetual.

In order to ensure that Iraq’s new “democracy” functions according to plan, Bremer’s Orders 57 and 77 ensure the implementation of all orders by placing US-appointed auditors and inspectors-general in every government ministry, with five-year terms and with sweeping authority over contracts, programs, employees and regulations. Bremer’s Orders stipulate that the US must approve every senior government appointment and must approve every candidate for elected government office. Senior US military officers are reported to frequently and freely enter cabinet meetings with demands or instructions on policy decisions to be made. There is no question of who actually exercises power in that country.

The world would be astonished to learn how commercial was the American invasion of Iraq. Bremer’s 100 Orders pave the way for US commercial control, permitting US multinationals to privatize the entire nation, a degree of foreign and private control that has not been witnessed since the days of the British East India Company and its extraterritoriality treaties. In one of his first acts, Bremer demonstrated US-style free enterprise by closing almost 200 state-owned businesses where the World Bank estimated 500,000 people were working, eliminated the jobs and turned the industry sectors over to American companies. His orders give American firms the right to purchase and control anything in Iraq, including the entire physical and social infrastructure. They allocate to American oil companies the exclusive right to control at least 65% of the country’s oil reserves, for both production and sales, and to determine the distribution of revenue and profit allocated to Iraq and the US multinationals.

Order 39 allows for the tax-free remittance of all US corporate profits. Order 81 stipulates that all Iraqi farmers must use Monsanto’s GM seed for all crops planted in the country, with the use of any heritage Iraqi seed stock now totally prohibited. The US government has given its GM seed companies total control of Iraq’s food supplies in perpetuity, while guaranteeing profits to Cargill and Monsanto in perpetuity. Order 17 grants foreign contractors immunity from Iraq’s laws and guarantees that Americans in Iraq will not be subject to Iraqi law. The orders state that “All trained elements of the Iraqi armed forces shall at all times be under the operational control of the American commander”. But if you ask almost any American you will learn that Iraq is now free and has democracy. It is necessary to point out that this is exactly the same kind of “freedom and democracy” the US wants for China.

US-Supported Dictatorships

The US has always had a fond affection for repressive dictators, tyrants and corrupt puppet-presidents, who have been aided, supported, and rewarded handsomely for their loyalty to US interests. These men usually rise to power through bloody ClA-backed coups, and rule by terror and torture. Their troops receive arms, training and advice from the CIA and other US agencies. It is US military support that guarantees their hold on power – and the fact that they provide free access to US corporations to exploit their countries’ resources. There are no occasions where the US government has ever been held responsible in any way for installing, supporting and protecting some of the worst human rights violators in the world.

The US has, over the years, installed, financed, supported with cash and arms, about 50 bloody dictators. In many of those cases, the US hypocritically overthrew a democracy to install one of its own dictators who would be more pliable to US foreign policy. There are also many cases where the population of a country revolted and overthrew the US-installed dictator, upon which the US sent in its warships to put down the revolution and re-install its dictator to power. The Dominican Republic comes to mind as one of the more shameful episodes in US history. Even worse, the US has often sent in CIA hit squads to assassinate a democratically-elected leader who wanted to eliminate colonialism and free his country from US control.

In the Philippines, US President Lyndon Johnson had the CIA arrange for Ferdinand Marcos to assume power as puppet-dictator, a man whose political career began at age 21 for killing the man who had beaten his father in a local election. In South Africa, US President Reagan gave US-installed President P. W. Botha extensive cash and military aid, even though Botha had some bad habits that Reagan ignored, which included cutting off the ears, noses, and limbs of civilians. Botha was famous for rounding up 10 year old boys, killing their parents in front of them, raping young women while they watched, then recruiting them to fight in his army. Precisely the kind of leader America admires. Just so it doesn’t go unsaid, Botha, on his 90th birthday, refused to apologise for his reign of horror and said he had “no regrets” about the way he had run his country.

In Iran, with the support of US President Eisenhower, the CIA toppled the elected government of Dr. Mohammad Mossadeq and installed Shah Reza Pelavi as dictator. With CIA encouragement, he forced all people to join his party or go to jail. Thousands were imprisoned or murdered. His agents raided a religious school and hurled hundreds of students to their deaths from the roof. The Shah’s secret police agency, SAVAK, was created in 1957 and managed by the CIA and Israel’s Mossad at all levels of daily operation, including the choice and organization of personnel, selection and operation of equipment, and the running of agents. Torture methods included electric shock, whipping, beating, inserting broken glass and pouring boiling water into the rectum, tying weights to the testicles, and the extraction of teeth and nails. Iran under the Shah became a devoted US ally and a base for spy operations on the border of the Soviet Union.

In Indonesia, Suharto was one of the most brutal dictators in history. US President Johnson authorised a CIA-organized coup that brought Suharto to power in 1965, supporting his rule for 32 years. Suharto continued his savage atrocities under the support of seven US presidents: Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush Sr., Clinton. Entire populations of towns and villages were herded to central locations and massacred. Under the guidance of the CIA, more than three million people were hacked to death with machetes, in the largest and most savage slaughter in modern political history. But Indonesia was now safe to be plundered by US multinationals.

In Pakistan, US and CIA-backed Mohammed Zia Ul-Haq executed his elected predecessor, Zulfigar Ali Bhutto in 1979, and by 1984 Pakistan was furnishing 70% of the world’s high grade heroin. That same year, George Bush addressed a group of Pakistani officials and praised the government of President Zia for its anti-narcotics program. Henry Kissinger called Pakistan a “frontline state defending free people everywhere”, in spite of its record of narcotics and torturing dissidents. Pakistan under Zia was the largest recipient of US aid, over half of which was for weapons. But since US puppets are only “President for Life”, Zia died in a mysterious (CIA induced) plane crash in 1988. Still in Pakistan, another US-backed political ‘asset’ and dictator, Khan initiated a massive campaign of genocide, targeting Muslims, Hindus, Bengali intellectuals, students and political activists. While President Nixon looked the other way, three million people were killed in a few months along with another 400,000 women who were raped. Central and South America were not better in any respect, with the Somozas in Nicaragua and a long list of similar pathological killers.

Below is an incomplete listing of nations where the US has overthrown a government to install a dictatorship that was controllable and would permit US multinationals to freely plunder the resources, unrestrained by conscience or morality, and with an astonishing and hypocritical lack of concern for either ‘freedom’ or ‘human rights’. These are the nations that became subjugated military colonies of the US; financed, trained and controlled by the US government, the CIA and the State Department. This is only one act of a continuous play that has been on stage for well over a century, and these are all facts of history, not in dispute by anyone, not even the US State Department. The US not only installed, but in each case protected, both politically and militarily, and supported with arms, cash and military training, the corrupt dictatorships of:

Here are some countries where the US military and/or CIA financed and led revolutions to depose electoral democracies and install a dictator, in several cases by assassinating the incumbent president: Bolivia, Brazil, Haiti, Spain, Philippines, Zaire, Guatemala, Iran, Greece, Chile, Fiji, Nicaragua, Indonesia, The Congo.

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Larry Romanoff is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

The original source of this article is Global Research

Copyright © Larry Romanoff, Global Research, 2019

God Save the Queen. The US Destruction of the British Empire

Source

This is a little-known and never-discussed part of US history, but yet one of the major factors that propelled the US to its overwhelming manufacturing and economic supremacy after the Second World War. It involves the final destruction of the British Empire, for which no thinking person would have regrets, and also the conditions obtaining after the end of World War II. The First World War caused Britain to lose about 40% of its former Empire and wealth, and the Second World War completed this task, but not without the little-known predatory intercession of America.

During the Second War, Britain needed huge volumes of supplies of food, raw materials, manufactured goods, armaments and military hardware. But Britain’s factories were being destroyed by the war, and in any case lacked sufficient productive capacity. Britain also increasingly lacked money to pay for those goods, its solution being to purchase on credit from its colonies. Canada, India, Australia, South Africa, and many other nations supplied England with necessary goods and war materials, on promise of future payment. The plan was that after the War ended, Britain would repay these debts with manufactured goods which a rebuilt Britain would be able to supply. These debts were recorded in the then British currency of Pounds Sterling, and maintained on ledgers in the Bank of England, commonly referred to as “The Sterling Balances”.

After the Second War ended, the US was the world’s only major economy that had not been bombed to rubble, a nation with all its factories intact, and able to operate at full capacity producing almost everything the world needed. The US had enormous capacity to supply, but the many countries of the British Empire, whose economies were in sound condition and had money to pay, were refusing to buy from the US since they were waiting for the UK to rebuild and repay the outstanding debts with manufactured goods. The US government and corporations realised that this enormous market consisting of so many of the world’s nations, would remain closed to it for perhaps decades, that it would have little or no commercial success in any part of the former British Empire so long as those Sterling Balances remained on the ledgers in the Bank of England. And this is one place where the true nature of America comes into sharp focus, an incident which serves better than many to illustrate the story of American “fair play” and of the US creating “a level playing field”.

At the end of the war, Britain, physically devastated and financially bankrupt, lacked factories to produce goods for rebuilding, the materials to rebuild the factories or purchase the machines to fill them, or with the money to pay for any of it. Britain’s situation was so dire, the government sent the economist John Maynard Keynes with a delegation to the US to beg for financial assistance, claiming that Britain was facing a “financial Dunkirk”. The Americans were willing to do so, on one condition: They would supply Britain with the financing, goods and materials to rebuild itself, but dictated that Britain must first eliminate those Sterling Balances by repudiating all its debts to its colonies. The alternative was to receive neither assistance nor credit from the US. Britain, impoverished and in debt, with no natural resources and no credit or ability to pay, had little choice but to capitulate. And of course with all receivables cancelled and since the US could produce today, those colonial nations had no further reason for refusing manufactured goods from the US. The strategy was successful. By the time Britain rebuilt itself, the US had more or less captured all of Britain’s former colonial markets, and for some time after the war’s end the US was manufacturing more than 50% of everything produced in the world. And that was the end of the British Empire, and the beginning of the last stage of America’s rise.

Americans have been propagandised into believing that their country selflessly supported the European war effort, and generously planned and financed the entire rebuilding of all of war-ravaged Europe. Their heads are full of ‘lend-lease’, the “Marshall Plan” and much more. But here we have three silent truths: One is that the US assisted Europe and the UK primarily because it needed markets for its goods. US corporations found little purchasing power in the European nations that were now largely destroyed and bankrupt, and without these markets the US economy would also have crashed. It was commercial self-interest rather than compassion or charity that prompted the US financial assistance to the UK and Europe. All the US did was provide large-scale consumer financing for the products of its own corporations, with most of the ‘financing’ never leaving the US. The Marshall Plan was mostly a welfare program for American multinationals. The second truth is that Europe and England paid heavily for this financial assistance. It was only in 2006 that Britain finally paid the last installment on the loans made to it by the US in 1945. The third is that the post-war financing of Europe was not primarily for reconstruction but as the foundation for an overwhelming political control that has largely persisted to this day. Funds from the American’s vaunted Marshall Plan were spent more to finance Operation Gladio than European reconstruction.

As William Blum so well noted in one of his articles, the US was far more interested in sabotaging the political left in Europe than in reconstruction, and Marshall Plan funds were siphoned off to finance political victories for the far right, as well for the violent terrorist program known as Operation Gladio. He also correctly mentioned that the CIA skimmed off substantial amounts to fund covert journalism and propaganda, one of the conduits being the Ford Foundation. As well, the US exercised enormous economic and political restrictions on recipient countries as conditions for the receipt of funds, most being used to help re-entrench the European bankers and elites in their positions of economic and political power (after a war that they themselves instigated) rather than to assist in reconstruction. In the end, the Europeans could have done as well without this so-called ‘assistance’ from the US, and Europe would have been far better and more independent today had they refused the offer. The conviction of most Americans that their nation ‘rebuilt’ Europe is pure historical mythology created by propaganda and supported by ignorance.

A History of the 21st Century

A History of the 21st Century

Paul Craig Roberts

Oct 31, 2019

 

In the 1990s with the Soviet Union collapsed as a result of the communist hardliners’ arrest of Soviet President Gorbachev and Yeltsin serving as Washington’s puppet while Americans and Israelis looted Russia, the neoconservatives called for Washington to overthrow Middle Eastern governments. The neocon scenario for remaking the Middle East was set out prior to the events of September 11, 2001. https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/whose-war/

The neoconservatives said that they needed “a new Pearl Harbor” in order to launch wars in the Middle East. The cover story was to bring democracy to the Middle East, but the real purpose was to remove governments in the way of Israeli expansion (https://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1932528172/counterpunchmaga).

Israel’s principal target was the water resources in southern Lebanon.  The Israeli Army had tried to occupy southern Lebanon but was sent fleeing back into Israel by the Hezbollah militia.  Israel concluded that it would use their American vassal to overthrow Iraq, Syria, and Iran, the governments that supplied the Hezbollah militia.  Once the American puppet had overthrown the resistance to Israel’s expansion, Hezbollah would have no financial or military backing and could safely be attacked by the Israeli army, a military force good only for killing unarmed Palestinian women and children.

9/11 was their New Pearl Harbor.

General Wesley Clark, a 4-star US general who was Supreme allied Commander of NATO, revealed on television that a mere 10 days after 9/11 he was in the Pentagon and was told by a general who formerly worked under him that the decision had been made to invade Iraq.  This was before any of the alleged and disproven connections between Iraq and 9/11 had emerged from the neoconservatives’ manipulation of America’s presstitute media.

In other words the invasion of Iraq was planned long before 9/11.  It was there all ready for a false flag launch.

Gen. Clark said on TV a few weeks later after the Cheney/Bush Regime was bombing Afghanistan that he again saw his former subordinate in the Pentagon.  The general held up a memo that “describes how we’re going to take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and finishing off with Iran.”  https://www.globalresearch.ca/we-re-going-to-take-out-7-countries-in-5-years-iraq-syria-lebanon-libya-somalia-sudan-iran/5166 

General Clark, with 4-stars, was one of the anointed ones.  He thought he could tell the truth, but his revelation had no effect. I am surprised that he wasn’t arrested and tortured like Julian Assange for revealing “classified secrets.”

Osama bin Laden, a CIA asset used against the Soviets in Afghanistan, and Al Qaeda, a CIA-supported group of fighters used against the Soviets in Afghanistan, were blamed for the 9/11 attack despite bin Laden’s denial.  Everyone knows that real terrorists claim responsibility for everything that happens, whether they had anything to do with it or not.  It is the way that they build their movement. It makes zero sense for the alleged Terrorist Leader bin Laden to deny a victory unprecedented in history over the “worlds only superpower.”

According to obituary notices from all over the Middle East, Egypt, and Fox News, Osama bin Laden died from renal failure and a variety of other illnesses in December 2001.  I published the widespread obituary notices on my website.

Osama bin Laden was a man who died twice. His death in December 2001 did not stop the corrupt Obama regime from killing bin Laden in Abbottabad, Pakistan a decade later in 2011 when Obama, whose first term failure was threatening him with challengers to his renomination, desperately needed a vindication.

We were presented with one.  Obama and his top officials were shown fixed in front of a TV screen allegedly watching the US SEAL Team killing an undefended bin Laden. This false claim was a mistake as everyone wanted the film of bin Laden’s death released. Someone hadn’t given the PR event much thought. As there was no film, the Obama regime found itself on the spot. A correction was issued. It was a media false report that Obama and his team were watching a film of the SEALs’ assault on bin Laden’s compound.  The replacement story was that they were listening to reports of the attack on bin Laden.

More problems emerged.  Pakistani TV interviewed the next door neighbor of the alleged “bin Laden compound” about what he witnessed on the night in which US SEAL forces allegedly landed and killed Osama bin Laden and carried away his body to be buried at sea from a US aircraft carrier.

The next-door resident said that three helicopters flew above and only one landed. The language soldiers spoke from the helicopter that landed was “Pashto.”  Navy SEALS don’t know Pashto. There were no Navy SEALs present.

The witness—all of this was on Pakistani TV with links in my archives, assuming that they haven’t been erased by Google or some other servant of the Evil Empire—reported that the occupants of the single helicopter that landed went into the home of his friend, who most certainly was not bin Laden, and returned in 20 minutes.  He said that when the helicopter lifted off it exploded.  He said there were no survivors, that body parts were all over.  He said that the Pakistani military appeared and cleared the immediate area of observers. The witness said that no other helicopter landed.

The US government acknowledged that a helicopter exploded and fought with Pakistan to get the remains of the helicopter returned to the US. The Obama regime claimed that other helicopters landed and conveyed the SEAL team and bin Laden’s body to a US aircraft carrier.  The Pakistani eyewitnesses to the scene said no such thing happened. The only helicopter they reported on Pakistani television was the one that exploded, and there were no survivors. 

So, how did anyone escape with bin Laden’s body to be dumped into the sea off a US aircraft carrier?

Many problems resulted from this Obama regime false news stunt.

The 2 or 3 thousand US sailors on the alleged aircraft carrier from which bin Laden allegedly was given a burial at sea wrote home that there was no bin Laden burial from their ship.  Aircraft carriers, like all navy ships, have people awake all hours of the day and night on watch. A ship doesn’t just close down and go to sleep during which a secret burial can take place.

Moreover, as those of sufficient intelligence asked, why was the undefended  “mastermind” senselessly killed when he held so much valuable information?  Why was his body disposed of instead of presented as evidence?  Why dispose of the body that would prove that the person who died a decade ago still lived despite renal failure and was finally hunted down after a decade and murdered in a foreign country not subject to US law?  The presstitutes were not interested in the questions, and neither was the Obama regime.

Without a media, Americans are helpless.  There is no voice for them.  The CIA knew this, and the CIA’s subversion of the American media gave Washington total power.  The only explanations Americans hear are the ones that keep them brainwashed.  https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2019/10/27/the-end-of-accountable-government-is-close-at-hand/ 

Next we heard that the SEAL unit from which the SEAL team was allegedly drawn was loaded into a Vietnam era troop helicopter in violation of the rule against putting all members of a SEAL unit on the same aircraft, and this unarmored ancient helicopter was shot down over Afghanistan with all SEALs killed.

SEAL families raised a stink.  They reported receiving messages from their sons that something was wrong, that they felt endangered. The families wanted the explanation why the rule against putting all SEAL unit members on the same aircraft was broken.  Why were they flown over hostile territory in an antique helicopter?   I reported this information at the time.  It has since disappeared from the news. Obviously, the SEALs were asking one another, “were you on the mission that got bin Laden?”  And no one was.  So Washington had to eliminate the SEAL unit.

Washington produced an alleged SEAL team member who “killed bin Laden” and sent him on a speaking tour. A book was written. A movie was made. The CIA-obedient presstitute media gave high emphasis to the veracity of the false story.  Gullible Americans were pleased to hear that Osama bin Laden had been given his just deserts with a second death a decade after he had died from renal failure.

A population as naive as America’s has no prospect of discerning truth from fiction.  They are a lost people whose fate is tyranny.  And they will think that they live in truth.

Through its control over the media as evidenced by Operation Mockingbird and Udo Ulfkotte’s book ( https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2019/10/27/the-end-of-accountable-government-is-close-at-hand/ ), the CIA has succeeded in turning the American population into Stepford Wives.  This serves the Deep State’s domestic control, but Stepford Wives are not a force capable of confronting the Russian and Chinese armed forces.  The military/security complex has seized control by turning a proud nation into misinformed sheeple.

This history written in the closing months of the second decade of the 21st century is the last independent history available before the Age of Tyranny. 

PEPE ESCOBAR: The Road to Damascus: How the Syria War was Won

Source

consortiumnews.com

By Pepe Escobar
Special to Consortium News

October 18, 2019 

Following the Damascus-Kurdish alliance, Syria may become the biggest defeat for the Central Intelligence Agency since Vietnam, says Pepe Escobar.

 

What is happening in Syria, following yet another Russia-brokered deal, is a massive geopolitical game-changer. I’ve tried to summarize it in a single paragraph this way:

“It’s a quadruple win. The U.S. performs a face-saving withdrawal, which Trump can sell as avoiding a conflict with NATO ally Turkey. Turkey has the guarantee – by the Russians – that the Syrian Army will be in control of the Turkish-Syrian border. Russia prevents a war escalation and keeps the Russia-Iran-Turkey peace process alive.  And Syria will eventually regain control of the entire northeast.”

Syria may be the biggest defeat for the CIA since Vietnam.

Yet that hardly begins to tell the whole story.

Allow me to briefly sketch in broad historical strokes how we got here.

It began with an intuition I felt last month at the tri-border point of Lebanon, Syria and Occupied Palestine; followed by a subsequent series of conversations in Beirut with first-class Lebanese, Syrian, Iranian, Russian, French and Italian analysts; all resting on my travels in Syria since the 1990s; with a mix of selected bibliography in French available at Antoine’s in Beirut thrown in.

The Vilayets

Let’s start in the 19^thcentury when Syria consisted of six vilayets — Ottoman provinces — without counting Mount Lebanon, which had a special status since 1861 to the benefit of Maronite Christians and Jerusalem, which was a sanjak (administrative division) of Istanbul.

The vilayets did not define the extremely complex Syrian identity: for instance, Armenians were the majority in the vilayet of Maras, Kurds in Diyarbakir – both now part of Turkey in southern Anatolia – and the vilayets of Aleppo and Damascus were both Sunni Arab.

Nineteenth century Ottoman Syria was the epitome of cosmopolitanism. There were no interior borders or walls. Everything was inter-dependent.

Ethnic groups in the Balkans and Asia Minor, early 20th Century, Historical Atlas, 1911.

Then the Europeans, profiting from World War I, intervened. France got the Syrian-Lebanese littoral, and later the vilayets of Maras and Mosul (today in Iraq). Palestine was separated from Cham (the “Levant”), to be internationalized. The vilayet of Damascus was cut in half: France got the north, the Brits got the south. Separation between Syria and the mostly Christian Lebanese lands came later.

There was always the complex question of the Syria-Iraq border. Since antiquity, the Euphrates acted as a barrier, for instance between the Cham of the Umayyads and their fierce competitors on the other side of the river, the Mesopotamian Abbasids.

James Barr, in his splendid “A Line in the Sand,” notes, correctly, that the Sykes-Picot agreement imposed on the Middle East the European conception of territory: their “line in the sand” codified a delimited separation between nation-states. The problem is, there were no nation-states in region in the early 20^thcentury.

The birth of Syria as we know it was a work in progress, involving the Europeans, the Hashemite dynasty, nationalist Syrians invested in building a Greater Syria including Lebanon, and the Maronites of Mount Lebanon. An important factor is that few in the region lamented losing dependence on Hashemite Medina, and except the Turks, the loss of the vilayet of Mosul in what became Iraq after World War I.

In 1925, Sunnis became the de facto prominent power in Syria, as the French unified Aleppo and Damascus. During the 1920s France also established the borders of eastern Syria. And the Treaty of Lausanne, in 1923, forced the Turks to give up all Ottoman holdings but didn’t keep them out of the game.

Turkish borders according to the Treaty of Lausanne, 1923.

The Turks soon started to encroach on the French mandate, and began blocking the dream of Kurdish autonomy. France in the end gave in: the Turkish-Syrian border would parallel the route of the fabled Bagdadbahn — the Berlin-Baghdad railway.

In the 1930s France gave in even more: the sanjak of Alexandretta (today’s Iskenderun, in Hatay province, Turkey), was finally annexed by Turkey in 1939 when only 40 percent of the population was Turkish.

The annexation led to the exile of tens of thousands of Armenians. It was a tremendous blow for Syrian nationalists. And it was a disaster for Aleppo, which lost its corridor to the Eastern Mediterranean.

Turkish forces under entered Alexandretta on July 5, 1938.

To the eastern steppes, Syria was all about Bedouin tribes. To the north, it was all about the Turkish-Kurdish clash. And to the south, the border was a mirage in the desert, only drawn with the advent of Transjordan. Only the western front, with Lebanon, was established, and consolidated after WWII.

This emergent Syria — out of conflicting Turkish, French, British and myriad local interests —obviously could not, and did not, please any community. Still, the heart of the nation configured what was described as “useful Syria.” No less than 60 percent of the nation was — and remains — practically void. Yet, geopolitically, that translates into “strategic depth” — the heart of the matter in the current war.

From Hafez to Bashar

Starting in 1963, the Baath party, secular and nationalist, took over Syria, finally consolidating its power in 1970 with Hafez al-Assad, who instead of just relying on his Alawite minority, built a humongous, hyper-centralized state machinery mixed with a police state. The key actors who refused to play the game were the Muslim Brotherhood, all the way to being massacred during the hardcore 1982 Hama repression.

Secularism and a police state: that’s how the fragile Syrian mosaic was preserved. But already in the 1970s major fractures were emerging: between major cities and a very poor periphery; between the “useful” west and the Bedouin east; between Arabs and Kurds. But the urban elites never repudiated the iron will of Damascus: cronyism, after all, was quite profitable.

Damascus interfered heavily with the Lebanese civil war since 1976 at the invitation of the Arab League as a “peacekeeping force.” In Hafez al-Assad’s logic, stressing the Arab identity of Lebanon was essential to recover Greater Syria. But Syrian control over Lebanon started to unravel in 2005, after the murder of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri, very close to Saudi Arabia, the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) eventually left.

Bashar al-Assad had taken power in 2000. Unlike his father, he bet on the Alawites to run the state machinery, preventing the possibility of a coup but completely alienating himself from the poor, Syrian on the street.

What the West defined as the Arab Spring, began in Syria in March 2011; it was a revolt against the Alawites as much  as a revolt against Damascus. Totally instrumentalized by the foreign interests, the revolt sprang up in extremely poor, dejected Sunni peripheries: Deraa in the south, the deserted east, and the suburbs of Damascus and Aleppo.

Protest in Damascus, April 24, 2011. (syriana2011/Flickr)

What was not understood in the West is that this “beggars banquet” was not against the Syrian nation, but against a “regime.” Jabhat al-Nusra, in a P.R. exercise, even broke its official link with al-Qaeda and changed its denomination to Fatah al-Cham and then Hayat Tahrir al-Cham (“Organization for the Liberation of the Levant”). Only ISIS/Daesh said they were fighting for the end of Sykes-Picot.

By 2014, the perpetually moving battlefield was more or less established: Damascus against both Jabhat al-Nusra and ISIS/Daesh, with a wobbly role for the Kurds in the northeast, obsessed in preserving the cantons of Afrin, Kobane and Qamichli.

But the key point is that each katiba (“combat group”), each neighborhood, each village, and in fact each combatant was in-and-out of allegiances non-stop. That yielded a dizzying nebulae of jihadis, criminals, mercenaries, some linked to al-Qaeda, some to Daesh, some trained by the Americans, some just making a quick buck.

For instance Salafis — lavishly financed by Saudi Arabia and Kuwait — especially Jaish al-Islam, even struck alliances with the PYD Kurds in Syria and the jihadis of Hayat Tahrir al-Cham (the remixed, 30,000-strong  al-Qaeda in Syria). Meanwhile, the PYD Kurds (an emanation of the Turkish Kurds’ PKK, which Ankara consider “terrorists”) profited from this unholy mess — plus a deliberate ambiguity by Damascus – to try to create their autonomous Rojava.

A demonstration in the city of Afrin in support of the YPG against the Turkish invasion of Afrin, Jan. 19, 2018. (Voice of America Kurdish, Wikimedia Commons)

That Turkish Strategic Depth

Turkey was all in. Turbo-charged by the neo-Ottoman politics of former Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, the logic was to reconquer parts of the Ottoman empire, and get rid of Assad because he had helped PKK Kurdish rebels in Turkey.

Davutoglu’s Strategik Derinlik (“Strategic Depth’), published in 2001, had been a smash hit in Turkey, reclaiming the glory of eight centuries of an sprawling empire, compared to puny 911 kilometers of borders fixed by the French and the Kemalists. Bilad al Cham, the Ottoman province congregating Lebanon, historical Palestine, Jordan and Syria, remained a powerful magnet in both the Syrian and Turkish unconscious.

No wonder Turkey’s Recep Erdogan was fired up: in 2012 he even boasted he was getting ready to pray in the Umayyad mosque in Damascus, post-regime change, of course. He has been gunning for a safe zone inside the Syrian border — actually a Turkish enclave — since 2014. To get it, he has used a whole bag of nasty players — from militias close to the Muslim Brotherhood to hardcore Turkmen gangs.

With the establishment of the Free Syrian Army (FSA), for the first time Turkey allowed foreign weaponized groups to operate on its own territory. A training camp was set up in 2011 in the sanjakof Alexandretta. The Syrian National Council was also created in Istanbul – a bunch of non-entities from the diaspora who had not been in Syria for decades.

Ankara enabled a de facto Jihad Highway — with people from Central Asia, Caucasus, Maghreb, Pakistan, Xinjiang, all points north in Europe being smuggled back and forth at will. In 2015, Ankara, Riyadh and Doha set up the dreaded Jaish al-Fath (“Army of Conquest”), which included Jabhat al-Nusra (al-Qaeda).

At the same time, Ankara maintained an extremely ambiguous relationship with ISIS/Daesh, buying its smuggled oil, treating jihadis in Turkish hospitals, and paying zero attention to jihad intel collected and developed on Turkish territory. For at least five years, the MIT — Turkish intelligence – provided political and logistic background to the Syrian opposition while weaponizing a galaxy of Salafis. After all, Ankara believed that ISIS/Daesh only existed because of the “evil” deployed by the Assad regime.

The Russian Factor

Russian President Vladiimir Putin meeting with President of Turkey Recep Erdogan; Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs Sergei Lavrov standing in background, Ankara, Dec. 1, 2014 Ankara. (Kremlin)

The first major game-changer was the spectacular Russian entrance in the summer of 2015. Vladimir Putin had asked the U.S. to join in the fight against the Islamic State as the Soviet Union allied against Hitler, negating the American idea that this was Russia’s bid to restore its imperial glory. But the American plan instead, under Barack Obama, was single-minded: betting on a rag-tag Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), a mix of Kurds and Sunni Arabs, supported by air power and U.S. Special Forces, north of the Euphrates, to smash ISIS/Daesh all the way to Raqqa and Deir ez-Zor.

Raqqa, bombed to rubble by the Pentagon, may have been taken by the SDF, but Deir ez-Zor was taken by Damascus’s Syrian Arab Army. The ultimate American aim was to consistently keep the north of the Euphrates under U.S. power, via their proxies, the SDF and the Kurdish PYD/YPG. That American dream is now over, lamented by imperial Democrats and Republicans alike.

The CIA will be after Trump’s scalp till Kingdom Come.

Kurdish Dream Over

Talk about a cultural misunderstanding. As much as the Syrian Kurds believed U.S. protection amounted to an endorsement of their independence dreams, Americans never seemed to understand that throughout the “Greater Middle East” you cannot buy a tribe. At best, you can rent them. And they use you according to their interests. I’ve seen it from Afghanistan to Iraq’s Anbar province.

The Kurdish dream of a contiguous, autonomous territory from Qamichli to Manbij is over. Sunni Arabs living in this perimeter will resist any Kurdish attempt at dominance.

The Syrian PYD was founded in 2005 by PKK militants. In 2011, Syrians from the PKK came from Qandil – the PKK base in northern Iraq – to build the YPG militia for the PYD. In predominantly Arab zones, Syrian Kurds are in charge of governing because for them Arabs are seen as a bunch of barbarians, incapable of building their “democratic, socialist, ecological and multi-communitarian” society.

Kurdish PKK guerillas In Kirkuk, Iraq. (Kurdishstruggle via Flickr)

One can imagine how conservative Sunni Arab tribal leaders hate their guts. There’s no way these tribal leaders will ever support the Kurds against the SAA or the Turkish army; after all these Arab tribal leaders spent a lot of time in Damascus seeking support from Bashar al-Assad.  And now the Kurds themselves have accepted that support in the face of the Trukish incursion, greenlighted by Trump.

East of Deir ez-Zor, the PYD/YPG already had to say goodbye to the region that is responsible for 50 percent of Syria’s oil production. Damascus and the SAA now have the upper hand. What’s left for the PYD/YPG is to resign themselves to Damascus’s and Russian protection against Turkey, and the chance of exercising sovereignty in exclusively Kurdish territories.

Ignorance of the West

The West, with typical Orientalist haughtiness, never understood that Alawites, Christians, Ismailis and Druze in Syria would always privilege Damascus for protection compared to an “opposition” monopolized by hardcore Islamists, if not jihadis.  The West also did not understand that the government in Damascus, for survival, could always count on formidable Baath party networks plus the dreaded mukhabarat — the intel services.

Rebuilding Syria

The reconstruction of Syria may cost as much as $200 billion. Damascus has already made it very clear that the U.S. and the EU are not welcome. China will be in the forefront, along with Russia and Iran; this will be a project strictly following the Eurasia integration playbook — with the Chinese aiming to revive Syria’s strategic positioning in the Ancient Silk Road.

As for Erdogan, distrusted by virtually everyone, and a tad less neo-Ottoman than in the recent past, he now seems to have finally understood that Bashar al-Assad “won’t go,” and he must live with it. Ankara is bound to remain imvolved with Tehran and Moscow, in finding a comprehensive, constitutional solution for the Syrian tragedy through the former “Astana process”, later developed in Ankara.

The war may not have been totally won, of course. But against all odds, it’s clear a unified, sovereign Syrian nation is bound to prevail over every perverted strand of geopolitical molotov cocktails concocted in sinister NATO/GCC labs. History will eventually tell us that, as an example to the whole Global South, this will remain the ultimate game-changer.

Pepe Escobar, a veteran Brazilian journalist, is the correspondent-at-large for Hong Kong-based Asia Times. His latest book is “2030.” Follow him on Facebook.

On Psychopathy And Power

Source

medium.com

Caitlin Johnstone

Oct 14, 2019

Due to a very painful and disturbing revelation in my personal life I have had the unfortunate occasion to spend the last several days thinking a lot about psychopaths and what makes them tick. I don’t want to get into the hairy details at this time, but I would like to share some of the more general thoughts that have been coming up here on the matter.

It is interesting that psychopathy should have reached a dark tentacle into my life in the way that it did, given that the three years I’ve been at this gig have been spent writing more and more about the way our world is run by calculating manipulators who are devoid of empathy. I often say that we have found ourselves ruled by psychopaths because we have a system wherein (A) those who are willing to do anything to anyone are rewarded with immense wealth, and (B) immense wealth translates directly to immense political power. Add in the fact that studies have shown that wealth itself kills off empathy and compassion, and you’ve got yourself a perfect recipe for a plutocratic dystopia dominated by antisocial personality disorder.

I’m not really interested in getting into the specific clinical diagnoses of psychopathy and sociopathy for the purposes of this discussion. What I’m talking about here is a specific slice of humanity that is neurologically wired in such a way that they experience the world more as a series of puzzles which can be manipulated around to get them whatever they want regardless of who it hurts, rather than experiencing a world full of fellow sentient beings with whom you can have deep, meaningful connections and interactions. Not all people who are diagnosed as psychopaths are high-functioning enough to manipulate people at high levels, and not everyone who manipulates people in this way would necessarily be diagnosed as a psychopath or even a sociopath. Feel free to mentally substitute whatever term you prefer.

Whatever you want to call it, people who have this condition (and are able to avoid prison) tend to do quite well for themselves by our society’s standards. Because they don’t see other people as anything other than tools and resources, they don’t let empathy and compassion stand in their way when viciousness and exploitation will help them achieve their goals. Because they don’t value connections with other people, they don’t see narratives and descriptions as paths toward deeper understanding, but as tools which can be twisted and distorted in order to secure themselves more wealth, status, sex, or whatever else they want. They quickly rise to the top in corporate and financial settings, in media institutions, in government agencies, and in politics. In modern society this ability is a natural advantage that the rest of us simply cannot compete with.

But it’s not just our current iteration of society which elevates psychopaths to the top. A casual glance through recorded history all around the world reveals an essentially unbroken track record of genocide, slavery, torture, exploitation and degradation as far as the eye can see, with the driving characters time and again being depraved dominators, conquerors and mass murderers. Research some of the horrors that were inflicted upon the Aboriginal people of Australia and the indigenous populations of the Americas and you’ll see that the whole thing was driven by a total lack of empathy for those human beings. Throughout history our main problems have been caused by the way we keep designing systems which elevate psychopaths to positions of leadership, who then go on to make psychopathic decisions.

Given the fact that people who are indifferent to truth or human suffering have always been so adept at ascending to power positions, it’s hard to even imagine a society where we don’t find ourselves ruled by psychopaths. George RR Martin set out to tell a story about a cast of characters all vying for power in an epic game of thrones, and that story wound up being populated almost entirely by psychopaths and sociopaths. It makes for a compelling tale because it’s very believable based on what we all know deep down about human behavior patterns, but it’s also a relentless assault on the audience’s empathy center.

So what can be done, then? How can we ordinary, feeling, caring human beings protect ourselves from this segment of the population which has been driving us into disaster after disaster since the dawn of civilization before they get us all killed?

Psychopathic leaders have never had any trouble figuring out how to get rid of segments of the population who they deem problematic: they round them up and exterminate them. This would obviously be out of the question for many reasons, not the least because in order to implement it we’d need to become psychopaths ourselves. We’d be “curing” the sickness by becoming the sickness.

Passing a bunch of laws against manipulation and deception wouldn’t work either. Manipulators actually love rules and laws, because they can figure out how to manipulate them and use them to their advantage. Julian Assange is currently awaiting extradition hearings in Belmarsh Prison because a bunch of psychopathic manipulators decided to pretend that it was very, very important to respect a series of laws and rules ranging from bail protocol to whistleblower source protection to government bureaucracy to embassy cat hygiene, and they were able to engineer a result that just so happens to look exactly the same as imprisoning a journalist for exposing US war crimes. All the worst atrocities in human history have been perfectly legal.

I’ve seen some people advocating mandatory brain scans for anyone seeking a leadership position. It is true that a psychopath’s brain shows up differently from the rest of us on a PET scan, and it is possible to envision a future where the collective is so aware of the pernicious dance between psychopathy and power that such a policy might be set and enforced. The problem of course is that manipulators manipulate, and there are many ways to manipulate one’s way around such a system; they’ve been inserting themselves into unofficial leadership positions for ages, for example, which they’d never need to be tested for. Plutocrats, advisors and propagandists are all in unofficial leadership positions.

Maybe you’ve got your own ideas about this, but I personally can’t think of a single solution to the fundamental problem of psychopaths inserting themselves into positions of power which doesn’t involve drastic, unprecedented changes in our civilization and our culture. Even if you completely tore down capitalism, ended plutocracy and replaced the entire system with a government-planned economy, you would still have positions of power and the absolute certainty of psychopaths manipulating their way into those positions sooner or later.

I’m talking about changes as drastic as the end of anyone having any power over anybody at all. A society where the idea of having power over anybody became so culturally taboo that even an unequal power dynamic between spouses would be seen as outrageous and ugly, to say nothing of governments or police forces. Such a society is very far from what we’ve got now, but it would surely be a very inhospitable environment for psychopathy. There would be no positions of leverage for one to manipulate their way into in order to force others to give them what they want, and if you started trying to create one everybody would immediately point at you and yell “Hey! What are you doing? Stop that, that’s weird! If you want something from us you need to form consensual collaborative relationships with us, just like we’re all doing.”

It’s also possible to imagine a culture in which manipulation is seen as an unacceptable taboo which immediately draws public backlash in the same way. In such a culture children would learn from the youngest age what honest and sincere interaction looks like, with examples of deceit and manipulation clearly illustrated for them in all forms as something gravely disordered. Advertising would cease to exist in such a society, as would propaganda in all its forms. And psychopaths would be like fish out of water, because manipulation only works when it isn’t recognized as such.

One can also imagine a culture which values empathy, compassion and helping others instead of valuing wealth, accomplishment and conquest. In such a culture we’d see the ability to connect with people and work for the good of the whole elevated, rather than seeing the ability to do whatever it takes to claw your way to the top of the heap elevated. In such a society psychopathy would actually be an immense disadvantage, rather than an immense advantage.

And that, in my opinion, would be the marker of a healthy society: one in which psychopathy and sociopathy become grave mental handicaps that the afflicted need to actively seek help for. A society that is so empathic and collaborative that having a diagnosis of schizophrenia or bipolar disorder isn’t such a big deal because your neighbors work with you and help you with what you need rather than pushing you to conform and achieve, while having psychopathy or sociopathy is a debilitating disorder which will turn you into a pariah sleeping on park benches if you don’t get help. Right now we have the opposite: people with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and other serious mental illnesses are treated like worthless hindrances to a society which values achievement over empathy, while psychopaths and sociopaths almost never seek help unless it’s court-ordered.

A healthy society would flip this. It would reward the things psychopaths are unable to do, and it would reject the things that psychopaths excel at. We can actually look at what psychopaths are and are not good at, and from there kind of reverse-engineer an idea of what a wholesome society would look like.

Is such a society possible? I don’t know. I recently put together some evidence which seems to suggest that our species may be on the verge of a drastic shift in consciousness, which would be the only facilitating agent I can think of that would make such massive cultural changes feasible. We seem to be headed for either huge changes or extinction relatively soon, so if there’s a future humanity on the other side of what’s coming, it likely exists because it made extraordinary changes in both its behavior and in its relationship with the phenomenon of psychopathy. We’ll either make the jump or we won’t.

Thanks for reading! The best way to get around the internet censors and make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for my website, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, liking me on Facebook, following my antics on Twitter, checking out my podcast on either Youtube, soundcloud, Apple podcasts or Spotify, following me on Steemit, throwing some money into my hat on Patreon or Paypal, purchasing some of my sweet merchandise, buying my new book Rogue Nation: Psychonautical Adventures With Caitlin Johnstone, or my previous book Woke: A Field Guide for Utopia Preppers. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish or use any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge.

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