The idea that this was just laughed off and it didn’t lead to a much larger conversation about why this fuckface needs to be hauled off to The Hague is endlessly depressing. We are ruled by absolute psychopaths. https://t.co/J38ZirS0Hl
— Comrade Misty is Putin’s Buddy 🍀 (@SarcasmStardust) November 12, 2022
American psychos destroying every single "rule" that THEY established; willing to implode the global economy; provoking a global food shortage as THEY admitted it; and all that as an ideological crusade in favor of a barbaric neo-Nazi regime – is absolutely beyond the pale.
The world is now being controlled by a bunch of conspirators – billionaires who are using a potent mixture of pharmaceutical companies, left-wing extremists, greens, and climate change cultists to push the world into economic chaos.
Once they have destroyed the global economy, pushed up energy and food prices, created mass poverty, and murdered a few hundred million people they will offer to save us all with a world government and a world controlled by digital passports.
The billionaires and the Bilderberger members are clearly psychopaths.
But what about the political leaders around the world – Biden, Trump, Johnson, Macron, Trudeau, Putin, Morrison, the wretched woman in New Zealand, and the rest of them. Are they all psychopaths too?
Psychopaths are exceptionally selfish, constant liars, manipulative, callous, grandiose, and parasitic.
Psychopaths bully, they are never anxious, and they may be superficially likeable. (That’s how they got elected). They seem strong, calm and confident but they lack personal insight. They never show remorse.
Psychopaths are ruthless, manipulative and permanently dishonest. They are charming but they are remorseless in their dealings with others; they do things which normal people would regard as terrible. But they never feel guilty.
Throughout history, psychopaths have always had an advantage when it comes to seeking high office. Today’s political party systems, with their emphasis on superficial likeability, and an endless capacity for lying and deceit, make it easier for psychopaths to reach the top.
Around the world, a remarkably high proportion of Presidents and Prime Ministers end up in prison. That certainly suggests that they have criminal tendencies. I think they also show clear psychopathic tendencies.
Throughout history, the possession of psychopathic traits has proved a useful passport to high office. Men and women who are unfettered by moral scruples, who are prepared to lie or cheat their way to the top and who will make promises they know they cannot keep have a huge advantage over those held back by notions of fair play. Leaders who are psychopaths have huge advantages over more democratically inclined leaders. The possession of psychopathic traits is actually advantageous to a political leader. They give him or her more degrees of freedom in his control and manipulating of those under him and most particularly in his dealings with potential enemies.
As they age, psychopaths become more of a threat than ever. They get better at lying and better at convincing people that their intentions are good.
To the psychopath, kindness, humanity and sentimentality are all signs of weakness, there to be exploited. Psychopaths do not have consciences, in the way that the rest of us do and so they never suffer from the restraining influence of guilt.
So, is your country’s leader a psychopath?
I’m going to describe twelve traits which will enable you to decide if your leader is a psychopath. Just write down a YES for each time you think you recognise your leader’s traits. At the end of the questionnaire, just add up the number of times you answered YES.
Psychopaths are exceptionally selfish and egocentric; they don’t worry about other people’s feelings. They don’t think twice about cheating other people if it is to their advantage.
Psychopaths lie constantly (and are extremely good at it).Politicians tell big, deliberate, determined, self-serving lies. They know that if they just keep lying they will manage to fool most of the people most of the time. Especially if they do it with a smile and a few disarming words. A psychopath will keep lying for so long, with such persistence and with such protestations of honesty and innocence, that his listeners will begin to doubt their own interpretation of the truth.
‘It would never come into average people’s heads to fabricate colossal untruths,’ wrote Adolf Hitler. ‘And they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously.’
The psychopath knows that if he or she lies often enough, and with enough persistence and determination, then the lie will eventually become the truth.
Psychopaths are manipulative and skilled at persuading other people to do things for them. Psychopaths get a great kick out of manipulating people – whether they are friends, colleagues or family members. They begin by manipulating people through charm and persuasion but if those methods fail then they will manipulate through fear.
The psychopath only ever loves him or herself. The psychopath knows that it is possible to get what he or she wants by pretending to be a good and loyal lover or friend. And so they will do everything they can to build up that image. But the psychopath’s primary loyalty will be to him or herself. He thinks him or herself genuinely superior to everyone around him. In their mind they are the only person who truly matters.
Psychopaths are callous and indifferent to suffering. Psychopaths do not feel or show any empathy or genuine sympathy when others around them are suffering, though they will show fake sympathy when these seem appropriate.
Psychopaths bully and are abusive and don’t see any reason why they shouldn’t be, especially since they know from experience that bullying is a very effective way to get their own way.
Psychopaths are charming because they have learned to be attentive and to fake interest in others; but their interest is purely superficial. Their eyes quickly glaze over when someone else is talking about themselves, and they change the subject as quickly as they can.
Psychopaths are unable to experience love or show true compassion and may to go from one relationship to another. They will make declarations of love if they think they will benefit and they will weep what appear to be real tears if the occasion demands them. The older and more experienced a psychopath becomes the better able he will be at faking emotional responses. Psychopaths neglect their families because their only real concern is themselves. Psychopaths are constantly searching for excitement and may, therefore, engage in an unending series of relationships. They do this not because they are looking for love or romance, or even physical excitement, but because they enjoy the thrill of the chase and the thrill of cheating on their partners without being found out.
Psychopaths never take responsibility; they always blame others when things go wrong. If they make a mistake they will always point a finger at someone else – and blame them. Psychopaths never show remorse or guilt and do not ever care about the feelings of others; they never feel bad when they do bad things and they never feel ashamed. Their primary concern is that they do not get caught and find themselves forced to take responsibility for what they have done.
Psychopaths often make promises they know they cannot keep, and have no intention of keeping. They make the promises because they are convenient and useful and they enable them to get what they want, when they want it. Obligations and commitments mean nothing to psychopaths, and they feel no need to honour promises or principles unless there is some obvious benefit to themselves in doing so. They will remain unmoved by the knowledge that their actions are causing hardship and unhappiness for others.
Psychopaths are good at self-promotion. They have enormous self-belief and confidence and sometimes appear exceptionally ‘pushy’. Psychopaths can manipulate others calmly, coolly (and without any qualms) and they frequently do this in order to further their own careers. Since they never feel guilt or shame, psychopaths can frequently rise right to the top in their chosen field.
Psychopaths are often extremely ambitious. And they rise to the top because they can deal with problems, setbacks and disappointments far more effectively than ordinary folk. Psychopaths ignore or brush aside the sort of genuine worries that destroy ordinary people.
It is the mental strength of psychopaths which helps them to rise to the top and it is that strength, that unswerving, uncaring, committed determination to achieve their own ambitions, whatever the cost might be, that is such a danger both to the rest of us and to society as a whole. And psychopaths never apologise. When ordinary folk make serious mistakes they apologise, try to put things right and, quite probably, feel full of guilt.
Sensitive, caring individuals bend over backwards to make amends. But when psychopaths make mistakes they lie and lie and lie again. And they do it convincingly and without a blush. It never occurs to them to apologise. They don’t make any effort to put things right. And, unless it is completely unavoidable, they do not resign. Their ambition is all that matters.
The more of these traits that you recognised the more likely it is that your leader is a psychopath. If you noted eight or more then they’re definitely psychopathic.
You can try these questions out on other well-known figures. Tony Blair, Donald Trump, Klaus Schwab, Prince Charles, the Entitled Harry and that bloke with the growly dog who lives at the end of your street.
Often when we think of the word psychopath, we think of deranged serial killers that are hopefully locked up in prison for life.
While there are many psychopaths who kill for reasons that are unfathomable to most of us and who are indeed in prison, there is an even greater number roaming free in our society and often using their condition to their advantage in any way possible.
In fact, it is very likely that you know some – they might even be your colleagues.
Most of us do not know or work with any serial killers, at least not that we are aware of. So, what exactly is a psychopath and how can we define them? The dictionary definition is as follows:
“A person suffering from a chronic mental disorder with abnormal or violent social behavior.”
As you can probably tell, a lot more than just serial killers will fit into this broad definition. In fact, according to Canadian psychologist Dr. Robert Hare, a world-renowned expert on psychopathy, an estimated 1% of the Earth’s population is psychopathic and around 25% of the population of male inmates at federal correctional facilities are psychopathic.
Psychopathic Traits
It is important to note that, in contrast with the popular image of the ‘deranged psycho,’ psychopaths tend to be very well composed, take good care of their appearance and are very charming (think of Christian Bale as Patrick Bateman in American Psycho). Because of this you may have a difficult time spotting them out, as they are masters of deception and are able to fake a lot of the qualities that define regular people. Some other psychopathic traits, according to Hare’s Psychopath
Glib and superficial charm
Grandiose estimation of self
Need for stimulation
Manipulative and cunning
Complete lack of remorse or guilt
Pathological lying
Have a parasitic lifestyle, often latching onto and taking from others
Have a history of early behavioral problems
Overly impulsive
Are very irresponsible
Unable to accept responsibility for actions
Unable to commit to long-term relationships
History of juvenile delinquency
Display criminal versatility
Experienced a “revocation of conditional release”
Lacks realistic long term goals
History of promiscuous sexual behavior
Have poor behavioral controls
Are callous and lack empathy
Have a “shallow affect” (psychopaths show a lack of emotion when an emotional reaction is appropriate.)
You can actually rate yourself to find out if you are psychopath. On each criterion, the subject is ranked on a 3-point scale: (0 = item does not apply, 1 = item applies somewhat, 2 = item definitely applies). The scores are summed to create a rank of zero to 40. Anyone who scores 30 and above is most likely a psychopath. Hare has used this test and checklist to detect which inmates are psychopaths.
Snakes In Suits
What many of us don’t realize is that psychopaths actually thrive in the corporate world. Hare has actually co-authored a book with Dr. Paul Babiak on this topic entitled, Snakes In Suits: Understanding and Surviving the Psychopaths in Your Office. Psychopaths manipulate others to accrue power, sometimes pitting them against each other in an attempt to divide and conquer. They are often attracted to bigger, dynamic corporations with very little structure or supervision. They generally don’t work well in teams because they don’t like to share information or skills and it brings them joy to watch others fail. They are addicted to power, status and money. Sound familiar?
Sadly, the corporate world is set up to favor psychopathic traits such as fearlessness, dominant behavior and immunity to stress. Because of this, psychopaths often find themselves in these types of positions, and then have an easier time climbing the corporate ladder and obtaining positions of great power. This is where they can do real damage to society.
Are Psychopaths Running The World?
Not only as corporate heads do psychopaths find success in our modern-day society, but also within our governments and political system — often as front-line politicians. This may come as a shock to you, but when you really look at some of the atrocities that are taking place on our planet, and if you’ve ever wondered how things that are so inhumane could actually be happening, well, therein lies your answer.
When you consider the war, genocide, senseless murder of civilians, treatment of the indigenous cultures of the world, chemicals in our food, air and water supply, acts of “terrorism”, war crimes and so many other unjust and cruel actions which are often instigated by our political leaders, it becomes easy to see how psychopaths actually fit the requirements for these types of roles quite well. As mentioned before they are masters of deception, pathological liars and often quite charming.
We already know how many politicians are crooked, but perhaps its time to start looking at them with the psychopath checklist in mind so that we can be better equipped to protect not only ourselves but our society from their malicious acts.
But Can’t We Help Them?
It is natural for anyone who is an empath or those involved in spiritual work to have compassion for these individuals and feel compelled to help them overcome their psychopathic behavior. However, most research has pointed towards the understanding that psychopaths are born, not made and therefore cannot be cured. This is one of the main differences that separates sociopaths from psychopaths. Another is that sociopaths have a conscience, albeit a weak one, and will often justify something they know to be wrong. By contrast, psychopaths will believe that their actions are justified and feel no remorse for any harm done. Sociopaths are made, and have a higher likelihood of overcoming their condition. However, many of those with sociopathic behavior will find themselves in similar corporate positions.
Hare’s research discovered that by attempting to heal or help a psychopath, you might actually be strengthening their cunning abilities, as they will find a way to manipulate you into believing that they are remorseful and understand how their actions were wrong.
The best we can do is learn to recognize the traits of psychopaths and be sure to stay clear of their actions and behaviors to protect ourselves from the wake of their inevitable destruction.
The FBI announced that 79-year-old inmate Samuel Little has confessed to 93 murders over the course of 35 years.
(TMU) — When most people think of candidates for the dubious crown of most prolific American serial killer, names like Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy and the Green River Killer, Gary Ridgeway, come to mind. But while these men each had major reigns of terror that claimed dozens and dozens of lives, a new sadistic monster may claim the mantle of worst serial killer in U.S. history.
Last week, just in time for Halloween, the FBI announced that 79-year-old inmate Samuel Little has confessed to 93 murders over the course of 35 years.
Shockingly, Little was a free man as recently as 2012, when he was arrested on a narcotics charge in Kentucky and extradited to California. It was there that the LAPD linked his DNA to three murders, and in 2014 prosecutors won three consecutive life sentences against Little.
However, while the FBI’s Violent Criminal Apprehension Program (ViCAP) believed there were more victims, they didn’t imagine the number would soon balloon to nearly a hundred.
Over the course of several years, Texas Ranger James Holland visited Little in prison, conducting daily interviews and helping Little sketch chalk pastel portraits of the women he murdered. With the help of FBI agents who confirmed the victims, Little eventually confessed to murdering 90 women, most by strangulation.
“For many years, Samuel Little believed he would not be caught because he thought no one was accounting for his victims,”stated ViCAP analyst Christie Palazzolo. “Even though he is already in prison, the FBI believes it is important to seek justice for each victim—to close every case possible.”
A former boxer, Mr. Little lived a nomadic life, frequently moving to different cities and prowling poor neighborhoods. This lifestyle, in addition to the poor DNA analysis technology of previous decades, allowed Little to evade arrest. He also targeted marginalized women—predominately low-income African-American sex workers—who are often unlikely to draw expansive police investigations. In fact, many of the women were originally either unidentified or considered drug overdoses.
While Little was arrested dozens of times for armed robbery, rape, and kidnapping, he had served less than 10 years in prison prior to his 2012 arrest, after which police were finally able to link him to three murders that happened in the late 1980s.
The FBI is still trying to identify all of Little’s victims. The agency is working against the clock as Little’s age and declining health and memory are factors. Agents recently released to the public five sketches of victims who have not yet been identified.
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.
Ryan Murphy, an economist at Southern Methodist University, recently published a working paper in which he ranked each of the states by the predominance of—there’s no nice way to put it—psychopaths. The winner? Washington in a walk. In fact, the capital scored higher on Murphy’s scale than the next two runners-up combined.
“I had previously written on politicians and psychopathy, but I had no expectation D.C. would stand out as much as it does,” Murphy wrote in an email…
On a national level, it raises the troubling question as to what it means to live in a country whose institutions are set up to reward some very dubious human traits. Like it or not, we’re more likely than not to wind up with some alarming personalities in positions of power.
One of the most frustrating aspects of modern American politics — and the culture in general — is our all-encompassing fixation on the superficial. It’s also one of the main reasons I have very little interest in presidential politics, which basically consists of a bunch of billionaire friendly puppets auditioning to become the next public face of imperial oligarchy. Though I understand the desire for quick fixes, our focus on highlighting and mitigating only the symptoms of societal decay as opposed to the root causes, ensures we’ll never achieve the sort of positive paradigm-level shift necessary to bring humankind forward.
The truth of the matter is incentives rule the world, and if we look at some of the most pernicious and predatory areas of our socio-economic reality, including (but not limited to) the financial sector, the defense industry, intelligence agencies and healthcare, we find a slew of incentives that handsomely reward sociopathic behavior, while penalizing ethical, conscious action beneficial to society at large. Notice it’s always the whistleblowers who end up imprisoned or hunted down.
In the economic realm, if we think about the idea of a competitive free market, the primary reason the profit incentive exists and is widely accepted is the implicit understanding that people should be incentivized to create a product or service that benefits the public at large. While we still have remnants of this at play within the modern U.S. economy, much of the “wealth” attained these days is a direct consequence of rent-seeking, parasitic behavior and corruption of one kind or another. The reason is pretty simple. It’s incentivized.
When you have a financial fraud crime spree like the one witnessed earlier this century and your response is to bail out the criminals and ensure no executives go to jail, it’s essentially a gigantic bell ringing in the ears of every scoundrel on the planet. It’s open season on the general public for sociopaths. The Obamas weren’t super wealthy when Barack became President, yet they’re now worth an estimated $40 million (likely more given the size of their real estate purchases). The same thing happened to the Clintons. They’ve reportedly earned $240 million since Lolita express frequent flier Bill left office.
The most surefire way to succeed in America today is to be a high-functioning sociopath who scratches the backs of other high-functioning sociopaths. As such, the most pressing problem at a root level is that our economy and society incentivizes sociopathic behavior by systematically funneling sociopaths into positions of unaccountable power. If this sounds insane it’s because it is. The very structure of how our society functions is in fact insane.
These are the people running the show. They infect every country, every industry, every government. All the halls of power. Until we figure out a way to marginalize humanity’s sociopaths rather than hand them the reins of power globally, we’ll continue to repeat the current pointless, destructive cycle.
Michael Krieger@LibertyBlitz
Yes, the recurrent problem is a very small percentage of sociopaths in society always get into power.
These networks seems to spontaneously arise in all cultures. Look at Russia, China, the Middle East, Africa. Humans have an innate desire to dominate and control.
I’m certain the current mainstream political discussion in the U.S. isn’t serious because so few people are focused on the structure of society itself. There’s very little focus on incentives, on the fact that our entire economy functions as a promotion mechanism for sociopaths. No amount of tinkering around the edges is going to dramatically transform the human experience into something more positive until we figure out a way to make society itself resistant to sociopath takeover.
Significantly, one of the most in your face examples of sociopath dominance relates to imperial military policy, which has nothing to do with national defense and everything to do with national offense. It’s simply about utilizing state murder to advance power and profit for a few. The incentives are completely backwards, which is why it never gets better.
There are few things a human being can do more evil and depraved than lying a nation into war, yet that’s precisely what the proponents of the Iraq war did. More significantly, what consequences have befallen the proponents of that war? Increased fame and fortune in most cases. In fact, one of them is currently the leading contender for the Democratic Party nomination for President.
When you incentivize murderous behavior, you get more of it. Those who stand to benefit most from war should also have the most to lose, but our current system functions in the exact opposite way.
Apropos of war chatter with Iran, here’s some quality war-related trolling. In 1935, Congressman Thomas O’Malley introduced a bill mandating that in case of war the Army draft the wealthiest men in the country and put them near the greatest posts of danger by order of income.
All that said, perhaps the most concerning instance of perverse incentives in society today can be found in the relationship between the national security state and average citizens. The way it works, and it’s rapidly getting worse, is you the individual have zero right to privacy while the national security state can classify what the CIA director ate for lunch. Those with the most power are subject to the least transparency, while the powerless masses are subject to mass surveillance. This unaccountable, authoritarian structure will continue to ensure the worst people alive end up in the highest echelons of power. What self-respecting sociopath wouldn’t be attracted to a system where you get to exercise total dominance over hundreds of millions of people with zero accountability? It’s like bees to honey.
If you build a house with a bad foundation you’re going to have problems. The same thing can be said about civilizations. We need to admit we live a world that incentivizes the worst amongst us to attain all meaningful positions of power.
Begging a sociopath for scraps of food might help you survive another day, but it won’t result in sustainable long-term progress. We need to see sociopaths for the societal cancer they are and completely reorient our incentive structure in order to reward conscious, cooperative behavior as opposed to ruthless parasitism. Change the incentives and you’ll change the outcome.
“Russia has warned that the escalating tensions in the Gulf could spark a catastrophic war. Potentially a war in the tinderbox region could lead to World War III.”
“It is insane and gut-wrenchingly tragic that world peace is being jeopardized by idiots like Hunt, Johnson and their puppet master in Washington. The only long-term solution is for the whole rotten political class in Britain, and the US, to be thrown out by popular revolt.”
“Lamentably, Britain’s shambolic politics and its venal politicians are playing with fire in their pathetic plans for personal self-aggrandizement of power.”
@ AP Photo / Marcos Moreno
“As Iranian President Hassan Rouhani said this week, there would be no need for the US or Britain to “protect shipping” in the Gulf if these two states simply respected international law and norms of diplomacy.”
Like a person going up in an escalator while asserting they are going down, the British foreign secretary Jeremy Hunt has a bizarre way of trying to assure Iran that war is not on the cards.
Hunt, who is vying to become Britain’s new prime minister, stated on camera that “he wants to de-escalate” the danger of a military confrontation with Iran over mounting tensions in the Persian Gulf.
That was only days after he vowed to dramatically increase Britain’s military spending and in particular, boost the country’s naval firepower – citing Iran as the main threat to British commercial shipping interests.
It also follows news that London has ordered a second warship to patrol the Persian Gulf. Earlier this week a British Royal Navy frigate reportedly challenged Iranian military vessels (three small boats) after they allegedly tried to impede a British oil tanker entering the narrow Strait of Hormuz. Iran vehemently denied any such interference by its boats and claimed that Britain and the US were engaging in a provocation.
Given that the Pentagon has announced plans to send an international coalition of warships to the Gulf “over the next two weeks”, under the guise of protecting commercial shipping from alleged Iranian threats, it must certainly look to Iran like the “war escalator” is speeding upwards.
Hunt has previously asserted that British forces would join in any American military attack on Iran. The resonance of past Anglo-American skullduggery against Iran is no doubt palpable to most Iranians.
There seems little doubt that Hunt is playing the “hard military man” card in his grubby contest with Boris Johnson to become the next prime minister. Conservative Party members are due to vote later this month on who is to replace the hapless Theresa May.
Bumbling Boris is the favourite to win the party race. But Hunt is making a last-gasp bid to rally the rank-and-file with seeming credentials of being a “tough leader”.
This week he wrote in a newspaper oped: “As the son of a naval officer, I know a little of the sacrifices of these individuals and of their families back home.”
He then promised that, if elected prime minister, he would ramp up military spending by 25 per cent, or by £15 billion, over the next five years. He claimed the tensions in the Gulf with Iran are “proof” that Britain needs to overhaul its maritime forces.
That exorbitant indulgence of military spending will likely wreak havoc on public services and prolong years of economic austerity on ordinary Britons. But such is the ambition of Hunt to get into 10 Downing Street, it’s a devastating price he seems willing to make British citizens pay.
However, more damning is Hunt’s reckless gamble from inflaming tensions with Iran. Sending more naval forces to the Gulf at a time of knife-edge fears about a war breaking out is ludicrous, if not criminally irresponsible.
Over the past two months, there have already been numerous incidents of alleged sabotage on shipping in the strategically important Gulf which the US has blamed on Iran. An American spy drone was shot down on June 20 by the Iranians after it allegedly violated Iran’s airspace. That incident nearly resulted in, reportedly, Trump ordering airstrikes.
The seizure last week by British commandoes of an Iranian oil tanker off Gibraltar has added to fraught nerves in the region. More so because Tehran contends that seizure to be an illegal “act of piracy” orchestrated by Washington and London. The refusal by Britain to release the cargo of two million barrels of oil – based on dubious claims of enforcing EU sanctions against Syria – would also seem to be a calculated insult to provoke Iran.
From Iran’s point of view, the British are permitted to hijack oil ships, but whenever its patrol boats even as much as approach a British tanker near its territorial waters, then London and Washington are crying “foul”. The flagrant hypocrisy is in itself another provocative goading.
Let’s be clear: the Buffoonish Boris Johnson would be equally as deplorable as the Silly Hunt. Both of them are unscrupulous sycophants to America’s President Trump and his crazed warmongering towards Iran.
Russia has warned that the escalating tensions in the Gulf could spark a catastrophic war. Potentially a war in the tinderbox region could lead to World War III.
Lamentably, Britain’s shambolic politics and its venal politicians are playing with fire in their pathetic plans for personal self-aggrandizement of power.
Hunt’s double-think posturing of “escalating to de-escalate” is a sure sign that this Tory toff should not be heading to Downing Street, but rather to a padded cell. Johnson could also qualify for a cell next door.
The backdrop to resolving the current madness for endangering global peace seems blindingly obvious. Washington needs to abide by the 2015 international nuclear treaty with Iran, lift the sanctions crushing the Iranian economy, and remove all warships from the Persian Gulf.
As Iranian President Hassan Rouhani said this week, there would be no need for the US or Britain to “protect shipping” in the Gulf if these two states simply respected international law and norms of diplomacy.
It is insane and gut-wrenchingly tragic that world peace is being jeopardized by idiots like Hunt, Johnson and their puppet master in Washington. The only long-term solution is for the whole rotten political class in Britain, and the US, to be thrown out by popular revolt.
Views and opinions expressed in the article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of Sputnik.
Something spoken of only in whispers is talk of a military coup in Washington. Few are aware of the factions in America’s military such as “Dominionists” who run the Air Force or did until former Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel and Chairman JCOS Marty Dempsey “eliminated them.”
You see, since the 1980s, religious extremism took root in America’s service academies and today’s most senior Pentagon brass is deeply infiltrated with members of an apocalypse cult that took root in America’s South during the 1930s, now thinly disguised as “Evangelical Christianity.”
Though most at the head of this movement are simply charlatans and deceivers, among their number are some who could accurately be described as psychopaths, a term that a number of medical professionals have applied to Donald Trump.
The issue of Trump is more complicated than many would have it, with power bases inside the US that few if any ever see manipulating Trump, playing on his fears and grandiosity. Trump well recognized that the CIA could not be trusted and turned to the conspiracy media, perhaps not recognizing that it too was under the control of intelligence agency factions, though not necessarily American in origin.
America has not been made “great” again, no parade can undo the blithering, the incompetence, the embarrassing idiocy and the generous dose of insanity that now is the American “brand.”
To succinctly describe the point, we turn to America’s most defining July 4th event, the year is 1863, the place is Gettysburg, a town in Pennsylvania, where a battle ensued that made the world we know today. Here, a fictional quote attributed to General Longstreet, one of General Lee’s corps commanders:
“Southern women like their men religious and a little mad.” ― Michael Shaara, The Killer Angels
Let’s go back to the Bush 43 presidency and an incident pushed from the history books, now veiled in lies or simply censored out of existence. Lies are the norm in America, the USS Liberty, the Tonkin Gulf, the search for imaginary WMDs or the equally imaginary “underground terror cities” former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said existed “in dozens” across Afghanistan.
Today, we think “Skripal” or “MH17.” No lie is too big. Thus, we are drawn to the summer of 2007 when an engineered try for Armageddon nearly succeeded.
On August 29, 2007, in an America at war with the world under neocon rule, an America deeply influenced by a Washington awash with Southern men, very religious and more than a bit mad, an incident now forgotten, occurred.
A B 52 aircraft, loaded with 6 AGM cruise missiles, each tipped with a 150-kiloton thermonuclear warhead, simply disappeared. It had taken off from Minot AFB in North Dakota, a base that also commanded much of America’s ICBM strike capability as well.
It was next spotted over Puerto Rico, heading for the Middle East, and sources tell us the eventual target was Iran.
The plane was intercepted by F15’s and turned back, landing at Barksdale AFB in Louisiana.
Eventually, in response, all nuclear missile crews were replaced and all nuclear authority for the entire United States Air Force was removed and placed under the US Army. Those involved, some were “retired,” others demoted, transferred, some charged with crimes like fraud or sexual assault. Others died in accidents or killed themselves, or so we are told.
Under Donald Trump and John Bolton, a war within the military command structure is now underway as presidential orders to use nuclear weapons against Syria and Iran have been countermanded by the military. Reports that “Trump changed his mind” are false.
July 4, 2019, America celebrates its independence. Along America’s borders, as the public is seeing in the endless photographs hitting the media, families with small children are piled into cages, fed garbage, taunted and abused, not a few people but thousands. We call this tyranny. Those who allow this are evil.
Some time ago, however, those who do such things, medical professionals intended to cure or those of us trained in “profiling,” created a methodology for expression of paradigm, a tool of analysis of what we call the “spectrum of social psychopathy.
In the business of intelligence and forecasting, such tools were applied to leaders. Which ones are crazy? How can we force this or that leader to self-destruct, using the controlled press, false flag terrorism, sanctions or even covert administration of psychotropic drugs. The few interested in such things, often self-proclaimed watchdogs, know of MK Ultra or Operation Northwoods, two names of hundreds of such endeavours.
At the heart of the problem is the nature of those who see themselves as leaders. Truth be told, no natural leader would choose American politics or even the military where “sucking up” and “selling out” is the only path to succeed. There have been exceptions, like George Patton or John Kennedy, but wait, weren’t they both murdered?
Natural leaders coach sports teams, some excel in commercial ventures. More likely, however, they will remain unseen and unknown. Perhaps there is no one worth leading and no place worth leading anyone to anymore.
This brings to mind the term Colonel David Hackworth used to describe America’s military leadership, “the perfumed princes of the Pentagon,” their chests bestrewn with medals and award for honors achieved at cocktail parties.
Crazy is as Crazy Does
As we have set things forth here, we then turn to behavioral analysis, the pseudoscience of predicting the future based on analysis of the unstable and incompetent and their actions when faced with chaos.
The toolsets used by such individuals, and I assure you there are detailed profiles out there, endless millions spent compiling them, blind rage, guesswork, blaming others, pathological deception and, as we see in Trump, likely early stage dementia.
Who are the “crazies?”
There are some notoriously sane leaders out there, Putin for one, Netanyahu for another. Many won’t like what they do or say but they aren’t insane.
Theresa May, Boris Johnson, certainly no overt signs of personality disorder but analysis of their historical reactions to issues yields a very different answer.
In the US, we find fertile ground, even Donald Trump cites Bolton and Pompeo as delusional.
With Bush 43 there were factors of substance abuse and a private life rumored to be very much at odds with his espoused values, this and extremely limited ability.
As for Trump, despite his endless efforts to prove himself unstable every time he speaks, his moments of clarity, his attacks on the press, the CIA and obvious inequities in the world’s economic system, are among the few accurate statements ever to come out of Washington.
Those who would have him turn to the “real leaders” instead of his son in law and daughter are themselves obviously insane.
“You want a friend in Washington? Get a dog.” Harry S Truman
Conclusion
Would the military overthrow Trump to prevent a war with Iran that all military experts around the world agree that America would lose? Who gains if America is pushed into obscurity, Russia, China or even Israel?
America’s fragile economy, ever accelerating levels of debt, declining standard of living, rising taxes, internal strife, this is not a nation capable of a ground conflict in the Middle East with a nation whose military is a thousand times stronger than Iraq was in 2003.
Yet there are even those in America who would see their own nation laid low, stripped bare. There is nothing more dangerous than a wounded predator, in this case, a nation in collapse with a massive arsenal of strategic nuclear weapons.
These are the “mad” we speak of, they infect Washington like a virus and no institution remains that can stand against them, perhaps a “cult of sanity” in the military that none have seen or can prove exists?
To what extent do Putin and Netanyahu influence Trump? Neither are guided by love of America and little is known of their vision of a world with America “on the ropes.”
The fear many Americans have is that a powerful America may well not be such a good thing, that whatever “Americans” are, the control of America long ago fell under what is now termed the Deep State.
Past this is the real “wild card,” the madness that manifests itself each day wherever we turn.
Gordon Duff is a Marine combat veteran of the Vietnam War that has worked on veterans and POW issues for decades and consulted with governments challenged by security issues. He’s a senior editor and chairman of the board of Veterans Today, especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook.”
I celebrate the late, great Peter Falk for his legendary “populist” characterization of Lt. Columbo, relentless nemesis to the Gucci’d “above the law” types who tried to use power and money to cavalierly escape responsibility for profound crimes against humankind.
I celebrate the Columbo TV series’ enactments of takedowns of the down-and-dirty high-and-mighties, since we are now seriously in the Season (or maybe we should call it Age) of the “High Functioning Sociopath” (so defiantly in your face during the Bush and Obama eras (let’s acknowledge bipartisan amorality) and now reaching epic dimensions in the ethical freakshow of Trump).
Our economy captured by them, our quality of life and that of our children and their children, etc., drastically diminished by them, our planet doomed by them, large masses of our global family killed, maimed and/or displaced by them and their “profits over human welfare” gratuitous and profound violent evil and all perpetrated with seemingly little legal, economic and even reputational consequence, thanks to crony capitalism and its post-morality, mis-informing and/or un-informing, conscience beveling, corporate media.
Maybe the only comfort we of awakened consciences and minds can glean is from a spiritual speculation of the risks to their immortal souls?
I confess, I find myself praying more and more not so much for the existence of a heaven, but a horrendous hell for the obscenely wealthy and obscenely criminal rat bastards of the universe.
We desperately need populist heroes, in real life and in art! We need them from past, present and future dimensions.
In the Columbo shows, you might remember how the amoral and murdering monsters did their best to finesse their way out of unspeakable, ends-justifies-any-means deeds. However, Columbo was like the proverbial terrier with a bone. We as viewers enjoyed the ultimate justice, the comeuppance of the smug, mendacious, callous, deadly and always privileged villains by show’s end.
Columbo wasn’t ever dazzled and conned by the money, the power or the fame of the sociopathic gamesman or gameswoman. He would sniff out their guilt early on and hover, hover, hover, question, question, question and then, that “just one more thing,” crime-cracking question.
What was such a kick was watching the elite’s preliminary dismissal of Columbo as a non-threatening, crass, working class, in-way-over-his-head, amiable schlub change to a begrudging respect and fear as the high-functioning sociopath realizes his or her ingenious, perfect-crime blueprint was not Columbo-proof.
Falk’s character counterpointed the moral shamelessness of the guilty, upscale criminal with his own, endearing shamelessness at being a non-rich, working class Joe, clunkily invading golden-gated communities to uphold justice.
Columbo would at times awkwardly gush over the opulence, the fame, the power he would stumble upon, while at the same time asserting pride over the satisfying symbols of his world — that clunker of a car, a hearty bowl of chili, or even a good deal on a less than $20 pair of shoes.
Columbo felt comfortable and entitled showing up anywhere despite, as one character declared, “looking like an unmade bed.” He was a “substance” not style kinda guy. (“Substance over style,” imagine that, Barack?)
Columbo’s ever-present and ridiculous for southern California raincoat, the ever-nursed “would you mind not smoking that here” cigar and a never-present gun!
God bless you, Peter Falk. I can use the catharsis from still seeing your Columbo give it to the smug, mendacious rat bastards, even if it is all on a small DVD or YouTube screen. Hail to your inspiring role-modeling of a strong and indomitable moral will, mischievous sense of humor and ever-dazzling display of connect-the-dots intelligence.
***
I would love to let loose a herd of us Columbo “channelers” on our millionaire/billionaire controlled Congress, courts, executive branch, and corporate gangster puppeteers with their sell out media hacks. Plain-speaking, citizen activists — people with humble life styles and a basic Golden Rule moral sensibility. People to help make that desperately needed paradigm shift from a US government of patriarchy to one of humanism. From might makes right, competition, win/lose violent engagements, profits over people killer gamesmanship to a social contract founded on humanism reflecting partnership, cooperation, win/win conflict resolution, empathy, and the manifestation of a collective soul and conscience rather than a xenophobic collective ego.
Alas, I gotta say, those are BIG, less than twenty dollar Columbo shoes to fill by those of us willing to exercise our consciences and courage.
Consider what we have to lose if we don’t take on such a fight, however.
Can a government of, by and for psychopaths exist when the vast majority of individuals governed by such a group can be said to be relatively normal? Psychologist Andrew Lobaczewski believed that it could, outlined the factors that allow for its functioning, and coined a term for such a social structure: a pathocracy. On this week’s show we will be delving deeper into the workings of pathological groupings – groupings that wield enormous amounts of power both overtly, and covertly, and over populations both large and small.
Hindsight is 20/20 when we look back at the acts of the 20th century’s most notorious and dangerous political movements. But what did those systems anticipate about certain trends we see today? What, if anything, about the psychological health of an individual – or a whole society – can be strengthened to ensure that an oppressive and inhuman power structure doesn’t take the reins completely? And if a bonafide pathocracy has assumed control of a population, how can the mere act of seeing it for what it assists us in dealing with it?
Harrison Koehli co-hosts SOTT Radio Network’s MindMatters, and is an editor for Red Pill Press. He has been interviewed on several North American radio shows about his writings on the study of ponerology. In addition to music and books, Harrison enjoys tobacco and bacon (often at the same time) and dislikes cell phones, vegetables, and fascists (commies too).
Born and raised in New York City, Elan has been an editor for SOTT.net since 2014 and is a co-host for MindMatters. He enjoys seeing and sharing what’s true about our profoundly and rapidly changing world.
Corey Schink was born and raised in the Midwestern United States, where he worked on farms and as a welder, musician, and social worker. His interests in government, philosophy and history led to his writing for SOTT in 2012 and to becoming a SOTT editor and SOTT Radio co-host in 2014. He now resides in North Carolina, where he enjoys the magnificent views of the Appalachian Mountains.
“It is agonizing to witness the mass murder of a heroic and progressive Venezuelan people, by a psychopathic capitalism which has not one iota of human decency, and wallowing in its cannibalistic behavior, desecrates the very concept of human rights. But that is the essence of monopoly capitalism, whose “highest” stage is fascism.”
April 25: Foreign Minister Arreaza Describes Excruciating Suffering of the Venezuelan People Resulting From US Sanctions;
April 26: US Violates its Obligation as UN Host Country and Sanctions the Foreign Minister for Speaking Truth to Power
“We are not only on the wrong side, we are the wrong side.” Pentagon Papers Expert Daniel Elllsberg
“American sanctions are deliberately aiming to wreck Venezuela’s economy and thereby lead to regime change. It’s a fruitless, heartless, illegal, and failed policy, causing grave harm to the Venezuelan people.” Professor Jeffrey Sachs
US Maneuvers at the United Nations
The entire official schedule of meetings of the United Nations Commission on Disarmament – April 8 through April 29 – was forced to cancel because the United States, in violation of its obligations as host country, refused a visa to important Russian delegates.
On April 25, Venezuela’s brilliant, charismatic Foreign Minister Jorge Arreaza (left) detailed, in a United Nations press briefing, the horrific suffering the Venezuelan people are enduring as a result of the dictatorship of US sanctions against his country, and US terrorization of each and every global institution and nation which the US is demanding sever all economic and diplomatic ties with Venezuela.
In a stealthy, deadly march to global dictatorship, and consistent with its attempt to subjugate the United Nations to the interests of US oligarchic power, the United States is abusing its membership in the United Nations, attempting to force regime change on Venezuela, using criminal methods in violation of the Hague Convention, the Geneva Convention, the United Nations Charter, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Charter of the Organization of American States, the Venezuelan Constitution, and in violation of U.S. law itself.
The U.S. maneuvers to destroy the Maduro government’s UN accreditation, and replace it with their puppet Guaido are horrifying and Machiavellian, and, quite realistically, since the US has absolutely no scruples, nor any respect for international law, there is an ominous possibility that they may succeed. Numerous diplomats of many countries, with whom I have spoken, are terrified by the sanctions the US just placed on the Venezuelan Foreign Minister, recognizing the threat to their own sovereignty, and sophisticated Iranian specialists delineated the dangerous possibilities the US has to use this method to force out the Venezuelan delegation to the UN, and de facto denude the Maduro government’s access to the UN. If the US succeeds in this criminal scheme, the credibility of the UN will be entirely and irreparably destroyed, as the many diplomats with whom I have spoken have confirmed. Many delegates are now saying that the UN would be better based in another more reliable and respectful country. Venezuela is Chairman of the Non-Aligned Movement, an organization of 120 member states. For the US to sanction her Foreign Minister is an unconscionable and intolerable abuse of the host country status.
The US has, furthermore, forged another mafia-style organization of flunkey Latin American “governments” which give every indication of becoming a new Operation Condor, that systematically organized engine of murder arranged by Augusto Pinochet and Henry Kissinger, (image left) an international organized criminal plan to exterminate all progressive and humanitarian efforts throughout Latin America and beyond.
Operation Condor orchestrated the slaughter of Chilean former Foreign Minister Orlando Letelier in Sheridan Circle, Washington, DC in 1976. Letelier bled to death after a car bomb arranged by Anti-Castro Cuban terrorists tore off his legs. An American girl working for the Institute of Policy Studies, Ronni Moffett was also killed in that terrorist action. In Argentina, Chilean General Carlos Prats was murdered when his Buenos Aires home was bombed; in Rome, ChileanSenator Bernardo Leighton’s wife was crippled by an assassin’s bullet intended for him; Operation Condor arranged the murder of former progressive Bolivian President Torres in Argentina.
Diabolic Methods Used by the US to Wreck Venezuela
In a colossal report entitled: “Economic Sanctions as Collective Punishment: The Case of Venezuela,” and corroborating everything stated by Foreign Minister Jorge Arreaza, economist Jeffrey Sachs and Mark Weisbrot describe the diabolic methods used by the United States to wreck Venezuela and discredit socialism, resulting in the deliberate murder of at least 40,000 Venezuelan people, including children, the elderly, the infirm and other of the most vulnerable civilians. This is a systematic and deliberate policy of the US government, a heinous plan to exterminate socialism and massacre the Venezuelan people in order to steal their oil, a spectacular act of piracy brazenly conducted with the collusion of obedient puppets in Western Europe and Canada, and craven, obsequious Latin American states whose shameful obedience to Washington is breathtaking.
Complete Blockade
Washington is now threatening to completely blockade and sanction Cuba to force that country to sever relations with Venezuela. Nicaragua is, of course, also in the crosshairs.
Yesterday there was a failed coup, provoked by the Quisling Juan Guaido, (image right with Lopez) who incited a military revolt to violently overthrow the democratically elected government of Nicholas Maduro. If Joseph Biden or Bernie Sanders, or any American citizen advocated the violent overthrow of the US government, they would be imprisoned and/or executed. It is astounding that the Manchurian candidate Juan Guaido, advocating the violent overthrow of the Venezuelan government, is allowed to roam free, throughout Venezuela. This is incontestable proof of the impeccably democratic character of the Maduro government. And perhaps it is proof of Maduro’s strength and trust in the Venezuelan people. But Maduro’s life is at risk for his country. During yesterday’s emergency, Venezuelan Ambassador Samuel Moncada convened a UN press conference, and skillfully replied to often slanted and biased questions for which Moncada was well prepared, and had no doubt anticipated.
The US government is disintegrating, and has been for many years, with the current administration rife with internecine warfare. The French government is confronting an incipient popular revolution of the Yellow Jackets, the British government stymied by Brexit and separatist movements threatening the survival of the “United Kingdom.” It is only with the most flagrant arrogance that they criticize Venezuela.
It is agonizing to witness the mass murder of a heroic and progressive Venezuelan people, by a psychopathic capitalism which has not one iota of human decency, and wallowing in its cannibalistic behavior, desecrates the very concept of human rights. But that is the essence of monopoly capitalism, whose “highest” stage is fascism. One can only hope that Russia and China will recognize the future menace to their own survival, and will not indulge in the wishful thinking of a “win-win” arrangement with Washington. One can only hope that the crucible of Venezuela will prove to be the Stalingrad of this de facto World War III, and it will be on the battlefield of Venezuela, with its transgenerational legacy of Simon Bolivar, that fascism is defeated, and the future progressive destiny of humanity will be forged.
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Carla Stea is Global Research’s correspondent at United Nations Headquarters, New York, N.Y.
The original source of this article is Global Research
They walk among us. On the outside. they’re just like you and me, but on the inside they are unfeeling automatons who care only for themselves. They are the psychopaths, and they are in control of our governments, our corporations, our military and all of the positions of power. Join us this week on The Corbett Report as we delve into Political Ponerology, a diagnosis of our politicians and a brief look at the bigger picture.
The Duran’s Alex Christoforou and Editor-in-Chief Alexander Mercouris discuss a stunning revelation reported by Bloomberg that states US President Mike Pence was lobbying German Chancellor Angela Merkel to provoke the Russian navy by sending in German warships into the Kerch Straits.
Bloomberg dropped a bombshell on Thursday, citing three high level sources familiar with US-German talks at last month’s Munich Security Conference who revealed US Vice President Mike Pence tried to persuade German Chancellor Angela Merkel to directly provoke Russia by sending German ships through the Kerch Strait, the two mile wide flashpoint off Crimea which saw Russia seize Ukrainian vessels and their crew members on November 25.
Merkel reportedly rebuffed the efforts which Bloomberg described as “a naval maneuver in Russia’s backyard aimed at provoking President Vladimir Putin.” Merkel declined Pence’s urging while citing reservations voiced by Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, who viewed such an act as “not enough” to ensure Russia opens the strait permanently, according to the sources. Sources said Pence’s plan was designed “to show Putin that Western powers won’t surrender their access to those waters.”
Image Source: Reuters
Interestingly, Merkel’s stance wasn’t based on any principled desire to promoted peace or prevent needless provocations which could potentially spark regional war between Ukraine and Russia and western allies, but out of concern it essentially “wasn’t enough”.
Merkel had indicated she was willing, in coordination with the French, to send a convoy through the waterway as a one-time maneuver but Poroshenko said that wasn’t enough to solve his problem — he wants to ensure the strait is open permanently, the people said. France also refused to take part, judging the idea as an unnecessary provocation, according to another official who declined to be identified.
Following the controversial 2014 Crimean status referendum, which resulted in the peninsula coming under Russian suzerainty, Russia has been accused of choking off Ukrainian naval access to its ports on the Sea of Azov to the north of the Kerch Strait.
When Ukrainian naval entry through the now disputed waterway came to a head in November of last year, the Russian navy fired on three Ukrainian vessels attempting to traverse the passageway before seizing the vessels and 24 Ukrainian sailors, which Moscow has refused to release, despite personal attempts by France’s Emmanuel Macron and other western leaders to intervene in the standoff.
Further, as Bloomberg notes, Russia completed a road bridge across the Kerch Strait in order to solidify Crimean links to the mainland and is reportedly in process of adding a rail link. Meanwhile, Kiev has attempted to rally international allies to mount a pressure campaign which would force Russia to open the strait to Ukrainian and other allied vessels.
But not only does this latest revelation of German and European reluctance to start a fight with Moscow over the strait reveal that Ukraine has a weak hand, a 2003 treaty between Russia and Ukraine deemed the Sea of Azov is an “internal” body of water, for which any outside military vessel must have the consent of both Moscow and Kiev to pass through.
Ukraine has recently said that the Russian seizure of Ukrainian vessels and crew violated the treaty’s terms, to which Moscow has said the Ukrainian vessels were aggressors against Russian ships in the first place.
Over the past two months both UK and US military ships have entered the Black Sea to the south of the Kerch Strait, but no others have made a move further north since the Kerch Strait incident, which had the potential of bringing Russia and Ukraine into more direct conflict, with western allies backing Kiev.
“They, frankly, don’t like us in the Black Sea,” General Curtis Scaparrotti of the U.S. European Command and NATO’s supreme Europe commander told the Senate Armed Services Committee while referencing Russia this week.
Scaparrotti further called for more deterrent firepower, specifically citing the “Russian threat” as something the United States remains underprepared for: “I am not comfortable yet with the deterrent posture that we have in Europe,” he said.
“While the US maintains a global military superiority over Russia, evolving Russian capabilities threaten to erode our competitive military advantage,” he explained.
Thus even by the Supreme Allied Commander Europe’s own admission, neither the US nor its European allies like Germany or France are ready to initiate a major confrontation with Moscow in its own backyard, as it appears Pence was ready and willing to do.
t is often said that “other-izing” people overall can be dangerous and other-izing your enemies specifically can be tactically detrimental. For one, it can lead to a false sense of superiority over those people as you assert some kind of imagined genetic advantage.
It can also lead to dangerous generalizations of vast groups as you categorize and pigeonhole millions as being exactly the same when this is rationally impossible. However, other-izing is perhaps the only option when faced with a very particular type of person embracing a very particular brand of ideology; other-izing can become a matter of survival.
Not the low level cronies and useful idiots within the globalist push or “movement,” because many of them simply represent a underlying gullibility or stupidity among people attracted to the inbred world of academia. Instead, I’m talking about the people behind the curtain; self proclaimed “globalists” or internationalists that have positioned themselves into strategic power centers.I am talking about the people that influence or outright control government policy as they stand over the shoulders of supposedly freely elected officials. I am talking about the people that influence economic security or insecurity through unaccountable central banking conglomerates. I am talking about the men and women that desire to dictate the fate of billions.
These people are not easily identified by anything other than their rhetoric and actions. They are made up of multiple ethnic groups. They herald from all corners of the planet.
They do not subscribe to any one spiritual doctrine, but they do publicly devote themselves to many different religions as a means to “fit in” with the common citizen. Globalism IS their religion. And their god? Well, they see themselves as gods.
To be a globalist, though, one has to do more than merely subscribe to the tenets of globalism; there is a matter of character traits and actions which must be examined.
After studying the behavior of globalists and their organizations for quite some time, I have noticed that their psychological patterns tend to match with a narrow band of people that are best described as “criminally insane.” More accurately, globalists behave like high-functioning narcissistic sociopaths and psychopaths. But what are the traits of such people? Let’s take a look at some of them…
False Sense of Superiority – Self-Aggrandizement
Every person wants to be seen as important or unique. But, narcissistic sociopaths believe themselves to be entitled to special treatment and see themselves as above the laws and niceties of normal society. They sometimes seek to prop up this attitude through “accomplishment;” scratching for positions of power and influence in order to reinforce the notion that they are special compared to others.
Of course, power is usually an artificial construct because the only power we have over others is the power they give us, knowingly or unknowingly. Power does not make one special. The narcissistic sociopath does not make such distinctions, however.
He/she only distinguishes between the people who strive for dominance and everyone else. In their minds, people that covet power are a superior subspecies, while people who do not covet power are considered bugs.
Frankly, I see no reason why we should not make the same absolute statement, only in reverse.
Narcissistic sociopaths and psychopaths are stricken with visions of assumed greatness. They do not view the content of their accomplishments as necessarily important.
Meaning, they think they were born great, therefore, it is not for them to accomplish anything that serves to help others or advance the knowledge of humanity. They don’t care about proving their greatness through legitimate achievement, they only care that people BELIEVE they are special, that they are anointed.
Manipulation and Coercion
A narcissistic sociopath usually prefers to get what they want easily. They expect people to hand them adoration and control automatically. But if they don’t get what they want as a matter of course, they will use any means at their disposal.
This usually includes the threat of force or the use of force, the use of torture, the use of elaborate lies and schemes to push their target into a corner (to make them behave in a specific manner), the use of psychological conditioning (molding behavior, usually through fear responses) and also the use of “gaslighting” (accusing the target of being “crazy” if they do not subscribe to the narcissist’s twisted view of the world).
Of course, this kind of disturbed person is never actually satisfied, even when they do get what they want. They always want more, there is always something else they need to fill the endless void within.
Lack of Empathy for Others
Not all narcissists are sociopaths, but most sociopaths are narcissists. When we speak of narcissists, it is important to remember that there are varying degrees of this psychological cancer. When I mention globalists in particular as being “narcissistic,” I am referring to their propensity to be high functioning narcissists with sociopathic tendencies.
In other words, they are narcissists that not only have an inflated sense of self worth, but they are also devoid of empathy and conscience. They are willing to harm others to any degree to get what they want in the moment as long as they think can avoid consequences for doing so.
There is also the matter of distinction between sociopaths and psychopaths. This is a little hard to describe being that they are so similar in many respects. I would put it this way — while sociopaths chase a goal and are willing to step on people to get to it, psychopaths step on people even when they don’t have a goal in mind. That is to say, the psychopath enjoys the act of destruction; what they want most of all is other people’s pain.
Sociopaths and psychopaths both appear to permeate the ranks of globalist institutions. Some of them want to build an idol to themselves and don’t care who they harm in the process. Some of them derive great enjoyment from simply hurting as many people as possible.
Desperate Need for Adoration
It is not enough for the narcissistic sociopath to attain a level of respect through coercion. Ultimately, what they want is for the lowly masses to voluntarily ACCEPT their greatness as absolute, as an obvious and undeniable fact of life.
What they want is reverence and devotion. As mentioned earlier, they want to be treated as gods by the people around them, and if they are particularly ambitious, by everyone in the world.
This is a strange dynamic indeed, for it requires a highly elaborate set of schemes and manipulations. If one is not a great person, let alone god-like, the amount of psychological conditioning needed to convince people otherwise is substantial.
This makes the narcissistic sociopath a potential slave to his/her own incessantly engineered conspiracies; lies pile upon lies and schemes upon schemes in the search for something they will never truly achieve.
Globalists Are Psychologically Broken Non-Humans
In the world of alternative analysis and investigative journalism it is not uncommon to run into people who attribute an otherworldly status to globalists. Some people see them as a representation of biblical Apocalypse — minions from the depths of hell.
Others see them as literally alien — interdimensional beings posing as human. And while many will laugh at such people as fringe conspiracy freaks, I think it is important to understand why they see the globalists this way.
When faced with true and organized evil empty of all care or remorse, one may be tempted to apply supernatural explanations. I’m not sure that I am against the idea.
Globalists exhibit most if not all the telltale signs of narcissistic sociopaths, including being devoid of conscience and moral compass. While there are many definitions of what it is that makes us human, there is a kind of universal requirement regardless of culture; namely the requirement of something like a soul.
What makes a soul? How about a basic desire to do right by others even if that means not getting what we want all the time? This is a good starting point, but there is more to it than that.
Psychologists and scientists have over many decades found a pattern of inherent character traits hardwired in the human psyche, traits present in humans from the moment of birth that stand outside of the influences of social environment.
Carl Jung was the foremost expert in this field of “archetypal qualities,” with a vast catalog of case studies from around the world including studies in tribal Africa.
An important part of archetypal or inborn knowledge and traits is the notion of good and evil; we are born understanding that certain behaviors are constructive while others are destructive and abhorrent. This is most likely the source of what we call “conscience.”
Unfortunately, not all people are born with a conscience. In some people, the difference between good and evil or constructive and destructive behavior is treated as blurry or frivolous. Jung and other psychologists mark this subset of our species as “latent” sociopaths and psychopaths.
Together they make up around 10% of any given culture or group. Many of them remain “latent” and more or less harmless for their entire lives unless certain unstable environmental conditions provide fuel for their malfunction. Around 1% are born as full blown sociopaths and psychopaths. These are what I would call the “non-humans.”
This is because high level narcissism and sociopathy are not traditional “mental illnesses,” but ingrained character traits. A narcissistic sociopath cannot be “cured” of his ailment because it is not an ailment, it is who they are. If you were to take the narcissism and sociopathy away from them, there would be nothing left to their personality.
When a normal person comes in contact with someone that has no inherent conscience there is an immediate recoil; a sense that they have just stumbled across a monster. This is not an exaggeration, this is entirely accurate.
High level narcissists and sociopaths are physically human of course, but if we were to peer in at a visual representation of their psyche, we would find a barren wasteland — a place where ghouls lurk. They do not dream as normal people dream.
They do not feel joy in the manner normal people do. They do not feel fulfillment in the things that commonly lift up the rest of us. They are incapable of love for others. They are incapable of regret for their actions, and only ever feel regret over failing to get what they want. They do not see other people as individuals, they see them as tools to be exploited.
Being sociopathic though does not mean that they are ignorant of what makes the rest of us function. On the contrary, sociopaths are very good at identifying the personal desires and drives of others, and mimicking people in a way that makes them seem “human.” They are parasites by nature,and thus they have to be able to get close to their host victims if they are to survive.
The globalist dynamic is interesting in that it is an example of organized narcissistic sociopathy. Globalists have stood at the forefront of numerous wars, economic collapses and tyrannies over the years, all ending in great suffering for the masses. Contrary to popular belief, sociopaths and psychopaths DO work together towards a common goal as long as there is a sense of mutual benefit.
In fact, these people seem to gravitate to each other in odd ways. It is my belief that globalist hierarchies actually seek out people with narcissistic and sociopathic personalities; that they do this deliberately when they wish to expand their ranks. These seem to be the only aspects that they all have in common.
It is quite a “conspiracy theory,” I know. But look at it this way, how else can we explain their tendencies and behaviors? If organized annihilation was an intrinsic value of humanity then we would have died out long ago. The globalists are not human, though. They are something opposite, and if you do not understand this core truth, they can be bewildering and terrifying.
Finally, a clear and convincing — and unrefuted — case can now be presented to the public, as to precisely whom the guilty party was, that downed the MH17 Malaysian airliner over Ukraine on 17 July 2014, and why it was done. The complete case, which will be fully documented here, displays unequivocally who needed the MH17 murders (of 298 persons) to be perpetrated. This mass-murder was done for one leader’s very pressing obsession. For him, it simply had to be done, and done at that precise time.
The full MH17 case will be presented here, to be judged by the public, because no court of law which possesses the power to bring this (or even any) case on the MH17 murders, is willing to do so, and because the evidence in this 17 July 2014 case has become overwhelming, and is unrefuted. This evidence is accepted by both sides. But it still remains effectively hidden from the publics in the United States and its allied countries. (The present news-report, which is the first ever to present this entire case, is submitted to all news-media in English-speaking countries, so that any of them that wishes to provide its audience access to this uncontested and conclusive evidence in the MH17 case can do so, by publishing this article. Any of them that won’t, don’t want their audience to have access to the conclusive evidence in this case, because this article is being made available to all of them to publish, free of charge; so, there is no other reason not to publish it.)
The complete evidence will be described, and all of the conclusive evidence is linked-to, proving who perpetrated, and who demanded, the shoot-down on 17 July 2014 of the Malaysian airliner MH17.
This article will start by demonstrating the most important thing, and will demonstrate it by means of links to the most conclusive evidence of all. This is the evidence which absolutely proves that the official Netherlands-headed investigation into this matter is an intentional and utter fraud — a fraud which has already been conclusively answered and exposed by the Russian Government. (Netherlands headed the investigation because 196 of the 298 murder-victims were Dutch.) Russia’s response provided, in excruciating detail, not only clear disproofs of the Netherlands-headed investigation’s conclusions of Russian guilt, but also (and on the basis of the very same evidence that the official investigation had made public on 24 May 2018) provided the still-unrefuted (but nonetheless still effectively hidden) proofs of Ukraine’s actual and incontestable guilt, in this mass-murder. This evidence, of the Netherlands team’s fraudulence, carries the investigation a large part of the way toward its ultimate conclusion, regarding whom the person was who had demanded Ukraine to commit this crime.
So, Russia’s response, on 17 September 2018, used that Netherlands-headed team’s own documentation, to disprove that team’s attribution of guilt to Russia, and to prove conclusively Ukraine’s guilt as having been the actual perpetrator of this mass-murder. Thus, the Netherlands-headed team includes the actual perpetrator, Ukraine, and not only the Netherlands Government, which had helped overthrow Ukraine’s prior and democratically elected Government and bring Ukraine’s current regime into power in February 2014, just months prior to the MH17 shoot-down, which resulted from that US coup.
Most readers who click onto the links here will be shocked. What will shock them is the evidence, because it has not been published in The West (except summarized in less than a half-dozen obscure news-media — and, even there, generally not documented, such as it is here).
The links will document and fully prove this stunning turnabout, from Russia to Ukraine. The documentation that was cited by Ukraine and Ukraine’s fellow team-member (the team’s leader) Netherlands, against Russia, on May 24th of 2018, contained previously unrecognized details (which were first pointed out in the Russian presentation on September 17th of 2018) which irrefutably convict Ukraine. Consequently, Russia’s response was ignored in The West, despite that presentation’s having been based upon the very same items of evidence that had been introduced by the Netherlands-led team on May 24th. Thus, the items of evidence, there, are the same that the Netherlands-led team had themselves provided. The items of evidence here are not in dispute.
The current article will be the first-ever to hone-in on the especially shocking key data in Russia’s data-packed September 17th response, the key evidence that Russia was calling attention to there, and which prove Ukraine’s guilt beyond any reasonable doubt — prove it on the basis of the very same evidence that had been introduced by Ukraine’s own team in their presentation four months earlier. Using the other side’s evidence to convict that other side is what makes this denouement the stunning turnabout that it is.
The Netherlands-headed Ukrainian team still refuses to answer the Russian presentation, which responds to the Ukrainian team’s May 24th presentation. Western ‘news’-media have likewise almost completely ignored Russia’s response. (One Dutch medium did report on it but dismissed it by focusing on a subordinate part: their report said and focused on “Russia now claims that the video images the investigators used to track the missile’s transport to the Ukraine, were manipulated.” However, the part of Russia’s presentation that will be discussed in the present article was being entirely ignored in that Dutch news-report, which, as you will see here, has nothing to do with any claim of manipulated evidence. Britain’s BBC likewise focused-in on the “manipulated evidence” that Russia’s presentation had attacked. The Washington Post instead headlined “Who spread disinformation about the MH17 crash? We followed the Twitter trail”, and it focused-in on how polarized the public is over the MH17 case. The West’s ‘news’-coverage was virtually entirely misdirection and disinformation, as you will recognize from what follows here. And the evidence here is linked-to, so that you can see it for yourself.)
Russia’s response documented beyond any question, at all, that this airliner was shot down by the Ukrainian Government, and that Western (i.e., US-allied) ‘news’media have been and are covering-up this crucial historical fact and The West’s still-ongoing lies about the downing of MH17.
Those lies are the basis of US and EU anti-Russia sanctions, which remain in effect despite the basis for those sanctions having been exposed unequivocally, on September 17th, to be based on lies. Thus, continuing to hide those lies is crucial to the liars. This is the reason why Russia’s blazingly detailed presentation on September 17th has been virtually ignored — to protect the actually guilty. The evidence here proves that those sanctions, themselves, are nothing but frauds against the public, and crimes against Russia — ongoing additional crimes, which have been, and remain, effectively hidden till now.
The reader can see and consider here all of the conclusive evidence in the MH17 case — it can be reached via the present article’s links. Unlike the ‘news’-reports in The West’s ‘news’-media, the presentation here is not presuming readers’ trust, but is instead providing to all readers access to the actual evidence — evidence that is accepted by both sides. That’s what the links here are for: examination by any skeptics.
Skepticism in judging anything is not only good; it is essential to justice. Trust should never be given; it should only be earned. Otherwise, no democracy can function. Only dictatorship can function in a country that’s controlled by lies, and by liars. Liars are believed by people who have faith in them. Thus, faith in anything or anyone can poison judgment. The way to test the case that is presented here is to click onto a link wherever one wants to see and examine the evidence. Without examining (usually by spot-checking) the evidence, no reader can intelligently judge any case. Dictatorship is almost inevitable in a counry where spot-checking of the actual evidence isn’t the norm. Most ‘news’-media don’t even enable such spot-checking. This is why ‘news’-media are so often actually propaganda-media instead.
So, here’s the complete MH17 case, for any reader to judge:
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The last announcement from the official investigation, the Netherlands-headed “Joint Investigative Team” (JIT), was on 24 May 2018, and it headlined “Update in criminal investigation MH17 disaster”. It said:
The JIT is convinced that the BUK-TELAR [missile and launcher] that was used to down MH17, originates from the 53rd Anti Aircraft Missile brigade (hereinafter 53rd brigade), a unit of the Russian army from Kursk in the Russian Federation. … This fingerprint has been compared with numerous images of BUK-TELARS, both Ukrainian and Russian ones. The only BUK-TELAR on which this combination of characteristics also was found, is a BUK-TELAR that was recorded several times when it joined a convoy of the 53rd brigade on 23 – 25 June 2014.
Consequently, the JIT presumes that within the 53rd brigade and within the circle around it, people have knowledge about the operation in which that particular BUK-TELAR was deployed. … Already in September 2016, the JIT disclosed that MH17 was downed with a BUK missile of the 9M38 series. …
The missile engine’s casing shows the number 9 д 1318869032.
Typical of Western ‘news’-media’s coverage of that presentation, was CNN’s report the same day, May 24th of 2018. It was headlined “Missile that downed MH17 ‘owned by Russian brigade’”. It stated: “‘At the time this area was under control of pro-Russian separatists,’ said Fred Westerbeke, chief prosecutor of the National Prosecutor’s Office of the Netherlands. The Buk launcher of the 9M38 series ‘was transported from the territory of the Russian Federation and was returned to that territory of the Russian Federation afterwards’.”
The Ukrainian side claimed they had finally found evidence which would enable them definitively to place the blame for the MH17 shoot-down on Russia. So, the very next day, May 25th, Britain’s Telegraph bannered “Netherlands and Australia call for compensation for MH17 victims as they accuse Russia of downing plane” and reported that “Australia and the Netherlands have said they hold Russia legally responsible for the downing of Malaysia Airlines flight 17 over Ukraine in 2014 and will seek reparations for relatives of the 298 people killed.” This demand against Russia was coming “the day after the Dutch-led international investigation concluded that the Russian military had deployed the Buk surface-to-air missile that shot down the plane.”
Four months later, on 17 September 2018, the Russian Ministry of Defense youtubed its response, which is titled “Briefing on newly discovered evidence pertaining to the crash of the MH17 flight”. It presented the actual history of the Buk missile and launcher which Ukraine and the other Governments on the JIT said had brought down the MH17. (The JIT includes four countries, Netherlands, Ukraine, Belgium, and Australia, with a fifth, Malaysia, having been brought in only later, after it finally agreed to allow Ukraine a veto over any conclusions that the team will publish. Malaysia’s participation started on 4 December 2014; but whether Malaysia has actually been allowed to play a role in the ‘investigation’ isn’t clear.) Russia, during the intervening months after the JIT’s May 24th presentation, had tracked down all of those serial numbers, 8868720, and 1318869032, and 9M38, and found (as you can see there by clicking on each, especially onto the “Briefing” itself) that after the acquisition of the launcher and missile, by Ukraine in 1986, from Russia, that missile and its launcher had always, and constantly since their transfer to Ukraine in 1986, remained in Ukraine, and never again were located in Russia. So: if the JIT’s supplied evidence is authentic — which the Ukrainian team asserts it to be — then it outright convicts Ukraine. This is an evidentiary checkmate, against the Ukrainian side.
—
With the passage now of years, the precise cause of the shooting-down of the Malaysian passenger plane MH17 on 17 July 2014 has been becoming clearer and clearer, despite the rigorous continuing attempts by Western ‘news’ media to cover it up and to hide from the public the growing and by-now irrefutable evidence (presented here) that clearly shows what and who actually brought down this airliner.
In the years since I headlined on August 24th of 2014 the news, “MH-17 ‘Investigation’: Secret August 8th Agreement Seeps Out: Perpetrator of the Downing in Ukraine, of the Malaysian Airliner, Will Stay Hidden”, the key fact about the official ‘investigation’ has actually been that the Government of Ukraine was, on 8 August 2014, granted veto-power over any official finding which would be produced by the Joint Investigative Team. On 20 November 2014, Russian Television headlined “Dutch government refuses to reveal ‘secret deal’ into MH17 crash probe” and reported that Holland’s science-publishers Elsevier had filed for this information under that country’s Freedom of Information Act, and the Government simply refused to comply with that law. The leaders of Western nations apparently want the black-box and much other basic data in their possession to remain hidden, and the four nations had signed this secret agreement to allow the Government of Ukraine to block any report that incriminates Ukraine in the MH17 shoot-down. But additional evidence has nonetheless become public, and all of it confirms and adds yet further details to the explanation that was first put forth by the retired German Lufthansa pilot Peter Haisenko, whose independent investigation had concluded that Ukrainian Government fighter-jets intentionally shot down this civilian plane. He did not rule out the possibility that a Buk missile had simultaneously been used there, but he made clear that at least one fighter-jet had been used in this shoot-down.
However, if those parts of a Buk missile, which were the focus of the Netherlands team’s presentation on May 24th, were indeed retrieved from the crash-site as that team claims, then a Buk missile had also hit the MH17. Serious question would nonetheless exist as to whether that Buk was fired by troops who were working for Ukraine, or instead for Russia (or else for Donbas separatists who were working in conjunction with Russia, which was Ukraine’s and America’s original version of the event).
Precisely what the method was, by which the direct perpetrators brought down the MH17, has gradually become clearer, despite this continuation of Western secrecy (and Ukraine’s veto-power over the ‘findings’) regarding the contents of the black boxes, and of the US satellite images, and of the Ukrainian air-traffic-control radar recordings, and of other evidence-sources that are still being held secret by The West and not made available to their ‘news’ media nor to anyone outside a tight official circle of those Western nations’ intelligence agencies.
But now, Russia has actually — on 17 September 2018 — exposed the outright fraudulence of the JIT’s 24 May 2018 presentation, and The West (the US Government’s allies) entirely ignored the conclusive evidence that that presentation by the JIT itself actually contained and to which Russia was pointing, so that there can no longer be reasonable doubt about The West’s intentional and still ongoing fraudulence regarding the entire MH17 matter.
Also entirely ignored in the Ukrainain team’s ‘explanation’ of the event is why Ukraine’s air-traffic control had guided the MH17’s pilot to fly over the conflict-zone where Ukraine’s civil war was being waged and where Ukraine’s war-planes were bombing. The MH17’s pilot was instructed by Ukraine’s air-traffic control to take that path instead of the one that the airline had planned and that had become normal during the civil war. This was highly abnormal, and it doomed the MH17. Clearly, only Ukraine’s Government could, and did, do that — change the route, and for only that one plane. Yet, still, the Netherlands-headed team blames Russia and is trusted in The West, but Russia is not. (Now, why would that be?)
Though Russia doesn’t possess those black boxes (which, by chance, were handed by the pro-Russian separatists to the Malaysian Government’s representative, and yet that Government handed them to Netherland’s Government instead of to Russia’s — apparently trusting Netherlands more than trusting Russia or even themselves), Russia does possess, and publicly reveals, evidence that’s conclusive on its own; and it is 100% consistent with Haisenko’s reconstruction of the event, regardless whether a Buk was involved or not. Russian Television had issued in October 2014 a 25-minute documentary on the event, and it starts with people whom they interviewed in that region, who were describing their having seen at least one and perhaps two planes rising toward the airliner, and then the airliner coming down from the sky. Other witnesses told them that they saw an SU-25 fighter plane take off in that general area just minutes before the airliner came down.
FIRST, THE MISSING BBC REPORT:
The BBC had previously posted to their website on 23 July 2014, just six days after the event itself, a news report in Russian via their Russian service (fortunately archived by Global Research), about the downing, but they quickly removed it without explanation. Fortunately, however, some Russian-speakers had managed to download it before it was yanked; and at least two of those downloads were posted to youtube, the first one having been posted there on 28 July 2014, with English subscripts, and with the headline, “UKRAINE Eyewitness Confirm Military Jet Flew Besides MH17 Airliner: BBC Censors Video 25Jul2014”. (It’s gone now, but, actually, several witnesses, and not just one, were interviewed there — there wasn’t just one “Eyewitness”.) Furthermore, Global Research posted on 10 September 2014 a transcript of it, headlining, “Deleted BBC Report. ‘Ukrainian Fighter Jet Shot Down MHI7’, Donetsk Eyewitnesses.” (The video itself is still at youtube and it will be linked-to just below here, so that you will be able to view it.)
The interviews by the BBC were done by their reporter Olga Ivshina. (Also see http://archive.is/vFoh9.) She had filmed local residents in the crash-debris area. In one passage of her 23 July 2014 news-report, there were two residents simultaneously who described what they had seen. One of them said, “And there was another aircraft.” The other continued immediately, in order to describe the other plane, “a military one, beside it [‘it’ being the airliner]. Everybody saw it. It was proceeding underneath below the civilian one.”
Here is the second, and clearer, version of that clip. (It’s the one that’s still live at youtube.) The key portion on it is at 0:38-042 in the video:
That was the 9 September 2014 repost of it, with the same subscript-translation into English, only the visual is sharper.
And here is an apology, dated 25 July 2014, by the BBC, for their having removed their original video of this interview — and yet they still didn’t repost it; they still continue to blockade it; even today the only versions available, of these, the earliest recorded interviews of people who said they witnessed the event, are the independently posted ones, but here is the BBC’s apology:
So: clearly, BBC has done all that they could to remove evidence, which they had mistakenly broadcast, which had fit the retired Lufthansa pilot Peter Haisenko’s reconstruction of the event, and which contradicted the US-Ukrainian reconstruction of it — the reconstruction that Western ‘news’ media project, and on the basis of which US President Barack Obama won from the EU stiff increases in, and subsequent extensions of, the economic sanctions against Russia, all on the basis of lies.
(Subsequently, on 17 December 2018, South Front headlined “‘EDITORIAL BOARD DEMANDS BLOOD’: INSIDE LOOK AT HOW BBC TRIES TO FIND PROOF OF RUSSIAN INFLUENCE ON YELLOW VEST PROTESTS”, and they reported that Ivshina had texted to a BBC stringer, on the streets of Paris, instructions of what story-lines were wanted by BBC management regarding the “Yellow Vests” demonstrations against French President Emmanuel Macron, ”Yes, I’m searching for the angles))) The editorial board wants blood, yo)))”. “And if you find these ultra-rightists [at the protests], will they talk about Putin and Moscow? Well, at least the Russians go to the protests, right?” Ivshina was instructing her French stringer what to look for, in order for her to be able to report the type of ‘news’ that her bosses wanted to publish. Perhaps Ivshina had been chastised in 2014 and had learned to never again be caught reporting anything that challenges the UK Government’s anti-Russia propaganda-line.)
So, this valuable eyewitness-testimony to the MH17 event is available despite Western ‘news’ media (or, more-accurately, propaganda-media), and the reason for the news-suppression is clear to anyone who views that BBC 23 July 2014 report, which presents several eyewitnesses, interviewed separately as individuals, not as a group, and yet all of whose testimonies — perhaps despite Ivshina’s wish for them not to say this — report having observed the very same basic narrative, of at least one military jet rising toward the airliner just before it came down.
In other words: it is clear that BBC had yanked this report because it didn’t confirm the West’s story-line, which says that Ukrainian pro-Russian separatists had fired a “Buk” ground-based missile at the airliner, thinking that the civilian plane was a Ukrainian Government war-plane about to bomb them and their families. But, first of all, the Ukrainian Government was virtually admitting there that they were bombing these villagers, which means that they were perpetrating an ethnic cleansing operation there, which indeed that Government was doing; but, secondly, the Ukrainian Government’s statement also acknowledged that if the event had happened in that way, it would have been unintentional, a tragic accident on the part of the rebels there. (The JIT’s line now is that it was instead an outright Russian attack against the MH17.)
So, then, why did “the international community” respond with massive economic sanctions against Russia on account of this downing — by, as it turns out, Ukraine? The whole Western propaganda position was designed for a public of sheer fools, if not of outright psychopathic ones, who cared not a bit about the plights of the victims of an ethnic-cleansing campaign. They cared only about victims in “The West.” The West’s basic story-line doesn’t make sense without recognizing that we were financing ethnic cleansing to clear the land in southeastern Ukraine, and that any support that Russia would be providing to those separatists would have been defensive in nature, not offensive. Yet Russia gets the blame when this passenger jet goes down? Even though Ukraine’s air-traffic control had guided the pilot there? In any case, that story-line of Russian guilt is false, from start to finish. And now (at least after 17 September 2018) it is finished. But Western ‘news’-media still continue to broadcast the lies, as if it weren’t.
Here is how outright ludicrous it actually is, and sound reason in itself that anyone in the military had to have known, from the very get-go, that the “Buk” ‘explanation’ was a line of pure malarkey:
THE RUSSIAN DOCUMENTARY:
The 22 October 2014 Russian documentary was titled, “MH-17: The Untold Story,” and it presents, among much else, videos of several “Buk” missiles being fired on other occasions, just to show how utterly ludicrous the initial Ukraine-US-and-allied ‘explanation of the MH17 event was. On 5 November 2014, I summarized that, with screen-shots from the Russian documentary.
So, when even the BBC’s reporter wasn’t able to find anyone in that entire region who recounts having seen anything of the sort, just how likely would the Ukrainian Government’s line on that matter — that not only was this done by a lone Buk but it was fired by (at first) pro-Russian separatists, and (then) by the Russian army — actually be? Obviously, any person with any military knowledge whatsoever had to have recognized virtually immediately that the Ukrainian Government’s story-line on the MH-17 downing was a pile of sheer malarkey, but did anyone in the Western ‘news’ media report that it was — that the Western line there was not just a lie, but an absurd one, one that requires an ignorant public in order for it to be able to be taken seriously at all by the public? One that requires an ignorant public, to remain ignorant? This is supposed to be the Western ‘news’ media, with a free press, and a democracy, a truthfully informed citizenry, who can vote based upon truths, not on mere lies?
Several of the locals there told Russian TV’s reporter that they had seen a military jet rise toward the airliner; and not a one of these individuals were any of the same ones who had testified the exact same thing to the BBC’s reporter, whose news-piece had been squelched by her managers.
HERE IS HOW MH17 WAS SHOT DOWN:
Now, to the substance of the explanation of how this plane was actually brought down:
Earlier, I had summarized the evidence for Peter Haisenko’s reconstruction of the event, but I questioned his having accepted the eyewitness testimony to the effect that the planes that shot down the airliner were SU-25s. In Haisenko’s Russian TV interview, he stuck by his belief that it was probably SU-25s instead of SU-27s or Mig 29s, both of which are also in the Ukrainian Air Force, and all three of which use 30-millimeter machine-guns or “cannons.” But since the fact is that all three of those attack-plane models use machine-guns (“cannons”) with 30-caliber bullets (which is the size that clearly was used, especially on the cockpit), the effect would be identically-sized round 30-caliber entry-holes, no matter what. My last major report on that evidence, prior to the 8 August 2014 formation of the JIT and their mutual agreement to report nothing that would be incriminating to Ukraine’s Government regarding the MH17 incident, was “Systematically Reconstructing the Shoot-Down of the Malaysian Airliner: The Guilt Is Clear and Damning.” That basically fills in (and the links, in that report, document with pictures and videos that) the actual way that this plane was downed, and that why it was downed was “to get the EU to go along with stiffened sanctions against Russia”. Obama (via the regime that he had installed in a February 2014 coup in Kiev) succeeded there in getting the international sanctions against Russia that he had been wanting. Obama, and certainly not Putin — and now we know it wasn’t Russia at all (not even if a Buk was involved) — was the key person behind this. The 298 MH17 murder-victims on 17 July 2014 were murdered by Barack Obama (via his agents such as Victoria Nuland — she ran Obama’s Ukrainian operation), just as clearly as (if not even more clearly than) Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman al-Saud (via his agents at the Sauds’ Istanbul Consulate) murdered Jamal Khashoggi on 2 October 2018.
International actions (such as economic sanctions) are based upon such fabrications, and ‘evidence’ taken out of its full context, as this from the far-right Forbes commentator Paul Roderick Gregory, but there are no such fakes, nor out-of-context items of evidence, in the case that has been presented here. That’s the difference between news-reporting versus propaganda; but, in the United States today, propaganda passes as if it were ‘news,’ and authentic news that doesn’t fit the regime’s cooked-up narrative is suppressed entirely. The scandal isn’t just Obama, and it’s not just Ukraine; it is also the propaganda-organs, and even (though to the least extent) their audiences who subscribe to such lying ‘news’-media.
Western governments, and their ‘news’ media, are treating their citizens, their own publics, not really as citizens, but as suckers. They are treating them as subjects, instead of as citizens. This is not authentic democracy. It is neo-feudal; it is, in fact, fascism.
The entire “Buk” ‘explanation’ of the downing of the Malaysian airliner (the idea that only a Buk missile caused the physical wreckage which was found) is for suckers only; and everyone in official circles, and in the press, who peddles it, is just as fake as the ridiculous story-line that he or she is peddling. To fall for it, after being provided all of the authentic evidence, which has been linked-to here, one would have to be a willing slave to psychopaths. In this case, the psychopath was Obama, who not only had perpetrated a bloody coup to overthrow the democratically elected President of Ukraine in February 2014 but who also was now struggling, and had a very pressing obsession, to get the EU to accept his sanctions against Russia for its having accepted the pleas of Crimeans (who had voted 75% for that President) to become restored again to Russia. The 14 July 2014 mass-murder that was set up to be blamed against Russia was Obama’s trick that enabled him to win his way on this.
CONCLUSIONS:
By no means do we know every detail about how the MH17 was shot down, but what we do now know for certain is that the narrative for that event which was supplied by Ukraine’s team on May 24th — the official account of how it happened — isn’t just false; it is outright fraudulent. Ukraine’s team supplied evidence which, if it is authentic, actually convicts Ukraine. And Western ‘news’-media hide this crucial fact.
So, now, we know why Western governments have hidden, instead of making available to the public, the black-box data and the other evidence that they still refuse to provide to the public. They are aiming to scam the public, not to inform it. Lying is their game. They might call it ‘patriotism.’ Traitors would likely do that. Traitors to any country could do it. And, so, they do. Their believers constitute their political base.
Unfortunately, anyone they fool becomes their tool, and everyone else is purely their victim — helpless to oust (much less, to replace) the tyrants who make things bad for everyone but themselves and their colleagues, the insiders at the very top.
Just the day before the MH17 shoot-down, Bloomberg News had headlined, on 16 July 2014, “EU Readies Russia Sanctions Amid US Pressure on Ukraine”, and reported that “the US urges the bloc to take a tougher stance against Moscow.” The day before that, on July 15th, Bloomberg’s headline had been “EU Leaders Weigh Sanctions Against Russia Over Ukraine”, and that report opened, “European Union leaders meeting in Brussels will consider expanded sanctions against Russia over the Ukraine conflict, as the US urges the bloc to take a tougher stand against Moscow.” Was the July 17th event only coincidentally timed perfectly in order to achieve what Obama was determined to produce: the first Ukraine-based anti-Russia sanctions? The regime that Obama had installed in Ukraine in February 2014 needed not only his support, but also the support of the IMF (in order to obtain loans), and of the EU (which it was seeking to join). There was probably even more pressure placed upon the leaders in Ukraine than there was upon the leaders in the EU. But there was plenty upon them both. The EU was widely reported to be balking at increasing the sanctions against Russia. Obama needed the EU to approve quickly his increased sanctions, so as to keep the momentum going for his entire anti-Russian campaign, which had been the reason behind his February 2014 coup in Ukraine. Something dramatic now was needed, in order for Obama to win the EU’s full cooperation. After all, Obama had secretly started at least by 2011 his operation to take over Ukraine. This operation was, for him, one of the central objectives of his entire two-term Presidency. Ukraine — and Ukraine alone — now had within its power the capacity to deliver to him the EU’s participation. Ukraine delivered it, precisely when it was the most urgently needed. This was essential in order for Ukraine to be able to enter the EU. And entering the EU would be essential in order for Ukraine to be able to enter NATO — the next key step in the Bilderbergers’ plan.
Perhaps the survivors’ families and Malaysia Airlines (which is owned by the Malaysian Government), and their Governments, will file both civil and criminal charges now initially against Ukraine and its President Petro Poroshenko, and ultimately against Victoria Nuland, Barack Obama, and the United States, but also against the Dutch Government, for its collusion with the United States Government in its fraudulent ‘investigation’ that had pre-established blame against Russia. (However, the secret agreement that Malaysia signed to join the JIT might prohibit Malaysia from joining such suits.) Netherlands pre-established Russian blame especially by means of its 8 August 2014 secret four-party agreement (joined later by Malaysia’s Government) to allow Ukraine, an actual suspect in this case, to hold veto power over the assignment of blame in this entire matter. However, not only the survivors of the 298 victims should be suing, but all of the victims should be represented in this case. There were also many violations of international laws. Obama’s coup against Ukraine was one such. The MH17 shoot-down resulted from that coup, couldn’t have occurred without it, and was an extension from it. That coup is thus an important part of the MH17 case.
On 20 September 2017, the now 5 countries in the JIT signed a joint “Memorandum of Understanding” saying “Arrangements for signatories and other grieving nations to make financial contributions to the national proceedings in the Netherlands will be laid down in a financial memorandum of understanding,” and that “This Memorandum will remain in effect for five years and will be automatically extended for successive five-year periods.” So, they intend to continue their ‘investigation’ into MH17 until they can present to the world evidence that Russia did it. Perhaps before that happens, however, all of the victims and their children will already have passed away and this fraud and farce will finally end, as secretly as it began, and only few people will even care, anymore, about it.
Or will victims and their families, instead, initiate whatever legal proceedings they can, right now, against all members of the JIT, for their cover-up, and against the ringleaders, in the US, who demanded this mass-murder to be done, and against the perpetrators in Ukraine, who actually ordered and did it?
Maybe they’ll even be able to get Barack Obama to return to the Nobel committee their 2009 Peace Prize.
Now, which major news-media in The West will report these solidly documented facts? Isn’t it time, finally, that they should start doing that? Or, do they have no honor, at all?
“They’re chronic, extremely convincing, and even enthusiastic liars, who often believe their own lies. That means they aren’t easy to spot, because normal people naturally assume another person is telling the truth…”
There are at least seven characteristics that define a sociopath, although I’m sure the list could be extended:
Sociopaths completely lack a conscience or any capacity for real regret about hurting people. Although they pretend the opposite.
Sociopaths put their own desires and wants on a totally different level from those of other people. Their wants are incommensurate. They truly believe their ends justify their means. Although they pretend the opposite.
Sociopaths consider themselves superior to everyone else, because they aren’t burdened by the emotions and ethics others have – they’re above all that. They’re arrogant. Although they pretend the opposite.
Sociopaths never accept the slightest responsibility for anything that goes wrong, even though they’re responsible for almost everything that goes wrong. You’ll never hear a sincere apology from them.
Sociopaths have a lopsided notion of property rights. What’s theirs is theirs, and what’s yours is theirs too. They therefore defend currency inflation and taxation as good things.
Sociopaths usually pick the wrong target to attack. If they lose their wallet, they kick the dog. If 16 Saudis fly planes into buildings, they attack Afghanistan.
Sociopaths traffic in disturbing news, they love to pass on destructive rumors, and they’ll falsify information to damage others.
They’re chronic, extremely convincing, and even enthusiastic liars, who often believe their own lies. That means they aren’t easy to spot, because normal people naturally assume another person is telling the truth. They rarely have handlebar mustaches or chortle like Snidely Whiplash. Instead, they cultivate a social veneer or a mask of sanity that diverts suspicion. You can rely on them to be “politically correct” in public. How could a congressman or senator who avidly supports charities possibly be a bad guy? How could someone who claims he just wants the U.S. to defend some foreign minority possibly be a warmonger? They’re expert at using facades to disguise reality, and they feel no guilt about it.
Political elites are primarily, and sometimes exclusively, composed of sociopaths. It’s not just that they aren’t normal human beings. They’re barely even human, a separate subspecies, differentiated by their psychological qualities. A normal human can mate with them spiritually and psychologically about as fruitfully as a modern human could mate physically with a Neanderthal; it can be done, but the results will be problematical.
It’s a serious problem when a society becomes highly politicized, as is now the case in the U.S. and Europe. In normal times, a sociopath stays under the radar. Perhaps he’ll commit a common crime when he thinks he can get away with it, but social mores keep him reined in. However, once the government changes its emphasis from protecting citizens from force to initiating force with laws and taxes, those social mores break down. Peer pressure, social approbation, and moral opprobrium, the forces that keep a healthy society orderly, are replaced by regulations enforced by cops and funded by taxes. Sociopaths sense this, start coming out of the woodwork, and are drawn to the State and its bureaucracies and regulatory agencies, where they can get licensed and paid to do what they’ve always wanted to do.
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It’s very simple, really. There are two ways people can relate to each other: Voluntarily or coercively. The government is pure coercion, and sociopaths are drawn to its power and force.
The majority of Americans will accept the situation for two reasons: One, Americans no longer have a philosophical anchor to keep them from being washed up onto the rocks. They no longer have any real core beliefs, and most of their opinions – e.g., “We need national health care,” “Our brave troops should fight evil over there so we don’t have to fight it over here,” “The rich should pay their fair share” – are just reactive and comforting catch phrases. The whole point of spin doctors is to produce comforting sound bites that elude testing against reality. And, two, Americans have become very pampered and comfortable. They’re a nation of overfed losers, mooches, and coasters who like the status quo without wondering how long it can possibly last.
It’s nonsensical to blather about the Land of the Free and Home of the Brave when reality TV and Walmart riots are much closer to the truth. The rot originates with the majority of Americans, of course. Political candidates spend millions to take their pulse in surveys and polls, and then just regurgitate what the public wants to hear. Once a country buys into the idea that a privileged lifestyle is everyone’s minimum due, that country is on the decline. Lobbying and taxation are replacing production and innovation as the national modus vivendi, but parasites can’t sustain prosperity. The wealth that took centuries to produce is not inexhaustible.
All political candidates decry the upper classes, say they love what’s left of the middle class, and want to shower more goodies on the proletariat.
People generally fall into an economic class because of their psychology and their values. Each of the three classes has a characteristic psychological profile.
For the lower class, it’s apathy. They have nothing, they’re ground down, and they don’t really care. They’re not in the game, and they aren’t going to do anything; they’re resigned to their fate.
For the upper class, it’s greed and arrogance. They have everything, and they think they deserve it – whether they do or not.
The middle class, at least in today’s world, is run by fear. Fear that they’re only a paycheck away from falling into the lower class. Fear that they can’t pay their debts or borrow more. Fear that they don’t have a realistic prospect of improving themselves.
The problem is that fear is a negative, dangerous, and potentially explosive emotion. It can easily morph into anger and violence. Exactly where it will lead is unpredictable, but it’s not a good place. One thing that exacerbates the situation is that all three classes now rely on the government, albeit in different ways. Bankruptcy of the government will affect them all drastically.
With sociopaths in charge, we could very well see the Milgram experiment reenacted on a national scale. In the experiment, you may recall, researchers asked members of the public to torture subjects (who, unbeknownst to the people being recruited, were paid actors) with electric shocks, all the way up to what they believed were lethal doses. Most of them did as asked, after being assured that it was “all right” and “necessary” by men in authority. The men in authority today are mostly sociopaths.
WHAT TO DO
One practical issue worth thinking about is how you, as someone with libertarian values, will manage in a future increasingly controlled by sociopaths. My guess is poorly, unless you take action to insulate yourself. That’s because of the way nature programs almost all creatures. They all share an imperative: Survive! People obviously want to do that as individuals. And as families. In fact, they want all the groups that they’re members of to survive, simply because (everything else being equal) it should help them to survive as individuals. So individual Marines want the Marine Corps to survive. Individual Rotarians want the Rotary Club to prosper. Individual Catholics leap to the defense of the Church of Rome.
That’s why individual Germans during World War II were, as has been asserted, “willing executioners” – they were supporting the Reich for the same reasons the Marines, the Rotarians, and the Catholics support their groups. Except more so, because the Reich was under attack from all sides. So, of course, they followed orders and turned in the neighbors who seemed less than enthusiastic. Failing to support the Reich, even if they knew it had some rather unsavory aspects, seemed an invitation to invading armies to come and rape their daughters, steal their property, and probably kill them. So, of course, the Germans closed ranks around their leaders, even though everyone at the top was a sociopath. You can expect Americans to do the same.
Americans have done so before, when the country was far less degraded. During the War Between the States, even saying something against the war was a criminal offense. The same was true during World War I. In World War II, the Japanese were all put in concentration camps on groundless, racially based suspicions of disloyalty. During the early years of the Cold War, McCarthyism was rampant. The examples are legion among humans, and the U.S. was never an exception. It’s even true among chickens. If a bird has a feather out of place, the others will peck at it, eventually killing it. That out-of-place feather is deemed a badge of otherness announcing that its owner isn’t part of the group. Chicken Autre must die.
Libertarians, who tend to be more intelligent, better informed, and very definitely more independent than average, are going to be in a touchy situation as the crisis deepens. Most aren’t going to buy into the groupthink that inevitably accompanies war and other major crises. As such, they’ll be seen as unreliable, even traitors. As Bush said, “If you’re not with us, you’re against us.” And, he might have added, “The Constitution be damned.” But, of course, that document is no longer even given lip service; it’s now a completely dead letter.
It’s very hard for an individualist to keep his mouth shut when he sees these things going on. But he’d better keep quiet, as even H.L. Mencken wisely did during both world wars. In today’s world, just keeping quiet won’t be enough; the national security state has an extensive, and growing, file on everybody. They believe they know exactly what your beliefs, desires, fears, and associations are, or may be. What we’re now facing is likely to be more dangerous than past crises. If you’re wise, you’ll relocate someplace where you’re something of an outsider and, by virtue of that fact, are allowed a measure of eccentric opinion. That’s why I spend an increasing amount of time in Latin America. In truth, however, security is going to be hard to find anywhere in the years to come. The most you can hope for is to tilt the odds in your favor.
The best way to do that is by diversifying your assets internationally. Allocating your wealth into real assets. Linking up with sound, like-minded people who share your values. And staying alert for the high-potential speculations that inevitably arise during chaotic times.
“Our citizens should know the urgent facts…but they don’t because our media serves imperial, not popular interests. They lie, deceive, connive and suppress what everyone needs to know, substituting managed news misinformation and rubbish for hard truths…”—Oliver Stone
@ AP Photo / Marcos Moreno
Tales from the Conspiratum 
