Israel’s Quest For A Palestinian-Free Palestine Continues With US Support – by Philip Giraldi – 29 March 2024

US support enables Netanyahu to ignore international pressure

Israel’s plan to expand into an Eretz or “Greater” state incorporating large chunks of its neighbors’ land starts with eliminating the pre-1948 inhabitants of a place once known as Palestine. That nearly all of those who think of themselves as Palestinians must be killed or otherwise removed is perhaps reduced to an aphorism, like “Israel has a right to defend itself,” to absolve the Israeli state and its rampaging army of any guilt in the process. Indeed, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s ability to avoid any serious consequences for his behavior is remarkable, and it generates further atrocities that might have been unimaginable when the fighting in Gaza started back in October. Al Jazeera has reported how Netanyahu is now pushing ahead to formalize what has been referred to as the “colonial project,” whereby “the appropriation of all Palestinian Lands will follow on… the outright exclusion of the Palestinian people from their homeland.” Bibi said in a speech to supporters that “These are the basic lines of the national government headed by me: The Jewish people have an exclusive and unquestionable right to all areas of the Land of Israel. The government will promote and develop settlement in all parts of the Land of Israel — in the Galilee, the Negev, the Golan, Judea and Samaria.”

Journalist Patrick Lawrence, writing at Consortium News, recently described how “Israel’s savagery in its determination to exterminate the Palestinians of Gaza — and we had better brace for what is next on the West Bank of the Jordan — marks a turn for all of humanity. In its descent into depravity the Zionist state drags the West altogether down with it.” Indeed, and the United States of America is the foremost great power to be reduced to the status of a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Jewish state, unable to advance its own interests when confronted by the juggernaut of the so-called Israel Lobby and associated Jewish and Zionist-Christian organizations that have corrupted and controlled American foreign as well as select domestic policies.

Witness what has occurred in the last several weeks when the international community has rallied to end the slaughter and deliberate starvation of largely defenseless Gazan civilians. First came a United Nations Security Council move by the United States, which introduced a resolution calling for, but not demanding, an immediate though possibly temporary cease fire in Gaza. When the resolution came up for a vote it was vetoed by Russia and China. There were several problems with the text as it inevitably sought to give Israel considerable flexibility in managing the situation. It included an admonition that the effort to secure a ceasefire must be “in connection with the release of all remaining hostages,” which is an Israeli demand with the willingness of Israel to participate at all very much dependent on the hostage issue. The resolution allowed the fighting to continue and it put control of the entry and distribution of urgently needed relief supplies under the ”security” management of the Israeli army. Then came a Russian and Chinese resolution, approved by all members of the council but the US which “abstained.” The US immediately declared the resolution to be “non-binding” and while the document was meant to permit a ceasefire through the end of Ramadan, it has yet to be enacted by Israel which continues to block food and medicine relief shipments and has focused its latest attacks on the few remaining hospitals, killing hundreds more Gazans. Even though the resolution demanded action on the ceasefire and access to relief supplies Israel has ignored it and so has Washington. As only the United States can compel Israel to change course the fact that it continues to fund Israel and provide it with secret shipments of planeloads weapons, without which Netanyahu would be unable to continue his war, speaks for itself in terms of who is controlling whom.

And don’t be fooled by President Joe Biden’s alleged pressure on Netanyahu to “protect civilians” even as Bibi draws up plans with his war cabinet to invade Gaza’s southernmost Rafah Region, where 1.5 million Palestinians have sought refuge and are now confronted by imminent death with no way out. Biden is responding to opinion polls in the US that indicate that more than half of Americans are opposed to what Israel is doing in Gaza and the percentage is steadily growing, so he is pretending to have humanitarian impulses and a conscience, neither of which is true, in a cynical effort to support his possible reelection.

To be sure both the White House and Congress, supported by the Jewish dominated media, are totally in Netanyahu’s pocket, something which he has admitted to publicly more than once, saying that the United States is “easily moved” by someone like him. But if one really needed proof positive about who is in charge in the US-Israel relationship, one need only look at the recent omnibus federal government budget bill of $1.2 trillion. Activist Pascal Lottaz has taken the time to go through the complete 1,012 page document detailing where the money goes and discusses his findings in a 9 minute podcast on YouTube. Lottaz has confirmed both the immediate cash payment of $3.8 billion in “tribute money” to Israel plus the already reported blocking of any federal government funding of United Nation Relief and Works Agency for Gaza (UNRWA) for at least a year. As UNRWA is the key humanitarian aid agency, the latter is a prohibition completely inconsistent with Biden’s expressed desire to confront the “surging” humanitarian aid crisis for the Gazans who are facing starvation in the context of an active genocide. The prohibition is in spite of the continuing lack of evidence to substantiate Israel’s claims of “terrorism support” leveled against the UN agency and despite the famine conditions already present in Gaza. In his review of the document, Lottaz has also discovered those and other specific benefits that involve Israel in 10 sections of the bill.

The bill also seeks to protect Israel from accountability under existing or new international law and to limit Palestinian efforts to resist or defend themselves. It requires any organization receiving US funding to show that it is actively taking steps “to combat anti-Israel bias” and it prohibits any funding to support Palestinian statehood unless it is shown that a list of specified conditions are met including satisfactory “cooperation with Israeli security organizations.” It prohibits any funding to the Palestinian Authority if Palestine is granted statehood status by the UN or any UN agency without Israel’s consent. It oddly prohibits any security support to the West Bank or Gaza unless it is shown that satisfactory steps are being taken by the Palestinian Authority to “end torture and other cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment of detainees.” It should be noted that the Palestinians, not Israel, are required to end abuse of detainees even though it is Israel that routinely engages in those practices. The detailed sections of the bill expanding on what is blocked or prohibited are as follows:

1. The bill forbids any US funding of the UN International Commission of Inquiry investigation into Israel’s unlawful occupation of Palestinian territory: Sec. 7848(C)(2) None of the funds appropriated by this Act may be made available for the United Nations International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and Israel.
2. The bill defunds the UN Human Rights Council unless the organization drops all inquiry into human rights violations by Israel: Sec. 7048(b)(2)(c) UNITED NATIONS HUMAN RIGHTS COUNCIL. (1) None of the funds appropriated by this Act may be made available in support of the United Nations Human Rights Council unless the Secretary of State determines and reports to the appropriate congressional committees that participation in the Council is important to the national interest of the United States and that such Council is taking significant steps to remove Israel as a permanent agenda item and ensure integrity in the election of members to such Council.
3. The bill requires any international organization, department, or agency receiving US funding to show that it is taking “credible steps to combat anti-Israel bias”: SEC. 7048. (a) TRANSPARENCY AND ACCOUNTABILITY. Not later than 120 days after the date of enactment of this Act, the Secretary of State shall report to the Committees on Appropriations whether each organization, department, or agency receiving a contribution from funds appropriated by this Act under the headings ‘‘Contributions to International Organizations’’ and ‘‘International Organizations and Programs’’:
4. The bill prohibits funding of any support to Palestinian Statehood except under US State Department confirmation that its government meets specified conditions including that is is “cooperating with appropriate Israeli and other appropriate security organizations.”
5. The bill prohibits any support to the Palestinian Broadcasting Corporation: SEC. 7038. None of the funds appropriated or otherwise made available by this Act may be used to provide equipment, technical support, consulting services, or any other form of assistance to the Palestinian Broadcasting Corporation.
6. The bill prohibits any funding to security assistance to the West Bank or Gaza unless the State Department reports on “the steps being taken by the Palestinian Authority to “end torture and other cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment of detainees”: 7039(C)(2) SECURITY ASSISTANCE AND REPORTING REQUIREMENT. Notwithstanding any other provision of law, none of the funds made available by this or prior appropriations Acts, including funds made available by transfer, may be made available for obligation for security assistance for the West Bank and Gaza until the Secretary of State reports to the Committees on Appropriations on the steps being taken by the Palestinian Authority to end torture and other cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment of detainees, including by bringing to justice members of Palestinian security forces who commit such crimes.
7. The bill prohibits any funding of the Palestinian Authority if Palestine achieves recognition of statehood by the UN or any UN agency without Israel’s agreement or if the Palestinians initiate an investigation of Israel in the International Criminal Court: Sec.7401(k)(2)(A)(i) None of the funds appropriated under the heading ‘‘Economic Support Fund’’ in this Act may be made available for assistance for the Palestinian Authority, if after the date of enactment of this Act the Palestinians obtain the same standing as member states or full membership as a state in the United Nations or any specialized agency thereof outside an agreement negotiated between Israel and the Palestinians or the Palestinians initiate an International Criminal Court (ICC) judicially authorized investigation, or actively support such an investigation, that subjects Israeli nationals to an investigation for alleged crimes against Palestinians.
8. The bill extends existing loan guarantees to Israel under the Emergency Wartime Supplemental Appropriations Act through September 30, 2029: SEC. 7034(k)(6).
9. The bill grants $3.3 billion in “Foreign Military Financing” to Israel, to be disbursed within 30 days: 7401(d) ISRAEL.—Of the funds appropriated by this Act under the heading ‘‘Foreign Military Financing Program’’, not less than $3,300,000,000 shall be available for grants only for Israel which shall be disbursed within 30 days of enactment of this Act: Provided, That to the extent that the Government of Israel requests that funds be used for such purposes, grants made available for Israel under this heading shall, as agreed by the United States and Israel, be available for advanced weapons systems, of which not less than $725,300,000 shall be available for the procurement in Israel of defense articles and defense services, including research and development.
10. The bill authorizes half a billion dollars in military aid to Israel for “Iron Dome” and other missile defense systems: SEC. 8072. Of the amounts appropriated in this Act under the headings ‘‘Procurement, Defense-Wide’’ and ‘‘Research, Development, Test and Evaluation, Defense-Wide, $500,000,000 shall be for the Israeli Cooperative Programs.

The bill has passed through Congress, is written into law, and is on its way for Joe Biden’s signature. In other words, the US is willingly complicit in thousands of deaths already plus the impending deaths of some tens of thousands more innocent people. It is funding Israel’s war of extermination against the Palestinians and is opposed to any attempts by the Palestinians to either defend themselves or their interests as a people. It is shameful and our government is behaving monstrously, controlled by a foreign power that has thoroughly corrupted it. And the rot is spreading throughout our political system to include the death of our own right to freedom of speech. Only last week Governor Greg Abbott of Texas boasted of new legislation to stamp out alleged antisemitism and as criticism of Israel or the behavior of Jews is defined as being antisemitic it is likely that students demonstrating against the Jewish state and in support of Gaza will be expelled from universities and even prosecuted. And it is also reported that the Israel Lobby in the US is busy assembling a war chest of $100 million to fund the removal of politicians and other public figures who are critical of Israel. This is serious stuff that will affect all of us.

Russia Prison – Wall Street Journal Activist/Reporter Gershkovich (Politico) 29 March 2024

Inside the WSJ’s ‘Very Intense’ Effort to Free Evan Gershkovich

“Until he’s out, not enough has been done by anyone,” says WSJ publisher Almar Latour.

POLITICO illustration/Photo by Getty Images

By RYAN LIZZA

03/29/2024 05:00 AM EDT

Ryan Lizza is a Playbook Co-Author and the Chief Washington Correspondent for POLITICO

Ayear ago today Evan Gershkovich, a Wall Street Journal Moscow correspondent, was meeting with a source at a steakhouse when FSB agents arrested him and charged him with espionage, an allegation he and the Journal said was absurd. The U.S. government agreed. In less than two weeks, the State Department declared that Gershkovich was “wrongfully detained,” an official status that commits the Biden administration to work for his release.

Almar Latour is the publisher of the Journal and the CEO of Dow Jones. One responsibility he did not expect when he took this job in 2020 was assisting in a hostage negotiation with Vladimir Putin. Latour has played a key role in the legal and diplomatic effort to free Gershkovich. He has worked with the Biden administration, foreign governments and through private channels to figure out what exactly Putin wants to secure the 32-year-old journalist’s freedom.

I spoke with Latour on this week’s episode of Playbook Deep Dive to learn the inside story of this effort. We discussed how the shadow of basketball star Brittney Griner’s detainment in Russia is influencing talks to bring Evan home; what Gershkovich’s detention means for Paul Whelan, the only other American considered by the U.S. to be wrongfully detained in Russia.; why a Russian hitman who is serving a life sentence in Germany for murder may be the key to unlocking a deal with Putin; and how the 2024 election may affect Gershkovich’s fate.

The following transcript has been edited for length and clarity with help from Deep Dive Senior Producer Alex Keeney and Producer Kara Tabor.https://player.simplecast.com/6ac87e9b-0698-43e8-9cb0-a38a78a562b8?dark=false 

What is the current status of the U.S. government’s efforts to bring Evan home and how has this played out over the past year?

Without speaking for the administration in any form, I would characterize it as a very intense effort. There are people dedicated to situations like these in the State Department. The Special Presidential Envoy for Hostage Affairs is a unit within the State Department that concentrates on cases like these, not necessarily around press freedom, but around Americans who are wrongfully detained.

There are many senior administration officials who have commented — the president, of course, has commented on the case. There is just a lot of activity from the White House and the State Department. What has been very impressive is how people have coalesced around this cause and how so many people are giving it their all.

That said, the outcome is sort of binary: He’s either free or he’s not. And so if the question is, “Has enough been done?” Well, we’ll know that when he walks free.

There are many senior administration officials who have commented — President Joe Biden, of course, has commented on the case. | Carolyn Kaster/AP

One of the eye-opening pieces of reporting the Journal published this week was about a complex prisoner swap to secure Evan’s freedom that involved both the Russian and German governments. According to the Journal’s reporting, the exchange involved Alexei Navalny before he died and a Russian assassin, Vadim Krasikov, who is in prison in Germany. Can you tell us anything about what happened there?

In the past year, there have been many forays into the realm of trying to free Evan. And there are different channels for that. First, there is the publicity around Evan that keeps him in the news and that helps with making sure that his release is a priority with the administration.

Then, there’s the official diplomacy that takes place that, in my view, would include signals that the president or the White House might send publicly. But also, a lot that happens behind the scenes bilaterally [or] on a multilateral basis.

And then there is what I would call “private diplomacy.” We have retained a law firm that has, among its many specialties, hostage affairs. So [we’re] creating additional channels to find a solution because you never know in cases like these where the eventual solution is going to come from. And so it’s important for us at the Wall Street Journal as an institution, but also, I think, for the administration, to have all these paths work simultaneously.

If that sounds complicated, it is because it is. And I think some of the reporting that you’ve read that I can’t comment on blow-by-blow reflects, at a minimum, that these cases and potential solutions often happen in very muddled terrain and in very blurry circumstances, where there just are a lot of variables.

Obviously, you’re not going to say anything that would jeopardize Evan in any way. But do you feel like the German government has been a good partner in this effort? Do you feel like the German government has understood how important this case is to the Biden administration? Or would you like them to do more?

We want everybody to do more until he’s out. Until he’s out, not enough has been done by anyone, and that goes for all of us. But we’re confident that at some point, he will be released.

I think on the specific Germany question, on this private diplomacy path, we have met a lot of people from a lot of different countries. We have traveled with Evan’s parents to different spots, including very publicly to Davos recently where they had a chance to meet with world leaders. And so, without commenting specifically on the Germans, we’ve had a chance for the parents to meet with world leaders, or for our lawyers to meet with world leaders, in addition to whatever the U.S. administration does on that front. And I think wherever and whenever we’ve done that, when faced with the parents, I’ve seen some senior figures on the world stage realize how much pain this causes for one family.

In addition, I think there is a realization that this case reverberates beyond one individual; that the wrongful incarceration of a journalist has wider implications, very negative implications for press freedom. So I do think that we’ve seen that awareness take hold with world leaders, in Western Europe, and around the world, and certainly also in the U.S.

I wanted to ask you about one of the stranger parts of this effort, and that is Tucker Carlson’s interview with Vladimir Putin, where he asked about releasing Evan. What did you and the Journal learn from that exchange? Did Tucker reach out to the Journal at all, or did he just raise Evan’s case to Putin on his own initiative?

I can’t speak to whom Tucker may have reached out to or not. There was, I think, a public awareness and certainly an awareness in this building that he was going to have that interview. And I think, at least I was under the impression, that the topic might come up. At least to me, there wasn’t a direct request or any notification of that sort, nor were we seeking that per se. We were more focused on Putin’s response.

What did you make of it?

It reinforced the notion that this was something very deliberate and that there was some forethought; that there was no surprise to this question and the answer didn’t seem so spontaneous.

Evan Gershkovich (right) is escorted from court in Moscow, Russia on Jan. 26, 2024. | Alexander Zemlianichenko/AP

He was weirdly honest about it, sort of like there was no B.S. about what was really going on with Evan. Or am I reading that incorrectly?

“Honest” is not a word that I would use in a sentence containing “Vladimir Putin.” I think you could see, at that moment, the transactional nature. So, it was a naked portrayal of the motivation, in my view.

Did it spin things forward? Not that I can tell.

So in a weird way, did it give you a little bit more optimism like, “Okay, this guy’s just looking for a deal, and we’ve got to find the deal that will satisfy him.”

Hostage-taking, you know, works like this to begin with.

You knew that already.

This is the whole game, right? We take somebody and we want a ransom or a trade or something in return.

So by this point, nobody on the Russian side is pretending that that’s not what this is about?

I can’t speak to specifically what the Russians have said or not said, but what I can say is that I would dismiss any sort of portrayal that this is anything other than seeking a trade. It comes on the back of another trade that has been made involving Brittney Griner. There’s very little that is truthful that comes out of the Kremlin these days. So even quasi-frank comments have to be seen in that transactional light.

Where were you when you learned that Evan had been arrested?

I was in South Africa. There was a period that preceded that moment where I got a phone call from my head of HR and head of security saying that, “We may have some difficult news and there might be a very difficult situation. A reporter in Russia did not show up at their appointed time.”

And that was really a moment because we have, like many major news organizations, a very strict security protocol where if you go out on something sensitive or you find yourself in a danger zone, there’s a significant amount of planning that happens. And there are appointed times when you check in; and depending on the situation, there might be some tracking. But when somebody doesn’t show up — which was the very first moment of this saga for me — that was alarming.

Putin ‘ready to talk’ about release of US prisoner Evan GershkovichShare

And initially, I suppose you didn’t know why Evan had missed his check-in?

No. And you hope for the best, of course. But a little bit later, it became clear that a second checkpoint had been missed. And Evan did not show up at his apartment — this is some hours later — and so it went from a suspicion that something had gone wrong to an ever-stronger suspicion that something had gone wrong.

And there were also, at that point, some rumors that had reached me indirectly that he might have been arrested. Some hours later, there was a confirmation of some sort that that had happened. And then for me, the next morning, very early morning on the East Coast, the FSB put out a statement.

The FSB statement was the first official word, right?

That was the first official word with context as to what this was and that contained this espionage lie immediately. And when you hear in a hostage situation that somebody has been taken, maybe at first your instinct is, “Let’s address this in the quiet. Let’s have the conversations that we need to have with the authorities in this case, maybe with an embassy or with the right team.”

But this got tossed out into the open right away. There was never really a chance to have that conversation, which is very different than some other cases. But here I think it shows the deliberate nature of what has happened. It got very deliberately pushed out into the world with a very clear message from the Russian Federation.

Let me ask you about two quick things. One, were there signs of the deteriorating situation for journalists in Russia? Was Evan picking up on that? Was your newsroom?

And second, the story that the Journal published this past Wednesday was an amazing piece of journalism, and I assume you’re very intimately aware of all the details. One thing it says is that Putin was looking for a new pawn at this point in time. And I’m just curious if that was something that was on anyone’s radar back then or if it’s just something we all realized in hindsight.

When you read that somebody has been falsely accused of something, you understand that there is some motivation to drive that, whether that is defaming the Western press or something else altogether.

But I think, at that moment a year ago, we were institutionally aware that the circumstances in Russia — and also in some other places around the world — were just more difficult for reporters. And when people are sent out into the field, it’s with their consent, with an elaborate discussion with security. And so we had been monitoring it. Did we know that there was a methodical approach to hostage-taking [by the Russian government] as it looks today? It’s easy to say with hindsight. But the situation did not seem accidental.

Almar Latour has worked with the Biden administration, foreign governments and through private channels to figure out what exactly President Vladimir Putin wants to secure Gershkovich’s freedom. | Patrick T. Fallon/AFP via Getty Images

The other wrongfully detained American in the Russian system is Paul Whelan. How much do the people like yourself, who are advocating on Evan’s behalf, coordinate with your counterparts who are advocating on Paul Whelan’s behalf?

You know, first off, my heart goes out to Paul and Paul’s family and they’ve been at this for way too long — five years. We want him to be released and we think it’s incredibly important. Our task here is to focus on our colleague. The government is focusing on a broader set of hostage situations. I do think that with the spotlight that we’ve deliberately put on Evan, there’s been, over the past year, a greater awareness of the hostage situations that exist in Russia and even elsewhere. And so in that sense, the Evan situation, when we talk about it implicitly, of course, pertains to Paul as well as to Alsu [Kurmasheva], who recently got apprehended there for what seems like bogus reasons.

Sadly, the court recently extended Evan’s imprisonment by three more months. What’s your reading of how the 2024 presidential campaign and political situation in the United States may or may not play into these efforts to get Evan back?

We have had bipartisan support for Evan’s release, and that has been very consistent throughout.

I think the extension that was made clear this week — through June 30th — has the air of sounding official, but all these things are really arbitrary and in parallel with the official legal system, could be decided separately if the Kremlin wanted to speed things up or slow things down.

So I mainly look at these extensions as the language of the Kremlin and whether they have what they want or not. So this means that at least for the next few months, theoretically, they don’t yet have what they want.

Gershkovich stands in a defendants’ cage at a hearing in Moscow on Sept. 19, 2023. | Dmitry Serebryakov/AP

What did you learn from previous efforts to get wrongfully detained Americans out of Russia? For example, Brittney Griner, who was swapped for the notorious arms dealer Viktor Bout?

So, a very different situation… But two decades ago, we did have a situation that did not end well when [Wall Street Journal correspondent] Daniel Pearl was taken hostage [in Pakistan]. And so there is an acute awareness institutionally here that you have to take these situations incredibly seriously. I think that was one lesson: that there’s no guarantee for the outcome necessarily, so you have to give it your all.

And I think that led to a very speedy organization around this where we set up various teams, a comms team, a legal team in the U.S., a legal team in Russia and a lot of other different channels.

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On the Griner case, one conclusion was that putting a spotlight on a situation like this helps. It helps with the prioritization. I think that has been a dominant theme for the past year: to make sure that having that voice, having that spotlight, helps this case. And then I think the transactional nature of the Griner case — having a major arms dealer traded against a basketball player of renown — that shows the crass nature of a situation like this.

So I think those lessons and a few other things quite quickly found their way into our bloodstream as we tried to get organized around this.

I think having the realization that you need to stay in close contact with the family, with the government, and bring to bear anyone you know who might influence the situation — so bring in all your resources — those are all lessons, at least in hindsight, that I think we picked up or we found out along the way.

I want to ask you one last question, and that is to explain to listeners who haven’t been following this case, one, why should they care about this? And two, what can people do if they care about Evan and want to help?

This case is important because it pertains to one man’s freedom, and that matters. Evan is a journalist and he was just doing his job. He was arrested for doing his job. And when that can happen and nobody says anything about it, that has a tremendous negative impact on society, on free press.

His arrest, in my view, was a direct attempt to suppress press freedom, to send a signal that you are not safe as a journalist in Russia. If we let that go by unnoticed, if we don’t say anything about it, if we don’t fight for Evan’s release, that signals to Russia that this is okay behavior. That makes any chance for reliable information to get to Russia even more difficult.

But I believe it can also be contagious. And that this may give other dictators, strongmen, the idea that, “Hey, there’s another way to deal with press that you don’t like,” and that is just by arresting them or by taking harsher measures.

And so what can you do about this? At first, I think, have this awareness and follow the case. I think it does matter to talk about it to your friends, to talk about press freedom to people you know, to talk to your elected officials about it.

I often get this question like, does it really matter? But if you wear that [Free Evan] pin, every little bit helps to support that thesis that free press is a good thing and that society needs that more than ever. And so, in fighting for Evan’s release, I think we can all make a statement for him, but also for society at large.

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Source

May Day 2024: For International Workers Action Against The Genocidal U.S./Israel War on Gaza!

All Out in Solidarity with the Palestinian People! (Internationalist Group)

Labor activists of S.I. Cobas, the CALP (Autonomous Collective of Port Workers) and other “rank-and-file” unions blockade the port of Genova, Italy on February 23-24, preventing loading/unloading of an Israeli Zim Line ship.  (Photo: S.I. Cobas)

With the barbaric war on Gaza now in its sixth month, it is utterly clear that this is an actual genocide, targeting the entire Palestinian Arab population of what has been termed the world’s largest open-air prison. After over 40,000 killed,¹ the destruction of more than half of all homes in the densely populated enclave, the bombing of schools and universities and attacks on hospitals, now more than one million people face the spectre of imminent starvation.² It is also clear that this is a joint U.S./Israeli war, as all the heavy bombs and all the warplanes from which they are dropped are supplied by the Pentagon, while Washington funnels billions in U.S. aid to Israel annually. Millions have marched worldwide to denounce the slaughter and calling for a ceasefire, to no avail. Every appeal to the Zionist/imperialist warmongers has come to naught.

What’s desperately needed is the mobilization of power that can bring the slaughter to a halt, the power of the working class, in the United States and around the world. This coming May 1, the workers day, should become a day of militant international workers action – including strikes and labor-led mass mobilization – to stop the genocidal U.S./Israel war on Gaza. It should be followed up with labor action worldwide to shut down all flights and shipping to and from Israel so long as the Zionist war on Gaza continues. Workers should demand: stop the bombing, stop the massacres, Israeli military and settlers get the hell out of Gaza and all the Occupied Territories NOW!

This is what genocide looks like. Residents of Gaza City gather at site of destroyed building, March 2024  (Photo: Agence France-Presse)

Last October, the Palestinian General Federation of Trade Unions (PGFTU) in Gaza and more than two dozen Palestinian unions and professional associations issued an urgent appeal to labor internationally to refuse to build or transport arms for and to Israel. In the U.S., over 200 union bodies have since passed resolutions calling for a ceasefire – but with no action beyond joining “peace” marches. In some cases, notably the AFL-CIO, these appeals are actually support for Israel, denouncing Palestinians for starting the war, not demanding that Israel get out of Gaza and calling for release of all Israeli hostages and nothing about the over 9,000 Palestinians being held hostage in Israeli jails (plus another 4,000 workers from Gaza who were in Israel when the war began and are now being held in military camps).³

The League for the Fourth International and its U.S. section, the Internationalist Group, have called from the outset to “Defend the Palestinians Against U.S./Israel Genocidal War on Gaza!” (The Internationalist, 10 October 2023), “For Workers Action Against Zionist Terror” and “against the shipment of arms to Israel and Ukraine,” where the U.S. and its NATO allies are waging an imperialist proxy war against Russia. We have underlined that, so far, calls for labor solidarity have been mainly on paper, and what port shutdowns there have been were mostly called by community groups rather than the unions, as long-time maritime labor activist Jack Heyman pointed out in his recent article reiterating the call “Dock Workers: Block Military Cargo to Israel” (The Internationalist, 15 February).

Motion calling for ILWU Local 10 to stop work on May 1 in solidarity with the Palestinian people and against genocidal war on Gaza. 

Last week, Heyman and others put forward a resolution for International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) Local 10 in the San Francisco Bay Area to stop work on May Day, the international workers day, “calling for international workers action in solidarity with the besieged Palestinian people, in opposition to the genocidal Israel/U.S. war on Gaza and to stop the flow of arms to that war.” The motion also urged the rest of the union and dock workers internationally to join in taking May Day Palestinian solidarity actions.

Now the Palestinian General Federation of Labor, Gaza has issued a May Day appeal to unions in the United States calling to do just that. The PGFTU statement says frankly that “we have encountered shocking silence and neglect by the international labor movement.” It spells this out:

“The international labor movement … retreated to verbal positions without taking measures on the ground or pressuring the decision-makers to stop this war of extermination, limiting union activities to conferences and statements and not delving deeply into the need to guarantee humanitarian aid, or influencing international public opinion to expose the truth about Zionist crimes and the practices of the allied countries that continue to support Israel.”  

(Click here or on image below for the full text of the PGFTU, Gaza appeal.)

In response to the PGFTU’s urgent appeal to unions and trade-unionists in the U.S. and internationally “to be our voice and advocate inside and outside America,” the League for the Fourth International urges labor militants around the world to mobilize workers’ power in hard-hitting labor-led actions on May 1 in solidarity with the besieged Palestinian people against the genocidal U.S./Israel war. Such actions can and should include not only focusing May Day marches on Palestine solidarity and organizing workers aid to Gaza, but blocking arms shipments and carrying out labor boycotts of flights and shipping to and from Israel, and wherever possible, strike action and shutting down production. Such actions should demand an immediate stop to the bombing, forced population transfers and any restrictions on emergency aid to Gaza; an end to all aid to Israel, and for Israel’s complete withdrawal from Gaza and all the Occupied Territories.

In the U.S., it is crucial to fight for the workers and oppressed to break with the Democrats, who are financing, advising, arming and jointly waging war on the Palestinians in Gaza together with the Israeli government of hardline Zionists and outright fascists; and to oust the class-collaborationist labor bureaucracy, which for decades has chained the unions to the bosses’ parties. A prime example of this is the leadership of the United Auto Workers (UAW), which in response to clamor from the ranks, particularly in the Detroit area with its large Arab American population, called for a ceasefire in Gaza, and then turned around and endorsed “Genocide Joe” Biden for president! For their part, the Teamster tops are currently flirting with Donald Trump, who said of the war in Gaza that he would tell Israeli prime minister Netanyahu to “finish it up and do it quickly” (Haaretz, 17 March).

The contours of effective solidarity action with the Palestinian people vary from country to country. In Germany, labor action against the genocidal war must necessarily oppose not only the ferociously pro-Zionist Social Democrat/Free Democrat/Green government (which has banned many pro-Palestinian protests) and the equally rabidly pro-Israel right-wing “opposition” but also the Left Party, as all the parliamentary parties explicitly support “Israel’s right to self-defense,” the formula justifying the mass murder in Gaza. In Italy, where fascists lead a far-right-wing government, organizing effective labor solidarity will require united action by the normally fractious “rank-and-file” unions and bringing out key industrial sectors in a direct challenge to the “mainstream” confederations, which despite talk of a ceasefire are solidly pro-Israel.

Everywhere, the opportunist left seeks to build a “broad antiwar movement,” typically centered on calls for a ceasefire, in order to include dissident liberal or “progressive” elements from the bourgeois and reformist parties, who don’t necessarily oppose the war on Gaza but only its “excesses.” Rather than such “popular-front” coalitions pushing impotent pressure politics, what’s urgently needed is independent, militant class struggle against all the capitalist and governing social-democratic parties, which are all cogs in the imperialist system, and therefore, one way or another, complicit in the genocide being carried out in Gaza. Classless appeals for “peace” are a diversion in the face of implacable U.S. and Israeli mass murderers, who can only be stopped by international socialist revolution.

Activists of Class Struggle Workers Portland (above at 11 November 2023 Palestine labor solidarity rally) call to defend Gaza, defeat U.S./Israel war on Palestinians. Four Portland area unions have passed motions demanding an end to Israeli bombing of Gaza, for Israel out of West Bank and Gaza and to end to U.S. arming and funding. (Internationalist photo)

Highlighting the urgency of this independent class-struggle policy are resolutions that have been passed by four unions – Iron Workers Local 29, IUPAT (Painters) Local 10, IBEW (electrical workers) Local 48 and AFT (education) Local 111 – in the Portland, Oregon area of the U.S. Pacific Northwest. Rather than calling for a ceasefire, which would leave the Israeli in control of Gaza and which plays into the hands of the Biden administration that is now toying with the word, the resolutions, introduced by supporters of Class Struggle Workers – Portland, call for labor action to stop the shipment of arms to Israel, for “the immediate end to Israel’s bombing of Gaza, for Israel to vacate Gaza and the West Bank, and to end all arming or funding to it now” (click here or on reproductions below to read resolutions on the web site of Class Struggle Workers – Portland).

Above all the fight to halt the genocidal U.S./Israel war against the Palestinian people requires a political fight against the capitalist parties. This was addressed by the Portland Painters, who in a 2016 resolution called to break with all the bosses’ parties and build a class-struggle workers party. The call in that resolution for the national union to repudiate its endorsement of the Democratic presidential candidate should be a beacon to worker militants today as unions in the U.S. join calls for a ceasefire in Gaza, and then endorse war criminal Democrat Biden who is responsible for arming, financing and directing the genocidal war.

August 2016 Resolution of International Union of Painters and
Allied Trades (IUPAT) Local 10 for a Class-Struggle Workers Party
(Excerpt)

“Whereas across the country, from Oakland to Baltimore, police under Democratic mayors regularly murder black men and women with impunity, and

“Whereas the 2016 presidential election offers us the “choice” between a raving, bigoted clown and a career representative of Wall Street, and …

“Whereas Democrats and Republicans are and have always been strike-breaking, war-making parties of the bosses, and

“Whereas so long as the labor movement supports one or another party of the bosses, we will be playing a losing game, therefore be it

“Resolved that IUPAT Local 10 does not support the Democrats, Republicans, or any bosses’ parties or politicians, and

“Resolved that we call on the International Union to repudiate its endorsement of Hillary Clinton for president, and

“Resolved that we call on the labor movement to break from the Democratic Party, and build a class-struggle workers party.

The embattled Palestinian Arabs have been subjected to “ethnic cleansing” for more than three-quarters of a century, following subjugation by the British imperialists and the Ottoman Empire – and now to outright genocide by the Zionist state of Israel and its U.S. patrons. It will take a revolution to put an end to this oppression, a revolution that can only be successful by splitting and exploding Israeli society from within. This requires intransigent, internationalist class struggle, throughout the entire region. As the League for the Fourth International has emphasized since the beginning of that war, and long before that, the bottom line is that defenders of the oppressed and opponents of imperialism must stand foursquare with the Palestinian people against the Zionist oppressors and their state, and that the only solution that promises a just and equitable future to the two peoples inhabiting this tiny land is for an Arab-Hebrew Palestinian workers state, in a socialist federation of the Middle East.

All out for militant international workers action on May Day in solidarity with the Palestinian people against the genocidal U.S./Israel war! ■

(28 March 2024 NYC Protest Versus Biden Fundraiser)

…………………………

1. 1. Includes 7,000+ missing under rubble of collapsed buildings. Euro-Med Monitor, Infographic, The Israeli Genocide in the Gaza Strip, 7 October 2023 – 14 March 2024.
2. 2. Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, Famine Review Committee: Gaza Strip, March 2024.
3. 3. “9,077 ‘Security’ Inmates Are Held In Prisons Inside Israel,” HaMoked, March 2024.

Source

NYC: Internationalist Group Joins Hundreds Protesting Biden – 28 March 2024

The Crucifixion of Julian Assange – by Chris Hedges – 27 March 2024

• 1,400 WORDS • 

British courts for five years have dragged out Julian Assange’s show trial. He continues to be denied due process as his physical and mental health deteriorates. This is the point.

Prosecutors representing the United States, whether by design or incompetence, refused — in the two-day hearing I attended in London in February — to provide guarantees that Julian Assange would be afforded First Amendment rights and would be spared the death penalty if extradited to the U.S.

The inability to give these assurances all but guaranteed that the High Court — as it did on Tuesday — would allow Julian’s lawyers to appeal. Was this done to stall for time so that Julian would not be extradited until after the U.S. presidential election? Was it a delaying tactic to work out a plea deal? Julian’s lawyers and U.S. prosecutors are discussing this possibility. Was it careless legal work? Or was it to keep Julian locked in a high security prison until he collapses mentally and physically?

If Julian is extradited, he will stand trial for allegedly violating 17 counts of the 1917 Espionage Act, with a potential sentence of 170 years, along with another charge for “conspiracy to commit computer intrusion” carrying an additional five years.

The court will permit Julian to appeal minor technical points — his basic free speech rights must be honored, he cannot be discriminated against on the basis of his nationality and he cannot be under threat of the death penalty.

No new hearing will allow his lawyers to focus on the war crimes and corruption that WikiLeaks exposed. No new hearing will permit Julian to mount a public-interest defense. No new hearing will discuss the political persecution of a publisher who has not committed a crime.

The court, by asking the U.S. for assurances that Julian would be granted First Amendment rights in the U.S. courts and not be subject to the death penalty, offered the U.S. an easy out — give the guarantees and the appeal is rejected.

It is hard to see how the U.S. can refuse the two-judge panel, composed of Dame Victoria Sharp and Justice Jeremy Johnson, which issued on Tuesday a 66-page judgment accompanied by a three-page court order and a four-page media briefing.

The hearing in February was Julian’s last chance to request an appeal of the extradition decision made in 2022 by the then British home secretary, Priti Patel, and many of the rulings of District Judge Vanessa Baraitser in 2021.

If Julian is denied an appeal, he can request an emergency stay of execution from the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) under Rule 39, which is given in “exceptional circumstances” and “only where there is an imminent risk of irreparable harm.” But it is possible the British court could order Julian’s immediate extradition prior to a Rule 39 instruction, or decide to ignore a request from the ECtHR to allow Julian to have his case heard there.

Julian has been engaged in a legal battle for 15 years. It began in 2010 when WikiLeaks published classified military files from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — including footage showing a U.S. helicopter gunning down civilians, including two Reuters journalists, in Baghdad.

Julian took refuge in the Embassy of Ecuador in London for seven years, fearing extradition to the U.S. He was arrested in April 2019 by the Metropolitan Police, who were permitted by the Embassy to enter and seize him. He has been held for nearly five years in HM Prison Belmarsh, a high-security prison in southeast London.

The case against Julian has made a mockery of the British justice system and international law. While in the embassy, the Spanish security firm UC Global provided video recordings of meetings between Julian and his lawyers to the CIA, eviscerating attorney-client privilege.

The Ecuadorian government — led by Lenin Moreno — violated international law by rescinding Julian’s asylum status and permitting police into their embassy to carry Julian into a waiting van. The courts have denied Julian’s status as a legitimate journalist and publisher. The U.S. and Britain have ignored Article 4 of their Extradition Treaty that prohibits extradition for political offenses. The key witness for the U.S., Sigurdur Thordarson — a convicted fraudster and pedophile — admitted to fabricating the accusations he made against Julian in exchange for immunity for past crimes..

Julian, an Australian citizen, is being charged under the U.S. Espionage Act although he did not engage in espionage and was not based in the U.S when he was sent the leaked documents. The British courts are considering extradition, despite the CIA’s plan to kidnap and assassinate Julian, plans that included a potential shoot-out on the streets of London, with involvement by London’s Metropolitan Police.

Julian has been held in isolation in a high-security prison without trial, although his only technical violation of the law is breaching bail conditions after he obtained asylum in the Embassy of Ecuador. This should only entail a fine.

Finally, Julian did not, unlike Daniel Ellsberg, leak the documents. He published documents leaked by U.S. Army whistleblower Chelsea Manning.

Three of the nine legal grounds were accepted by the judges as potential points for appeal. The other six were denied. The two-judge panel also rejected the request by Julian’s lawyers to present new evidence.

Julian’s legal team asked the court to introduce into the case the Yahoo! News report that revealed, after the release of the documents known as Vault 7, that the then-director of the CIA Mike Pompeo, considered assassinating Julian. Julian’s lawyers also hoped to introduce a statement from Joshua Dratel, a U.S. attorney, who said that Pompeo’s use of the terms “non-state hostile intelligence service” and “enemy combatant” were phrases designed to give legal cover for an assassination. The third piece of evidence Julian’s lawyers hoped to introduce was a statement from a Spanish witness in the criminal proceedings underway in Spain against UC Global.

The CIA is the engine behind Julian’s extradition. Vault 7 exposed hacking tools that permit the CIA to access our phones, computers and televisions, turning them — even when switched off — into monitoring and recording devices. The extradition request does not include charges based on the release of the Vault 7 files, but the U.S. indictment followed the release of the Vault 7 files.

Justice Sharp and Justice Johnson dismissed the report in Yahoo! News as “another recitation of opinion by journalists on matters that were considered by the judge.” They rejected the argument made by the defense that Julian’s extradition would be in violation of Section 81 of the U.K. Extradition Act of 2003, which prohibits extraditions in cases where individuals are prosecuted for their political opinions. The judges also dismissed the arguments made by Julian’s attorneys that extradition would violate his protections under the European Convention of Human Rights — the right to life, the prohibition of inhuman and degrading treatment, the right to a free trial and protections against punishment without law respectively.

The U.S. largely built its arguments from the affidavits of the U.S. prosecutor Gordon D. Kromberg. Kromberg, an Assistant U.S. Attorney in the Eastern District of Virginia has stated that Julian, as a foreign national, is “not entitled to protections under the First Amendment, at least as it concerns national defense information.”

Ben Watson, King’s Counsel, who represented the U.K. government during the two-day hearing in February, conceded that if Julian is found guilty under the Espionage Act, he could receive a death penalty sentence.

The U.S. and the U.K Secretary of State were urged by the judges to offer the British court assurances on these three points by April 16.

If the assurances are not provided, the appeal will proceed.

If the assurances are provided, lawyers for both sides have until April 30th to make new written submissions to the court. At that point, the court will convene again on May 20 to decide if the appeal can go forward.

The goals in this Dickensian nightmare remain unchanged. Erase Julian from the public consciousness. Demonize him. Criminalize those who expose government crimes. Use Julian’s slow motion crucifixion to warn journalists that no matter their nationality, no matter where they live, they can be kidnapped and extradited to the U.S. Drag out the judicial lynching for years until Julian, already in a precarious physical and mental condition, disintegrates.

This ruling, like all of the rulings in this case, is not about justice. It is about vengeance.

……………………….

(Republished from Scheerpost)

US Congress Goes Berserk Over TikTok – by Eve Ottenberg – 29 March 2024

Lots of people have been blamed for the frenzy to ban TikTok, from the CIA and FBI, to the mainstream media, to political elites, to AIPAC, to competitors like Facebook. But I blame Congress. They pulled the trigger. Now as we teeter on the abyss of a Steve Mnuchin takeover of TikTok – a development, make no mistake, that would be disastrous for everything from free speech to ownership of such a platform by a capitalist super-predator, to intelligent, rational foreign policy, to those who simply object to his let-them-eat-cake wife – we can thank the intellectual heavyweights on capitol hill who thought it would be a dandy idea to wade into a hopeless morass of hysteria and hokum and to extract from it an absolute monster of congressionally regulated speech.

As Arnaud Bertrand noted on Twitter March 14,Ccongress is stealing TikTok because it is “owned by the Chinese government.” He added: “It’s not, China only has a 1 percent stake in the mother company.” To this, someone else tweeted: “This is exactly how the Nazis forced Jewish owners of companies to sell to German capitalists.” Or, as China’s foreign ministry succinctly summed it up: “This is banditry.”

Whatever you want to call it, it’s bad. It sets a lousy financial and business precedent at a moment jam-packed with lousy financial and business precedents – for instance, the west looting Russia’s frozen assets to the tune of $300 billion, or previously making off with Afghanistan’s money, or earlier Venezuela’s gold, or the U.S. blowing up the Nordstream pipeline to corner Europe’s energy market. So now we gonna just straight up steal a company because China owns one percent of it? Who in their right mind will do business with the United States if this nonsense becomes law? I’ll tell you who: Other bandits. And that means one stinking awful thing – ordinary Americans will get fleeced. We’re already getting fleeced, but this just sets it in stone for the foreseeable future.

One thing’s for sure: the youth vote ain’t gonna like this. And overall, there are about 180 million TikTok users. So those people, young and less young, may very well drop Biden like a hot potato come November. He doesn’t seem to think so – how else to explain his eagerness to sign this offensive law? But I noticed Trump came out against it. Remember he’s the one who, back in 2020, called for banning TikTok. But unlike Biden, he figured out which way the wind is blowing, and what it’s blowing from Congress is such a putrid stench that over 100 million voters may very well stampede in the other direction. (Trump may also be trying to align with Jeff Yass, the billionaire stakeholder in TikTok, a moneyman who owns much of another company that recently merged with Trump’s Truth Social, thus possibly legally rescuing the former president by helping him make bail.)

This idiotic House TikTok vote comes at a very bad time, too, as Beijing casts a dour and doubtful eye over all parts of the Washington project. Indeed, a Chinese defense representative stated March 16 that Beijing is “ready to intervene,” should NATO or the U.S. attack Russia. NATO troops recently landed south of Kiev in Cherkassy might want to keep that in mind, as might the megageniuses who cooked up this nitwit scheme. Just as ominously, according to Anti-War.com March 14, U.S. Army special forces soldiers are in Kinmen, “a group of islands that are controlled by Taiwan but located just off the coast of mainland China.” Some are just 2.5 miles from the Chinese city of Xiamen. “The U.S. soldiers are also deployed in Penghu, a Taiwanese-controlled archipelago about 30 miles west” of Taiwan, “and 70 miles east of mainland China.” That’s not provocative, oh no, never!

Making matters worse, according to the Global Times March 21, the U.S. wants to expand the AUKUS military alliance, “forming a mini-NATO in Asia.” And everyone with a brain, and the Chinese have plenty, knows what that means. NATO on Russia’s front porch, in Ukraine, started a big, horrible war. It will try to do the same if mini-NATO expands to include Japan and Canada and muscles in on China’s doorstep. Of course, Washington wants to corral the Philippines into it too, and indeed anyone they can to enhance an aggressive posture that Beltway bandits will no doubt insist, just as they did after the 2014 CIA neo-Nazi putsch in Kiev, is purely “defensive.” It’s called creating the enemy from whose much-hyped putative danger your weapons contractors can then get rich.

And that’s not all. Global Times reports March 14 that “the UK is now mulling curbs on the number of Chinese nationals who can enter the UK on official business and bypass normal visa checks…” The article notes that with an election approaching, “Conservatives could resort to more hawkish China policies and enhance their coordination with the U.S.” It quotes a Shanghai Academy of Global Governance and Area Studies researcher to the effect that the UK has been “hyping China espionage threats since 2023.” Another Chinese researcher cites coordination between the UK and the U.S. on international affairs. This at a time when no diplomat in their right mind wants to “coordinate” with the U.S. on China. But rampant Western Sinophobia long ago ditched the concerns of mere diplomacy.

Also on the bad news radar March 14, a Global Times headline: “Trilateral summit suggests Manila intensifying collusion with U.S., Japan to further complicate S. China Sea issues.” This report warns that the upcoming April summit could destabilize a pelagic expanse already bristling with warships from multiple nations. The three countries will discuss China’s growing “hegemonic activities,” a descriptor Beijing vigorously denies, with a foreign ministry spokesman arguing “that China’s activities in those waters fully comply with domestic and international law.”

Well, good luck with that. If the U.S. is involved, so is the so-called “rules-based order,” which means all bets are off, what Washington says goes and if those imperial commands defy international law, tough luck. The Empire loves is rules-based order, making up those rules as it goes along, and discarding them when they’re no longer convenient. Oh, and the rest of the world better not imitate Washington. Copycats not allowed. Only Beltway mandarins get to junk these opaque rules when they get in the way.

Also alarming to Beijing is the recent replacement of Victoria “Fuck the EU” Nuland as deputy secretary of state by China Hawk Kurt “Let Congress Critters Swarm Taiwan” Campbell, famous for calling out Beijing’s “provocative” behavior. In what context did he mention such provocations? Back on August 12, 2022, in a statement where he turned a simple factual narrative into a pretzel to trash Beijing. In short, then House speaker Nancy “My Husband’s Stock Trades Are His Business” Pelosi had just jetted into Taiwan, something everyone knew, because Beijing told them, crossed a very bright red line. Even Pelosi herself publicly aired Pentagon worries that her jet might get shot down and thereafter was careful to sneak into Taiwan in the dead of night, like someone who knew darn well she was doing something she shouldn’t. Well, according to Campbell, Pelosi’s little performance – against which everyone with an IQ above the double digits warned and which utterly spoiled Sino-American relations for over a year – was “a visit that is consistent with our One China Policy and is not unprecedented.” So yes, China’s worried about this loose cannon.

There is some good news, however. The head of the House Select Committee on (Bashing) China, Mike “The Chinese Are Coming” Gallagher, a rabid opponent of the 5000-year-old civilization, announced his retirement in February. He’s even leaving early, in April. This should hearten anti-war advocates everywhere, as it will decrease congressional Sinophobic pugilism and the chances of military fireworks erupting between two of the world’s three superpowers. Because we’re all on the same page here – right? We don’t want to glow in the dark or starve via nuclear winter. The five billion of us who would perish come Atomic Armageddon, aka war between the U.S. and China, don’t want that. So anything that blocks such a disaster is a good thing. Besides, it was a good bet Gallagher would find very lucrative employment anyway at a K Street lobby shop or in a right-wing think tank; then came news March 22 via Forbes that Gallagher in fact snagged a comfortable berth at Palantir, a very defense and intelligence connected tech company if ever there was one and one that has led the fight against…dum, da, dum, dum, you got it – TikTok! And by an astonishing coincidence, so did Gallagher while in the House! Golly gee, don’t his goals and Palantir’s dovetail nicely and, evidently, remuneratively, for the congressman?

So in the end, no matter how much of a ruckus our congressional luminaries make while in office, they usually manage a soft, cushy landing when they leave. A win/win situation for everyone who counts, which excludes, of course, all ordinary Americans and most of the rest of the world’s people. But we’re not resentful. We’re just happy they condescend to let us live.

…………………….

Eve Ottenberg is a novelist and journalist. Her latest book is Lizard People. She can be reached at her website.

The CIA Does ‘Soulful Work’ – by Edward Curtin – 27 March 2024

Back in the late 1980s and early 1990s, a spate of books and articles extolling the word “soul” became the rage in the United States.  Soul became the chic word.  It popped up everywhere.  Everything seemed to acquire soul – cars, toasters, underwear, cats’ pajamas, assorted crap, kitsch, etc.  Soul sold styles from boots to bras to bibelots from The New York Times to O Magazine.

The vogue in soul talk spread to every domain as everyone was commodified and capital was financialized.  While political, economic, and ecological reality spun out of regular people’s control and they felt unable to feel connected to a religious tradition that cut through the materialistic and war miasma, they were ravaged with a hunger to devour, to consume.  It was soul propaganda, highbrow New Ageism at its finest, the religious equivalent of an old-fashioned Ralph Lauren interior.  It was the era of consuming souls in a society that had become a spiritual void.  At least for those who had become divorced from their bodies and tradition at its best.  Fantasy started to rapidly replace reality.

The great popularizer of this new sense of soul and self (though no-self would be more accurate) was Thomas Moore, the author of the best-selling book – Care of the Soul, “a pathbreaking lifestyle handbook” and soon to be soul franchise (The Soul of Sex, Soul Therapy, The Soul of Christmas, etc.)  His works replaced the idea of an existential self with a precious, epicurean conception.  “You have a soul, the tree in front of your house has a soul, but so too does the car parked under the tree,” he said, adding that things “have as much personality and independence as I do.”  Ah, soul!

Not soul as I once learned in Catholic school: the essence of human freedom and consciousness in God united with the body.

Definitely not soul as the essence of a person bound by conscience to God and other human beings.

Not soul as in “For what shall it profit a man if he should gain the whole world and lose his soul.”

Not even soul as the dictionary defines it” “the immortal essence of an individual life.”

Although I have seen this soul-talk used for decades now to sell all sorts of bullshit and thought I couldn’t be surprised by any more usage, I just stumbled on one that took my breath away.  I read in Life Undercover, a memoir by RFK, Jr.’s presidential campaign manager, daughter-in-law, and former CIA spy under nonofficial cover in the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and North Africa, Amaryllis Fox (Kennedy), that CIA work is “soulful work.”  I didn’t know this.  I thought its job was to spy, kill, and foment chaos for its Wall St handlers (with certain exceptions being some analysts who gather information).  I recall former CIA Director Mike Pompeo saying, “I was the CIA director. We lied, we cheated, we stole. It’s – it was like – we had entire training courses. It reminds you of the glory of the American experiment.”  Or as my friend Doug Valentine, an expert on the CIA, puts it, the CIA is “Organized Crime,” not a bunch of soul-force workers out to feed the hungry and clothe the naked.  He writes:

CIA and military intelligence units now operate out of a global network of bases, as well as secret jails and detention sites operated by complicit secret police interrogators. Their strategic intelligence networks in any nation are protected by corrupt warlords and politicians, the ‘friendly civilians’ who supply the death squads that in fact are their private militias, funded largely by drug smuggling and other criminal activities.

Yet Fox effusively thanks her CIA colleagues for their great work and for making her the woman she has become.  “Your allegiance is to the flag, to the Constitution, to some higher power, be that God or Love,” she writes in gratitude.

For some reason, I don’t think the assassinated JFK or RFK would buy her love talk; rather, they may quote another eloquent Irish-American, the playwright Eugene O’Neill: “God damn you, stop shoving your rotten soul in my lap.”

The man Fox is trying to elect president of the U.S., Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., also wrote a memoir – American Values – that revolves around an indictment of the CIA for an endless series of crimes:  “What are we going to do about the CIA?” he quotes his father saying to his aide Fred Dutton at the beginning of JFK’s presidency, before both Kennedys had yet to be killed by the soulful CIA.  Kennedy, Jr. writes:

Critics warned that the ‘tail’ of the covert operations branch would inevitably wag the dog of intelligence gathering (espionage). And indeed , the clandestine services quickly subsumed the CIA’s espionage function as the Agency’s intelligence analysts increasingly provided justification for the CIA’s endless interventions.

Fifty-six years later his campaign manager Fox Kennedy – you can’t make this weirdness up – married to RFK, III, is touting the soulful work of the Agency.  She replaced Dennis Kucinich, who was a strong a supporter of the Palestinians.  Is Fox and RFK, Jr.’s relationship a matter of what the Boss says to Luke in the iconic movie Cool Hand Luke – “What we got here is failure to communicate” – or the kind of communication that takes place in elite circles behind closed doors?

Sometimes sick people utter truths that lead to sardonic assent.  They remind you of history that is so shameful you cringe.  Fox and Pompeo also seem to live in separate realities, their psyches twisted by some deep evil force for which they both worked.

And here we are in another presidential election year.  When you think about presidential politics, you have to laugh.  I like to laugh, so I think about them from time to time.  It’s always a bad joke, but that’s why they are funny.  It makes no difference whether the president is Ford, Nixon, Carter, Reagan, George H. W. Bush, Clinton, Bush Jr., Obama, Trump, Biden, or anyone who tries to square the oval office for their special sort of big change that never comes.  Those who tell you with a straight face that the lesser of two (or more) evils is better than nothing have not studied history.  They choose the evil of two lessers and wash their hands.  They live on pipe dreams, as Eugene O’Neill put it in his play The Iceman Cometh:

To hell with the truth! As the history of the world proves, the truth has no bearing on anything. It’s irrelevant and immaterial, as the lawyers say. The lie of a pipe dream is what gives life to the whole misbegotten mad lot of us, drunk or sober.

I am reminded of advice I was given during the immoral and illegal Vietnam War when I had decided to apply for a discharge from the Marines as a conscientious objector.  But if you don’t go to the war, people said to me with straight faces, some poor draftee will.  The military needs good people.  To which I would often respond: Like the country needs good commanders-in-chief such as Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon.  It’s like what people say about buying a lottery ticket when your odds are 1 in 500,000,000 – someone has to win.  Ha!  Ha!  Never reject the system is always the message.

Contemplating U.S. history for the past fifty-five plus years confirms the continuity of government policy for war and economic policies that enrich the wealthy at the expense of the working class and massacre the innocent around the world.  But we can pretend otherwise.  For an egregious recent example, the three leading candidates in this year’s election – Biden, Trump, and RFK, Jr. – all stand firmly behind the Israeli genocide in Gaza that any human being with a soul would condemn.

That these men are controlled by the Israel Lobby is obvious, but we can pretend otherwise.

That this is corruption is obvious, but we can pretend otherwise.

We can pretend and pretend and pretend all we want because we are living in a pretend society.

What’s that old Rodney Dangerfield joke: the problem with happiness is that it can’t buy you money?  Well, the problem with presidential politics is it can’t buy you the truth, but if you do it right it can fetch you money, a lot of corrupt money to help you rise to the pinnacle of a corrupt government.  For the truth is that the CIA/NSA run U.S. foreign war policy and the presidents are figureheads, actors in a society that lost all connection to reality on November 22, 1963.

Now, amid such a tense environment, it appears the C.I.A. has not only green-lighted an actual invasion of the Russian Federation, but more than likely was involved in its planning, preparation and execution.

Never in the history of the nuclear era has such danger of nuclear war been so manifest.

That the American people have allowed their government to create the conditions where foreign governments can determine their fate and the C.I.A. can carry out a secret war which could trigger a nuclear conflict, eviscerates the notion of democracy.

If this is soulful work, God help us.

Ask the 32,000 + dead Palestinians in Gaza whose voices cry out for justice while the top presidential contenders cheer on the Israeli/U.S. slaughter.

“The terrible truth is,” writes Douglass Valentine, “that a Cult of Death rules America and is hell-bent on world domination.”

And yes, presidential politics is a funny diversion from that reality.  Eugene O’Neill could be humorous also.  He played the Iceman theme to perfection, the Grim Reaper of two faces.

There was a tale circulating in the 1930s that a man came home and called upstairs to his wife, “Has the iceman come yet?”  “No,” she replied, “but he’s breathing hard.”

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Source

RFKjr Fear of the Jews and the Jewish God of Terror – by LAURENT GUYÉNOT – 25 March 2024

• 1,900 WORDS • 

“It’s time for Jews to be feared!” declared Rabbi Shmuley recently. Jews having failed to overcome anti-Semitism by trying to be loved, respected or admired, must now make themselves feared. This is the new watchword.

The problem is, if Jews want to be feared, then they must also accept being hated. “Fear of the Jews” can be translated, literally, as “Judeophobia” (from the Greek phobos, to fear). To be feared, you must have the power to harm, and you must prove it. So if Jews want to be feared in order to fight anti-Semitism, then anti-Semitism has a bright future ahead.

This all doesn’t make much sense. But it’s very biblical. To my knowledge, the Hebrew Bible does not recommend that Jews should strive to be loved by non-Jews. On the contrary, Yahweh said to his people in Deuteronomy 2:25:

“Today and henceforth, I shall fill the peoples under all heavens with fear and terror of you; whoever hears word of your approach will tremble and writhe in anguish because of you”

If Yahweh wants to spread terror among non-Jews, doesn’t that make him a terrorist, or the god of terrorists? It does, and it makes Zionists good Yahwists. In his 1951 memoir The Revolt, Menachem Begin bragged about “the military victory at Deir Yassin,” because the news of this slaughter of 254 villagers (mostly unarmed men, women, and children) immediately led to the “maddened, uncontrollable stampede of 635,000 Arabs. … The political and economic significance of this development can hardly be overestimated.”[1] Wasn’t Begin a worthy servant of his national god?

What Netanyahu is doing today is more than a hundred Deir Yassins. And the goal, again, is not just to kill indiscriminately, but by doing so to terrorize millions of Palestinians into leaving “voluntarily”. This explains why they let so many images of the martyrdom of Gaza filter: it is a public crucifixion, meant for all to see. (Andrew Anglin has suggested another reason, not contradictory with this one).

One of Netanyahu’s favorite biblical stories is the Book of Esther. He mentioned it in 2015 before the American Congress, as an argument why America should bomb Iran.[2] The Book of Esther is important for understanding how the Jews want to be feared. Under the influence of his minister Haman, the Persian king Ahasuerus issued a decree of final solution regarding the Jews of his kingdom, because “this people, and it alone, stands constantly in opposition to every nation, perversely following a strange manner of life and laws, and is ill-disposed to our government, doing all the harm they can so that our kingdom may not attain stability” (3:13). But thanks to Esther, Ahasuerus’s secretly Jewish wife, the Jews turn the situation around and obtain from the king that Haman be hanged with these ten sons, and that a new royal decree is promulgated, which gives the Jews “permission to destroy, slaughter and annihilate any armed force of any people or province that might attack them, together with their women and children, and to plunder their possessions” (8.11). And so the Jews massacred seventy-five thousand people. Throughout the land, the book concludes, “there was joy and gladness among the Jews, with feasting and holiday-making. Of the country’s population many became Jews, since now the Jews were feared” (8.17).

This story is entirely fictional, but it is very important to Jews, because every year, at Purim, they celebrate the hanging of Haman with his twelve sons, and the massacre of 75,000 people, including women and children.

According to the conclusion of this story, fear of the Jews produces new Jews, meaning Gentiles who become Jews out of fear of the Jews: “many became Jews, since now the Jews were feared.” Or in a more literal translation: “many people became Jews because the fear of the Jews fell upon them.” As I said, fear of Jews is more likely to produce anti-Semites than new Jews. Yet there are many examples of people who make themselves Jews out of fear of the Jews: any non-Jewish politician who one day put a yarmulke on his head and swore eternal loyalty to Israel fits that profile.

There is another story in the Book of Joshua that goes along the same lines. At the beginning of chapter 2, Joshua, who receives his orders directly from Yahweh in the Tabernacle, sends two spies to the city of Jericho. Having been spotted, they hide with a prostitute named Rahab. She helps them escape in exchange for being spared together with her family when Israel attacks the city, because, she says, “we are afraid of you and everyone living in this country has been seized with terror at your approach” (2:9). Because Israel is so terrifying, she assumes that “Yahweh your god is God.”

The French Catholic Bible de Jérusalem adds a footnote saying that “Rahab’s profession of faith in the god of Israel made her, in the eyes of more than one Church Father, a figure of the Gentile Church, saved by her faith.” I find perplexing the idea of making the whore of Jericho a symbol of the Church because, out of fear of Israel, she converted to the god of Israel and helped Israel to commit the genocide of her own city (“men and women, young and old, including the oxen, the sheep and the donkeys, slaughtering them all,” Joshua 6:21).

On the other hand, it is not a bad metaphor for the complicity of the Christian world in the Israeli genocide of Gazans. There is no doubt that, in most Christians today, fear of the Jews is much stronger than pity for the Gazans. And the heads of states of most Christian nation would rather start World War III with Russia than criticize Israel. Russia is, after all, a rational enemy, while no one knows what psychopathic Israel is capable of.

Israel is the only country that openly threatens to blow up the planet. They call it the Samson Option. The Samson Option is the combination of Israel’s nuclear capability and Israel’s reputation as a dangerous paranoid. Everyone knows that Israel has a hundred nuclear warheads (80 according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute). And everyone knows that Israel is biblical, eager to fulfill prophecies, such as Zechariah 14:12:

“And this is the plague with which Yahweh will strike all the nations who have fought against Jerusalem; their flesh will rot while they are still standing on their feet; their eyes will rot in their sockets; their tongues will rot in their mouths.”

Martin van Creveld, professor of military history at the University of Jerusalem, explained to the British newspaper The Gardian in 2003 that the Palestinians’ recurrent Intifadas will find only one solution: the “transfer” of all Palestinians out of Palestine. On the risk of opposition from the international community to such a project, he added:

“We possess several hundred atomic warheads and rockets and can launch them at targets in all directions … We have the capability to take the world down with us. And I can assure you that that will happen before Israel goes under.”[i]

That’s the Samson Option in a nutshell. Its essence is nuclear terrorism.

The audacity and impunity of Israel today are incomprehensible if we do not take into account the Samson Option. But the Samson Option, like Jewish Power in general, is taboo: everyone must know about it, but no one has the right to talk about it. This silence is the ultimate test of Israel’s fear. In a very recent post, Seymour Hersh writes:

“No one who’s anyone in Washington is allowed to talk about Israel’s nuclear arsenal. Or how it affects the region. Or whether it serves U.S. interests, even as the Middle East teeters on the brink of regional war.”[3]

As Hersh himself has documented in The Samson Option, it was thanks to the Kennedy assassination that Israel was able to adopt the Samson Option. Jefferson Morley, an investigator on the Kennedy assassination, noted, in a comment on Hersh’s post, that there is also an “Israeli gag” in Kennedy research:

“you can see the effects of the Israeli gag rule in the long-classified testimony of James Angleton, chief of CIA counterintelligence, to Senate investigators in June 1975. The redactions make visible what the U.S. and Israel government seek to conceal in 2024: how Israel obtained nuclear weapons on Angleton’s watch.”[4]

In the extract below, the word “Israeli” has been redacted to conceal the fact that Angleton was running the “Israeli account” and was, in that function, the sole liaison with the Mossad.

In his remarkable biography of Angleton, Morley shows that Angleton’s loyalty to Israel went as far as allowing them and covering their smuggling of nuclear materials and technology. As every Kennedy research knows, Angleton is also the number one suspect in the CIA for the Kennedy assassination. Which means the CIA trail in the Kennedy assassination runs directly into the Mossad trail (something that Morley avoids saying, as a respectable member of the mainstream It’s-the-CIA school).

I must say that I am very disappointed by President Kennedy’s nephew, Robert Kennedy Junior, who either seems to have no idea of ​​the heavy suspicion hanging over Israel in the assassinations of his uncle and father, or else pretends not to know, or just don’t want to know.

And since I started this article talking about Rabbi Shmuley, the sad news is that Rabbi Shmuley is one of RFK Jr.’s friends and advisors. At a rally on July 25, 2023, he introduced Robert Kennedy by mentioning his father:

“On the fifth of June, 1968, at 12:15 am, … Robert Kennedy Sr., one of the greatest Americans who ever lived, was gunned down by a Palestinian domestic terrorist, Sirhan Sirhan, and murdered because of his support for Israel. He was gunned down because he wanted to share the fate of the Jewish people.”

Bobby Jr. listened and took it in, without the slightest sign of disapproval, even though he knows very well that his father was not killed by Sirhan, and certainly not for his support of Israel. He remained frozen and mute in his chair, not even nodding when a brave lady in the audience protested, “Why are you lying? Sirhan Sirhan was not the murderer of Robert Kennedy…”[5] RFK Jr. will not contradict the lying Rabbi.

It’s a sadly revealing moment. By publicly humiliating Robert Kennedy Junior, insulting the memory of his father with his gross lie, right beside him, Shmuley is making an example. To be feared, Jews must show their power by making examples. That’s a good example.

Notes

[1] Menachem Begin, The Revolt: Story of the Irgun, Henry Schuman, 1951, quoted in Alfred Lilienthal, What Price Israel?, op. cit., p. 81.

[2] “Benjamin Netanyahu Speech to Congress 2015” on YouTube.

[3] Seymour Hersh, « It’s Bibi’s War », https://seymourhersh.substack.com/p/its-bibis-war

[4] Jefferson Morley, “In the Last of the JFK Files, Israel’s Nuclear Secrets Are Safe,” 26 féb 2024, https://jfkfacts.substack.com/p/in-the-last-of-the-jfk-files-israels

[5] “Conversation with RFK Jr. 7.25.23” sur www.youtube.com/watch?v=kihS7wFPG6I&t=434s, à partir de 5:30 minutes.

[i] David Hirst, “The War Game”, The Gardian, September 21, 2003: www.guardian.co.uk/world/2003/sep/21/israelandthepalestinians.bookextr

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RFKjr Book – Fauci – Audiobook Mp3 (38:03 min)

Germany: Taurus and The Bullfighters – by Victor Grossman – 25 March 2024

A Taurus on display at the 2006 ILA air show. Photograph Source: axesofevil2000 – Public Domain

Watching genteel Bundestag ladies and gentlemen speechifying, often with forceful words and gestures but mostly polite, it is hard to imagine that their topic is war or peace, possibly world war or peace, even atomic war or peace. A key word was Taurus, Latin for “bull.” But they weren’t arguing about Zodiac astrology or the myth about the god Jupiter, cheating on wife Juno by taking on the shape of a bull to abduct a princess. Nor about the starry constellation named for his disguise. The name of that princess was Europa, and the continent bearing her name was indeed involved in the subject of debate: steel-covered missiles called Taurus, weighing 1000 lbs., 17 foot long, which, if fired from a plane well inside Ukraine can reach and pierce the walls of the Kremlin or destroy concrete bunkers as deep or deeper than Moscow’s subway system. 

Of course, Volodymir Zelenskiy wants them and any weapons or aid in a war now looking less and less like the triumph he predicted a year ago. Should his wishes, which often sounded more like demands, be fulfilled?  

That mythical Jupiter fathered three sons with Europa (I hope he was back in the body of Jupiter by then). Three sons of modern Europa met in a hastily arranged “Paris-Berlin-Warsaw” summit in early March to reach an agreement about Ukraine, especially about Taurus. Poland’s Tusk, only four months into his top job, is seen as more moderate than his predecessor. But he seems no less eager to supply anything if it damages the hereditary Russian enemy and solidifies Poland’s role as main USA outpost in Eastern Europe. However, he soon had to hurry home to mollify farm tractor drivers blockading borders to protest cheap Ukrainian grain imports. 

Macron, who had spoken boldly of sending in “European” troops to oppose the Russians, toned that down with the words: “Maybe at some point – I don’t want it, I won’t take the initiative – we will have to have operations on the ground…to counter the Russian forces… France’s strength is that we can do it.”  

Evidently Scholz had stepped on the brakes with Tusk and Macron: “To say it sharp and clear: as German chancellor, I will send no Bundeswehr soldiers into Ukraine!” So, at least for now – no Taurus!

Was his seemingly bold front a façade for a general German downward skid in Europe? There was a decline of the economy in 2023. A predicted puny plus of 0.2% for 2024 could mean that Germany is already in a recession, for only the second time since 1945. Economy Minister Habeck warned: “We cannot continue this way!” One expert’s brief analysis: “Germany has lost cheap energy from Russia, flourishing trade markets in China and an almost cost-free guarantee of security from the USA.” 

Olaf Scholz’s three-party government has rapidly declined in popularity. The Greens, who promised a “green economic miracle” a year ago, have made one ecology compromise after another, like their go-ahead for big docks for liquid gas from US frackers to replace the Russian gas-oil cut by war, politics and that suspicious explosion of the Baltic pipeline. The new docks threaten both major bird emigration stopovers and some of Germany’s most idyllic beach resorts (once peopled, back in GDR days, by happy, mostly nudist bathers).

Ecology disputes turned dramatic with Elon Musk’s Tesla gigafactory on Berlin’s outskirts, his first and largest in all Europe and now capable of turning out 500,000 E-cars a year, beating out VW. That meant chopping down 740 acres of the protective forest ring around Berlin and draining into crucial aquifers. But Musk now aims at a million cars – costing 420 more forest acres and drying-up ponds and creeks. The village hit hardest voted “No!” and one group plans to defy a planned police onslaught in tree houses and platforms. On March 5th a secret, more extremist group set fire to a high-voltage power pylon, cutting local electricity for a few hours and shutting down production for a few days. Such disputes are getting hotter. 

Rounding out the picture, Germany has been facing its biggest strike wave in years: railroad engineers, bus and tram drivers, airport personnel, public service workers, kindergarten teachers, even clinic doctors. Their demands are mostly for enough pay to catch up with inflation and frightening rent increases but also – for many – for a 35-hour work week with no cut in pay. 

While the compromising Greens strain to hold onto their dwindling professional college-graduate base and the Social Democrats struggle to win back working-class support, the weakest of the three partners, the Free Democrats (FDP), closest to big-biz, keep flirting with the Christian Democrats across the aisle, blackmailing attempts by the other two to seem socially conscious by resisting remaining environmental restrictions, preventing rules against child labor on products from abroad, limiting aid for the many poverty-ridden children in Germany, reducing assistance for the elderly and, above all, insisting on keeping or lowering low taxes on the super-wealthy, using the old trickle-down argument. More and more, the coalition is coming to resemble a free-for-all wrestling match.

But they agreed on one main issue: in Ukraine, keep that war going! Till victory! The Greens, always most valiant with Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock hoping to see Russia “ruined,” are being overtaken as word and banner bearers by the Free Democrats, who now boast a “Defense Committee” spokesperson who is formidable in word, appearance, personality and even name: Marie-Agnes Strack-Zimmermann. Her imperative calls for more weapons until total victory over the Russians rouse up TV viewers almost every single evening. And even when a majority in the Bundestag ended the Taurus debate by voting “Nein” to a Christian Democratic bill to give Kyiv the missiles, she broke the ranks of coalition party discipline and voted “Ja” with the opposition. 

Somehow I haven’t yet heard anyone remark that Düsseldorf, which she represents, is also home to Rheinmetall, Germany’s leading armaments manufacturer since 1889. After great sales records in World War I it had giant success in World War II, largely by working thousands of miserable POWs and forced laborers to the bone. Now super-good times are back again thanks to its Panther tanks and all kinds of weapons and explosive ammo. Company boss  Armin Papperger, who took home a tidy € 3,587,000 in 2022 (about  $3.9 m) and expects this year’s company earnings to finally top its € 10 billion goal made a happy prediction of “a continuing strong growth increase in sales and earnings.” But who could dare to suspect any connection between Rheinmetall and its Düsseldorf neighbor,  Frau Marie-Agnes Strack-Zimmermann. (BTW, big hunks of those handsome sums also go to Blackrock in Manhattan’s Hudson Yards and other solid Transatlantic benefactors.) 

But in his crumbling coalition Olaf Scholz’s leading Social Democratic Party has also been vigorously supporting  the Ukrainian cause! It was he who dramatically called for a “Zeitenwende” an “historic turning point” – with an extra fund of  € 100 billion for a major military build up – in Ukraine, Germany, the European Union and NATO, with drones, jets, artillery, ammo, tanks, missiles (but at least not yet the Taunus for Kyiv.

But his Defense Minister Boris Pistorius (Social Democrat) is never sated; for him the Bundeswehr is always far too weak. “It must be made fit for the challenges ahead. Germany needs a Bundeswehr that can fight, one which is operational and sustainable. Germany must defend itself, because ‘war is back in Europe.’  The Bundeswehr must become fit for war again. I know that sounds harsh… But I am concerned with nothing other than preventing war. That is why credible deterrence is the motto of the hour – to be able to fight in order not to have to fight. An important signal in this context is the formation of the brigade in Lithuania.”

Despite all disavowals, some beans have recently been spilled about NATO military experts secretly helping Kyiv ever since 2014. A mysteriously leaked report on a meeting of top German brass revealed plans for helping  Ukraine use the Taunus to destroy the Russian bridge to Crimea. The whole atmosphere in Germany is becoming frighteningly “kriegstüchtig,” to use Pistorius’ word – “ready for war.” He also raised the question of renewing the military draft whose last vestiges were ended thirteen years ago – this time perhaps including women. The proposal was a trial balloon – and soon dropped, at least for this pre-election season. Another trial balloon came from the Education Minister, Bettina Stark-Watzinger, who called for air raid drills in schools, with renovated or new shelter rooms in the cellars and more visits by officers to prepare children  for the worst – or recruit them. When protests against this proposal grew too strong she modified it a bit – to stress, aside from war, readiness for possible floods or other climate catastrophes.

Weapons, weapons, weapons – the more the better! With ever louder talk about “the foe” and “protective measures”, as if Putin were amassing troops or maneuvering warships along German borders – instead of just the opposite taking place in the Baltic and Lithuania – and no longer so secretly in Ukraine. The blitzkrieg-laden spirit of 1941 Germany is all over the media, with no audible recollections of Stalingrad in 1943 or a wrecked and wretched Berlin (and Dresden, Hamburg and all the others) in 1945.  

The reports on Gaza since October contrasted markedly with the anger over the Russian attack on Ukraine; they almost never mentioned Hamas without the prefaced adjective “terrorist” but showed few pictures of devastated Gaza which, for me, bitterly recalled those German cities I saw a few years after the war, like Dresden. Over and over we were shown Israeli soldiers bravely firing away; at what? Or digging in wrecked hospitals;  for what? Or showing those “compassionate” parachute drops, a sad joke when small crowds of Israelis were somehow permitted to block hundreds of truckloads of really tangible assistance – and while Germany joined the USA in sending weapons to Netanyahu while stymying UNO efforts to end the slaughter.  

But the heart-wrenching pictures of weeping fathers and dead or maimed children in Gaza could not be ignored. Demonstrations, led by Arabs in Germany but including many other, also Jewish Germans, grew larger, despite all attempts to prevent, limit or sideline them. Their calls for negotiations and peace sometimes included the war in Ukraine – and a rejection of SPD-FDP-Green-CDU-CSU militarist unity. But then came the giant rallies against the fascistic Alternative for Germany (AfD). In the past often harassed or at best ignored, they were now amazingly well-organized and coordinated, clearly promoted from above and blessed in the media. I suspect they were consciously aimed at deflecting a progressive, pro-peace trend born of horror at the hugely disproportionate Israeli response to October 7th, misusing a popular anti-AfD cause for the purpose, together with an increased stress on opposing anti-Semitism, while equating it with any criticism of Israeli repression and extreme brutality. It was good that the rallies  opposed racism and fascists, but they were no longer leaning toward united left opposition.  

Is there now any opposition to top level policies?  Yes, of a sort. Or rather of approximately four sorts. 

Within the ranks of the Social Democrats, while many admire dynamic (and ambitious?) Minister Pistorius, some others may be coming to their senses. Most courageous recently was Rolf Mützenich, chair of the SPD caucus in the Bundestag and long known as a rare opponent of militarism. During the Taurus debate he asked the Bundestag delegates: “Isn’t it time not only to speak about waging a war but to start thinking about how we can freeze a war and then end it as well?“ He had hardly finished his brief remarks with question when the counterattack began, from fellow politicians and from most of the mass media. Two nasty words recurred shamelessly: “Appeasement” and “Cowardice”. Unlike Pope Francis, who dared to voice similar sentiments, Mützenich had no shred of any “infallibility” status, and the truly vicious attacks forced him to stage a partial retreat to save his neck. But the words had been uttered and some may have listened. As for appeasement, Neville Chamberlain and Daladier let Hitler expand in Spain, then tolerated his expansion eastward to Austria and Czechoslovakia because it meant closing in on the hated USSR. His all-European attack in June 1941 was more analogous to EU-NATO eastward-aimed unanimity than the reverse!

Olaf Scholz often vacillates. But at times, unlike some ministers, he seems to listen to and echo people like Mützenich. “German soldiers must at no point and in no place be linked to targets this Taurus system reaches…Not in Germany either…This clarity is necessary. I am surprised that this doesn’t move some people, that they don’t even think about whether … a participation in the war could emerge from what we do.” 

But then, Scholz certainly learned arithmetic at school. The European elections are due this June, Bundestag elections next year, with key state elections in between. In the polls his Social Democratic party is stuck at about a weak 15%, half its traditional Christian rivals and even behind the Alternative for Germany (AfD). Opinions change frequently but 80% now favor diplomatic negotiations for Ukraine and 41% want less weapons sent there. Scholz – or Germany – cannot really change course in such basic matters. But  he may think that dragging his feet rather ambiguously might win back more voters.  

A second group demanding negotiations and an end to the Ukraine war, perhaps very surprisingly,  is the AfD. Although it supports big business, NATO, the draft and German rearmament enthusiastically, it calls nevertheless for negotiations, peace and a resumption of normal trade relations. It is possible that the AfD simply wants only to further increase its popularity , especially in eastern Germany, where there is the least military enthusiasm – and it is already amazingly strong  (and dangerous) position, at about30%. Of course they are called “Putin-lovers.” Who knows, perhaps they are. But their top woman in leadership, Alice Weidel, is intelligent, shrewd, a skilled speaker, and made an eloquent plea for peace, while thanking Mützenich and congratulating Scholz for not sending Taurus to Kyiv. Thus creating a difficult complication.                        

And then there is the Linke party, which has seen itself from birth as the ”party of peace”. Indeed, over the years it has opposed every deployment of German troops or ships outside its borders, it has opposed the payment of giant sums to Rheinmetall and its siblings at home or abroad, it has opposed the export of German weapons to nearly every oppressive government that could be found, it has opposed every form of militarization. A brave and exemplary record, alongside its fight for a higher minimum wage, more money for seniors, for child care and women’s rights. Its stand also forced Social Democrats and Greens to take better positions, if only to avoid a drift of their voters to the small yet potentially growing Linke.

Perhaps it was its successes which became its weak point. Not only the delegates who got elected on the national, state or local level but also  their staffs and assistants had good jobs. Some tended, too often, to become a part of the mistrusted “establishment” in the eyes of dissatisfied and disappointed voters – or then non-voters. Their increasingly respectable status led to interest in “identity rights”, immigrant rights, gender rights, but too often to a growing distance from neglected, underpaid, overburdened working people, including temps and the jobless. Some leaders, hoping to crown state cabinet posts with those in a national coalition, watered down their rejection of NATO and its relentless eastward moves and threats. Their rejection of even meager approval of the giant peace demonstration led by Sahra Wagenknecht last year on flimsy grounds borrowed from the mass media proved the last straw for many members and led to the formation of a breakaway party, called (temporarily it is hoped) Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht. 

Some in the Linke, convinced Marxists, think it was a mistake to split and leave the party instead of fighting it out, even though they were outvoted by conformist, status quo leaders who now want to force them out just as they did to Sahra Wagenknecht and her adherents. And some believe that if the Linke again becomes more militant in something whose name is hardly even whispered these days  (class conflict) then it can be rescued from menacing-oblivion. It is already in great trouble, nationally down to 3%, which would bar it from the next Bundestag. 

As for Sahra’s BSW, it stands full square for negotiations and peace, like no other, and certainly for working people’s rights and needs. But much of its program remains vague as yet and seems to be turning out to be less militant than expected. It polls 5 to 7% nationally, not bad for a newbie with rudimentary state structures but less than some had expected in view of Sahra’s popularity. The European Union elections in June and the state elections in September will show how the two stand, now as rivals in a divided Left.  

As for the bellicose forces, some pro-American “Atlanticists” are worried about being cast adrift after November 5th by that unpredictable man from Mar-a-Lago, or they are studying geriatric tables. Others, the Germanic wing, who reject American infiltration, from music styles to dirty slang, are scheming and dreaming of the good old days of smart uniforms, clicking heels, Iron Crosses and people knowing their proper place. But they all join Rheinmetall, Lockhead and the others in hoping the warring may last until they get new chances to win out in broad Eurasian expanses, re-establish Germany’s proper position in the world and perhaps for some, a hope to avenge that disaster for their grandfathers back in 1945. More and more, we are engulfed by all their  war talk – and preparatory action.

What is desperately needed, not only in Germany but especially in Germany, is a new consolidation of all those in any party, or no party, who still have unaddled brains in their heads and a heart in their chests for an end to the killing and starving of Ukrainians, Russians, the Palestinians and the still as yet far too small number of  brave Jewish Israelis (like the “refuseniks”) to build up a dynamic peace movement like that against the Vietnam war, or against missiles in West Germany in the 1980s, or the marches to prevent the Iraq war or,  I recent months, to rescue the tortured million and more innocent people of Gaza – yes, and those100 hostages as well.  Such a movement is desperately necessary; the clock is ticking away. Can the Jupiters of the world be dethroned? For Europa and for the world. Is that possible?

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Victor Grossman writes the Berlin Bulletin, which you can subscribe to for free by sending an email to: wechsler_grossman@yahoo.de.

US and Israeli Sick Cultures: When Belief Systems Turn Pathological – by Lawrence Davidson – 26 March 2024

It might come as a surprise but the answer to this question derives from influences many of which are beyond our control. For instance, most of us experience attitudinal changes along a spectrum from day to day or maybe even hour to hour. This has to do with our individualized reaction to all manner of hormonal and other secretions in your body. These, in turn, are influenced by epigenetic factors triggered by both internal and external environmental conditions.

A lot of these factors are inherited. You did not choose your genetic makeup or the parents who gave it to you and they did not choose their parents, and so on. This unchosen heritage sets your body up for all sorts of possibilities. Some might turn out to be good for you: nicely working immune system, relatively stable and positive mental disposition and acuity, etc. But it doesn’t have to go like that, and a propensity for illness and instability might be your inherited lot. 

Nor did you choose the sort of environment in which you were born. I might tell you to avoid being born into poverty, but you can’t do that. Nonetheless, statistically, the chance for a “prosperous and productive” life is low if early poverty is your fate. I might suggest that you avoid parents who are neglectful or physically/emotionally abusive. Do not grow up next to a “super fund” contaminated site. Just so, you should avoid being born in the middle of a raging war. Despite the fact that all of these outcomes would certainly affect your behavior, none involve choices you can make. It is amazing how much of our history and condition is beyond our control. 

What Do We Believe?

Just as we are arbitrarily centered in a body we did not choose, we are arbitrarily centered locally in time and space. That is, in a culture. And, here too, much is beyond our control. 

It has been one of the frequent themes of these blog essays that there is something called “natural localism.”* That is, most people tend to settle down in a local community. It is within this locale that they work or go to school, live within a family and friendship network, and come to feel a community identity. That does not mean that people don’t travel (mostly to visit friends and family) or relocate within that same cultural realm for work or school. However, the natural inclination of most is find a place to settle down. There is even an evolutionary aspect to this. Natural localism provides a time and space that maximizes familiarity and predictability. That is why it usually provides a sense of security. 

There is, of course, a downside. Natural localism ties one to a community worldview that mitigates against independent questioning and fact-checking. Over time established communities and groups socialize members into views supported by traditions, the interests of whatever passes for a ruling class, and often an ideology that idealizes the community’s raison d’être. Most who live within the range of such an aggregation will, almost habitually, see the world through the community’s lens. 

That means, for most of us, our belief system encompassing our notion of what is right and wrong and who is friendly and who is unfriendly, is not something we have independently chosen. There are endless examples of this. Take the Cold War between the U.S. and its allies on one side and the Soviet Union, the Warsaw Pact countries and China on the other. If you are old enough to remember this time (roughly 1945 to 1991) you should recall that the majority of adults in the U.S. and Western Europe had a hostile outlook toward the USSR and its allies. Most had no direct contact or experience that would provoke this hostility. They got it in an osmotic way. The culturally negative messages in one’s external environment shaped their perceptions so that they conformed to a community-wide point of view. 

Of course, just like bodies react differently to hormones and other secretions, individuals have varying reactions to the inherited belief systems of their cultures. A bell curve results—most people will be within an average range of cultural compliance. They will readily accept what they are taught at at home and in school, and hear from their teachers, leaders and media. There may be differences of opinion on the details, but most will buy into the overall message. At the edges of the curve will be found those who, for whatever experiential reasons, ignore or reject the message. The majority will see this minority as weird. At the extreme, they will be seen as a threat to social stability.

The Pathological Potential of Belief Systems

The negative feelings generated during the Cold War were felt by populations that were, for the most part, geographically separated. What happens when this inherited fear and negativity runs between populations sharing the same immediate landscape? What can your community point of view make you feel and do then?

Here are two examples: 

The United States prior to the 1960s:

U.S. culture prior to the 1960s was characterized by an institutionally and legally sanctioned racial divide between White and Black Americans. Racism relegated Black Americans to an inferior status enforced by legal segregation and discrimination. This resulted in an impoverished economic and social environment. From the point of view of many Whites, Black disadvantage was an historically ratified “normal” situation. That is, it felt natural and orderly to the White population based on tradition and long practice.

Thus, White Americans had been acculturated to a system that periodically pushed Black Americans to rebellion—“race riots.” These uprisings frightened White citizens who then supported strong police action against Blacks in order to maintain social stability and security. Such a posture only made future uprisings more likely. 

This situation did not begin to change until the 1954 Supreme Court decision in the case of Brown v Board of Education, followed by a Black political movement led by Martin Luther King Jr.  The goal of this movement was to outlaw segregation and other egregious acts of discrimination in the public sphere. This effort was supported by a liberal sector of the White population who recognized the need for change based on a culturally idealized view of American socio-economic potential. King and his allies were successful in bringing change to the public sphere— essentially creating a new definition of normal based on a more egalitarian United States. However, changing individual laws is relatively easy compared to changing culture. Since the 1980s the country has experienced what is known as “culture wars.” That is, a political pushback by a sizable number of “conservatives” against progressive legislation.

Several things are to be noted here: (1) U.S. culture, since its beginning, has had a racist character that dehumanized its minority populations. It is in this sense that it was and, in some regards, still is pathological. (2) For most of its history this toxic environment was, and for some continue to be, invisible because most Whites were raised in family and/or local community surroundings that registered the toxicity as normal. Despite the change that eventually came in the 1950s and 60s, today some are so addicted to the older worldview that they are waging a political battle to return to a “sick normal.”

Contemporary Israel:

Israel’s story overlaps with that of the United States: (1) A sense of racially/religiously based superiority. While it is White Christians in the U.S., it is Jewish Zionists in Israel. (2) A claim that the country’s land is divinely deeded or blessed. (3) The existence of a largely segregated and disadvantaged class of “others.” In Israel, the “others” are the Palestinians. 

Israeli and other Jews, and many who support them (i.e. Joe Biden), have learned about Israel through a biased narrative. The result is an attitude sustained by a customized pro-Zionist history. To maintain the narrative within Israel itself, education has been turned into a process of indoctrination. What is taught in this process? (1) God gave the land of Palestine to the Hebrew ancestors of contemporary Jews. (2) Jews need the State of Israel to be safe in a world where antisemitism is widespread. (3) The world owes it to the Jews to secure this Jewish state. (4) Palestinians are dangerous interlopers who hate Jews and seek to destroy the Jewish state. For Zionists, the Palestinians have replaced the Nazis as perpetrators of another potential Holocaust. The result has been the maintenance of Israel as a fortress nation—roughly resembling ancient Sparta where an elite population lived in fear of the serfs (helots) they had oppressed and driven by that fear, these elites trained constantly for war.

The national and local environment inherited by Israeli Jews is infused with this mindset. Defense against Palestinian and Arab “terrorists” is an important psychological theme of their culture. It is reinforced in the average family setting. It is detailed out for them in school. It provides a sense of camaraderie among friends and within the workplace. It is capped off by a program of near-universal conscription of Jewish Israelis. It is extraordinarily difficult to escape the pressures of such an overbearing cultural climate. Here too, the toxic nature of this environment is invisible to many of Israel’s Jewish citizens because of having been raised in local surroundings that registered their perceptions as normal. The predominant rationalization for the resulting Israeli aggressiveness has always been “national defense.” What can be more normal than that? Hence, the fact that “Israelis overwhelmingly are confident in the justice of the present Gaza war.” And this support of the wholesale destruction of Gaza** is the final confirming factor demonstrating the pathological nature of Israeli/Zionist culture. 

Conclusion

The United States and Israel are not the only sick cultures on the planet. However, as noted, they stand together due to a historical symmetry. This connection allowed the Zionists in the U.S. to build a powerful special interest organization and easily convince most of the American population to accept the Israeli narrative that, among other things, claimed the two countries held similar values. This despite the fact that Israel does not even have the framework for an idealized just society. It lacks a constitution and, insisting on a culture of Jewish supremacy, guarantees the absence of equal justice for all.

The connection also sees both nations attempting to deny similar sins while claiming similar virtues: Israeli claim that it is “the only democracy in the Middle East” covers up the reality that it is an apartheid state and, in the case of the U.S., the claim of exceptionalism due to the practice of high ethical standards covers up a continuing national struggle against racism and a foreign policy that contradicts U.S. claims of spreading democracy.

On the other hand, over time the United States did create legislative and judicial ideals for itself based on a self-glorifying narrative—that the U.S. was a nation of superior moral-ethical potential. Thus, when the government fails the citizenry you can get civil rights movements and anti-war protests of historic importance.

Significantly, it is this lurking moral uneasiness with their nation’s hypocrisy, felt particularly by the youth, that is now eroding the American alliance with Israel. The ethnic cleansing and genocide, so acceptable to Israeli Jews, is a behavior that a number of Americans see as indefensible—particularly from an “ally” claiming to hold values similar to their own. 

Thus is change possible even in an environment over which we have but nominal control. And, in this case, for the U.S. to get past its own hypocrisy—the sick elements of its own culture—it must finally leave Israel behind. 

…………………

Notes.

*See Lawrence Davidson, Foreign Policy Inc. (University Press of Kentucky, 2009), chapter 1. 

**The proper historical analogy to the destruction of Gaza is the Nazi destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto.  

Lawrence Davidson is a retired professor of history at West Chester University in West Chester, PA.

ГимнРоссии Russian National Anthem – Sung By Shaman (1:00 min) Audio Mp3

ГимнРоссии Russian National Anthem – Sung By Shaman (1:00 min) Audio Mp3

ГимнРоссии Russian National Anthem – Sung By Shaman (3:30 min) Audio Mp3

ГимнРоссии если любишь свою Родину 

The Nuland – Budanov – Tajik – Crocus Connection – by Pepe Escobar – 26 March 2024

• 1,700 WORDS • 

The Russian population has handed to the Kremlin total carte blanche to exercise brutal, maximum punishment – whatever and wherever it takes

Let’s start with the possible chain of events that may have led to the Crocus terror attack. This is as explosive as it gets. Intel sources in Moscow discreetly confirm this is one of the FSB’s prime lines of investigation.

December 4, 2023. Former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen Mark Milley, only 3 months after his retirement, tells CIA mouthpiece The Washington Post: “There should be no Russian who goes to sleep without wondering if they’re going to get their throat slit in the middle of the night (…) You gotta get back there and create a campaign behind the lines.”

January 4, 2024: In an interview with ABC News, “spy chief” Kyrylo Budanov lays down the road map: strikes “deeper and deeper” into Russia.

January 31: Victoria Nuland travels to Kiev and meets Budanov. Then, in a dodgy press conference at night in the middle of an empty street, she promises “nasty surprises” to Putin: code for asymmetric war.

February 22: Nuland shows up at a Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) event and doubles down on the “nasty surprises” and asymmetric war. That may be interpreted as the definitive signal for Budanov to start deploying dirty ops.

February 25: The New York Times publishes a story about CIA cells in Ukraine: nothing that Russian intel does not already know.

Then, a lull until March 5 – when crucial shadow play may have been in effect. Privileged scenario: Nuland was a key dirty ops plotter alongside the CIA and the Ukrainian GUR (Budanov). Rival Deep State factions got hold of it and maneuvered to “terminate” her one way or another – because Russian intel would have inevitably connected the dots.

Yet Nuland, in fact, is not “retired” yet; she’s still presented as Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs and showed up recently in Rome for a G7-related meeting, although her new job, in theory, seems to be at Columbia University (a Hillary Clinton maneuver).

Meanwhile, the assets for a major “nasty surprise” are already in place, in the dark, and totally off radar. The op cannot be called off.

March 5: Little Blinken formally announces Nuland’s “retirement”.

March 7: At least one Tajik among the four-member terror commando visits the Crocus venue and has his photo taken.

March 7-8 at night: U.S. and British embassies simultaneously announce a possible terror attack on Moscow, telling their nationals to avoid “concerts” and gatherings within the next two days.

March 9: Massively popular Russian patriotic singer Shaman performs at Crocus. That may have been the carefully chosen occasion targeted for the “nasty surprise” – as it falls only a few days before the presidential elections, from March 15 to 17. But security at Crocus was massive, so the op is postponed.

March 22: The Crocus City Hall terror attack.

ISIS-K: the ultimate can of worms

The Budanov connection is betrayed by the modus operandi – similar to previous Ukraine intel terror attacks against Daria Dugina and Vladimir Tatarsky: close reconnaissance for days, even weeks; the hit; and then a dash for the border.

And that brings us to the Tajik connection.

There seem to be holes aplenty in the narrative concocted by the ragged bunch turned mass killers: following an Islamist preacher on Telegram; offered what was later established as a puny 500 thousand rubles (roughly $4,500) for the four of them to shoot random people in a concert hall; sent half of the funds via Telegram; directed to a weapons cache where they find AK-12s and hand grenades.

The videos show that they used the machine guns like pros; shots were accurate, short bursts or single fire; no panic whatsoever; effective use of hand grenades; fleeing the scene in a flash, just melting away, almost in time to catch the “window” that would take them across the border to Ukraine.

All that takes training. And that also applies to facing nasty counter-interrogation. Still, the FSB seems to have broken them all – quite literally.

A potential handler has surfaced, named Abdullo Buriyev. Turkish intel had earlier identified him as a handler for ISIS-K, or Wilayat Khorasan in Afghanistan. One of the members of the Crocus commando told the FSB their “acquaintance” Abdullo helped them to buy the car for the op.

And that leads us to the massive can of worms to end them all: ISIS-K.

The alleged emir of ISIS-K, since 2020, is an Afghan Tajik, Sanaullah Ghafari. He was not killed in Afghanistan in June 2023, as the Americans were spinning: he may be currently holed up in Balochistan in Pakistan.

Yet the real person of interest here is not Tajik Ghafari but Chechen Abdul Hakim al-Shishani, the former leader of the jihadi outfit Ajnad al-Kavkaz (“Soldiers of the Caucasus”), who was fighting against the government in Damascus in Idlib and then escaped to Ukraine because of a crackdown by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) – in another one of those classic inter-jihadi squabbles.

Shishani was spotted on the border near Belgorod during the recent attack concocted by Ukrainian intel inside Russia. Call it another vector of the “nasty surprises”.

Shishani had been in Ukraine for over two years and has acquired citizenship. He is in fact the sterling connection between the nasty motley crue Idlib gangs in Syria and GUR in Kiev – as his Chechens worked closely with Jabhat al-Nusra, which was virtually indistinguishable from ISIS.

Shishani, fiercely anti-Assad, anti-Putin and anti-Kadyrov, is the classic “moderate rebel” advertised for years as a “freedom fighter” by the CIA and the Pentagon.

Some of the four hapless Tajiks seem to have followed ideological/religious indoctrination on the internet dispensed by Wilayat Khorasan, or ISIS-K, in a chat room called Rahnamo ba Khuroson.

The indoctrination game happened to be supervised by a Tajik, Salmon Khurosoni. He’s the guy who made the first move to recruit the commando. Khurosoni is arguably a messenger between ISIS-K and the CIA.

The problem is the ISIS-K modus operandi for any attack never features a fistful of dollars: the promise is Paradise via martyrdom. Yet in this case it seems it’s Khurosoni himself who has approved the 500 thousand ruble reward.

After handler Buriyev relayed the instructions, the commando sent the bayat – the ISIS pledge of allegiance – to Khurosoni. Ukraine may not have been their final destination. Another foreign intel connection – not identified by FSB sources – would have sent them to Turkey, and then Afghanistan.

That’s exactly where Khurosoni is to be found. Khurosoni may have been the ideological mastermind of Crocus. But, crucially, he’s not the client.

The Ukrainian love affair with terror gangs

Ukrainian intel, SBU and GUR, have been using the “Islamic” terror galaxy as they please since the first Chechnya war in the mid-1990s. Milley and Nuland of course knew it, as there were serious rifts in the past, for instance, between GUR and the CIA.

Following the symbiosis of any Ukrainian government post-1991 with assorted terror/jihadi outfits, Kiev post-Maidan turbo-charged these connections especially with Idlib gangs, as well as north Caucasus outfits, from the Chechen Shishani to ISIS in Syria and then ISIS-K. GUR routinely aims to recruit ISIS and ISIS-K denizens via online chat rooms. Exactly the modus operandi that led to Crocus.

One “Azan” association, founded in 2017 by Anvar Derkach, a member of the Hizb ut-Tahrir, actually facilitates terrorist life in Ukraine, Tatars from Crimea included – from lodging to juridical assistance.

The FSB investigation is establishing a trail: Crocus was planned by pros – and certainly not by a bunch of low-IQ Tajik dregs. Not by ISIS-K, but by GUR. A classic false flag, with the clueless Tajiks under the impression that they were working for ISIS-K.

The FSB investigation is also unveiling the standard modus operandi of online terror, everywhere. A recruiter focuses on a specific profile; adapts himself to the candidate, especially his – low – IQ; provides him with the minimum necessary for a job; then the candidate/executor become disposable.

Everyone in Russia remembers that during the first attack on the Crimea bridge, the driver of the kamikaze truck was blissfully unaware of what he was carrying,

As for ISIS, everyone seriously following West Asia knows that’s a gigantic diversionist scam, complete with the Americans transferring ISIS operatives from the Al-Tanf base to the eastern Euphrates, and then to Afghanistan after the Hegemon’s humiliating “withdrawal”. Project ISIS-K actually started in 2021, after it became pointless to use ISIS goons imported from Syria to block the relentless progress of the Taliban.

Ace Russian war correspondent Marat Khairullin has added another juicy morsel to this funky salad: he convincingly unveils the MI6 angle in the Crocus City Hall terror attack (in English here, in two parts, posted by “S”).

The FSB is right in the middle of the painstaking process of cracking most, if not all ISIS-K-CIA/MI6 connections. Once it’s all established, there will be hell to pay.

But that won’t be the end of the story. Countless terror networks are not controlled by Western intel – although they will work with Western intel via middlemen, usually Salafist “preachers” who deal with Saudi/Gulf intel agencies.

The case of the CIA flying “black” helicopters to extract jihadists from Syria and drop them in Afghanistan is more like an exception – in terms of direct contact – than the norm. So the FSB and the Kremlin will be very careful when it comes to directly accusing the CIA and MI6 of managing these networks.

But even with plausible deniability, the Crocus investigation seems to be leading exactly to where Moscow wants it: uncovering the crucial middleman. And everything seems to be pointing to Budanov and his goons.

Ramzan Kadyrov dropped an extra clue. He said the Crocus “curators” chose on purpose to instrumentalize elements of an ethnic minority – Tajiks – who barely speak Russian to open up new wounds in a multinational nation where dozens of ethnicities live side by side for centuries.

In the end, it didn’t work. The Russian population has handed to the Kremlin total carte blanche to exercise brutal, maximum punishment – whatever and wherever it takes.

………………………….

(Republished from Strategic Culture Foundation)

‘I’ve been a Jolly Tinker near forty years or more’ – Clancy Bros (2:11 min) Audio Mp3

Jolly Tinker – Clancy Bros (2:11 min) Audio Mp3

It’s War: The Real Meat Grinder Starts Now – by Pepe Escobar – 23 March 2024

• 1,300 WORDS • 

No more shadow play. It’s now in the open. No holds barred.

Exhibit 1: Friday, March 22, 2024. It’s War. The Kremlin, via Peskov, finally admits it, on the record.

The money quote:

“Russia cannot allow the existence on its borders of a state that has a documented intention to use any methods to take Crimea away from it, not to mention the territory of new regions.”

Translation: the Hegemon-constructed Kiev mongrel is doomed, one way or another. The Kremlin signal: “We haven’t even started” starts now.

Exhibit 2: Friday afternoon, a few hours after Peskov. Confirmed by a serious European – not Russian – source. The first counter-signal.

Regular troops from France, Germany and Poland have arrived, by rail and air, to Cherkassy, south of Kiev. A substantial force. No numbers leaked. They are being housed in schools. For all practical purposes, this is a NATO force.

That signals, “Let the games begin”. From a Russian point of view, Mr. Khinzal’s business cards are set to be in great demand.

Exhibit 3: Friday evening. Terror attack on Crocus City, a music venue northwest of Moscow. A heavily trained commando shoots people on sight, point blank, in cold blood, then sets a concert hall on fire. The definitive counter-signal: with the battlefield collapsing, all that’s left is terrorism in Moscow.

And just as terror was striking Moscow, the US and the UK, in southwest Asia, was bombing Sana’a, the Yemeni capital, with at least five strikes.

Some nifty coordination. Yemen has just clinched a strategic deal in Oman with Russia-China for no-hassle navigation in the Red Sea, and is among the top candidates for BRICS+ expansion at the summit in Kazan next October.

Not only the Houthis are spectacularly defeating thalassocracy, they have the Russia-China strategic partnership on their side. Assuring China and Russia that their ships can sail through the Bab-al-Mandeb, Red Sea and Gulf of Aden with no problems is exchanged with total political support from Beijing and Moscow.

The sponsors remain the same

Deep in the night in Moscow, before dawn on Saturday 23. Virtually no one is sleeping. Rumors dance like dervishes on countless screens. Of course nothing has been confirmed – yet. Only the FSB will have answers. A massive investigation is in progress.

The timing of the Crocus massacre is quite intriguing. On a Friday during Ramadan. Real Muslims would not even think about perpetrating a mass murder of unarmed civilians under such a holy occasion. Compare it with the ISIS card being frantically branded by the usual suspects.

Let’s go pop. To quote Talking Heads: “This ain’t no party/ this ain’t no disco/ this ain’t no fooling around”. Oh no; it’s more like an all-American psy op. ISIS are cartoonish mercenaries/goons. Not real Muslims. And everyone knows who finances and weaponizes them.

That leads to the most possible scenario, before the FSB weighs in: ISIS goons imported from the Syria battleground – as it stands, probably Tajiks – trained by CIA and MI6, working on behalf of the Ukrainian SBU. Several witnesses at Crocus referred to “Wahhabis” – as in the commando killers did not look like Slavs.

It was up to Serbia’s Aleksandar Vucic to cut to the chase. He directly connected the “warnings” in early March from American and British embassies directed at their citizens not to visit public places in Moscow with CIA/MI6 intel having inside info about possible terrorism, and not disclosing it to Moscow.

The plot thickens when it is established that Crocus is owned by the Agalarovs: an Azeri-Russian billionaire family, very close friends of…

… Donald Trump.

Talk about a Deep State-pinpointed target.

ISIS spin-off or banderistas – the sponsors remain the same. The clownish secretary of the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine, Oleksiy Danilov, was dumb enough to virtually, indirectly confirm they did it, saying on Ukrainian TV, “we will give them [Russians] this kind of fun more often.”

But it was up to Sergei Goncharov, a veteran of the elite Russia Alpha anti-terrorism unit, to get closer to unwrapping the enigma: he told Sputnik the most feasible mastermind is Kyrylo Budanov – the chief of the Main Directorate of Intelligence at the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense.

The “spy chief” who happens to be the top CIA asset in Kiev.

It’s got to go till the last Ukrainian

The three exhibits above complement what the head of NATO’s

military committee, Rob Bauer, previously told a security forum in Kiev: “You need more than just grenades – you need people to replace the dead and wounded. And this means mobilization.”

Translation: NATO spelling out this is a war until the last Ukrainian.

And the “leadership” in Kiev still does not get it. Former Minister of Infrastructure Omelyan: “If we win, we will pay back with Russian oil, gas, diamonds and fur. If we lose, there will be no talk of money – the West will think about how to survive.”

In parallel, puny “garden-and jungle” Borrell admitted that it would be “difficult” for the EU to find an extra 50 billion euros for Kiev if Washington pulls the plug. The cocaine-fueled sweaty sweatshirt leadership actually believes that Washington is not “helping” in the form of loans, but in the form of free gifts. And the same applies for the EU.

The Theater of the Absurd is unmatchable. The German Liver Sausage Chancellor actually believes that proceeds from stolen Russian assets “do not belong to anyone”, so they can be used to finance extra Kiev weaponizing.

Everyone with a brain knows that using interest from “frozen”, actually stolen Russian assets to weaponize Ukraine is a dead end – unless they steal all of Russia’s assets, roughly $200 billion, mostly parked in Belgium and Switzerland: that would tank the Euro for good, and the whole EU economy for that matter.

Eurocrats better listen to Russian Central Bank major “disrupter” (American terminology) Elvira Nabiullina: The Bank of Russia will take “appropriate measures” if the EU does anything on the “frozen”/stolen Russian assets.

It goes without saying that the three exhibits above completely nullify the “La Cage aux Folles” circus promoted by the puny Petit Roi, now known across his French domains as Macronapoleon.

Virtually the whole planet, including the English-speaking Global North, had already been mocking the “exploits” of his Can Can Moulin Rouge Army.

So French, German and Polish soldiers, as part of NATO, are already in the south of Kiev. The most possible scenario is that they will stay far, far away from the frontlines – although traceable by Mr. Khinzal’s business activities.

Even before this new NATO batch arriving in the south of Kiev, Poland – which happens to serve as prime transit corridor for Kiev’s troops – had confirmed that Western troops are already on the ground.

So this is not about mercenaries anymore. France, by the way, is only 7^th in terms of mercenaries on the ground, largely trailing Poland, the US and Georgia, for instance. The Russian Ministry of Defense has all the precise records.

In a nutshell: now war has morphed from Donetsk, Avdeyevka and Belgorod to Moscow. Further on down the road, it may not just stop in Kiev. It may only stop in Lviv. Mr. 87%, enjoying massive national near-unanimity, now has the mandate to go all the way. Especially after Crocus.

There’s every possibility the terror tactics by Kiev goons will finally drive Russia to return Ukraine to its original 17^th century landlocked borders: Black Sea-deprived, and with Poland, Romania, and Hungary reclaiming their former territories.

Remaining Ukrainians will start to ask serious questions about what led them to fight – literally to their death – on behalf of the US Deep State, the military complex and BlackRock.

As it stands, the Highway to Hell meat grinder is bound to reach maximum velocity.

……………………………….

(Republished from Strategic Culture Foundation)

Terrorist Attack in Moscow — Who Did It? – by Larry Johnson – 22 March 2024

• 800 WORDS • 

On the “Usual Suspects” list we have Ukraine and we have ISIS (Islamic State). A good case can be made for both. I am posting three videos — some of it is repetitive — that discusses the attack and the very odd behavior of the Biden Administration. Let’s go through the chronology of events.

On March 7 US Embassy Moscow issued the following alert:

The Embassy is monitoring reports that extremists have imminent plans to target large gatherings in Moscow, to include concerts, and U.S. citizens should be advised to avoid large gatherings over the next 48 hours.

What you need to understand is that this warning was not issued at the discretion of the embassy. This was approved in Washington, DC at Main State and would have required some intelligence that was deemed somewhat specific and “credible.” When I was doing this job at State Counter Terrorism in 1990, this was in the aftermath of the bombing of Pan, 103. It was widely believed in the public that state department, and the CIA had information in advance about the terrorist bombing of that plane, and warned our person out not to get on board. That was not true but it did raise the issue of when, and how to warn the public about a potential threat. We came up with a system that required specific and credible intelligence. The more specific and credible the intelligence, the less need to warn the public. Consider, for example, that if we knew a terrorist attack was going to be carried out on Friday at a public concert hall by a particular group, we would be able to alert appropriate authorities and take precautions to intercept the attack without alarming the public.

On the other hand, if the information was not in great detail, but did come from a credible source, then we would take the time to put together a public warning. That is what happened when the US Embassy Moscow issued the warning on 7 March. They had information they thought was credible, but not terribly specific. This raises a key question — did the United States warn Russian authorities? Normally, when I was doing the job, we would share the information with the appropriate government and law enforcement authorities, in order to try to prevent the attack. Based on public comments by Maria Zakharova and Dimitri Medvedev, following the March 7, warning, and following today’s attack, it appears that the United States did not share any of its information with Russia. I would note there is a Wall Street Journal report tonight, stating that the United States did warn, but Russian authorities insist that they were not provided with an Intel heads up.

What makes the entire situation so bizarre and questionable in terms of what the United States knew, and when it knew it, is that the State Department issued a statement within two hours of the bombing — remember, we still did not know how many attackers, what kind of weapons, how many casualties, and whether or not, they were hostages — declaring that Ukraine was not responsible for this attack. How did State Department know that? It’s strongly suggests that the United States had intelligence, which did not share with Moscow.

Then we have this very unusual X message (formerly Twitter) that was posted at 3:30 AM this morning, 22 March, by OSINTdefender (which I think of has a CIA front for spreading messages the CIA wants out there):

Members of U.S. National Security Council and the White House have reportedly started to become Increasingly Frustrated by “Unauthorized Brazen Actions” taken by Ukraine against Russia, including their recent Campaign of Long-Range Drone Strikes having Targeted at least 25 Oil Refineries, Terminals, Depots and Storage Facilities across Western Russia; with some Biden Administration Officials believing these Strikes will cause a Spike in Global Oil Prices as well as Significant Escalation and Retaliation against Ukraine like was seen during tonight’s Large-Scale Missile Attack.

Do you think that is just a happy coincidence that the Biden White House is bemoaning Ukraine taking “unauthorized brazen actions” on the same day there is a massive terrorist attack in Moscow? I don’t believe in coincidence. I think the Biden ministration was trying to get out ahead of an attack that they knew was coming.

Some claims have emerged late in the day with ISIS, allegedly, taking credit for the attack. What makes that interesting is that we have evidence that some members of ISIS have been fighting in Ukraine against Russia, so this does not necessarily exonerate, either Ukraine or the United States.

Anyway, I deal with these issues from different perspectives in the following videos:

Here’s the Judge and Ray:

And Nima:

(Republished from Sonar21)

BOEING’S UNCONTROLLED DESCENT – By Charles Wing-Uexkull – 18 March 2024

HOW THE AEROSPACE MANUFACTURING COMPANY DECLINED OVER THE DECADES

There’s no doubt that Boeing is in serious trouble. Recent reports of serious safety issues and concerns over workforce diversity campaigns are symptoms of a corporate culture that has been ailing for a while. The legendary American company that helped win WWII and dominated the postwar aviation industry used to attack engineering problems by empowering the organization’s best men with almost dictatorial authority. But over the past quarter-century, Boeing has transformed from a hard-nosed, mission-focus company into a complacent mediocrity defined by bureaucratic entrenchment and financial chicanery.

Boeing’s golden age during WWII was defined by the execution of projects like the B-29: a four-engine bomber that could deliver up to 20,000 pounds of bombs against a target more than 2,600 miles away at a speed exceeding 250 miles per hour, far in excess of any other aircraft in the war. The B-29 was the first bomber with a pressurized cabin, which helped extend its service ceiling above 30,000 feet, well out of the range of Mitsubishi Zeroes. It had remote-controlled machine gun turrets that could be slaved together in a synchronized aiming system run by an analog computer. The plane itself had a startling, graceful silhouette — albatross-like wings that stretched 141 feet, longer than the Wright Brothers’ first flight at Kitty Hawk.

The project was a hideously complex and expensive weapons program with a total cost more than double that of the Manhattan Project, requiring the coordination of thousands of contractors and production facilities spread across the United States. After Boeing missed multiple deadlines to deliver combat-worthy planes to the U.S. Army Air Force, Hap Arnold empowered General Bennett Meyers to take control of the production process and do everything possible to bring out the plane; ‘The Battle of Kansas’ thus ensued. Thousands of technicians from all over the country were called into Wichita, modification centers at Great Bend, Pratt, Walter, and Salina, working in subzero weather and snowstorms. The shock force of aircraft technicians replaced the plating on the wings, the glass in the cockpit, modified the cowl flaps around the engines, and removed, replaced, and resoldered every electrical connection.

The ‘Battle of Kansas’ involved direct military control over civilian workforce, and it furnished an example of how centralized authority and accountability could quickly yield results. Within weeks, the first B-29s were flying. By the war’s end, Boeing delivered more than 3,600 Superfortresses. On the night of March 9, 334 B-29s were sent to bomb Tokyo from altitudes between 5,000 and 10,000 feet, each loaded with 16,000 pounds of incendiary bombs. Eventually, the Enola Gay, a B-29, dropped the bomb on Hiroshima.

Today, Boeing lacks this commitment to pushing the technological envelope as well as any sense of urgency with regard to the national interest: in this respect it still represents a mirror of America, only now it is a mirror of decline. The history of Boeing over the past thirty years is a story of a critical American institution that sold off its engineering culture and embraced an asset-light focus on margin instead of product vision, and then executed that strategy poorly. In 2024, Boeing is producing fewer planes than it did a decade ago and faces an onslaught of headlines about spectacular accidents, nagging regulators, and disappointing earnings.

A large part of the issues can be traced back to the Boeing-McDonnell Douglas merger in 1997. The deal seemed like a good idea at the time. By 1996, McDonnell Douglas commanded only 4% share in U.S. commercial aviation, and its production lines were languishing. Meanwhile, Boeing had a $100 billion backlog, and needed more assembly capacity to ramp deliveries and fulfill its orders. Yet in the event, the joke on Wall Street became that “McDonnell Douglas bought Boeing with Boeing’s money.” McDonnell Douglas CEO Harry Stonecipher and John McDonnell, the chair of McDonnell Douglas’ board, became the largest shareholders of the combined entity after a stock swap worth $13 billion and they brought McDonnell Douglas’ bureaucratic defense contractor culture of margin-focused, risk-averse financial engineering with them.

This culture almost immediately began to win out over Boeing’s engineering culture committed to innovation and quality. The first “clean-sheet” aircraft produced by the combined entity would be the 787 Dreamliner. From the start of the project in 2003 Stonecipher imposed strict cost controls, demanding that the plane be developed for less than 40% of what it cost Boeing to develop the 777 more than a decade before. He also required each plane’s unit cost to be less than 60% of the cost of a 777. Boeing would accomplish this, Stonecipher said, by abandoning full-fledged, bottoms-up assembly. Instead, for the first time, workers in Boeing’s Everett plant would connect sub-assemblies and integrate disparate systems provided by suppliers rather than attaching every bolt and component themselves.

For the 787, Boeing engineers eschewed the expensive, time-consuming process of designing new components in-house — instead, they provided high-level specifications to their suppliers and let them design the parts, pushing cost and accountability outside the organization and diluting authority. In short, Stonecipher implemented the kind of development and design program that you’d expect from a company that wanted to reduce its assets and costs and guarantee the production of airplanes at a wide gross margin. But his plan backfired: costs ballooned as the problems of orchestrating more suppliers handling more of the work outran the savings generated by outsourcing it in the first place. The 787, named the ‘Dreamliner’, was a beautiful plane — the way that its carbon-fiber wings can flex up and down more than 25 feet make it resemble a living creature, a bird instinctively controlling its feathers as it rides the air. But its deferred costs piled up to more than $30 billion, almost ten times the cost of the 777 program.

The 787 ended up as a financial catastrophe for Boeing: even after delivering more than 1,100 Dreamliners, the program is still billions of dollars in the red. During the pandemic, production of the 787 was moved to Boeing’s North Charleston plant, which had a mandate to increase deliveries to 14 planes per month. But Boeing never came close to those targets: currently North Charleston is only delivering five to six 787s per month.

The conventional wisdom is that Boeing’s recent obsession with quarterly results, margin, and an asset-light balance sheet led to deterioration in quality control that manifested not only in assembly — the Alaska Air flight with the blown-out door — but also in design — the faulty 737 MAX software that sent planes diving toward the ground. But the conventional wisdom is only half-right. Not only did the McDonnell Douglas executives shift Boeing’s strategy to optimize for margin and profitability, but they incompetently executed their own strategy — their new plane, the 787, burned more money than any other Boeing commercial aviation airframe.

Fundamentally, Boeing’s problem was that it lost sight of the truth that advancing complex projects is only possible when command and control is concentrated, rather than dispersed. Extraordinarily committed engineers must be given great authority to execute; groundbreaking planes don’t come together simply because the unit economics are favorable or subcontractor agreements are favorably written.

There’s no sign that Boeing has taken this lesson to heart since the embarrassing state of the 787 program or the 737 MAX’s safety debacle. Before the so-called pandemic, Boeing was neck-and-neck with its chief rival in commercial jetliners, Airbus: in 2018, Boeing delivered 806 commercial aircraft and Airbus delivered 800. But the grounding of the 737 MAX in 2019, coupled with the lockdowns that started in 2020, devastated Boeing’s ability to produce planes. Its 2020 deliveries fell to 157 planes, while Airbus managed to deliver 566 planes. That year, Boeing made the decision to gut its engineering force even further, laying off 1,239 engineers and technical workers and nearly 3,800 machinists. Those cost-saving decisions made in a panic during an industry trough hampered Boeing’s ability to ramp deliveries once the lockdowns ended: in 2021 when Airbus delivered 611 planes, Boeing only delivered 340.

Boeing is still missing its delivery numbers in 2024, even as its market share among the big four domestic airlines fell from 88.7% in 2012 to 69.4% in 2023. In a few years, Delta will be flying a majority Airbus fleet; American Airlines already is. The storied American aircraft manufacturer is literally losing its home market, the densest, most mature commercial aviation market in the world, the market it built, to a state-supported European manufacturer that is outcompeting it in efficiency and volume.

Meanwhile, management is rearranging deck chairs to make them more diverse. In 2022, Boeing tied managers’ incentive compensation to the ‘diversity’ of their interview slates, meaning that their bonuses depended on whether or not they considered women, racial minorities, and the disabled for positions they were hiring for. In Boeing’s Global Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (GEDI) 2023 Report, Sara Bowen, vice president of GEDI, Talent Intelligence, and Employee Listening, wrote: “We know diversity must be at the table for every important decision our company makes — every challenge we face, every innovation we design. Equity, diversity and inclusion are core values because they make Boeing — and each of us individually — better.”

The GEDI report boasted that racial and ethnic minorities now hold 41.4% of all jobs in U.S. Boeing Commercial Airplanes, 28.3% of all jobs in Defense, Space, & Security, and 38.2% of all jobs in Global Services. Minorities accounted for 47.5% of all new hires in 2022, and 34.4% of all promotions. More Boeing employees are disabled — in 2022, 7.7% of Boeing employees had a disability, up 1.3 points from the previous year, the report noted. The proportion of military veterans at the company, on the other hand, is declining. 

But DEI is only part of the problem. Historically, Boeing has achieved great results by centralizing authority and control in the hands of the most exceptionally talented engineers. Today, the culture at Boeing is the opposite: listening sessions with the downtrodden, coddling the broken, and tiptoeing around the oppressed. Authority diffused throughout an entire organization’s hierarchy is no authority at all; accountability to technical results becomes challenging, if not impossible, when managers are serving two masters. 

“Progress is every teammate acting on our Seek, Speak & Listen habits,” Bowen wrote in the 2023 report. “[It] is every teammate feeling physically and psychologically safe, and ensuring that safety for each other.” In November 2022, Boeing CEO David Calhoun told investors that the company would not introduce a new clean sheet design until the 2030s. This will be the first decade in Boeing’s history that the company will fail to bring out a new airplane; nearly a generation will pass between new aircraft launches, a gap in institutional knowledge and organizational capacity that will impose costs on the company for years to come, if not finish it off for good.

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Source

Charles Wing-Uexküll is a writer and ex-academic. He can be followed @CWingUexkull.

Is TikTok a Weapon Against American Hegemony? – by Hugo DIONÍSIO – 20 March 2024

 • 3,400 WORDS • 

TikTok not only destroys Silicon Valley’s monopoly by competing furiously with its platforms, it also steals their space, which was previously shielded, as the White House believed.

In the aftermath of Vladimir Putin’s resounding victory; after an election with a very high turnout (with a lower abstention rate than is usually the case in the West); an even higher approval rating for the current president of the Russian Federation; the contradiction between the real information, witnessed and verified by countless international observers, and the information broadcast on the White House-dominated communication spectrum, forces us to put into perspective an entire information battle taking place in the virtual universe.

When we see news that this or that Silicon Valley platform is leaving Russia, in the light of the war waged on TikTok by the U.S. plutocracy, we can only consider that this departure is fortunate for the country and its people. Had the Russian authorities not made the necessary efforts to build a sovereign digital ecosystem, leaving the country to the propaganda of California, would we be talking about the same results? I have my doubts!

A Rutgers study with the NCRI (Network Contagion Research Institute), on the alignment of TikTok with the geopolitical perspectives of the Communist Party of China, analyzes the information conveyed by the Chinese platform in comparison with Instagram, using, of course, the latter as a control reference.

Subsequently, they draw the conclusion that there is an alignment by saying that, comparing the number of posts between the two platforms, the “pernicious” TikTok and the “transparent” Instagram, posts about Uighurs are 1 (on TikTok) to 11 (on Instagram); about Tibet 1 to 38, Tiananmen 1 to 82 and “democracy in Hong Kong” 1 to 180. The study says that these are “sensitive” topics for the Chinese government. Not for a moment does it question the veracity of such sensitive information for “Communist China”.

A concrete example is the war in Ukraine subject, which pits NATO against the Russian Federation, where posts have a ratio of 5 (TikTok) to 8 (Instagram) when it comes to the “support Ukraine” movement, or the genocide in Gaza, where the ratio is 2 to 6 when it comes to “supporting Israel”. The study does little to analyze the metrics in reverse, i.e. in relation to hashtags that are in opposition to Washington’s interests. But what is truly conclusive is the total disparity between what is mentioned more or less on each of the platforms. The same accusation that is leveled at TikTok regarding sensitive topics for the Chinese government, could also be leveled at the U.S. administration when it comes to topics that run counter to its propaganda, on Silicon Valley platforms. Rutgers doesn’t deal with that, much less the algorithmic biases that justify the disparity in the treatment of certain topics. We know why they exist. And that reason doesn’t work in the White House’s favor, quite the opposite.

If an analysis of the hashtags, which are supposedly in China’s universe of interests, already shows us that what is in China’s interest is diametrically disinterested in Washington’s, there is one issue in particular that is much more sensitive than the rest, and that is the Palestinian cause. For every 3 posts of “support for Palestine” on TikTok, we only have 1 on Instagram. This tells us, in my opinion, more about the U.S. than about China. Considering that the Chinese government is known for not meddling in the internal affairs of other countries and considering that it maintains important trade relations with Israel, this gap between TikTok and Instagram is indicative, above all, of the concerns of the United States.

And here we have a brief indication of the real driving force behind the anti-TikTok wave that has been sweeping the Capitol. The truth is that the American-Jewish community has been the most active in anti-TikTok lobbying. An article on www.jewishreviewofbooks.com, with the title “Israel’s TikTok problem” says in so many words that “protecting Americans from TikTok’s political influence will be a gain for the relationship between Israel and its most important ally”. Words for what?

The big concern is the space given by TikTok to pro-Palestinian groups and ideas they call “antisemitic”, knowing how exacerbated the antisemitic sensitivities of Zionists are. The warning in this article is extremely serious, pointing to the serious problems this elite has with democracy itself. In addition to mentioning, as a negative factor, the demographic weight that countries such as Indonesia, Malaysia or Pakistan have in TikTok, influencing the algorithm – this democracy thing has a lot to say about it – the whole article appeals to the attention of the American ruling class to the fact that a generational confrontation between the young and the old is at stake. What really worries them is that younger people are far more “pro-Palestinian” than “pro-Israeli”. The culprit? It’s TikTok! Why is that? Because it prevents them from effectively spreading their propaganda.

This reality is even acknowledged in the article, when it criticizes the TikTok administration for not accepting a paid advertisement that dramatized the issue of the return of kidnapped Israeli citizens. At the same time, it is the website www.vox.com that reports on the fact that the Israeli foreign ministry spent 1.5 million dollars on propaganda on Youtube, X and the mainstream media about the lie – already confirmed – of the 40 beheaded babies. This is really TikTok’s main sin. Rather than spreading low-quality information or information aligned with Chinese pretensions, the platform is not controlled to the liking of Washington or Tel Aviv.

As if to make my point about democracy and the problems the White House has with it – well reported in its handling of the Russian elections and the choices made by the Russian people – the American Pew Research Center, in an analysis of the importance of social media for democracy, tells us that only in three countries does more than half the population say that social media is bad for democracy: the Netherlands, France and the United States. It’s ironic that the country that has the most social networks and controls them the most – contrary to what it assumes – is precisely the one in which the most people say that social networks are bad for democracy: in this case, the USA, with 64% of responses in the negative. Symptomatic, given the exposure to White House manipulation. Perhaps the American and European people don’t sleep that much.

What does this have to do with all the “Russiagate” propaganda, the anti-Trump “fakenews”, or the recent TikTok affair? In my opinion, everything! Above all, it’s a problem of dealing with an undeniable fact: the opening up of social networks to the world puts the White House’s pretensions in an unfavorable demographic position, dissolving the propaganda that Washington manufactures to denigrate governments that don’t obey it into a huge global majority. As such, platforms that don’t obey its dictates, deleting posts or users that contradict Western propaganda, must be banned. There is no shortage of articles such as the one on www.nbcnews.com, stating that “critics are renewing calls for TikTok to be banned, claiming it has an anti-Israel bias”. A whole unipolar model is at stake.

So, the U.S. problem with TikTok is simple. TikTok represents a digital counterpoint, on a par with the counterpoints that already exist in the real world. Until very recently, the virtual world was seen as a kind of heavenly paradise – like a neoliberal Garden of Eden – totally controlled by the U.S. power clique. Until, one day, some countries began to find solutions that favored the creation of their own digital ecosystems.

The fateful and strategic decision was made by the People’s Republic of China when it rejected a Google and Facebook “without manual brakes”, which did not operate according to the procedures that the White House had defined for its territory, but according to its own. Huawei, Tik-Tok, Weechat, Aliexpress and other top digital platforms are “children” of this decision, which is referred to in the West as “the great Firewall of China”. And the most cartoonish thing about this is that the existence of the “great firewall of China” is, above all, the responsibility of the aggressive and intrusive American foreign policy. If there is any truth to the Rutgers study, it is that the American anti-Chinese agenda has been partly responsible for the generational problems that the U.S. now encounters among its population and which concern relations between its American territory and its arm in the Middle East.

And this reading can be partially confirmed in a Quinnipiac University poll from October 17, 2023, which says that voters aged 18-34 (39%) disapprove of sending arms to Israel to fight Hamas, those aged 35-49 (35%), while those over 50 (only 17%) disapprove. In other words, there is a clear generational divide (50% difference), confirmed by the fact that TikTok’s metrics show an equal number of views over the last 30 days for videos with the hashtag “I support Palestine” and “I support Israel”. Something that doesn’t happen on Silicon Valley platforms.

In response to China’s intention not to be dependent on an ecosystem dominated by Washington, attacks have poured in. “There is no freedom in China”; “there is so much dictatorship in China that not even Google is the same”. Symptomatically, both China and Russia demonstrated early on that they wanted to develop their own digital environment, anticipating, as independently as they did wisely, the risks associated with large-scale access to the minds of their peoples. Through the back door, the White House’s attitude has proved both countries right. Today, it is the White House that wants to protect its vital virtual space.

You may or may not agree with the limitations that the PRC demanded of the search engine at the time, and whose unwillingness to accept them led to the blocking of these applications. Today, we realize that for Alphabet and Meta it wasn’t a question of agreeing to apply “limits”, but of who defined them and ordered them to be applied. Quite simply – and paradoxically – it was up to Uncle Sam to apply limitations, and the Chinese state itself did not have the power to apply them on its territory. Conversely, by applying them here more than ever, Uncle Sam is accusing the PRC of wanting to impose a “digital autocracy”.

Thus, on the material level, with the inauguration of the multipolar world, the growing autonomy of nations such as Iran, China, Russia, India, Brazil, Saudi Arabia and South Africa, it wasn’t long before the “threat” of multipolarity began to be felt on the digital level too. In my opinion, the imposition of the “great firewall of China” was an important step in this process.

The first symptom of this success was Huawei, which challenged the dictatorship of communication technologies, until then monopolized by the U.S. Above all, Huawei meant access to the most advanced technologies of the future for a country considered “lesser” by the Anglo-Saxon supremacist elite and their wannabes. Stemming this development has become one of the main tasks of the U.S., of its “contain China” enterprise. An obvious sign of this success is that U.S. discourse is moving from the level of “containing China” to the more acute level of “countering China”, which seems to indicate a recognition of failure. It is no longer a question of “containing”, but of contradicting, annulling, counter-attacking, “countering” what has not been contained.

The result of these choices is that anyone who reads the bill H.R. 7521 (Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act) or the report issued by the Energy and Commerce Committee, which served as the basis for the bill, can see from the U.S.’s own words what China’s main concerns were at the time of the attempt by Google and Facebook to enter its territory without limits. All the risks that are pointed out to TikTok, many of which have already been pointed out to Huawei, are known practices by the U.S. against countries that do not guard their virtual space as they should and as the protection of their sovereignty and the interests of their peoples would demand.

This is what the Energy and Commerce Committee report says right at the start: “Foreign adversaries have used access to data (…) to disrupt Americans’ daily lives, conduct espionage activities, and push disinformation and propaganda campaigns in an attempt to undermine our democracy and gain global influence and control.”

Symptomatically, we have to take this “control” and “national interest” thing very seriously. According to the data provided by the report itself, TikTok is in 150 countries and serves 1 billion people, including 170 million Americans. And this is a real drama for Washington. How can you control the minds of a people when half of them follow a platform you don’t control? How do you manipulate the minds of 170 million Americans when the technology that could be used to manipulate them is in China? How can you collect the data of 170 million people, aggregating it into profiles and predicting their behavior, so that you can push them in the desired directions, when that data is stored in China? If Israel is in danger, then so are the dollar and hegemony.

Meanwhile, the triggering of the panic button is also related to the effect that Tik-Tok has as a disruptor of the virtual, monopolistic environment created in Silycon Valey. The CIA, through DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), has created an entire virtual ecosystem, transporting every one of its people’s minds into it. This ecosystem, controlled throughout the West only by the security agencies at Washington’s service, wanted a certain degree of invulnerability. In order to be perfect, the flow of data had to be closed and watertight, so that the algorithms could not be infected and, with it, the “harmonious” functioning of the system of “surveillance capitalism”, as Shoshana Zuboff rightly called it, could not be disrupted.

It is this ecosystem, through which U.S. security agencies monitor all the digital information of the world’s peoples in real time, predicting and producing behavior, promoting and demoting parties, governments and public figures, accelerating or delaying agendas, that is at stake. Above all, with TikTok, the Washington regime’s concern exceeds the Trump administration’s anxiety levels with Huawei. Badly or well, with Huawei it was about the more structural, more architectural technological aspects. With TikTok, what’s at stake is the very central nervous system of the internet. China now has privileged access to the neuronal network and the central nervous system of a body, which the U.S. had created in order to dominate the world.

With the virtual monopoly deeply affected, on its own territory, the U.S. is choosing to shoot itself in the foot, as it did when it decided to load Russia with endless sanctions. With this action on TikTok, the U.S. is sending out another serious warning to countries that hold capital and investments in the West. At any moment, a change in the law, a geopolitical pretext or a false accusation could justify confiscation.

To position TikTok in the firing line, the U.S. is once again looking in the mirror. In the preamble, the bill, H.R. 7521, refers to the Chinese National Security Law, published in 2017, clearly distorting both its content and its territorial scope. Referring to what we know to be Article 7 of that law – through the report of the Energy and Commerce Committee – they state that there is a risk that Tik-Tok will be called upon to share international personal data with the Chinese government, since, as they claim, all organizations, public or private, have to collaborate with the efforts of the Chinese intelligence services. This is at least partly true. The text of Article 7 of the PRC’s National Security Law reads: “All organizations and citizens shall support, assist and cooperate with national intelligence efforts in accordance with the law, and protect the secrets of national intelligence work of which they are aware.”

What the text of the proposal doesn’t mention is what’s in the next article of China’s National Security Law. After all, Article 8 of the same law requires “respecting and protecting human rights, protecting the rights and interests of individuals and organizations”. In other words, contrary to what the U.S. Congress says, this aid is conditional on compliance with the law and the rights of citizens and organizations, and is not a discretionary, authoritarian or autocratic power.

But the main distortion introduced in the energy and trade committee’s report is the territorial interpretation of the Chinese National Security Law. Article 7 of the PRC National Security Law is to be read within the framework of the Chinese constitution, i.e. cooperation is limited to persons and organizations of Chinese nationality, in relation to actions carried out on Chinese territory.

And it is precisely in China that Bytedance maintains its fundamental technological base. That really is the biggest obstacle for the U.S. Contrary to what the promoters of the proposal to “protect Americans from foreign adversaries – the Controlled Applications Act” say, this is not about the fear that their 170 million Americans will be monitored. After all, realistically, we all know from practice and theory that China has a doctrine of non-interference in the internal affairs of other countries. No matter how much they talk about the Chinese “Data Protection” Law of 2020, arguing that it provides for the use of personal and organizational data to prevent and anticipate risks to national security, none of this is groundbreaking or an exception these days in any country that cares about protecting its people. Monitoring all the people, as the U.S. does, is completely unjustified.

What really worries the American plutocratic and gerontocratic regime is monopoly. An empire is made up of monopolies, and to be an empire it’s not enough to be big, you have to monopolize. And in order to build and maintain a hegemonic empire, it is essential to monopolize the structural sectors of the economy. And this is the real problem. TikTok not only destroys Silicon Valley’s monopoly by competing furiously with these platforms, it also steals their space, which was previously shielded, as the White House believed.

To protect what’s left of the monopoly, how about choosing someone who feels sentimentally connected to it? The choice fell on the illustrious New Delhi-born congressman of Indian descent, Raja Krishnamoorthi. What is certain is that Raja has everything to do with anti-Chinese things, such as his responsibilities on the “U.S. House Select Committee on Strategic Competition between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party”. The Democratic intention is obvious, a way of turning something political into a personal agenda that seeks confrontation and direct provocation.

Thus, we are witnessing yet another act of desperation, the effect of which will be to increase the already established mistrust of the seriousness with which the West views its own “free and open market” ideology. At the head of a sector inaugurated by the U.S. itself, surpassing them at their own game, Titok and China are thus demonstrating that the days of exclusivity and restricted access to the best the world has to offer are long gone. Just as Russia had already shown that the time for excesses around its territory was over.

So, thinking about empires and monopolies – with reference to a resolution recently passed in the European Parliament that aims to “decolonize, de-imperialize and re-federalize Russia” – this TikTok issue once again demonstrates the existence of a disintegration movement. TikTok is to the virtual world as BRICS is to de-dollarization in the material world. Both are inexorable processes that threaten to accelerate the “de-imperialization” of the West.

TikTok’s relationship with Israel is premonitory. The defeat imposed by TikTok on the Zionist narrative is not unrelated to Israel’s role in securing the petrodollar, hegemony and its defeat by the multipolar world. TikTok puts everything at risk!

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Hugo Dionísio is a Lawyer, researcher and geopolitics’ analyst. He is the owner of Canal-factual.wordpress.com Blog and co-founder of MultipolarTv, a Youtube Channel targeted to geopolitical analysis. He develops activity as Human Rights and Social rights activist as board member of the Portuguese Democratic Lawyers Association. He is also a researcher at the Portuguese Workers Trade Union Confederation (CGTP-IN).

(Republished from Strategic Culture Foundation)

Donetsk, Avdeyevka, Mariupol – on the Road in Electoral Donbass – by Pepe Escobar – 20 March 2024

• 1,600 WORDS • 

They have waited 10 long, suffering years to vote in this election. And vote they did, in massive numbers, certifying a landslide reelection for the political leader who brought them back to Mother Russia. VVP may now be widely referred to as Mr. 87%. In Donetsk, turnout was even higher: 88,17%. And no less than 95% voted for him.

To follow the Russian electoral process at work in Donbass was a humbling – and illuminating – experience. Graphically, in front of us, the full weight of the collective West’s relentless denigration campaign was instantly gobbled up by the rich black soil of Novorossiya. The impeccable organization, the full transparency of the voting, the enthusiasm by polling station workers and voters alike punctuated the historical gravity of the political moment: at the same time everything was enveloped in an impalpable feeling of silent jubilation.

This was of course a referendum. Donbass represents a microcosm of the solid internal cohesion of Russian citizens around the policies of Team Putin – while at the same time sharing a feeling experienced by the overwhelming majority of the Global South. VVP’s victory was a victory of the Global Majority.

And that’s what’s making the puny Global Minority even more apoplectic. With their highest turnout since 1991, Russian voters inflicted a massive strategic defeat to the intellectual pigmies who pass for Western “leadership” – arguably the most mediocre political class of the past 100 years. They voted for a fairer, stable system of international relations; for multipolarity; and for true leadership by civilization-states such as Russia.

VVP’s 87% score was followed, by a long shot, by the Communists, with 3.9%. That is quite significant, because these 91% represent a total rejection of the globalist Davos/Great Reset plutocratic “future” envisioned by the 0.001%.

Avdeyevka: Voting Under Total Devastation

On Election Day Two, at section 198 in downtown Donetsk, not far from Government House, it was possible to fully measure the fluidity and transparency of the system – even as Donetsk was not spared from shelling, in the late afternoon and early evening in the final day of voting.

Afterwards, a strategic pit stop in a neighborhood mini-market. Yuri, an activist, was buying a full load of fresh eggs to be transported to the nearly starving civilians who still remain in Avdeyevka. Ten eggs cost the equivalent of a dollar and forty cents.

Electoral Donbass © Sputnik

At Yasinovata, very close to Avdeyevka, we visit the MBOU, or school number 7, impeccably rebuilt after non-stop shelling. The director, Ludmilla Leonova, an extraordinary strong woman, takes me on a guide tour of the school and its brand new classrooms for chemistry and biology, a quaint Soviet alphabet decorating the classroom for Russian language. Classes, hopefully, will resume in the Fall.

Close to the school a refugee center for those who have been brought from Avdeyevka has been set up. Everything is spotlessly clean. People are processed, entered into the system, then wait for proper papers. Everyone wants to obtain a Russian passport as soon as possible.

For the moment, they stay in dormitories, around 10 people in each room. Some came from Avdeyevka, miraculously, in their own cars: there are a few Ukrainian license plates around. Invariably, the overall expectation is to return to Avdeyevka, when reconstruction starts, to rebuild their lives in their own town.

Then, it’s on the road to Avdeyevka. Nothing, absolutely nothing prepares us to confront total devastation. In my nearly 40 years as a foreign correspondent, I’ve never seen anything like it – even Iraq. At the unofficial entry to Avdeyevka, beside the skeleton of a bombed building and the remains of a tank turret, the flags of all military batallions which took part in the liberation flutter in the wind.

Each building in every street is at least partially destroyed. A few remaining residents congregate in a flat to organize the distribution of essential supplies. I find a miraculously preserved icon behind the window of a bombed-out ground floor apartment.

FPVs loiter overheard – detected by a handheld device, and our military escort is on full alert. We find out that as we enter a ground floor apartment which is being kept as a sort of mini food depot – housing donations from Yasinovata or from the military – that very same room, in the morning, had been converted into a polling station. That’s where the very few remaining Avdeyevka residents actually voted.

A nearly blind man with his dog explains why he can’t leave: he lives in the same street, and his apartment is still functional – even though he has no water or electricity. He explains how the Ukrainians were occupying each apartment block – with residents turned into refugees or hostages in the basements – and then, pressed by the Russians, relocated to nearby schools and hospitals until finally fleeing.

The basements are a nightmare. Virtually no light. The temperature is at least 10 degrees Celsius lower than at street level. It’s impossible to imagine how they survived. Another resident nonchalantly strolls by in his bicycle, surrounded by derelict concrete skeletons. The loud booms – mostly outgoing – are incessant.

Then, standing amidst total devastation, a vision: the elegant silhouette of the Church of Mary Magdalen, immaculately preserved. Dmitry, the caretaker, takes me around; it’s a beautiful church, the paintings on the roof still gleaming under the pale sunlight, a gorgeous chandelier and the inner chamber virtually intact.

The Mariupol Renaissance

The final election day is spent in Mariupol – which is being rebuilt at nearly breakneck speed: the new railway station has just been finished. Voting is seamless at school number 53, housing district 711. A beautiful mural behind the ballot box depicts the sister cities St. Petersburg and Mariupol, with the legendary Scarlet Sails from the Alexander Green story right in the middle.

I revisit the port: international cargo is still not moving, only ships coming from the Russian mainland. But the first deal has been reached with Cameroon – fruits in exchange with metals and manufactured products. Several other deals with African nations are on the horizon.

in Electoral Donbass © Sputnik

The Pakrovska church, a Mariupol landmark, is being carefully restored. We are welcomed by Father Viktor, who hosts lunch for a group of people from the parish, and a fine conversation ensues ranging from Christian Orthodoxy to the Decline of the West and the LGBT agenda.

We go to the roof and walk around a balustrade offering a spectacular 360-degree view of Mariupol, with the port, the destroyed Azovstal iron works and the Russian Sea of Azov in the deep background. The massive church bells ring – as in a metaphor for the resurrection of a beautiful city which has the potential to become a sort of Nice in the Sea of Azov.

Back in Donetsk, going to a “secret” school/museum only 2 km away from the line of fire – which I first visited last month – has to be canceled: Donetsk continues to be shelled.

With Avdeyevka in mind, as well as the shelling that refuses to go away, a few questions on numbers pop up on the long 20-hour drive back to Moscow.

In Chechnya, led by uber-patriot Kadyrov, turnout was 97%. And no less than 99% voted for VVP. So, unlike in the past, forget about any ulterior attempt at a color revolution in Chechnya.

Same pattern in the Caucasus, in the region of Kabardino: turnout was 96%. No less than 94% voted for VVP.

Between Kazakhstan and Mongolia, in Tuva, turnout was 96%. And 95% voted for VVP. In the autonomous Yamal-Nenets, turnout was 94%. But VVP got “only” 79% of the votes. In lake Baikal, Buryatia had 74% turnout and 88% of votes for VVP.

The key, once again, remains Moscow. Turnout, compared to other regions, was relatively low: 67%. Well, Moscow is still largely Westernized and in several aspects ideologically globalist – thus more critical than other parts of Russia when it comes to the patriotic emphasis.

And that brings us to the clincher. Even with the resounding success of Mr. 87%, they will never give up. If there ever is a minor chance of a successful Hybrid War strategy provoking a color revolution, the stage will be Moscow. Quite pathetic, actually, when compared to the images of Mr. 87% saluted by a packed Red Square on Sunday like the ultimate rock star.

The Kremlin is taking no chances. Putin addressed the FSB and went straight to the point: attempts to sow interethnic trouble – as a prelude to color revolutions – must be strictly suppressed. The FSB will go for the next level: traitors will be identified by name and targeted without a statute of limitations.

After the electoral euphoria, no one really knows what happens next. It has to be something hugely significant, honoring the historical VVP electoral landslide. He has carte blanche now to do anything. Priority number one: to finish once and for all with the Hegemon-built terror mongrel that has been attacking Novorossiya for 10 long years.

……………………….

(Republished from Sputnik International)

The Resistance’s Disruptive Military Innovation May Determine the Fate of Israel – by Alastair Crooke – 18 March 2024

• 1,900 WORDS • 

Looking back to what I wrote in 2012, in the midst of the so-called Arab Spring and its aftermath, it is striking just how much the Region has shifted. It is now almost 180° re-orientated. Then, I argued,

“That the Arab Spring “Awakening” is taking a turn, very different to the excitement and promise with which it was hailed at the outset. Sired from an initial, broad popular impulse, it is becoming increasingly understood, and feared, as a nascent counter-revolutionary “cultural revolution” – a re-culturation of the region in the direction of a prescriptive canon that is emptying out those early high expectations …

“That popular impulse associated with the ‘awakening’ has now been subsumed and absorbed into three major political projects associated with this push to reassert [Sunni primacy]: a Muslim Brotherhood project, a Saudi-Qatari-Salafist project, and a [radical jihadi] project.

“No one really knows the nature of the [first project] the Brotherhood project – whether it is that of a sect; or if it is truly mainstream … What is clear, however, is that the Brotherhood tone everywhere is increasingly one of militant sectarian grievance. The joint Saudi-Salafist project was conceived as a direct counter to the Brotherhood project – and [the third] was the uncompromising Sunni radicalism [Wahhabism], funded and armed by Saudi Arabia and Qatar, that aims, not to contain, but rather, to displace traditional Sunnism with the culture of Salafism. i.e. It sought the ‘Salifisation’ of traditional Sunni Islam.

“All these projects, whilst they may overlap in some parts, are in a fundamental way competitors with each other. And [were] being fired-up in Yemen, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, north Africa, the Sahel, Nigeria, and the horn of Africa.

[Not surprisingly] …“Iranians increasingly interpret Saudi Arabia’s mood as a hungering for war, and Gulf statements do often have that edge of hysteria and aggression: a recent editorial in the Saudi-owned al-Hayat stated: “The climate in the GCC [Gulf Cooperation Council] indicates that matters are heading towards a GCC-Iranian-Russian confrontation on Syrian soil, similar to what took place in Afghanistan during the Cold War. To be sure, the decision has been taken to overthrow the Syrian regime, seeing as it is vital to the regional influence and hegemony of the Islamic Republic of Iran”.

Well, that was then. How different the landscape is today: The Muslim Brotherhood largely is a ‘broken reed’, compared to what it was; Saudi Arabia has effectively ‘switched off the lights’ on Salafist jihadism, and is focussed more on courting tourism, and the Kingdom now has a peace accord with Iran (brokered by China).

“The cultural shift toward re-imagining a wider Sunni Muslim polity”, as I wrote in 2012, always was an American dream, dating back to Richard Perle’s ‘Clean Break’ Policy Paper of 1996 (a report that had been commissioned by Israel’s then-PM, Netanyahu). Its roots lay with the British post-war II policy of transplanting the stalwart family notables of the Ottoman era into the Gulf as an Anglophile ruling strata catering to western oil interests.

But look what has happened —

A mini revolution: Iran has, in the interim, ‘come in from the cold’ and is firmly anchored as ‘a regional power’. It is now the strategic partner to Russia and China. And Gulf States today are more preoccupied with ‘business’ and Tech than Islamic jurisprudence. Syria, targeted by the West, and an outcast in the region, has been welcomed back into the Arab League’s Arab sphere with high ceremony, and Syria is on its way to assuming again its former standing within the Middle East.

What is interesting is that even then, hints of the coming conflict between Israel and the Palestinians were apparent; as I wrote in 2012:

“Over recent years we have heard the Israelis emphasise their demand for recognition of a specifically Jewish nation-state, rather than for an Israeli State, per se. A Jewish state that in principle, would remain open to any Jew seeking to return: the creation of a ‘Jewish umma’, as it were.

“Now, it seems we have, in the western half of the Middle East, at least, a mirror trend, asking for the reinstatement of a wider Sunni nation – representing the ‘undoing’ of the last remnants of the colonial era. Will we see the struggle increasing epitomised as a primordial struggle between Jewish and Islamic religious symbols – between al-Aqsa and the Temple Mount?

“It seems that both Israel and its surrounding terrain are marching in step toward language which takes them far away from the underlying, largely secular concepts by which this conflict traditionally has been conceptualised. What will be the consequence as the conflict, by its own logic, becomes a clash of religious poles?”

What has driven this 180° turn? One factor, assuredly, was Russia’s limited intervention into Syria to prevent a jihadi sweep. The second has been China’s appearance on the scene as a truly gargantuan business partner – and putative mediator too – precisely at a time when the U.S. had begun its withdrawal from the region (at least in terms of the attention it pays to it, if not (yet) reflected in any substantive physical departure).

The latter – U.S. military withdrawal (Iraq and Syria) – however, seems more a question of ‘when’, rather than if. All expect it.

Put plainly, we have experienced a Mackinder-style ‘pivot of history’: Russia and China – and Iran – are slowly taking control of the Asian heartland (both institutionally and economically), as the pendulum of the West swings away.

The Sunni world – ineluctably and warily – marches towards the BRICS. Effectively, the Gulf finds itself badly wrong-footed by the so-called ‘Abraham Accords’ that tied them to Israeli Tech (which, in turn, was channelling considerable Wall Street venture ‘free money’ their way). Israel’s ‘suspect genocide’ (ICJ language) in Gaza is slowly driving a stake into the heart of the Gulf ‘business model’.

But another key factor has been the smart diplomacy pursued by Iran. It is easy for western Iran-hawks to decry Iran’s politicking and influencing across the region – the Islamic Republic is after all, unrepentantly ‘non-compliant’ with the U.S. aims and pro-Israeli ambitions in the Region. What else, other than pushback, might you expect when all the encircling western ‘fire’ was so concentrated on the Islamic Republic?

Yet, Iran has pursued an astute path. It has NOT gone to war against Sunni Arab states in Syria, as was mooted in 2012. Rather, it quietly has pursued a strategy of diplomacy and joint Gulf security and trade with Gulf States. Iran too, has partly succeeded in shaking itself free from much of the effects of western sanctions. It has joined both BRICS and the SCO and has acquired a new economic and political ‘spatial depth’.

Whether the U.S. and Europe likes it or not, Iran is a major regional political player, and it sits atop, with others, the coalition of Resistance Movements and Fronts that have been woven together through shrewd diplomacy to work in close conjunction with each other.

This development has become a key strategic ‘project’: Sunni (Hamas) and Shi’i (Hizbullah) are joined with other ‘fronts’ in an anti-colonial struggle for liberation under the non-sectarian symbol of Al-Aqsa (which is neither Sunni, nor Shi’a, nor Muslim Brotherhood, nor Salafist or Wahhabi). It represents, rather, the storied tale of Islamic civilisation. Yes, it is, in its way, eschatological too.

This latter achievement has done much to limit the threat of all-out war from engulfing the region (fingers-crossed though …). The Iranian and Resistance Axis’ interest is twofold: First, to retain power to carefully calibrate the intensity of conflict – upping and lowering as appropriate; and secondly, to keep escalatory dominance as much as possible in their hands.

The second aspect encompasses strategic patience. The Resistance Movements well understand the Israeli psyche – therefore, NO Pavlovian reflexes to Israeli provocations are accepted. But rather, to wait and rely on Israel to provide the pretext to any further step up the escalatory ladder. Israel must be seen to be the instigator for escalation – and the resistance merely the responder. The ‘eye’ must be on the Washington political psyche.

Thirdly, Iran draws confidence to pursue its ‘forwardness’ by having innovated a tectonic shift in asymmetric warfare, and in deterrence against Israel and the West. The U.S. might huff and puff, but Iran felt assured throughout this period that the U.S. well knows the risks associated with trying ‘blow the house down’.

Realists in the West tend to believe that ‘power’ is a simple function of national population size and GDP. So that, given the disparity in air and firepower, no way, as an example, can Hizbullah expect to ‘come out quits’ against Israel – a much richer and more populated entity.

This blindspot is the Resistance’s silent ‘ally’. It prevents the West (mostly) from understanding this pivot in military thinking.

Iran and its allies take a different view: They regard a state’s power to rest on intangibles, rather than literal tangibles: strategic patience; ideology; discipline; innovation and the concept of military leadership defined as the ability to cast a ‘magic’ spell over men so that they would follow their commander, even unto death.

The West has (or had) airpower and unchallenged air superiority, but the Resistance Fronts have their two-stage solution. They manufacture their own AI-assisted swarm drones and smart earth-hugging missiles. This is their Air Force.

The second stage naturally would be to evolve a layered air defence system (Russian-style). Does the Resistance possess such? Like Brer Rabbit, they stay mum.

The Resistance’s underlying strategy is clear: the West is over-invested in its air dominance and in its overwhelming fire-power. It prioritises quick shock and awe thrusts, but usually quickly exhausts itself early in the encounter. They rarely can sustain such high-intensity assault for long.

In Lebanon in 2006, Hizbullah remained deep underground whilst the Israeli air assault swept overhead. The physical surface damage was huge, yet their forces were unaffected and emerged only afterwards. Then came the 33 days of Hizbullah’s missile barrage – until Israel called it quits. This patience represents the first pillar of strategy.

The second therefore, is that whereas the West has short endurance, the opposition is trained and prepared for long attritional conflict – missile and rocket barrage to the point that civil society can sustain the impact no longer. War’s aim not necessarily has killing the enemy soldiers as a prime objective; rather it is exhaustion and inculcating a sense of defeat.

And what of the opposing project?

In 2012, I wrote:

“It seems that both Israel and [the Islamic world] are marching in step toward [eschatological narratives] which is taking them far away from the underlying, largely secular concepts by which this conflict traditionally has been conceptualised. What will be the consequence as the conflict, by its own logic, becomes a clash of religious poles? ” [– Al-Aqsa versus the Temple Mount].

Well, the West remains stuck with trying to manage and contain the conflict, using precisely those ‘largely secular concepts’ by which this conflict has been conceptualised and managed (or non-managed, I would say). In so doing, and through the West’s (secular) support for one particular eschatological vision (which happens to overlap with its own) over another, it inadvertently fuels the conflict.

Too late to return to secular modes of management; the genie is out.

……………………………..

(Republished from Strategic Culture Foundation)

Joe Biden’s Parting Gift to America Will be Christian Fascism – by Chris Hedges – 17 March 2024

• 1,500 WORDS • 

Onward Christian Fascism – by Mr. Fish

The Democratic Party had one last chance to implement the kind of New Deal Reforms that could save us from another Trump presidency and Christian fascism. It failed.

Joe Biden and the Democratic Party made a Trump presidency possible once and look set to make it possible again. If Trump returns to power, it will not be due to Russian interference, voter suppression or because the working class is filled with irredeemable bigots and racists. It will be because the Democrats are as indifferent to the suffering of Palestinians in Gaza as they are to immigrants, the poor in our impoverished inner cities, those driven into bankruptcy by medical bills, credit card debt and usurious mortgages, those discarded, especially in rural America, by waves of mass layoffs and workers, trapped in the serfdom of the gig economy, with its job instability and suppressed wages.

Biden and the Democrats, along with the Republican Party, gutted antitrust enforcement and deregulated banks and corporations, allowing them to cannibalize the nation. They backed legislation in 1982 to green light the manipulation of stocks through massive buybacks and the “harvesting” of companies by private equity firms that resulted in mass layoffs. They pushed through onerous trade deals, including the North American Free Trade Agreement, the greatest betrayal of the working class since the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act, which crippled union organizing. They were full partners in the construction of the vast archipelagos of the U.S. prison system — the largest in the world — and the militarization of police to turn them into internal armies of occupation. They fund the endless wars.

The Democrats dutifully serve their corporate masters, without whom most of them, including Biden, would not have a political career. This is why Biden and the Democrats will not turn on those who are destroying our economy and extinguishing our democracy. The slops in the trough would dry up. Advocating reforms jeopardize their fiefdoms of privilege and power. They fancy themselves as “captains of the ship,” labor journalist Hamilton Nolan writes, but they are “actually the wood-eating shipworms who are consuming the thing from inside until it sinks.”

Authoritarianism is nurtured in the fertile soil of a bankrupt liberalism. This was true in Weimar Germany. It was true in the former Yugoslavia. And it is true now. The Democrats had four years to institute New Deal reforms. They failed. Now we will pay.

A second Trump term will not be like the first. It will be about vengeance. Vengeance against the institutions that targeted Trump – the press, the courts, the intelligence agencies, disloyal Republicans, artists, intellectuals, the federal bureaucracy and the Democratic Party.

Our imperial presidency, if Donald Trump returns to power, will shift effortlessly into a dictatorship that emasculates the legislative and judicial branches. The plan to snuff out our anemic democracy is methodically laid out in the 887-page plan amassed by the Heritage Foundation called “Mandate for Leadership.”

The Heritage Foundation spent $22 million to draw up policy proposals, hiring lists and transition plans in Project 2025 to save Trump from the rudderless chaos that plagued his first term. Trump blames “snakes,” “traitors,” and the “Deep State” for undermining his first administration.

Our industrious American fascists, clutching the Christian cross and waving the flag, will begin work on day one to purge federal agencies of “snakes” and “traitors,” promulgate “Biblical” values, cut taxes for the billionaire class, abolish the Environmental Protection Agency, stack the courts and federal agencies with ideologues and strip workers of the few rights and protections they have left. War and internal security, including the wholesale surveillance of the public, will remain the main business of the state. The other functions of the state, especially those that focus on social services, including Social Security and protection of the vulnerable, will wither away.

Unfettered and unregulated capitalism, which has no self-imposed limits, turns everything into a commodity, from human beings to the natural world, which it exploits, until exhaustion or collapse. It first creates a mafia economy, as Karl Polanyi writes, and then a mafia government. Political theorists, including Aristotle, Karl Marx and Sheldon Wolin, warn that when oligarchs seize power, the only options left are tyranny or revolution.

The Democrats know the working class has abandoned them. And they know why. Democratic Party pollster Mike Lux writes:

[C]ontrary to many pundits’ assumptions, economic issues are driving the problems of Democrats in non-metro working class counties far more than the culture war…[T]hese voters wouldn’t care all that much about cultural difference and the woke thing if they thought Democrats gave more of a damn about economic challenges they face deeply and daily…The voters we need to win in these counties are not inherently right-wing on social issues.

But the Democrats will not alienate the corporations and billionaires who keep them in office. They have opted instead for two self-defeating tactics: lies and fear.

The Democrats express a faux concern for workers who are victimized by mass layoffs while at the same time courting the corporate leaders who orchestrate these layoffs with lavish government contracts. The same hypocrisy sees them express concern for civilians being slaughtered in Gaza while funneling billions of dollars in weapons to Israel and vetoing ceasefire resolutions at the U.N. to sustain the genocide.

Les Leopold in his book Wall Street’s War on Workers, filled with exhaustive polling and data, illustrates that economic dislocation and despair is the engine behind an enraged working class, not racism and bigotry.

He writes about the decision by Siemens to close its plant in Olean, New York with 530 decent paying union jobs. While Democrats bemoaned the closure, they refused to deny federal contracts to Siemans to protect the workers at the plant.

Biden then invited Siemens’ USA CEO Barbara Humpton to the White House signing of the 2021 infrastructure bill. The photo of the signing shows Humpton standing in the front row along with New York Senator Chuck Schumer.

Mingo County in the early 20th century was the epicenter of an armed clash between the United Mine Workers and the coal barons, with their hired gun thugs from the Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency. The gun thugs evicted striking workers in 1912 from company housing and beat up and shot union members until the state militia occupied the coal towns and broke the strike. The federal siege was not lifted until 1933 by the Roosevelt administration. The union, which had been banned, was legalized.

“Mingo County didn’t forget, at least not for a long time,” Leopold writes. “As late as 1996, with more than 3,200 coal miners still at work, Mingo County gave Bill Clinton a whopping 69.7 percent of its vote. But every four years thereafter, support for the Democrats declined, going down and down, and down some more. By 2020, Joe Biden received only 13.9 percent of the vote in Mingo, a brutal downturn in a county that once saw the Democratic Party as its savior.”

The 3,300 Mingo County coal mining jobs by 2020 had fallen to 300, the largest loss of coal jobs in any county in the country.

The lies of Democratic politicians did far more damage to working men and women than any of the lies spewed by Trump.

There have been at least 30 million mass layoffs since 1996 when the Bureau of Labor Statistics started tracking them, according to the Labor Institute. The reigning oligarchs, not content with mass layoffs and reducing the unionized workforce in the private sector to a paltry 6 percent, have filed legal papers to shut down the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), the federal agency that enforces labor rights. Elon Musk’s SpaceX as well as Amazon, Starbucks and Trader Joe’s targeted the NLRB – already stripped of most of its power to levy fines and force corporate compliance – after it accused Amazon, Starbucks and Trader Joe’s of breaking the law by blocking union organizing. The NLRB accused SpaceX of illegally firing eight workers for criticizing Musk. SpaceX, Amazon, Starbucks and Trader Joes are seeking to get the federal courts to overturn the 89-year-old National Labor Relations Act to prevent judges from hearing cases brought against corporations for violating labor laws.

Fear — fear of the return of Trump and Christian fascism — is the only card the Democrats have left to play. This will work in urban, liberal enclaves where college educated technocrats, part of the globalized knowledge economy, are busy scolding and demonizing the working class for their ingratitude.

The Democrats have foolishly written off these “deplorables” as a lost political cause. This precariat, the mantra goes, is victimized not by a predatory system built to enrich the billionaire class, but by their ignorance and individual failures. Dismissing the disenfranchised absolves the Democrats from advocating the legislation to protect and create decent-paying jobs.

Fear has no hold in deindustrialized urban landscapes and the neglected wastelands of rural America, where families struggle without sustainable work, an opioid crisis, food deserts, personal bankruptcies, evictions, crippling debt and profound despair.

They want what Trump wants. Vengeance. Who can blame them?

………………………………

(Republished from Scheerpost)

Northern Ireland: UK State Operative “Stakeknife” Murders of Resistance – by Steve James – 17 March 2024

The interim report published this month from Operation Kenova, the police investigation into the British spy “Stakeknife”, confirmed that British agents within the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) committed multiple murders.

The Stakeknife operation is among the foulest episodes of British imperialism’s decades long dirty war in Northern Ireland. Infiltration of the IRA and other republican and loyalist paramilitary groups, by British and Northern Ireland security and intelligence forces, was a central component of the 30-year conflict.

Kenova report, March 2024 [Photo: PSNI]

In line with the “Low Intensity Operations” doctrine codified by the British Army’s late General Sir Frank Kitson, infiltration of republican groups provided information allowing arrests, operations to be sabotaged and executions and bloody ambushes set up. Infiltration of, and collusion with, the loyalist, pro-British groups provided them with weaponry and targeting information, allowing them to function as state sanctioned assassination squads.

For several years up to 1991, for motives that remain uncertain, although money played a role, Freddie Scappaticci, a republican from Belfast, in the leadership of the IRA’s Internal Security Unit (ISU) intimidated, tortured, manipulated and murdered IRA members accused or suspected of being British agents. But, from sometime around 1978, Scappaticci was a British agent, feeding information on IRA discussions, operations and members to his British Army paymasters and controllers.

Freddie Scappaticci

Scappaticci was handled by the British Army’s spy operating Force Research Unit (FRU), while maintaining the image of a tough and violent operator respected by the republican leadership. Scappaticci, whose ISU also vetted new recruits to the Provisionals and maintained a brutal dictatorship in working class areas against youth accused of petty crimes, was outed in 2003 after years of suspicion, following failed operations, regarding the existence of top level British spies in the IRA.

In his readable 2023 work, “Stakeknife’s Dirty War” former IRA prisoner and press officer, Richard O’Rawe noted “the road to peace was strewn with dead bodies—many of them ASU [Active Service Unit] members, who were cut down in carefully constructed SAS [Special Air Services] ambushes.”

O’Rawe notes that the late Deputy First Minster of Northern Ireland, former head of the IRA’s Northern Command, Martin McGuinness, was central to Scappaticci’s rise to head the ISU in 1986.

Scappaticci’s treachery ran parallel with efforts of the Sinn Fein leadership to end their guerrilla war and find terms on which they could integrate themselves into the British government in the North and serve as partners in the exploitation of the working class. Remarkably, although sidelined and widely distrusted in republican circles from 1991 on, Scappaticci continued to live in Belfast, unhindered and unharmed.

When he was first publicly named in 2003, then Sinn Fein president, Gerry Adams said he initially accepted Scappaticci’s protestations of innocence “at face value.” Stakeknife came to be identified, not because of republican efforts, but primarily through the work of disgruntled ex-FRU member Ian Hurst, incensed at the brutal treatment and murder of other British agents, sacrificed to maintain Stakeknife in place.

Scappaticci eventually fled, later in 2003, to unknown locations in the UK, after abandoning efforts to deny his role. He died in April last year.

He only surfaced in public once, at Westminster Magistrates Court, where he was found guilty of possessing extreme animal pornography. His case was heard by Chief Magistrate and Senior District Judge for England and Wales, Emma Arbuthnot, the same judge who spearheaded the legal torture of Wikileaks founder, Julian Assange.

“Judge” Emma Arbuthot

Unlike her treatment of the principled journalist and publisher targeted for exposing imperialist war crimes, Arbuthnot thought well of the brutal torturer and murderer Scappaticci. She told him “You have not been before the court for 50 years—and that’s good character in my book,” handing him a suspended sentence.

In 2003, the Stakeknife revelations threatened not only further damaging documentary and legal exposure of the British state’s murderous and cynical methods, and a large number of murder trials, but also to discredit the Sinn Fein leadership with grave political consequences for the Good Friday Agreement. Therefore Operation Kenova was not commissioned until 2015, 13 years after Scappaticci’s exposure and tasked with investigating 24 murders. Scappaticci was not interviewed until 2018.

It has taken another nine years for Kenova to deliver an interim report which does not even formally confirm that Scappaticci was Stakeknife. Instead, Kenova led by led then Chief Constable of Bedfordshire Jon Boutcher, names Scappaticci as “inextricably bound up with and a critical person of interest at the heart of Operation Kenova”. Beyond that, the report rests on generalisations.

For example, Kenova identified three types of murders:

• murders committed by agents, including cases in which one agent murdered another.
• murders of alleged or suspected agents, carried out as punishment or deterrence, including cases when the victim was not in fact an agent.
• murders of both categories which could have been prevented but were not.

Kenova came to its conclusions after following up 12,000 lines of enquiry, taking 2,000 statements and interviewing 300 people, including 40 under caution. Eventually 35 files were submitted to the Public Prosecution Service for Northern Ireland (PPSNI). These referred to over 50,000 pages of evidence acquired from official sources including previously undisclosed files. Newly available forensic techniques were deployed.

More detailed and specific reports on individual murders are going to be handed to families at a later date along with a final report which, Boutcher claims, “will confirm the truth and set out the full facts”.

Much of Boutcher’s interim report is devoted to problems setting up and managing the investigation and his frustrations in dealing with multiple security and legal agencies. These are bound up with the need to draw a line under the dirty war, present all the issues arising out of it as “legacy” while offering a pretence of legal restitution for families whose relatives were killed.

The Shankill road, Belfast during the troubles, circa 1970 [Photo by Fribbler / Wikimedia / CC BY-SA 3.0]

This has given rise to considerable tensions between police and legal authorities—tasked with formally investigating large numbers of unsolved murders—and the huge intelligence, police and military apparatus and their political leadership in Britain and Northern Ireland. The British government and military have no more interest in investigating their crimes in Northern Ireland than in later and current atrocities in Iraq, Afghanistan and worldwide.

Boutcher, despite repeatedly insisting on his support for the intelligence services work, writes of:

“The lack of any legal or policy framework to guide FRU and [Royal Ulster Constabulary] agent handlers in particular and of any associated oversight or supervisory mechanisms were very serious failings: they put lives at risk, left those on the frontline exposed and fostered a maverick culture where agent handling was sometimes seen as a high-stakes ‘dark art’ practised ‘off the books’.”

He admits:

“Whether a result of cultural obstruction, documents being over-classified or difficulty identifying and locating relevant material held by the authorities, access to records has been a persistent problem and a legitimate concern to families.”

Despite having negotiated agreements and single points of contact with the Security Service, MI5, the Ministry of Defence (MoD) and the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI), data was still difficult to extract.

The Kenova team, for example, was given logins to intelligence database, MACER, used by the British Army. It became apparent that the MoD had a different set of logins with access to more records. Kenova was duly given more access, but Boutcher noted that the logins with greater rights had not been available to the series of previous investigations into intelligence activity and collusion in the “Troubles”.

Jon Boutcher [Photo: kenova/kenova.co.uk]

Boutcher complained that MI5 was holding historical material from the Royal Ulster Constabulary Special Branch and the FRU which remained marked as Top Secret.

Boutcher notes that on the very day Kenova intended to submit its first set of files regarding members of both the Provisional IRA and the security forces, MI5 informed his team that their security credentials on their London building had expired.

He placed his difficulties in the context of a series of investigations into intelligence handling and collusion between loyalist killers and the British state, many remain Secret or Top Secret.

These include the Stalker report of 1984 into “shoot to kill” allegations against the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC), predecessor to the PSNI. A follow up report, Sampson 1986, also remains Secret while a further review into both the Stalker and Sampson reports, the 1988 McLachlan report, is labeled Top Secret.

Sir John Stevens’ three reports into the leaking of targeting information from the security forces to loyalist killers found that almost all loyalist intelligence came from the British security forces. They were only partly released. A central focus of Stevens’ first report, Stevens 1, was the former soldier Brian Nelson’s role as both intelligence officer for the loyalist Ulster Defence Association and an agent for the FRU. Nelson had a role in as many as 30 murders. He was eventually charged and found guilty of 20 crimes, including conspiracy to murder.

Remarkably, Stevens was entirely unaware of Stakeknife despite Scappaticci being handled by the same FRU that he investigated regarding Nelson. Stevens 1 remains Top Secret. A follow up Blelloch report on agent handling was, until Boutcher requested a change, marked as Top Secret, now downgraded to Secret. Boutcher noted, “Lord Stevens said it was apparent that discussions at the highest level in the Army had resulted in the decision to withhold vital information from his inquiry team.” Stevens 2 remains Top Secret. Stevens 3, released in 2003, found that members of the security forces had colluded with the UDA in loyalist murders including that of human rights lawyer Pat Finucane in 1989.

Pat Finucane mural on the Falls Road, west Belfast [Photo by Zubro © 2003 / CC BY-SA 3.0]

In his outcomes and findings, Boutcher insists that files handed to the PPSNI “contain significant evidence implicating Stakeknife and others in very serious criminality and that this needs to be ventilated publicly.” But no-one in senior government or military positions claimed to have had any knowledge of Stakeknife. Boutcher points to what he euphemistically describes as “conscious lack of professional curiosity from the very senior leadership of the Army” regarding recruitment and running of agents.

Nevertheless, “Our Kenova investigations have established that agents were regularly involved in inciting and committing serious criminal acts” and “It is undoubtedly the case that some FRU and RUC Special Branch agents disclosed their involvement in criminality to their handlers (both before and after the event) and were assured that their anonymity and status would always be protected and they would never stand trial or spend time in jail.”

Shortly before Boutcher’s report was published, the PPSNI announced it would not be taking action against seven people alleged to have been Provisional IRA members and five retired members of the British Army’s Force Research Unit, said to be agent handlers, and more senior army figures. This follows decisions, stretching back to 2020 to avoid prosecuting former Security Service members and a PPSNI prosecutor.

Late 2023, the PPSNI said it would not be proceeding against “civilian suspects” in connection with murders, conspiracy to murder and false imprisonment, one police officer and six military personnel over allegations of perverting the course of justice and misconduct in public office. Earlier last month the PPSNI decided not to proceed against a further two former soldiers and two alleged Provisional IRA members.

Not one of the files submitted to the PPSNI by Kenova have resulted in a single prosecution.

…………………

Source

The Debate Over Israel as ‘US Aircraft Carrier’ – by Diana Johnstone (Consortium News) 12 March 2024

 • 2,900 WORDS • 

U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin addressing an AIPAC forum in Washington, D.C., Jan. 10, 2023. (DoD, Alexander Kubitza)

As was to be expected, considering the extreme complexity of the U.S.-Israel relationship, our recent article on “The Myth of Israel as ‘US Aircraft Carrier’ in Middle East,” far from settling this controversial issue, aroused numerous objections. We see these disagreements as an invitation to respond, in the hope that a friendly debate can contribute to clarifying the issues.

The Aircraft Carrier Image

A reader directly asks us “what individual or entity is the quotation ‘The Myth of Israel as “US Aircraft Carrier” in Middle East’ borrowed from or attributed to?”

There is no single answer, inasmuch as this image is used quite frequently, originally by advocates of the U.S.-Israel alliance, to justify it. That the Zionists make this claim is to be expected, and is no more credible than their other claims.

Our questioning of that expression is directed primarily at pro-Palestinian friends, usually on the left who accept and spread the belief that Israel is a U.S. “strategic asset,” usually meaning it contributes to U.S. control of Middle East oil.

This assumption is often based on the notion that a capitalist power must act in its own economic interest, and thus could not be fooled by ideology or bribery into acting against its own interests.

Not wanting to engage in ad hominem attacks on commentators with whom we largely agree on just about everything else, we have been reluctant to name names. But here goes: a perfect example is a recent interview with the excellent economist Michael Hudson by Ben Norton. Both identify as Marxist. Their interview is titled “Israel as a Landed Aircraft Carrier.”

Norton introduces his interview by citing Biden’s notorious declaration, “if there were not an Israel, we would have to invent one.”

Michael Hudson takes up the theme. He stresses that U.S. support to Israel, is “not altruistic” (no doubt), and provides his own explanation.

“Israel is a landed aircraft carrier in the Near East. Israel is the takeoff point for America to control the Near East…The United States has always viewed Israel as just our foreign military base…”

His initial justification for this statement is historic.

“When England first passed the act saying that there should be an Israel, the Balfour Declaration, it was because Britain wanted to control the Near East and its oil supplies…”

However, we maintain that the reasons for the Balfour Declaration (discussed at length in the book by Alison Weir that we cite) are long out of date and cannot explain current U.S. official devotion to Israel.

By the time Israel came into being, after World War II, the U.S. had effectively taken control of the region and its oil sources and had no particular interest in Israel.

Saudi King Ibn Saud converses with FDR (right) through an interpreter, Feb. 14, 1945, on board the USS Quincy, in the Suez Canal, during which U.S. secured Saudi oil flows in exchange for U.S. security guarantees. (U.S. Navy/Wikimedia Commons)

Hudson’s second justification is a generalization about U.S. imperialism:

“And that’s really the U.S. strategy all over the world; it’s trying to fuel other countries to fight wars for its own control.”

But in fact, the fighting and dying in the Middle East has been done by the United States itself and certain NATO allies, while the only people Israeli soldiers are actively fighting are the Palestinians, whose destruction provides no advantage to the United States.

Uzi Arad in 2011. (Harald Dettenborn, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 3.0 de)

Hudson’s third justification is an anecdote. From his work at the Hudson Institute, he became a close associate of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s main national security adviser, Uzi Arad. Once they were together at a party in San Francisco, and

“one of the U.S. generals came over and slapped Uzi on the back and said, ‘you’re our landed aircraft carrier over there. We love you.’ ”

So that is what a U.S. general said, and probably believed. It is certainly what the Israeli lobby has been telling the Americans for a long time, to justify all that money and military aid. But is it true?

Perhaps one can say that Israel is an aircraft carrier salesman who never delivers the aircraft carrier. Because Israel for a long time has had the rare privilege of NOT housing a U.S. military base, or at least not housing it openly.

Only in 2017, the U.S. and Israel revealed the inauguration of “the first American military base on Israeli soil,” which the U.S. military said was not an American base but merely living quarters for U.S. personnel working on a secret Israeli radar site in the Negev desert evidently spying on Iran. This facility serves Israeli defense interests. Some aircraft carrier!

And all through the Middle East, the U.S. has its own floating aircraft carriers, as well as great big genuine, non-floating military bases. The largest is Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar, and there are important military bases in Bahrain, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

Netanyahu as Zelensky

However, Hudson’s argument does not in fact explain how Israel serves U.S. purposes as a military asset, as an “aircraft carrier” in the sense of an unsinkable military base which the U.S. can use to attack its enemies. Rather, Hudson sees Israel as an expendable pawn, a puppet used by Washington to trigger a war that the U.S. wants to wage against Iran, to the ruin of Israel itself.

Hudson sees Netanyahu as “the Israeli version of Zelensky in the Ukraine.” Just as the U.S. used Ukraine to provoke Russia, the United States pushes Netanyahu to escalate against Gaza so that he will provoke Hezbollah to come to the aid of the Palestinians, and since Hezbollah is described as an Iranian proxy, this will be the excuse for the U.S. to go to war against Iran.

March 21, 2019: Netanyahu on phone with U.S. President Donald Trump during a visit by U.S. Secretary of State Michael Pompeo to Jerusalem. (U.S. State Department/Ron Przysucha)

Hudson said:

“The whole world has noticed that the U.S. now has two aircraft carriers in the Mediterranean, right off the Near Eastern shore, and it has an atomic submarine near the Persian Gulf…. And it’s very clear that they’re there not to protect Israel, but to fight Iran. Again and again, every American newspaper, when it talks about Hamas, it says Hamas is acting on behalf of Iran….

America isn’t trying to fight to protect Ukraine. It’s fighting for the last Ukrainian to be exhausted in what they’d hoped would be depleting Russia’s military. …Well, the same thing in Israel. If the United States is pushing Israel and Netanyahu to escalate, escalate, escalate, to do something that at a point is going to lead [Hezbollah leader Hassan] Nasrallah to finally say, ‘okay, we can’t take it anymore.

We’re coming in and helping rescue the Gazans and especially rescue the West Bank, where just as much fighting is taking place. We’re going to come in.’ And that’s when the United States will then feel free to move not only against Lebanon, but all the way via Syria, Iraq, to Iran.”

So this implies that the U.S. military and civilian strategists are eager to find an excuse to go to war with Iran, after having failed to gain full control of Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan or Syria after attacking them militarily (with help from certain NATO allies, but not from Israel). And Iran is a much more formidable power than any of those.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Armed Forces are having difficulty in recruitment (although they may be counting on filling the ranks with some of the undocumented immigrants flooding across the southern borders). Bogged down in Ukraine, preparing for conflict with China, are U.S. leaders really eager to get into a major war with Iran?

This speculation raises the key question raised by a number of Consortium News readers: what is meant by the U.S. national interest?

The National Interest

As we anticipated, there are readers on the left who interpret our appeal to “the national interest” as proof that we are defenders of capitalism. One reader writes: “The defense of capitalism in this article is truly bewildering. The authors conflate U.S. interests with Corporate interests.” That conflation is being done by the reader who assumes that “national interest” cannot be diversely defined.

Our position is simple. We are not aware of any realistic prospect for abolishing the American capitalist system in the foreseeable future, even though there are many symptoms of its radical decline both domestically and in international relations. This decline is due largely to the way the “national interest” is currently defined and pursued.

“This assumption is often based on the notion that a capitalist power must act in its own economic interest, and thus could not be fooled by ideology or bribery into acting against its own interests.”

Our view is that even under capitalism, some policies are better or worse than others. When it comes to the urgency of the survival of the Palestinian people, or more broadly, of sparing humanity the devastation of nuclear war, prudent policies are worth the risk of benefiting some less harmful branches of capitalism in some way.

Although the political system is largely paralyzed, there exist contrary ways of defining the national interest, and some are more perilous for the future of humanity than others.

The current policies that define the official “national interest” in the United States did not spring forth from a unanimous understanding or scientific analysis of what is best for capitalist profit or for anything else. The current ruling foreign policy doctrine is the product of specific influences and individuals that can be named and identified.

To be precise, the “national interest” that is being pursued by the current administration both on the elected top and especially the deep state below is a theoretical construct that has been created by the convergence of two powers that have excluded their rivals from the process.

These two powers are the military-industrial complex and the intellectual branch of the Zionist lobby, known as the “neoconservatives.”

The Lobby as Policy Maker

Biden in Israel, July 2022. (U.S. Embassy Jerusalem, Flickr, CC BY 2.0)

U.S. foreign policy has encountered moments where positive change was possible: after withdrawal from Vietnam, and even more, after the collapse of the Soviet Union. At that point, all the interests linked to the military industrial complex were under threat from the prospect of a “peace dividend” involving substantial disarmament.

What was needed was a fresh ideological justification for the MIC, and this was provided by the growing influence of the privately-financed think tanks that began their takeover of foreign policy definition in the 1970s.

In the following decades, these institutions came under the decisive influence of Zionist donors such as Haim Saban, Sheldon Adelson and AIPAC itself, which founded the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. These think tanks provided echo chambers for pro-Israel neocon intellectuals to shape editorial policy of major liberal media as well as foreign policy itself.

Here is the point: current U.S. policy is not the natural expression of “capitalist corporate interests,” but rather is the product of that process, of the deliberate takeover of U.S. foreign policy by a highly motivated, coherent and talented group of intellectuals, some with dual U.S.-Israeli citizenship. This policy has a name: the Wolfowitz Doctrine.

The Wolfowitz Doctrine & PNAC

The text is available on internet and speaks for itself. It was written as the initial version of the Defense Planning Guidance for the 1994–1999 fiscal years in the office of Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, Paul Wolfowitz, an ardent Zionist.

The version leaked to The New York Times in March 1992 was officially toned down after it caused an uproar, but it has remained as the guidelines for aggressive U.S foreign policy ever since.

Basically, the doctrine announces that the main objective of the United States is to retain its status as the world’s only remaining superpower. No serious rival must be allowed to develop.

This amounts to decreeing that history has come to a stop, and denies the natural historical process whereby China, for instance, which in the past was a leading power, must not be allowed to resume that status.

Wolfowitz during a press conference at the Pentagon on March 1, 2001. (DoD photo by R. D. Ward)

In 1997, neocons William Kristol and Robert Kagan founded the “Project for the New American Century” with the clear purpose of defining U.S. foreign policy in line with the Wolfowitz Doctrine.

As the “world’s pre-eminent power,” the United States must “shape a new century favorable to American principles and interests.” This was to be done neither by virtuous example nor by diplomacy, but by military strength and the force of arms.

PNAC members including Vice President Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz took control of policy under President George W. Bush and have kept it ever since.

Inside one administration after another, Robert Kagan’s wife, former Cheney aide Victoria Nuland (who last week said she would be resigning her State Dept. position) has advanced the neocon agenda, notably by managing the Ukrainian disaster. PNAC dissolved itself in 2006, announcing that its job was done.

This job amounted to linking the powerful military industrial complex to the global extension of U.S. power that was turned first and foremost against Israel’s Arab neighbors, starting with Iraq.

This branch of the Lobby, inside the government itself and mainstream media, on the false claim that Iraq was a dangerous enemy of the U.S., got the U.S. to attack and destroy a regime that was in fact an enemy of Israel.

The U.S. was fighting on Israel’s behalf, not the other way around.

The neoconservatives have designed the policy which AIPAC pays members of Congress to support. Every senator has taken AIPAC money.

National Interests Can Be Redefined

The Wolfowitz doctrine is expressed in Nuland’s anti-Russian Ukrainian policy as well as in the American provocations surrounding Taiwan. These policies are not inevitable, even under capitalism.

The expansion of NATO, as an example, was firmly opposed by a generation of U.S. foreign policy experts who have been sidelined and expelled from the policy-making process by the triumphant neocons.

Some are still alive, and others can emerge. So it is neither far-fetched nor “pro-capitalist” to suggest that a more realistic, less arrogant and belligerent foreign policy might be possible.

Such a change cannot be easy, but may be favored precisely by growing recognition of the multiple failures of the reigning neoconservative foreign policy.

For this, a free debate is necessary, in which it is possible to challenge the role of the Lobby without being accused of plagiarizing the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

It is obvious that in the United States, where this debate is most significant, there are Zionists who are not Jewish, while a very large proportion of the Jewish population is highly critical of Israel and has nothing to do with the Lobby.

The government in Jerusalem proclaiming itself “the Jewish State” as it slaughters native Palestinians is responsible for any current rise in misguided anti-Jewish feelings, which that government blatantly exploits to attract Jewish immigrants from France and New Jersey, in particular.

A reader suggests: “Some folks may find it emotionally and psychologically comforting to blame The Lobby and Israel for the evil of U.S. foreign policy, and somehow the good ol USA is an unwitting victim.”

Can’t we more accurately suggest: “Some folks may find it emotionally and psychologically comforting to blame the U.S. foreign policy for everything rather than risk the inevitable furious reactions to any mention of the Lobby and Israel?”

“The U.S. was fighting on Israel’s behalf, not the other way around.”

Certainly U.S. foreign policy is responsible for everything it does, and that is a gigantic evil. But that does not mean that everyone else is totally innocent.

The Lobby is most certainly responsible for doing all it can to encourage the very worst tendencies in U.S. arrogant exceptionalism, the MIC, Islamophobia and Christian evangelical fantasies, when they can be used against Israel’s adversaries.

And we maintain that encouraging the worst tendencies is not in the American interest.

………………………..

Diana Johnstone was press secretary of the Green Group in the European Parliament from 1989 to 1996. In her latest book, Circle in the Darkness: Memoirs of a World Watcher (Clarity Press, 2020), she recounts key episodes in the transformation of the German Green Party from a peace to a war party. Her other books include Fools’ Crusade: Yugoslavia, NATO and Western Delusions (Pluto/Monthly Review) and in co-authorship with her father, Paul H. Johnstone, From MAD to Madness: Inside Pentagon Nuclear War Planning (Clarity Press). She can be reached at diana.johnstone@wanadoo.fr

(Republished from Consortium News)

The German-American Strategic Depth Clown Show – by Pepe Escobar – 15 March 2024

The Four Stooges saga of Bundeswehr officers plotting to blow up the Kerch bridge in Crimea with Taurus missiles and getting away with it is a gift that keeps on giving.

President Putin, in his comprehensive interview to Dmitry Kiselev for Russia 1/RIA Novosti, did not fail to address it:

“They are fantasizing, encouraging themselves, first of all. Secondly, they are trying to intimidate us. As for the Federal Republic of Germany, there are constitutional problems there. They correctly say: if these Taurus hit that part of the Crimean Bridge, which, of course, even according to their concepts, is Russian territory, this is a violation of the constitution of the Federal Republic of Germany.”

Yet it gets curioser and curioser.

When the transcript of the Taurus leak was published by RT, everyone was able to hear Brigadier General Frank Gräfe – head of operations of the German Air Force – speaking with Lieutenant Colonel Fenske from the German Space Command Air Operations on the plan to deploy Taurus systems in Ukraine.

A key point is that during the plotting, these two mention that plans were already discussed “four months ago” with “Schneider”, the successor of “Wilsbach”.

Well, these are German names, of course. Thus it did not dawn on anyone that (Kevin) Schneider and (Kenneth) Wilsbach could instead be… Americans.

Yet that did raise the eyebrows of German investigative journalist Dirk Pohlmann – who I had the pleasure to meet in Berlin years ago – and his fellow researcher Tobias Augenbraun.

They found out that the German-sounding names did identify Americans. Not only that: none less than the former and the current Commanders of the U.S. Pacific Air Forces.

The Four (actually Six) Stooges element gets an extra boost when it is established that Liver Sausage Chancellor Scholz and his Totalenkrieg Minister Pistorius learned about the Taurus plan no less than four months later.

So here apparently we have a clear cut case of top German military officers taking direct orders regarding an attack on Crimea – part of the Russian Federation – directly from American officers in the Pacific Air Forces.

That in itself opens the dossier to a large spectrum ranging from national treason (against Germany) to casus belli (from the point of view of Russia).

Of course none of that is being discussed on German mainstream media.

After all, the only thing that seems to disturb Brigadier General Gräfe is that German media may start seriously prying on the Bundeswehr’s Multiple Stooges methods.

The only ones who actually did proper investigation were Pohlmann and Augenbaun.

It would be too much to expect from German media of the “Bild” type to analyze what would be the Russian response to the Multiple Stooge shenanigans against Crimea: a devastating retaliation against Berlin assets.

It’s so cold in Alaska

During the jolly Bundeswehr conversation yet another “plan” is mentioned:

“Nee, nee. Ich mein wegen der anderen Sache.” (“No, no. I mean the other matter.”) Then: “Ähm … meinst du Alaska jetzt?” (“Ahm, you mean Alaska now?”)

It all gest juicier when it is known that German Space Command Air Operations Centre officer Florstedt will meet none other than Schneider next Tuesday, March 19, in Alaska.

And Gräfe will also “have to go back to Alaska” to explain everything all over again to Schneider as he is “new” in the post.

So the question is: Why Alaska?

Enter American shadowplay on a lot of “activities” in Alaska – which happen to concern none other than China.

And there’s more: during the conversation still another “plan” (“Auftrag”, meaning “mission”) also surfaces, bearing a not clearly understandable code name sounding like “Kumalatra”.

What all of that tells us is that the Crash Test Dummy administration in the White House, the CIA and the Pentagon seem to betting, in desperation, on Total War in the black soil of Novorossiya.

And now they are sayin’ it out loud, with no shadow play, and coming directly from the head of the CIA, William Burns, who obviously sucks at secrecy.

This is what Burns told the members of the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee earlier this week:

“I think without supplemental assistance in 2024, you’re going to see more Avdeevkas, and that – it seems to me – would be a massive and historic mistake for the United States.”

That spells out how much the Avdeevka trauma is impressed on the psyche of the U.S. intel apparatus.

Yet there’s more: “With supplemental assistance, Ukraine can hold its own on the front lines through 2024 and into early 2025. Ukraine can continue to exact costs against Russia, not only with deep penetration strikes in Crimea, but also against Russia’s Black Sea Fleet.”

Here we go: Crimea all over again.

Burns actually believes that the humongous $60 billion new “aid” package which must be approved by the U.S. Congress will enable Kiev to launch an “offensive” by the end of 2024.

The only thing he gets right is that if there’s no new package, there will be “significant territorial losses for Ukraine this year.”

Burns may not be the brightest bulb in the – intel – room. A long time ago he was a diplomat/CIA asset in Moscow, and seems to have learned nothing.

Apart from letting cats and kitties galore out of the bag. It’s not only about attacking Crimea. This one is being read with surpreme delight in Beijing:

“The U.S. is providing assistance to Ukraine in part because such activities help curb China.”

Burns nailed his Cat Out of the Bag Oscar win when he said “if we’re seen to be walking away from support for Ukraine, not only is that going to feed doubts amongst our allies and partners in the Indo-Pacific; it’s going to stoke the ambitions of the Chinese leadership in contingencies ranging from Taiwan to the South China Sea”.

The inestimable Andrei Martyanov perfectly summed up the astonishing incompetence, peppered with tawdry exceptionalism, that permeates this performance by Burns.

There are things “they cannot grasp due to low level of education and culture. This is a new paradigm for them – all of them are ‘graduates’ of the school of ‘beating the crap from defenseless nations’ strategic ‘studies’, and with the level of economic ‘science’ in the West they cannot grasp how this all unfolds.”

So what is left is panic, as expressed by Burns in the Senate, mixed with the impotence in understanding a “different warrior culture” such as Russia’s: “They simply have no reference points.”

And still they choose war, as masterfully analyzed by Rostislav Ishchenko.

Even as the acronym fest of the CIA and 17 other U.S. intel agencies have concluded, in a report shown to Congress earlier this week, that Russia is “almost certainly” seeking to avoid a direct military conflict with NATO and will calibrate its policies to steer clear of a global war.

After all the Empire of Chaos is all about Forever Wars. And we are all in the middle of a do or die affair. The Empire simply cannot afford the cosmic humiliation of NATO in Novorossiya.

Still every “plan” – Taurus on Crimea-style – is a bluff. Russia is aware of bluff after bluff. The Western cards are now all on the table. The only question is when, and how fast will Russia call the bluff.

(Republished from Strategic Culture Foundation)

When Titans Clashed: How The Red Army Stopped Hitler – by David M. Glantz – Audiobook (4:56:34 min) Audio Mp3

When Titans Clashed: How The Red Army Stopped Hitler – by David M. Glantz – Audiobook (4:56:34 min) Audio Mp3

Think About It, There Must Be Higher Love – Steve Winwood – Video / Audio Mp3

Higher Love – Instrumental (6:04 min) Audio Mp3

Hollywood: Defend Jonathan Glazer ‘The Zone of Interest’ Director from Zionist Attacks

In defense of Jonathan Glazer: The Zone of Interest director under venomous attack for Academy Awards statement

James Wilson, from left, Leonard Blavatnik, and Jonathan Glazer accept the award for “The Zone of Interest” from the United Kingdom, for best international feature film at the Oscars on Sunday, March 10, 2024, at the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles. [AP Photo/Chris Pizzello]

……………………..

British filmmaker Jonathan Glazer has become the target of a vicious witch-hunt for his remarks at the Academy Awards ceremony last Sunday. Upon receiving the award for best international feature film for The Zone of Interest, about the commandant of Auschwitz, Glazer told the audience:

All our choices we made to reflect and confront us in the present, not to say “look what they did then.” Rather, “look what we do now.” Our film shows where dehumanization leads at its worst. It shaped all of our past and present.

Right now, we stand here as men who refute their Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation which has led to conflict for so many innocent people. Whether the victims of October 7 in Israel or the ongoing attack on Gaza—all the victims of this dehumanization, how do we resist?

Glazer’s entirely legitimate response to the fact that he and his colleagues have had “their Jewishness and the Holocaust hijacked” by the current Israeli onslaught in Gaza struck a nerve with the professional defenders of Israel’s mass crimes. Someone letting the general public in on a dirty secret, that the Zionists routinely and cynically make use of the horrors of the Holocaust to justify their atrocities—before an international viewing audience that still numbers in the tens of millions—had to be denounced and smeared.

The result has been a stream of vitriolic, hysterical abuse.

Some of the critics were stupid or dishonest enough to misquote Glazer and report that he had simply “refuted his Jewishness.” Meghan McCain, “television personality,” daughter of the late warmonger Sen. John McCain and a reactionary in her own right, denounced a situation in which “a man gets on stage to ‘refute his Jewishness’ and half the room claps.” She was corrected by hundreds of commentators on social media, to no effect of course.

Abraham Foxman, former director of the Anti-Defamation League and a ferocious defender of Israel, also chose to distort Glazer’s statement, asserting that as “a survivor of the Holocaust I am shocked the director would slap the memory of over 1 million Jews who died because they were Jews by announcing he refutes his Jewishness. Shame on you.”

The pro-Zionist forces who managed to grasp Glazer’s comment, however, were no less hostile.

Noa Tishby, a former Israeli government official, has become a leading apologist in the US for Israel’s crimes. She denounced the entire film award event March 10, without mentioning Glazer by name, as “a subtle and overt display of Jew-hatred.”

Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, another media-seeking defender of Zionism, took to X to denounce Glazer’s comments as “Absolutely disgusting!” The director, according to Boteach, had “betrayed his people and disgraced himself and trivialized the 6 million martyrs of the holocaust, when he said that Israel’s War in Gaza was hijacking the memory of the holocaust. How dare you compare the two? You fool. The whole purpose of Israel’s war in Gaza is to make sure THERE ISN’T A SECOND HOLOCAUST so we don’t need more of your films because Jews actually remain alive. HAMAS HAS ONE INTENTION. GENOCIDE OF JEWS.”

These are fascist-minded individuals who only restrain themselves, for the moment at least, from bellowing: Kill all the Arabs!

David Schaecter, president of the Miami-based Holocaust Survivors’ Foundation USA, defensively claimed that Glazer’s comment was “factually incorrect and morally indefensible” and said that Israel “has nothing to do with the Holocaust.” He insisted Glazer was trying to “equate Hamas’ maniacal brutality against innocent Israelis with Israel’s difficult but necessary self-defense in the face of Hamas’s ongoing barbarity.”

The CEO of Combat Antisemitism Movement Sacha Roytman Dratwa claimed that Glazer had appropriated “his religious and ethnic identity to attack the national homeland of the Jewish People which is fighting a war on seven fronts against those who openly call for the genocide of Jews.”

These people can justify anything. One hundred thousand Gazans dead, wounded or missing; 2,000 pound Israeli-“Made in the USA” bombs dropped on residential neighborhoods; the destruction of hospitals, universities, mosques, libraries and schools; the assassination of political opponents, intellectuals, artists; the slaughter of thousands of women and children; the sadistic torture and summary execution of prisoners; the deliberate starvation of an entire population.

The world watches in horror as the Israeli military commits one crime after another, each more heinous than the one before. And through it all, the pack of fascists that comprise Netanyahu’s cabinet, along with the leading voices of the Israeli and global media, and the Biden administration and its European allies insist they are fighting “terrorism” and “antisemitism.”

One of the most repulsive and dishonest attacks on Glazer was posted on the Hollywood Reporter website, appropriately enough, as the publication played a leading role in the McCarthyite witch-hunts of the late 1940s and 1950s. The piece, by one Richard Trank, first of all, lyingly asserts that the current conflict began October 7, not 76 years ago with the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, followed by decades of destruction of villages and orchards, theft of land, persecution, murder and abuse, including almost 20 years of forcing the Gazan population to live in an open-air prison camp.

Trank presents the ongoing genocidal campaign and subsequent events in these terms:

Toward the end of October, the Israeli army attacked Hamas in Gaza, determined to wipe it out forever so that an atrocity like this [October 7] will never happen again. In the subsequent months, we have watched pro-Hamas and anti-Israel forces unleash a campaign of worldwide antisemitism the likes of which has not been seen since the Nazi era.

Trank argues that those actors and others at the awards ceremony March 10 who sported “red pins in support of a Cease Fire Now and Palestinian flags on their lapels” were wearing the equivalent of “swastika pins in sympathy with Hitler’s Reich.”

There is an element of derangement in this type of slanderous comment. Glazer’s observation about “dehumanization” seems entirely fitting. No crime is beyond the Israeli regime and its backers in Washington, London, Paris and Berlin. There are no military, moral or intellectual “red lines.”

Derangement, and extreme anxiety. Tens of millions have expressed their horror at the mass killings in Gaza. Great numbers of Jewish young people, in the US and elsewhere, are participating in the mass protests. Glazer’s remarks, from a filmmaker without a history of political commentary or intervention, demonstrates how far the discrediting of Zionism’s lies has reached.

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The Decline and Fall of It All? American Empire in Crisis – by Alfred W. McCoy – 14 March 2024

Empires don’t just fall like toppled trees. Instead, they weaken slowly as a succession of crises drain their strength and confidence until they suddenly begin to disintegrate. So it was with the British, French, and Soviet empires; so it now is with imperial America.

Great Britain confronted serious colonial crises in India, Iran, and Palestine before plunging headlong into the Suez Canal and imperial collapse in 1956. In the later years of the Cold War, the Soviet Union faced its own challenges in Czechoslovakia, Egypt, and Ethiopia before crashing into a brick wall in its war in Afghanistan.

America’s post-Cold War victory lap suffered its own crisis early in this century with disastrous invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Now, looming just over history’s horizon are three more imperial crises in Gaza, Taiwan, and Ukraine that could cumulatively turn a slow imperial recessional into an all-too-rapid decline, if not collapse.

As a start, let’s put the very idea of an imperial crisis in perspective. The history of every empire, ancient or modern, has always involved a succession of crises — usually mastered in the empire’s earlier years, only to be ever more disastrously mishandled in its era of decline. Right after World War II, when the United States became history’s most powerful empire, Washington’s leaders skillfully handled just such crises in Greece, Berlin, Italy, and France, and somewhat less skillfully but not disastrously in a Korean War that never quite officially ended. Even after the dual disasters of a bungled covert invasion of Cuba in 1961 and a conventional war in Vietnam that went all too disastrously awry in the 1960s and early 1970s, Washington proved capable of recalibrating effectively enough to outlast the Soviet Union, “win” the Cold War, and become the “lone superpower” on this planet.

In both success and failure, crisis management usually entails a delicate balance between domestic politics and global geopolitics. President John F. Kennedy’s White House, manipulated by the CIA into the disastrous 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, managed to recover its political balance sufficiently to check the Pentagon and achieve a diplomatic resolution of the dangerous 1962 Cuban missile crisis with the Soviet Union.

America’s current plight, however, can be traced at least in part to a growing imbalance between a domestic politics that appears to be coming apart at the seams and a series of challenging global upheavals. Whether in Gaza, Ukraine, or even Taiwan, the Washington of President Joe Biden is clearly failing to align domestic political constituencies with the empire’s international interests. And in each case, crisis mismanagement has only been compounded by errors that have accumulated in the decades since the Cold War’s end, turning each crisis into a conundrum without an easy resolution or perhaps any resolution at all. Both individually and collectively, then, the mishandling of these crises is likely to prove a significant marker of America’s ultimate decline as a global power, both at home and abroad.

Creeping Disaster in Ukraine

Since the closing months of the Cold War, mismanaging relations with Ukraine has been a curiously bipartisan project. As the Soviet Union began breaking up in 1991, Washington focused on ensuring that Moscow’s arsenal of possibly 45,000 nuclear warheads was secure, particularly the 5,000 atomic weapons then stored in Ukraine, which also had the largest Soviet nuclear weapons plant at Dnipropetrovsk.

During an August 1991 visit, President George H.W. Bush told Ukrainian Prime Minister Leonid Kravchuk that he could not support Ukraine’s future independence and gave what became known as his “chicken Kiev” speech, saying: “Americans will not support those who seek independence in order to replace a far-off tyranny with a local despotism. They will not aid those who promote a suicidal nationalism based upon ethnic hatred.” He would, however, soon recognize Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia as independent states since they didn’t have nuclear weapons.

When the Soviet Union finally imploded in December 1991, Ukraine instantly became the world’s third-largest nuclear power, though it had no way to actually deliver most of those atomic weapons. To persuade Ukraine to transfer its nuclear warheads to Moscow, Washington launched three years of multilateral negotiations, while giving Kyiv “assurances” (but not “guarantees”) of its future security — the diplomatic equivalent of a personal check drawn on a bank account with a zero balance.

Under the Budapest Memorandum on Security in December 1994, three former Soviet republics — Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine — signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and started transferring their atomic weapons to Russia. Simultaneously, Russia, the U.S., and Great Britain agreed to respect the sovereignty of the three signatories and refrain from using such weaponry against them. Everyone present, however, seemed to understand that the agreement was, at best, tenuous. (One Ukrainian diplomat told the Americans that he had “no illusions that the Russians would live up to the agreements they signed.”)

Meanwhile — and this should sound familiar today — Russian President Boris Yeltsin raged against Washington’s plans to expand NATO further, accusing President Bill Clinton of moving from a Cold War to a “cold peace.” Right after that conference, Defense Secretary William Perry warned Clinton, point blank, that “a wounded Moscow would lash out in response to NATO expansion.”

Nonetheless, once those former Soviet republics were safely disarmed of their nuclear weapons, Clinton agreed to begin admitting new members to NATO, launching a relentless eastward march toward Russia that continued under his successor George W. Bush. It came to include three former Soviet satellites, the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland (1999); three one-time Soviet Republics, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania (2004); and three more former satellites, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia (2004). At the Bucharest summit in 2008, moreover, the alliance’s 26 members unanimously agreed that, at some unspecified point, Ukraine and Georgia, too, would “become members of NATO.” In other words, having pushed NATO right up to the Ukrainian border, Washington seemed oblivious to the possibility that Russia might feel in any way threatened and react by annexing that nation to create its own security corridor.

In those years, Washington also came to believe that it could transform Russia into a functioning democracy to be fully integrated into a still-developing American world order. Yet for more than 200 years, Russia’s governance had been autocratic and every ruler from Catherine the Great to Leonid Brezhnev had achieved domestic stability through incessant foreign expansion. So, it should hardly have been surprising when the seemingly endless expansion of NATO led Russia’s latest autocrat, Vladimir Putin, to invade the Crimean Peninsula in March 2014, only weeks after hosting the Winter Olympics.

In an interview soon after Moscow annexed that area of Ukraine, President Obama recognized the geopolitical reality that could yet consign all of that land to Russia’s orbit, saying: “The fact is that Ukraine, which is a non-NATO country, is going to be vulnerable to military domination by Russia no matter what we do.”

Then, in February 2022, after years of low-intensity fighting in the Donbass region of eastern Ukraine, Putin sent 200,000 mechanized troops to capture the country’s capital, Kyiv, and establish that very “military domination.” At first, as the Ukrainians surprisingly fought off the Russians, Washington and the West reacted with a striking resolve — cutting Europe’s energy imports from Russia, imposing serious sanctions on Moscow, expanding NATO to all of Scandinavia, and dispatching an impressive arsenal of armaments to Ukraine.

After two years of never-ending war, however, cracks have appeared in the anti-Russian coalition, indicating that Washington’s global clout has declined markedly since its Cold War glory days. After 30 years of free-market growth, Russia’s resilient economy has weathered sanctions, its oil exports have found new markets, and its gross domestic product is projected to grow a healthy 2.6% this year. In last spring and summer’s fighting season, a Ukrainian “counteroffensive” failed and the war is, in the view of both Russian and Ukrainian commanders, at least “stalemated,” if not now beginning to turn in Russia’s favor.

Most critically, U.S. support for Ukraine is faltering. After successfully rallying the NATO alliance to stand with Ukraine, the Biden White House opened the American arsenal to provide Kyiv with a stunning array of weaponry, totaling $46 billion, that gave its smaller army a technological edge on the battlefield. But now, in a move with historic implications, part of the Republican (or rather Trumpublican) Party has broken with the bipartisan foreign policy that sustained American global power since the Cold War began. For weeks, the Republican-led House has even repeatedly refused to consider President Biden’s latest $60 billion aid package for Ukraine, contributing to Kyiv’s recent reverses on the battlefield.

The Republican Party’s rupture starts with its leader. In the view of former White House adviser Fiona Hill, Donald Trump was so painfully deferential to Vladimir Putin during “the now legendarily disastrous press conference” at Helsinki in 2018 that critics were convinced “the Kremlin held sway over the American president.” But the problem goes so much deeper. As New York Times columnist David Brooks noted recently, the Republican Party’s historic “isolationism is still on the march.” Indeed, between March 2022 and December 2023, the Pew Research Center found that the percentage of Republicans who think the U.S. gives “too much support” to Ukraine climbed from just 9% to a whopping 48%. Asked to explain the trend, Brooks feels that “Trumpian populism does represent some very legitimate values: the fear of imperial overreach… [and] the need to protect working-class wages from the pressures of globalization.”

Since Trump represents this deeper trend, his hostility toward NATO has taken on an added significance. His recent remarks that he would encourage Russia to “do whatever the hell they want” to a NATO ally that didn’t pay its fair share sent shockwaves across Europe, forcing key allies to consider what such an alliance would be like without the United States (even as Russian President Vladimir Putin, undoubtedly sensing a weakening of U.S. resolve, threatened Europe with nuclear war). All of this is certainly signaling to the world that Washington’s global leadership is now anything but a certainty.

Crisis in Gaza

Just as in Ukraine, decades of diffident American leadership, compounded by increasingly chaotic domestic politics, let the Gaza crisis spin out of control. At the close of the Cold War, when the Middle East was momentarily disentangled from great-power politics, Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization signed the 1993 Oslo Accord. In it, they agreed to create the Palestinian Authority as the first step toward a two-state solution. For the next two decades, however, Washington’s ineffectual initiatives failed to break the deadlock between that Authority and successive Israeli governments that prevented any progress toward such a solution.

In 2005, Israel’s hawkish Prime Minister Ariel Sharon decided to withdraw his defense forces and 25 Israeli settlements from the Gaza Strip with the aim of improving “Israel’s security and international status.” Within two years, however, Hamas militants had seized power in Gaza, ousting the Palestinian Authority under President Mahmoud Abbas. In 2009, the controversial Benjamin Netanyahu started his nearly continuous 15-year stretch as Israel’s prime minister and soon discovered the utility of supporting Hamas as a political foil to block the two-state solution he so abhorred.

Not surprisingly then, the day after last year’s tragic October 7th Hamas attack, theTimes of Israel published this headline: “For Years Netanyahu Propped Up Hamas. Now It’s Blown Up in Our Faces.” In her lead piece, senior political correspondent Tal Schneider reported: “For years, the various governments led by Benjamin Netanyahu took an approach that divided power between the Gaza Strip and the West Bank — bringing Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas to his knees while making moves that propped up the Hamas terror group.”

On October 18th, with the Israeli bombing of Gaza already inflicting severe casualties on Palestinian civilians, President Biden flew to Tel Aviv for a meeting with Netanyahu that would prove eerily reminiscent of Trump’s Helsinki press conference with Putin. After Netanyahu praised the president for drawing “a clear line between the forces of civilization and the forces of barbarism,” Biden endorsed that Manichean view by condemning Hamas for “evils and atrocities that make ISIS look somewhat more rational” and promised to provide the weaponry Israel needed “as they respond to these attacks.” Biden said nothing about Netanyahu’s previous arm’s length alliance with Hamas or the two-state solution. Instead, the Biden White House began vetoing ceasefire proposals at the U.N. while air-freighting, among other weaponry, 15,000 bombs to Israel, including the behemoth 2,000-pound “bunker busters” that were soon flattening Gaza’s high-rise buildings with increasingly heavy civilian casualties.

After five months of arms shipments to Israel, three U.N. ceasefire vetoes, and nothing to stop Netanyahu’s plan for an endless occupation of Gaza instead of a two-state solution, Biden has damaged American diplomatic leadership in the Middle East and much of the world. In November and again in February, massive crowds calling for peace in Gaza marched in Berlin, London, Madrid, Milan, Paris, Istanbul, and Dakar, among other places.

Moreover, the relentless rise in civilian deaths well past 30,000 in Gaza, striking numbers of them children, has already weakened Biden’s domestic support in constituencies that were critical for his win in 2020 — including Arab-Americans in the key swing state of Michigan, African-Americans nationwide, and younger voters more generally. To heal the breach, Biden is now becoming desperate for a negotiated cease-fire. In an inept intertwining of international and domestic politics, the president has given Netanyahu, a natural ally of Donald Trump, the opportunity for an October surprise of more devastation in Gaza that could rip the Democratic coalition apart and thereby increase the chances of a Trump win in November — with fatal consequences for U.S. global power.

Trouble in the Taiwan Straits

While Washington is preoccupied with Gaza and Ukraine, it may also be at the threshold of a serious crisis in the Taiwan Straits. Beijing’s relentless pressure on the island of Taiwan continues unabated. Following the incremental strategy that it’s used since 2014 to secure a half-dozen military bases in the South China Sea, Beijing is moving to slowly strangle Taiwan’s sovereignty. Its breaches of the island’s airspace have increased from 400 in 2020 to 1,700 in 2023. Similarly, Chinese warships have crossed the median line in the Taiwan Straits 300 times since August 2022, effectively erasing it. As commentator Ben Lewis warned, “There soon may be no lines left for China to cross.”

After recognizing Beijing as “the sole legal Government of China” in 1979, Washington agreed to “acknowledge” that Taiwan was part of China. At the same time, however, Congress passed the Taiwan Relations Act of 1979, requiring “that the United States maintain the capacity to resist any resort to force… that would jeopardize the security… of the people on Taiwan.”

Such all-American ambiguity seemed manageable until October 2022 when Chinese President Xi Jinping told the 20th Communist Party Congress that “reunification must be realized” and refused “to renounce the use of force” against Taiwan. In a fateful counterpoint, President Biden stated, as recently as September 2022, that the US would defend Taiwan “if in fact there was an unprecedented attack.”

But Beijing could cripple Taiwan several steps short of that “unprecedented attack” by turning those air and sea transgressions into a customs quarantine that would peacefully divert all Taiwan-bound cargo to mainland China. With the island’s major ports at Taipei and Kaohsiung facing the Taiwan Straits, any American warships trying to break that embargo would face a lethal swarm of nuclear submarines, jet aircraft, and ship-killing missiles.

Given the near-certain loss of two or three aircraft carriers, the U.S. Navy would likely back off and Taiwan would be forced to negotiate the terms of its reunification with Beijing. Such a humiliating reversal would send a clear signal that, after 80 years, American dominion over the Pacific had finally ended, inflicting another major blow to U.S. global hegemony.

The Sum of Three Crises

Washington now finds itself facing three complex global crises, each demanding its undivided attention. Any one of them would challenge the skills of even the most seasoned diplomat. Their simultaneity places the U.S. in the unenviable position of potential reverses in all three at once, even as its politics at home threaten to head into an era of chaos. Playing upon American domestic divisions, the protagonists in Beijing, Moscow, and Tel Aviv are all holding a long hand (or at least a potentially longer one than Washington’s) and hoping to win by default when the U.S. tires of the game. As the incumbent, President Biden must bear the burden of any reversal, with the consequent political damage this November.

Meanwhile, waiting in the wings, Donald Trump may try to escape such foreign entanglements and their political cost by reverting to the Republican Party’s historic isolationism, even as he ensures that the former lone superpower of Planet Earth could come apart at the seams in the wake of election 2024. If so, in such a distinctly quagmire world, American global hegemony would fade with surprising speed, soon becoming little more than a distant memory.

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This column is distributed by Tom Dispatch.

The Myth of Israel as ‘US Aircraft Carrier’ in Middle East – by Jean Bricmont and Diana Johnstone (Consortium News) 6 March 2024

 • 2,700 WORDS • 

Outside annual AIPAC meeting in Washington, March 2016. (Susan Melkisethian, Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

If Israeli apartheid were to disappear, oil and trade would still flow from the Middle East towards the West.

Why does the United States give total support to Israel?

In answer, there is a common myth shared by both champions and radical critics of the Zionist state which needs to be dispelled.

The myth is that Israel is a major U.S. strategic asset, described as a sort of unsinkable American aircraft carrier vital to Washington’s interests in the Middle East.

The line of argument of those who share this myth is to show that the United States has economic and strategic interests in the oil-rich Middle East (which nobody denies) and to quote American (and, of course, Israeli) political figures who claim that Israel is the best or even the sole U.S. ally in the region.

For example U.S. President Joe Biden has gone so far as to say that if Israel didn’t exist the U.S. should have invented it.

But the crucial evidence, totally missing from their analysis, is the slightest example of Israel actually serving American interests in the region.

If no examples are given, it’s simply because there are none. Israel has never fired a shot on behalf of the United States or brought a drop of oil under U.S. control.

We can start with a common sense argument: If the U.S. is interested in Middle East oil, why would it support a country that is hated (for whatever reasons) by all the populations of the oil producing countries?

In the 1950s, such was the reasoning of most U.S. experts, who put good relations with Arab countries ahead of support to Israel. This no doubt helps explain why AIPAC, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, was founded in 1963, to align U.S. policy with that of Israel.

1967 War & After

U.S. support for Israel took off after the 1967 war. Israel’s success dealt a fatal blow to the Arab nationalism embodied by Egypt’s Gamal Nasser, which some U.S. policy-makers falsely saw as a potential communist threat (which they saw just about everywhere).

But the war was waged by Israel for its own interests and expansion, with no benefit to the United States.

On the contrary: a remarkable official silence has been maintained over the fact that in the course of that short war, the American intelligence gathering ship USS Liberty, which was spying on the conflict, was shelled for several hours by the Israeli air force, with the obvious intention to sink it, killing 34 sailors and wounding 174.

Damage to USS Liberty, June 1967. (Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain)

Had there been no survivors, Egypt could have been accused (making it a “false flag” operation). The survivors were ordered not to speak about it, and the incident was never fully investigated, accepting the official Israeli explanation that it was a “mistake.” In any case, Israel’s behavior was not exactly that of a precious ally.

When Israel attacked Lebanon in 2006, that country’s government was perfectly “pro-Western.” What’s more, during the 1991 war against Iraq over Kuwait, the United States insisted that Israel should not participate, because such involvement would have collapsed their Arab anti-Iraq coalition. Again, it’s hard here to see Israel as an indispensable “ally.”

U.S. post-9/11 wars have targeted Israel’s enemies — Iraq, Libya, Syria — with no advantage to U.S. oil companies, on the contrary. The question arises whether the U.S. choice of enemies in the Middle East has not been determined by the interests of a foreign government, contrary to American interests in the region.

Washington & Gaza Today

Now we come to the current situation: what interest does the United States have in the slaughter being perpetrated in Gaza?

In reality, what Washington is doing is trying to maintain good relations with their Arab allies (Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States) by pretending to seek a compromise while exerting no effective pressure on Israel – for instance, by cutting off funds.

And why don’t they? The answer is obvious but saying so is politically incorrect, and is rarely discussed by defenders of the myth, except to refute it. It is the action of the pro-Israeli lobby, which de facto controls Congress and without which no president can really act.

[See: Israel Lobby’s Disastrous Domination]

The lobby is no secret conspiracy. It is openly coordinated by AIPAC, which spreads billionaire donations throughout the U.S. political system and dictates the line to take on Israel to ensure a successful career.

Outside annual AIPAC meeting in Washington, March 2016. (Susan Melkisethian, Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

Control is virtually complete over the two parties represented in Congress.

It is achieved primarily through the funding of election campaigns. All those who comply can count on campaign donations, while anyone daring to defy the lobby’s injunctions would quickly be challenged by a very well-funded opponent in the next primary election, thus losing support of his or her own party in the next election — as happened to Georgia representative Cynthia McKinney in 2002.

[See: Zionist Suppression in Congress and US Congress: ‘We Stand With Genocide’]

The lobby also animates smear campaigns against any critic of Israel, as seen recently in the attacks on university presidents (Harvard, MIT, Pennsylvania) for not having sufficiently cracked down on alleged student “anti-Semitism” on their campuses.

There are several books that explain in detail how the lobby works:

• They Dare to Speak Out: People and Institutions Confront Israel’s Lobby (1985) by Paul Findley, a Republican congressman from Illinois, who details how the lobby politically “liquidated” all those who wanted a different policy in the Middle East, precisely because they wanted to defend the interests of the United States.
• The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt (2007) a comprehensive and well sourced book on the functioning and the effects of the lobby.
• Against Our Better Judgment : The hidden history of how the U.S. was used to create Israël, by Alison Weir, 2014, which goes back to the Balfour declaration.

One can also watch hidden-camera reports by Al Jazeera on the lobby’s work in the U.S. and Britain.

The way the Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn was “eliminated” politically rests entirely on the lobby’s action and campaigns against his (imaginary) anti-Semitism. The same process is currently underway in France with Jean-Luc Mélenchon and his France Insoumise party.

American presidents as different as Richard Nixon and Jimmy Carter have complained that their actions were hampered by the lobby. In fact, every American president has wanted to get rid of the “Palestinian problem” (through the two-state solution) but has been impeded by Congress.

As for Congress itself, let us quote very explicit insider testimony, that of James Abourezk, who was first a congressman and then a senator from South Dakota in the 1970s and who sent this letter in 2006 to Jeff Blankfort, an anti-Zionist activist:

“I can tell you from personal experience that, at least in the Congress, the support Israel has in that body is based completely on political fear — fear of defeat by anyone who does not do what Israel wants done. I can also tell you that very few members of Congress — at least when I served there — have any affection for Israel or for its Lobby. What they have is contempt, but it is silenced by fear of being found out exactly how they feel.

I’ve heard too many cloakroom conversations in which members of the Senate will voice their bitter feelings about how they’re pushed around by the Lobby to think otherwise. In private one hears the dislike of Israel and the tactics of the Lobby, but not one of them is willing to risk the Lobby’s animosity by making their feelings public.

Thus, I see no desire on the part of Members of Congress to further any U.S. imperial dreams by using Israel as their pit bull. The only exceptions to that rule are the feelings of Jewish members, who, I believe, are sincere in their efforts to keep U.S. money flowing to Israel.”

AIPAC Suppression

Abourezk added that the Lobby made every effort to suppress even a single voice of congressional dissent – as his own – that might question annual appropriations to Israel, so that

“if Congress is completely silent on the issue, the press will have no one to quote, which effectively silences the press as well. Any journalists or editors who step out of line are quickly brought under control by well organized economic pressure against the newspaper caught sinning.”

Abourezk once traveled through the Middle East with a reporter who wrote honestly about what he saw. As a result, newspaper executives received threats from several of their large advertisers that their advertising would be terminated if they continued publishing the journalist’s articles.

Abourezk circa 1977. (Handout photo, Wikimedia Commons, Public domain)

“I do not recall a single instance where any administration saw the need for Israel’s military power to advance U.S. Imperial interests. In fact, as we saw in the Gulf War, Israel’s involvement was detrimental to what Bush, Sr. wanted to accomplish in that war. They had, as you might remember, to suppress any Israeli assistance so that the coalition would not be destroyed by their involvement.

So far as the argument that we need to use Israel as a base for U.S. operations, I’m not aware of any U.S. bases there of any kind. The U.S. has enough military bases, and fleets, in the area to be able to handle any kind of military needs without using Israel. In fact I can’t think of an instance where the U.S. would want to involve Israel militarily for fear of upsetting the current allies the U.S. has, i.e., Saudi Arabia and the Emirates. The public in those countries would not allow the monarchies to continue their alliance with the U.S. should Israel become involved.”

Abourezk said that U.S. encouragement in its invasions of Lebanon “was merely an extension of the U.S. policy of helping Israel because of the Lobby’s continual pressure. … Lebanon always has been a ‘throw away’ country so far as the Congress is concerned, that is, what happens there has no effect on U.S. interests. There is no Lebanon Lobby.”

“The public must realize that far from being an asset, Israel is a chronic liability that squanders billions of American dollars, drags the United States into wars and whose genocidal treatment of the Palestinians is radically destroying America’s moral pretensions in most of the world.”

Alleged Strategic Value

The alleged strategic value of Israel is just one among many examples of claiming that some imperial/colonial project is necessary for the global capitalist system.

The Vietnam war was justified in part by the domino theory: all of South-East Asia would become communist if Vietnam “fell.” The only domino that fell was Cambodia, as a result of U.S. bombing, after victorious Vietnam intervened to overthrow a genocidal regime there.

South African apartheid was supported by the West, in part out of fear of communism, but the end of apartheid had no dramatic effect on capitalist imperialism in Africa.

If Israeli apartheid were to disappear in Palestine, oil and trade would still flow from the Middle East towards the West, and there would be no attempts by Houthis to block shipments in the Red Sea.

A realistic analysis shows that Israel’s treatment of Palestinians and aggressive policies toward its neighbors are entirely detrimental to American interests in the Middle East, which the current crisis only serves to highlight even more.

The trouble with the “Israel as U.S. aircraft carrier” thesis is that while it’s very comfortable for its defenders, it is also very damaging for the Palestinian cause.

It’s comfortable because it doesn’t risk incurring accusations of anti-Semitism, as it shifts responsibility for Israeli atrocities to American imperialism and its multinational corporations.

On the other hand, if you emphasize the Lobby’s leading role in U.S. Middle East policy, you will be accused of echoing fantasies and “conspiracy theories” about “Jewish power” dating from times when there was no Israel and thus no Israel Lobby.

Rejection of discredited stereotypes is no reason to ignore the facts of the unprecedented relationship that has developed between the United States and Israel.

Harm to Palestinian Cause

The “Israel as U.S. aircraft carrier” is precisely an Israeli argument designed to win over total U.S. political, financial and military support.

Thus it is no wonder that echoing that argument is extremely harmful to the Palestinian cause. If it were true, how could we hope to end this American support to Israel?

Persuade the American population to revolt against something said to be highly beneficial to U.S. interests? Or wait for American imperialism to collapse? That’s not likely to happen any time soon.

But if the power of the lobby is the key to U.S. support, then the strategy to be followed is much simpler and has a much greater chance of success: we need simply to dare speak out and tell the truth.

The public must realize that far from being an asset, Israel is a chronic liability that squanders billions of American dollars, drags the United States into wars and whose genocidal treatment of the Palestinians is radically destroying America’s moral pretensions in most of the world.

Once this is understood, support for Israel will collapse, and voters may put enough pressure on the national elite, the administration and even the intimidated Congress to reorient U.S. policy in line with genuine national interests.

There are signs that part of the economic ruling class is moving this way: Elon Musk’s defense of free speech on social networks is a step in the right direction (to the rage of Israel’s supporters).

Although Donald Trump, as president, did all he could for Israel, his popular slogan “America First” means something quite different, as understood by anti-interventionists on the right such as Tucker Carlson.

Unfortunately, many on the left cling to an ostensibly “Marxist” view that U.S. support for Israel must be motivated by economic interests, by capitalist profits, by control of the flow of Middle Eastern oil. This belief is not only unsupported factually, it amounts to an invitation to U.S. rulers to keep it up.

With worldwide indignation rising against the genocidal assault on Gaza, how is it possible for any American to claim that Israel is “acting in American interests?” Israel is responsible for its crimes, and it is both true and in the U.S. national interest to recognize that far from being a strategic asset, Israel is America’s No. 1 liability.

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Jean Bricmont is professor of theoretical physics at the Catholic University of Louvain (Belgium), and author of numerous articles and books, including Humanitarian Imperialism, La République des Censeurs,and Fashionable Nonsense (with Alan Sokal).

Diana Johnstone was press secretary of the Green Group in the European Parliament from 1989 to 1996. In her latest book, Circle in the Darkness: Memoirs of a World Watcher(Clarity Press, 2020), she recounts key episodes in the transformation of the German Green Party from a peace to a war party. Her other books include Fools’ Crusade: Yugoslavia, NATO and Western Delusions (Pluto/Monthly Review) and in co-authorship with her father, Paul H. Johnstone, From MAD to Madness: Inside Pentagon Nuclear War Planning (Clarity Press). She can be reached at diana.johnstone@wanadoo.fr

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(Republished from Consortium News)

Communist China – Confident Dragon Lays Out Modernization Roadmap – by Pepe Escobar – 12 March 2024

 • 1,800 WORDS • 

As Project Ukraine goes down the drain of history, Project Taiwan will go on overdrive. Forever Wars never die.

This is the Year of the Wooden Dragon, according to China’s classic wuxing (“five elements”) culture. The dragon, one of the 12 signs of the Chinese zodiac, is a symbol of power, nobility and intelligence. Wood adds growth, development and prosperity.

Call it a summary of where China is heading in 2024.

The second session of the 14th National Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) was finalized on Sunday in Beijing.

The wider world should know that within the framework of grassroots democracy with Chinese characteristics, an extremely complex – and fascinating – phenomenon, the importance of the CPPCC is paramount.

The CPPCC channels wide-ranging expectations of the average Chinese to the decision level, and actually advises the central government on a vast range of issues – from everyday living to high-quality development strategies.

This year, most of the discussion focused on how to drive China’s modernization even faster. This being China, concepts – like flowers – were blooming all around the spectrum, such as “new quality productive forces, “deepening reform,” “high-standard opening-up,” and a fabulous new one, “major-country diplomacy with Chinese characteristics.”

As the Global Times emphasized, “2024 is not only a critical year for achieving the goals of the ‘14th Five-Year Plan’ but also a key year for achieving the transition to high-quality development of the economy.”

Betting on strategic investment

So let’s start with Chinese Premier Li Qiang’s first “work report” delivered a week ago, which opened the annual session of the National People’s Congress. The key takeaway: Beijing will be pursuing the same economic targets as in 2023. That translates as 5% annual growth.

Of course deflationary risks, a downturn in the real estate market and somewhat shaky business confidence simply won’t vanish. Li was quite realistic, emphasizing Beijing is “keenly aware” of the challenges ahead: “Achieving this year’s targets will not be easy.” And he added: “Global economic growth lacks steam and the regional hotspot issues keep erupting. This has made China’s external environment more complex, severe and uncertain.”

Beijing’s strategy remains focused on a “proactive fiscal policy and prudent monetary policy”. In a nutshell: the song remains the same. There won’t be a “stimulus” of any kind.

Deeper answers should be found in the work report/budget released by the National Development and Reform Commission: the focus will be on structural change, via extra funds to science, technology, education, national defense, agriculture. Translation: China bets on strategic investment, the key for a high-quality economic transition.

In practice, Beijing will be heavily invested in modernizing industry and developing “new quality productive forces” such as new-energy vehicles, biomanufacturing and commercial space flight.

Science Minister Yin Hejun made it clear: there was an 8.1% increase in national investment in research and development in 2023. He wants more – and he will get it: R&D spending will grow by 10% to a total of 370.8 billion yuan.

The mantra is “self-reliance”. On all fronts – from chipmaking to AI. A no holds barred tech war is on – and China is totally focused to counter “tech containment” from the Hegemon as much as its ultimate goal is to wrest tech supremacy from its prime competitor. Beijing simply cannot allow itself to be vulnerable to U.S.-imposed tech choke points and supply chain disruptions.

So short-term economic problems will not be causing sleepless nights. The Beijing leadership is always looking ahead – focusing on long-term challenges.

Learning lessons from the Donbass battlefield

Beijing will continue to steer the economic development of Hong Kong and Macau, and invest even more in the crucial Greater Bay Area, which is the premier southern China high tech, services and finance hub.

Taiwan of course was central to the work report; Beijing fiercely opposes “external interference” – code for Hegemon tactics. That will become even trickier in May, when William Lai Ching-te, who flirts with independence, becomes president.

On defense, there will be only a 7.2% increase in 2024, which is peanuts compared to the Hegemon’s defense budget now approaching $900 billion: China’s stands as $238 billion, even as China’s nominal GDP is approaching the U.S.

A great deal of China’s defense budget will go for emerging tech – considering the immensely valuables lessons the PLA is learning out of the Donbass battlefield, as well as the deep interactions part of the Russia-China strategic partnership.

And that brings us to diplomacy. China will continue to be firmly positioned as a champion of the Global South. That was made explicit by Foreign Minister Wang Yi in a press conference on the sidelines of the National People’s Congress.

Wang Yi’s priorities: to “maintain stable relations with major powers; join hands with its neighbouring countries for progress; and strive for revitalisation with the Global South”.

Wang Yi once again stressed that Beijing favors an “equal and orderly” multipolar world and “inclusive economic globalization”.

And of course he could not allow U.S. Secretary of State Little Blinken – always out of his depth – to get away with his latest “recipe”: “It is impermissible that those with the bigger fist have the final say, and it is definitely unacceptable that certain countries must be at the table while others can only be on the menu.”

BRI as a global accelerator

Crucially, Wang Yi re-emphasized the drive for “high-quality” cooperation within the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) framework. He defined BRI as “an engine for the common development of all countries and an accelerator for the modernisation of the whole world”. Wang Yi actually said he’s hopeful about the emergence of a “Global South moment in global governance” – in which China and BRI play an essential part.

Li Qiang’s work report, incidentally, had only one paragraph on BRI. But then we find this nugget as Li refers to the New International Land-Sea Trade Corridor – which links China’s landlocked southwest with the eastern seaboard, via Guangxi province.

Translation: BRI will be focusing on opening new economic roads for China’s less developed regions, diversifying from the previous emphasis on Xinjiang.

Dr Wei Yuansong is a member of the CPPCC and also the Chinese Peasants’ and Workers’ Democratic Party – which happens to be one of the eight non-CCP parties in Chinese politics (very few outside of China know about this).

He offered some fascinating comments on BRI to Fengmian News and also stressed the need to “tell China’s story well” to avoid “conflict and incidents” along the BRI road. For that, Wei suggests the need to use an “international language” in telling these stories; that implies using English.

As for what Wang Yi said in his press conference, in fact that was discussed in detail at the closed-door Central Conference on Foreign Affairs Work in late 2023, where it was established that China faced “strategic opportunities” to raise its “international influence, appeal and power” despite “high winds and choppy waters”.

The key takeaway: the narrative war between China and the Hegemon will be pitiless. Beijing is confident it’s capable of offering stability, investment, connectivity and sound diplomacy to the whole Global South, instead of Forever Wars.

That is reflected, for instance, by Ma Xinmin, the Chinese Foreign Ministry’s legal advisor, telling the International Court of Justice that the Palestinians have the right to armed resistance when it comes to fighting the colonialist, racist, apartheid state of Israel. Therefore, Hamas cannot be defined as a terrorist organization.

This is the overwhelming position across the lands of Islam and across the majority of the Global South – linking Beijing with fellow BRICS member Brazil and President Lula, who compared the genocide in Gaza to the Nazi genocide in WWII.

How to resist collective West sanctions

The Two Sessions did reflect Beijing’s full understanding that Hegemon containment and destabilization tactics remain the biggest challenge to China’s peaceful rise. But simultaneously it reflected Chinese confidence on its global diplomatic clout as a force for peace, stability and economic development. It’s an extremely sensitive balance that only the Middle Kingdom seems capable of pulling off.

Then there’s the Trump factor.

Economist Ding Yifan, a former deputy director of the World Development Institute, part of the State Council’s Development Research Centre, is one among those who’s aware China is learning key lessons from Russia on how to resist collective West sanctions – which will be inevitable against China especially if Trump is back at the White House.

And that brings us to the absolute key issue being currently discussed in Moscow, within the Russia-China partnership, and soon among the BRICS: alternative settlement payments to the U.S. dollar, increasing trade among “friendly nations”, and controls on capital flight.

Nearly all Russia-China trade is now in yuan and rubles. As much as Russian trade with the EU fell by 68% in 2023, trade with Asia rose by 5.6% – with new landmarks reached with China ($240 billion) and India ($65 billion) – and 84% of Russia’s total energy exports going to “friendly countries”.

The Two Sessions did not get into detail on some extremely thorny geopolitical issues. For instance, India’s version of multipolarity – considering New Delhi’s unresolved love affair with Washington – is quite different from China’s. Everyone knows – and no one more than the Russians – that within BRICS 10 the biggest strategic issue is how to accommodate the perpetual tension between India and China.

What’s clear even behind the fog of goodwill enveloping the Two Sessions is that Beijing is fully aware of how the Hegemon is – deliberately – already crossing a key Chinese red line, officially stationing “permanent troops” in Taiwan.

Since last year U.S. Special Forces have been training Taiwanese in operating Black Hornet nano microdrones. In 2024 U.S. military advisers are deployed full time at army bases on Kinmen and Penghu islands.

Those actually driving U.S. foreign policy behind the Crash Test Dummy at the White House believe that even as they are powerless to handle the Houthi Ansarallah in the Red Sea, they are capable of poking the Dragon.

No posturing will alter the Dragon’s roadmap. The CPPCC’s political resolution on Taiwan calls for uniting “all patriotic forces”, “deepen integration and development in various fields across the Taiwan Straits”, and go all out on “peaceful reunification”. That will translate in practice into increased economic/trade cooperation, more direct flights, more cargo ports and logistics bases.

As Project Ukraine goes down the drain of history, Project Taiwan will go on overdrive. Forever Wars never die. Bring it on. The Dragon is ready.

……………………….

(Republished from Strategic Culture Foundation)

Biden’s Unpopular Wars Reap Mass Death and Nuclear Brinkmanship – by Connor Freedman (Libertarian Institute) 7 March 2024

Protesters demanding a ceasefire in Gaza interrupt U.S. President Joe Biden’s speech at Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina. January 8, 2024.

President Joe Biden, better known as Genocide Joe, in cooperation with a perfunctory legislative branch has mired the American people in savage, reckless, costly, and unpopular wars. The White House’s catastrophic foreign policy may force American society to a breaking point.

The American public is increasingly rejecting Washington’s proxy war against Russia in Ukraine, which has already cost well over $100 billion, put the world on the brink of nuclear annihilation, and seen Ukrainians killed or injured by the hundreds of thousands.

As Americans are more concerned with simultaneous crises of inflation, healthcare, immigration, and crime, according to the latest Harris poll, 70% of Americans oppose Biden’s policy of unending military aid going to the Ukrainian meat grinder and instead want a diplomatic settlement.

The disconnect between those living in the country and those in Washington DC is highlighted by members of the U.S. Senate openly salivating about drawing Russian blood and funneling tens of billions of dollars into the military-industrial complex.

Arch-neocon and top State Department official Victoria Nuland is threatening Moscow that the United States will assist Ukraine to “accelerate [its] asymmetric warfare” and provide “nasty surprises on the battlefield.” At the same time, French President Emmanuel Macron says deploying NATO troops to Ukraine to fight Russia should not be off the table.

Subsequent to a meeting with other leaders in Europe concerning the effort to weaken Russia with the Ukrainian battering ram, Macron declared, “There’s no consensus today to send in an official, endorsed manner troops on the ground. But in terms of dynamics, nothing can be ruled out.”

In response to Macron’s bluster, Russian President Vladimir Putin proclaimed in a speech to the Federal Assembly “[our] strategic nuclear forces are on full combat alert, and the ability to use them is assured.” The Russian leader continued, “Now they have started talking about the possibility of deploying NATO military contingents to Ukraine…They must grasp that we also have weapons—yes, they know this, as I have just said—capable of striking targets on their territory.”

Concurrently, the head of the German Air Force has been caught on a leaked tape discussing with his officers plans to provide Taurus missiles to Kiev, weapons which have a range of roughly 300 miles, in hopes of carrying out attacks against Russia. London confirmed last week that “a small number” of British troops are on the ground “supporting the armed forces of Ukraine.”

On numerous occasions last year, neo-Nazis armed with NATO weaponry and ties to Ukrainian military intelligence attacked civilian areas across the border in Russia. Using Western intelligence, Kiev has already waged drone warfare deep inside Russia.

Despite Putin’s ominous remarks and the sentiments of the American people, NATO is launching massive war games, including on Russia’s borders, in preparation for war with Moscow. As the Libertarian Institute’s News Editor Kyle Anzalone reports, “[These] latest drills are a part of NATO’s Steadfast Defender military exercises—the bloc’s largest series of war games, which will see over 90,000 troops participate in about a dozen maneuvers from January through August.”

Biden’s unpopular war with Russia has brought humanity closer to a nuclear holocaust than ever before. But perhaps more widely despised and devastating to the American soul is the genocidal campaign unleashed by Israel against the Palestinian Muslims and Christians inhabiting the besieged Gaza Strip.

Per a recent Data For Progress poll, two-thirds of the American population oppose the Biden administration’s unconditional support for Israel and instead want the White House to back a permanent ceasefire. 77% of Democrats, 69% of Independents, and a staggering 56% of Republicans agree regarding this issue.

However, Israel’s globally livestreamed mass killing spree—primarily against women and children—is fully supported by the White House. The same government which practically every member of America’s political class swears is “our greatest ally” has cut Gaza off from food, water, fuel, and electricity. Israel is destroying Gaza, making it uninhabitable by bombing cities, neighborhoods, apartments, homes, schools, universities, hospitals, ambulances, UN shelters, mosques, churches, greenhouses, orchards, and refugee camps.

So far, the Israeli apartheid army has butchered over 30,000 people, including more than 12,000 children. Unfortunately, these confirmed figures paint a picture less macabre than reality, as thousands of men, women, and children are buried beneath rubble and presumed dead. One can only imagine what the final death toll and excess death rate will be.

Often using dystopian AI programs to select targets, the United States and Israel have leveled a greater percentage of infrastructure in Gaza than the Allied bombings in Dresden during World War II. The Guardian recently reported, “As of 17 January, analysis of satellite data by Corey Scher of the City University of New York and Jamon Van Den Hoek of Oregon State University reveals that between 50% and 62% of all buildings in Gaza have likely been damaged or destroyed.”

Gaza’s 2.3 million residents, approximately half of which are children, have been bombed everywhere. At times, this has included 2,000-pound bombs raining down on the Israeli-designated safe zones. Virtually every city in Gaza has been eradicated except Rafah, where 1.5 million refugees have fled to and which the Israeli war cabinet plans to hit with a blitzkrieg this month.

Social media feeds in every American household have been flooded with graphic videos and images showing countless Palestinian babies, children, women, elderly people, and men being blown to bits, killed, shot, mutilated, or permanently disfigured with our weaponry.

Last week, in what is known now as the “Flour Massacre,” the Israeli occupation opened fire killing over a hundred Palestinians and injuring hundreds more near Gaza City as they desperately attempted to obtain what they could from a trickle of aid that was allowed into the Strip.

Biden, previously known as “Israel’s man in Washington,” is fond of reciting his assertion that “If Israel didn’t exist, [the United States] would have to invent it.” But each day, new horrors and atrocities are unearthed, revealing Israel to be nothing more than a rogue state (incidentally armed with dozens, if not hundreds, of nuclear weapons).

Caitlin Johnstone perfectly sums up the reaction of normal people with a conscience to the unending stream of Israeli barbarism reported daily:

So it turns out the IDF has been running a Telegram channel featuring homemade snuff films in which Gazans are brutally murdered by Israeli forces, captioned with celebrations of the gore and pain therein like “Burning their mother…You won’t believe the video we got! You can hear their bones crunch.” The IDF had previously denied any association with the channel, but Haaretz now reports that it was directly run by an IDF psychological warfare unit.

This is one of those many, many times where Israel is so awful that at first you’re not sure what you’re looking at. You think you must be misreading the report. Then you read it again and go “Oh wow, that’s SO much worse than I would have guessed.”

However bad you think Israel is, you can always be sure that information will come out later that proves it’s even worse.

Palestinians are being subjected to inhumane torture as well. After The New York Times analyzed a report from the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), the paper reported, “Detainees said they were beaten, stripped, robbed, blindfolded, sexually abused, and denied access to lawyers and doctors, often for more than a month.”

The Times article continues, “Some detainees, according to the report, told UNRWA investigators that they had often been beaten on open wounds, had been held for hours in painful stress positions, and had been attacked by military dogs.”

One prisoner was “beaten so badly that his genitals turned blue and that there was still blood present in his urine…guards made him sleep naked in the open air, next to a fan blowing cold air, and played music so loudly that his ear bled.”

This coincides with numerous Israeli media reports of torture inflicted against the occupied Palestinians at the hands of their Zionist army captors. In January, +972 Magazine reported on the hellish scenes inside Israeli detention centers holding untold numbers of civilians rounded up in Gaza:

“Israeli soldiers subjected Palestinian detainees to electric shocks, burned their skin with lighters, spat in their mouths, and deprived them of sleep, food, and access to bathrooms until they defecated on themselves. Many were tied to a fence for hours, handcuffed, and blindfolded for most of the day…Several people are known to have died as a result of being held in these conditions.”

Israel has the population of Gaza trapped in an open-air concentration camp, with 75% of Palestinians crammed into a single city. More than 90% of the Palestinians living in the Strip have been internally displaced amidst the Israeli onslaught.

Tens of thousands of bombs have been dropped in Gaza, as the United States has delivered Israel some 25,000 tons of weapons including thousands of 2,000 pound bombs and tens of thousands of artillery shells.

It is a repudiation of every treasured American value for our government to make all of us a party to such atrocities under any conditions.

The whole world sees this for what it is. Half of Americans who voted for Biden in 2020 believe he is complicit in genocide. Indeed, the International Court of Justice has issued a preliminary ruling that Israel’s actions may plausibly constitute genocide. Nevertheless, our Congress is committed to financing this systematic destruction of Gaza with another $14 billion of the American people’s hard-earned money.

Palestinians are not only being ripped apart with American bombs and shells, they are being starved to death by the hundreds of thousands. As Antiwar.com News Editor Dave DeCamp reports:

At least 16 Palestinian children have starved to death in the Gaza Strip over the past few days due to the US-backed Israeli siege, and the UN’s child relief agency is warning that the number of child deaths will “rapidly increase” if conditions don’t immediately change.

“Last week, we warned that an explosion in child deaths was imminent if the burgeoning nutrition crisis wasn’t resolved,” said Adele Khodr, UNICEF’s director for the Middle East and North Africa. “Now, the child deaths we feared are here and are likely to rapidly increase unless the war ends and obstacles to humanitarian relief are immediately resolved.”

The latest Palestinian child reported to die of hunger was Yazan al-Kafarna, a 10-year-old with cerebral palsy who was in the al-Najjar Hospital in Rafah. Fifteen children have also died of malnutrition and dehydration at the Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza.

The UN has previously warned that Gaza’s entire population of about 2.2 million people is facing “crisis” levels of food insecurity, and at least 576,000 Palestinians in Gaza are “facing catastrophic levels of deprivation and starvation.”

Despite the dire situation, the State Department reaffirmed on Monday that it will continue to provide military assistance for Israel’s genocidal war.

The last vestiges of our deluded American exceptionalism burned up in front of the Israeli embassy in Washington D.C. with Aaron Bushnell last month. As the former member of the U.S. Air Force stated before his self-immolation in protest of the genocide in Gaza, “this is what our ruling class has decided will be normal.”

But regardless of what excuses White House spokespeople are able to conjure up in an attempt to hide the blood on their hands, this is not normal and the American people will never accept it. As evidenced by the public opinion polls and protest movements across the country, Biden will pay dearly in the coming election for his role in the mass murder ongoing in Palestine.

NBC News revealed the Biden reelection team has taken “extraordinary steps” to avoid antiwar protesters including “by making [their events] smaller, withholding their precise locations from the media and the public until he arrives, and avoiding college campuses.”

Additionally, the more than 100,000 “uncommitted” protest votes in the Michigan Democratic primary last week foreshadows things to come for Genocide Joe and the Democratic Party establishment. Demonstrators camped out daily in front of Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s residence chant “Blinken! Blinken! We see you and all the war crimes that you do!”

In his last words, Bushnell said he could “no longer be complicit in genocide.” His message was one that resonates with perhaps a majority of Americans. But in Washington, his message could not be more alien.

Americans have witnessed the true nature of the U.S. empire, its allies, partners, and proxies. They have voiced their abhorrence to their government and have been shocked at the abject lack of empathy for the Palestinian women and children being slaughtered, tortured, and deprived to death on an industrial scale.

In a video last month, Rep. Andy Ogles (R-TN) was told by a peace activist on Capitol Hill, “I’ve seen the footage of shredded children’s bodies. That’s my taxpayer dollars that are going to bomb those kids.” Ogles responded proudly, “I think we should kill ’em all, if that makes you feel better.”

An American antiwar populace cannot be ruled by unrepentant and unAmerican warmongers in perpetuity; a breaking point cannot come soon enough.

……………………

Source

US Empire Decline and Costly Delusions – by Richard D. Wolff – 8 March 2024

(Napoleon Retreats From Russia In Defeat)

Пераправа цераз раку Бярэзіну (Biarezina)

When Napoleon engaged Russia in a European land war, the Russians mounted a determined defense, and the French lost. When Hitler tried the same, the Soviet Union responded similarly, and the Germans lost. In World War 1 and its post-revolutionary civil war (1914-1922), first Russia and then the USSR defended with far greater effect against two invasions than the invaders had calculated. That history ought to have cautioned U.S. and European leaders to minimize the risks of confronting Russia, especially when Russia felt threatened and determined to defend itself.

Instead of caution, delusions prompted ill-advised judgments by the collective West (roughly the G7 nations: the U.S. and its major allies). Those delusions emerged partly from the collective West’s widespread denial of its relative economic decline in the 21st century. That denial also enabled a remarkable blindness to the limits that decline imposed on the collective West’s global actions. Delusions also flowed from a basic undervaluation of Russia’s defensiveness and its resulting commitments. The Ukraine war starkly illustrates both the decline and the costly delusions it fosters.

The United States and Europe seriously underestimated what Russia could and would do to prevail militarily in Ukraine. Russia’s victory—at least so far after two years of war—has proven decisive. Their underestimation stemmed from a shared inability to grasp or absorb the changing world economy and its implications. By mostly minimizing, marginalizing, or simply denying the decline of the U.S. empire relative to the rise of China and its BRICS allies, the United States and Europe missed that decline’s unfolding implications. Russia’s allies’ support combined with its national determination to defend itself have so far defeated a Ukraine heavily funded and armed by the collective West. Historically, declining empires often provoke denials and delusions that teach their people “hard lessons” and impose on them “hard choices”. That is where we are now.

The economics of the U.S. empire decline constitutes the continuing global context. The BRICS countries’ collective GDP, wealth, income, share of world trade, and presence at the highest levels of new technology increasingly exceed those of the G7. That relentless economic development frames the decline of the G7’s political and cultural influences as well. The massive U.S. and European sanctions program against Russia after February 2022 has failed. Russia turned especially to its BRICS allies to quickly as well as comprehensively escape most of those sanctions’ intended effects.

UN votes on the ceasefire issue in Gaza reflect and reinforce the mounting difficulties facing the U.S. position in the Middle East and globally. So does the Houthis’ intervention in Red Sea shipping and so too will other future Arab and Islamic initiatives supporting Palestine against Israel. Among the consequences flowing from the changing world economy, many work to undermine and weaken the U.S. empire.

Trump’s disrespect for NATO is partly an expression of disappointment with an institution he can blame for failing to stop empire’s decline. Trump and his supporters broadly downgrade many institutions once thought crucially central to running the U.S., empire globally. Both the Trump and Biden regimes attacked China’s Huawei corporation, shared commitments to trade and tariff wars, and heavily subsidized competitively challenged U.S. corporations. Nothing less than a historic shift away from neoliberal globalization toward economic nationalism is underway. An American empire that once targeted the whole world is shrinking into a merely regional bloc confronting one or more emerging regional blocs. Much of the rest of the world’s nations—a possible “world majority” of the planet’s people—are pulling away from the U.S. empire.

U.S. leaders’ aggressive economic nationalist policies distract attention from the empire’s decline and thereby facilitate its denial. Yet they also cause new problems. Allies fear that economic nationalism in the United States already has or will soon adversely affect their economic relations with the United States; “America first” targets not only the Chinese. Many countries are rethinking and reconstructing their economic relations with the United States and their expectations about those relations’ futures. Likewise, major groups of U.S. employers are reconsidering their investment strategies. Those who invested heavily overseas as part of the neoliberal globalization frenzies of the last half century are especially fearful. They anticipate costs and losses from policy shifts toward economic nationalism. Their pushback slows those shifts. As capitalists everywhere adjust practically to the changing world economy, they also quarrel and dispute the direction and pace of change. That injects more uncertainty and volatility into a thereby further destabilized world economy. As the U.S. empire unravels, the world economic order it once dominated and enforced likewise changes.

“Make America Great Again” (MAGA) slogans have politically weaponized U.S. empire’s decline, always in carefully vague and general terms. They simplify and misunderstand it within another set of delusions. Trump will, he promises repeatedly, undo that decline and reverse it. He will punish those he blames for it: China, but also Democrats, liberals, globalists, socialists, and Marxists whom he lumps together in a bloc-building strategy. There is rarely any serious attention to the economics of the G7’s decline since to do so would critically implicate capitalists’ profit-driven decisions as key causes of the decline. Neither Republicans nor Democrats dare do that. Biden speaks and acts as if the U.S. wealth and power positions within the world economy were undiminished from what they were across the second half of the 20th century (most of Biden’s political lifetime).

Continuing to fund and arm Ukraine in the war with Russia, like endorsing and supporting Israel’s treatment of Palestinians, are policies premised on denials of a changed world. So too are successive waves of economic sanctions despite each wave failing to achieve its goals. Using tariffs to keep better, cheaper Chinese electric vehicles off the U.S. market will only disadvantage U.S. individuals (via such Chinese electric vehicles’ higher prices) and businesses (via global competition from businesses buying the cheaper Chinese cars and trucks).

Perhaps the greatest, costliest delusions that follow from a denial of years of decline dog the upcoming presidential election. The two major parties and their candidates offer no serious plan for how to deal with the declining empire they seek to lead. Both parties took turns presiding over the decline, yet denial and blaming the other is all either party offers in 2024. Biden offers voters a partnership in denial that the empire is declining. Trump promises vaguely to undo the decline caused by bad Democratic leadership that his election will remove. Nothing either major party does entails sober admissions and assessments of a changed world economy and how each plans to cope with that.

The last 40 to 50 years of the economic history of the G7 witnessed extreme redistributions of wealth and income upward. Those redistributions functioned as both causes and effects of neoliberal globalization. However, domestic reactions (economic and social divisions increasingly hostile and volatile) and foreign reactions (emergence of today’s China and BRICS) are undermining neoliberal globalization and beginning to challenge its accompanying inequalities. U.S. capitalism and its empire cannot yet face its decline amid a changing world. Delusions about retaining or regaining power at the top of society proliferate alongside delusional conspiracy theories and political scapegoating (immigrants, China, Russia) below.

Meanwhile, the economic, political, and cultural costs mount. And on some level, as per Leonard Cohen’s famous song, “Everybody Knows.”

………………………..

This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

Richard Wolff is the author of Capitalism Hits the Fan and Capitalism’s Crisis Deepens. He is founder of Democracy at Work.

Israel – Enemy POW Torture Videos Make Jewish State Overlords Proud – by Jonathan Ofir (MondoWeis) 6 March 2024

‘We are the masters of the house’: Israeli channels air snuff videos featuring systematic torture of Palestinians

Israeli TV channels aired a number of reports showing the torture and humiliation of Palestinians in Israeli prisons. The videos are consumed by the Israeli public as entertainment, revealing the sadism of Israeli society.

BY JONATHAN OFIR 

Over the past month, mainstream Israeli television channels have aired what can only be described as snuff films. They depict the systematic torture of Palestinians from Gaza in Israeli jails. Such videos have aired on at least three occasions — twice on Channel 14, and once on the public broadcaster, Channel 13. While Channel 14 is considered right-wing, so is about two-thirds of the Israeli public, and the more “mainstream” Channel 13 has shown no qualms about airing similar footage. 

The broadcasts follow prison officials into detention centers to document the mistreatment of prisoners, which seems to be something that the officials — and apparently the viewers — find satisfying rather than revolting. The airing of these snuff films is a demonstration of societal sadism. 

As Yumna Patel has recently reported, several rights groups have sounded the alarm over the widespread and systemic abuse that Palestinian prisoners face at the hands of the Israeli authorities. These groups’ calls have been unintentionally buttressed by Israeli soldiers’ unapologetic videos of themselves torturing or demeaning Palestinian detainees, which they boastfully post on social media. Now, it seems that the phenomenon has expanded to mainstream Israeli television.   

The two aforementioned reports on Channel 14 (threads with subtitles can be found here and here) contained footage of actual interrogation sessions during which torture was used. The Channel 13 report did not, but it exposed some of the worst prison conditions to be broadcast to the public. These conditions include forcing prisoners to live in inhumane conditions and subjecting them to torture and harassment. Here’s the 11-minute video with translated subtitles.

‘The feeling is one of pride’

“Here, we see the cells in which the Nukhba terrorists are held,” the narrator says.

The “Nukhba” refers to elite Hamas-led fighters who carried out the October 7 attack. In the cell, viewers notice metal bunkbeds without mattresses, and instead of a toilet, there is just a hole in the floor. The room is almost completely dark throughout the day, and prisoners have their hands and legs chained together. 

We hear attack dogs barking constantly as prisoners are made to kneel while bound and blindfolded, their heads touching the floor. 

“This is how it should be,” a guard says. “This is how a Nukhba prisoner should be…what happened on October 7 will never return.” 

In another scene, a guard shouts at prisoners as dogs continue to bark incessantly. “Heads down! Heads on the floor!” he yells. 

“There are many prisoners here that I personally saw at the [October 7] events,” a prison official says, taking pride in humiliating them. “The difference is that this time, he is afraid, shaking, with his head on the floor…no Allahu Akbar, nothing. You won’t hear a squeak from him.”

“They have no mattresses,” says a warden shift commander. “They have nothing…we control them 100% — their food, their shackling, their sleep…[we] show them we are the masters of the house.” Even without knowing the background to that phrase, to hear him say it is chilling. 

“Masters of the house” was the election slogan of Itamar Ben-Gvir, the Jewish Power leader and current Minister of National Security. Ben-Gvir declared war on Palestinian prisoners long before October 7, and this has included shutting down bakeries that supply bread to prisoners — described by Ben-Gvir as an “indulgence” — and drastically limiting prisoners’ water use. So now it’s become much worse. 

While one is tempted to believe that all prisoners here are “Nukhba” members, it turns out that many of them aren’t even suspected of that. Rather, they were rounded up in Gaza after October 7, during mass arrests in which hundreds of Gazan men were stripped and paraded in a most sadistic demonstration of power. The mass arrests also included hundreds of women, including pregnant women detained with their babies. Israeli security officials told Haaretz that by their own estimate, “only 10 to 15 percent of the hundreds of the semi-naked and bound Gazan men arrested in the Strip during the recent days are Hamas members or those who identified with the organization.”

Back to the Channel 13 coverage, viewers can hear the nonstop blasting of the Zionist anthem, Am Israel Hai (“the people of Israel live”). 

“The prison authorities claim that it is meant to boost the morale of the staff,” the narrator declares. “But it is clear that this is another part of the psychological warfare against the prisoners.” 

Torture, in other words. 

It’s hard to imagine the depths to which Israeli society has sunk. The official tells the Channel 13 reporter that “the feeling is one of pride.”

 The reason such sadism has become formalized as a matter of policy is because this is what the Israeli public demands. The Israeli Democracy Institute released a survey last week showing that two-thirds of Jewish Israelis oppose “the transfer of humanitarian aid to Gaza residents at this time,” even if “via international bodies that are not linked to Hamas or to UNRWA.” For right-wing voters, the opposition to aid jumps from 68% to 80%. 

This is not Israel’s Abu Ghraib moment, because when Abu Ghraib was revealed, most Americans were revolted. Israeli society, on the other hand, is thirsting for genocide. No wonder they consume such videos as entertainment on mainstream TV.

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Source

All I Want To Say Is They Don’t Really Care About Us! (4:00 min) Audio Mp3

All I Want To Say Is They Don’t Really Care About Us! (4:00 min) Audio Mp3

Israeli Lobby Leak – Key Words (Greyzone) 6 March 2024

Leaked Israel lobby presentation urges US officials to justify war on Gaza with ‘Hamas rape’ claims

MAX BLUMENTHAL

The Grayzone has obtained slides from a confidential Israel lobby presentation based on data from Republican pollster Frank Luntz. They contain talking points for politicians and public figures seeking to justify Israel’s assault on the Gaza Strip.

Two prominent pro-Israel lobby groups are holding private briefings in New York City to coach elected officials and well-known figures on how to influence public opinion in favor of the Israeli military’s rampage in Gaza, The Grayzone can reveal. These PR sessions, convened by the UJA-Federation and Jewish Community Relations Council, rely on data collected by Frank Luntz, a veteran Republican pollster and pundit.

A source who was present during several meetings provided Luntz’s slides to The Grayzone. Participants were informed that the presentations and data contained in the slides were strictly confidential, the source said.

“This is NOT helpful,” Luntz stated in response to an email from The Grayzone requesting his comment on the private meetings.

The Luntz-tested presentations on the war in Gaza urge politicians to avoid trumpeting America’s supposedly shared democratic values with Israel, and focus instead on deploying “The Language of War with Hamas.” According to this framing, they must deploy incendiary language painting Hamas as a “brutal and savage…organization of hate” which has “raped women,” while insisting Israel is engaged in “a war for humanity.”

On his personal website, Luntz markets himself as “one of the most honored communications professionals in America today.” He has earned a small fortune crafting talking points for Republican Party heavyweights and scandal-stained corporate clients like Enron, the energy company which collapsed after engineering California’s energy crisis. Following the financial crash of 2008-09, Luntz advised the GOP on shielding the party’s big business donors from scrutiny. At around the same time, he furnished the Republican Governor’s Association with advice on undermining Occupy Wall Street, the movement demanding accountability for the banking industry’s malfeasance.

The celebrity GOP pollster has moonlighted as a consultant for the Israel lobby, producing a “Global Language Dictionary” for the now-defunct Israel Project in the aftermath of the brutal 2008-09 attack on Gaza known as Operation Cast Lead. In his propaganda handbook, Luntz counseled “leaders who are on the front lines of fighting the media war for Israel” to shy from debates related to the illegal occupation of Palestine.

“Avoid talking about borders in terms of pre- or post-1967,” he advised, “because it only serves to remind Americans of Israel’s military history. Particularly on the left, this does you harm.”

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Luntz’s Gaza war presentation puts his poll-tested tactics back in the Israel lobby’s hands, urging pro-Israel public figures to stay on the attack with incendiary language and shocking allegations against their enemies.

In one focus group, Luntz asked participants to state which alleged act by Hamas on October 7 “bothers you more.” After being presented with a laundry list of alleged atrocities, a majority declared that they were most upset by the claim that Hamas “raped civilians” – 19 percent than those who expressed outrage that Hamas supposedly “exterminated civilians.”

Data like this apparently influenced the Israeli government to launch an obsessive but still unsuccessful campaign to prove that Hamas carried out sexual assault on a systematic basis on October 7. Initiated at Israel’s United Nations mission in December 2023 with speeches by neoliberal tech oligarch Sheryl Sandberg and former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, a recipient of hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations and speaking fees from Israel lobby organizations, Tel Aviv’s propaganda blitz has yet to produce a single self-identified victim of sexual assault by Hamas. A March 5 report by UN Special Representative on Sexual Violence Pramila Patten did not contain one direct testimony of sexual assault on October 7. What’s more, Patten’s team said they found “no digital evidence specifically depicting acts of sexual violence.”

To further the demonization of Palestinians, the Luntz-crafted slides advise that “Israel’s best response is the brainwashed children of Hamas spewing hatred towards Jews (even more than condemning Israelis) with words they don’t know the meaning of and can’t even pronounce.”

The portrayal of the youth of Gaza as ignorant tools of Hamas is clearly intended to deflect from Israel’s industrial-scale slaughter of some 15,000 children in the Gaza Strip since October 7, as well as the wounding, orphaning and starving of countless more in the besieged territory.

To make their arguments stick, Luntz recommends pro-Israel forces avoid the exterminationist language favored by Israeli officials who have called, for example, to “erase” the population of Gaza, and to instead advocate for “an efficient, effective approach” to eliminating Hamas.

At the same time, veteran pollster acknowledges that Republican voters prefer phrases which imply maximalist violence, like “eradicate” and “obliterate,” while sanitized terms like “neutralize” appeal more to Democrats. Republican presidential candidates Nikki Haley and Donald Trump have showcased similar focus-grouped rhetoric with their calls to “finish them” and “finish the problem” in Gaza.

As in past Israel-lobby seminars, Luntz has urged pro-Israel forces to divert from arguments about Israel’s military occupation of Palestinian territory by deploying banal slogans like, “Israelis have a right to defend themselves.”

“This is about Israelis,” a Luntz-crafted slide declares, “not about territory.”

According to the pollster’s research, pro-Israel politicians should avoid references to “Israel” entirely and instead discuss “Israelis” when “setting the context” for a debate over the war in Gaza.

The recommended tweak hints at the PR crisis Israel lobby forces have encountered since Israel’s military invaded and besieged Gaza, leaving most of its residents homeless, placing its entire public health and sanitation system out of service, and exterminating over 2% of the overall population, according to conservative death toll estimates.

One slide demonstrates that only a small sliver of those polled by Luntz buy into the Israeli government’s mantra that “Hamas is ISIS.” The same visual aid counsels pro-Israel officials to shy from the phrases “genuine accuracy” and “hard evidence,” and allude more generally to “the truth” when discussing Israel’s actions.

Luntz acknowledges Israel’s mounting PR problems in a slide identifying the most powerful tactics employed by Palestine solidarity activists. “Israelis attacking Israel is the second most potent weapon against Israel,” the visual display reads beside a photo of a protest by Jewish Voices for Peace, a US-based Jewish organization dedicated to ending Israel’s occupation of Palestine.

“The most potent” tactic in mobilizing opposition to Israel’s assault on Gaza, according to Luntz, “is the visual destruction of Gaza and the human toll.” The slide inadvertently acknowledges the cruelty of Israel’s bombardment of Gaza, displaying a bombed out apartment building with clearly anguished women and children fleeing in the foreground.

But Luntz assures his audience, “It ‘looks like a genocide’ even though the damage has nothing to do with the definition.”

According to this logic, the American public can become more tolerant of copiously documented crimes against humanity if they are simply told not to believe their lying eyes.

US – Harvard Law Prof – Opposing Israel’s War Is Antisemitism – March 2024

Harvard Professor Noah Feldman denounces opposition to the Gaza War as the “New antisemitism”

Time Magazine has chosen as its cover story Harvard Professor of Law Noah Feldman’s maliciously dishonest and morally bankrupt defense of Israel’s savage war against the population of Gaza.

The “old” antisemitism was a central element of fascism, espousing virulent nationalism, anti-communism and anti-socialism, and implementing genocide of defenseless people.

The “new” antisemitism, according to Feldman, is a central element of the left, which opposes the Israeli war machine, nationalist xenophobia, anti-Arab racism, and the mass murder of defenseless and oppressed people in Gaza.

Feldman’s propaganda piece consists of the crudest historical falsifications. He writes, “Ultimately, in different ways, both Nazism and Marxism identified Jews as an enemy deserving liquidation.” This is an outrageous lie.

The Marxist and socialist movement led the struggle against antisemitism in Germany, throughout Europe, and in the United States. Fundamental to Nazi and fascist ideology and politics was the identification of Jews with socialism and the labor movement.

Feldman dissolves Judaism as a religion into Israeli nationalism, proclaims the Israeli state as the supreme manifestation of Jewish existence, and asserts its “status as the only homeland for a historically oppressed people who have nowhere else to call their own.”

This claim ignores the fact that more than half the world’s Jewish population, including Feldman, hold citizenship in countries other than Israel. And, one might add, that thousands of Israelis abandon this “homeland” every year.

Feldman resorts to the most vile sophistries to minimize Israeli crimes, such as the claim that ethnic cleansing practiced by Israel “would arguably not count as genocide under the legal meaning of the term.”

He also states, “The genocide charge depends on intent. And Israel, as a state, is not fighting the Gaza War with the intent to destroy the Palestinian people.”

According to Feldman, since Israel’s “stated war aims” are merely “to hold Hamas accountable,” it cannot be accused of genocide. Israel’s “aims are lawful in themselves.”

Writing as an attorney for mass murderers, Feldman asserts, “There is no single, definitive international-law answer to the question of how much collateral damage renders a strike disproportionate to its concrete military objective.”

Feldman, shedding a tear, writes, “The number of Palestinian dead, over 29,000 as of this writing, is heartbreaking.” But the actual killing of the 29,000, according to Feldman, is not a crime.

Of all the arguments advanced by Feldman, the most cynical is his claim that “Accusing Israel of genocide can function, intentionally or otherwise, as a way of erasing the memory of the Holocaust and transforming Jews from victims into oppressors.”

This is the same argument made by the Polish government in introducing a law in 2018 illegalizing references to the complicity of Poles in the mass murder of Jews during World War II.

The bill passed by the Polish Senate declared that “whoever accuses … the Polish nation, or the Polish state, of being responsible or complicit in the Nazi crimes … shall be subject to a fine or a penalty of imprisonment of up to three years.”

The fascistic Polish government justified this law on the grounds that references to Polish complicity in the Holocaust detracted from the sufferings of the Polish people during the years of Nazi occupation. Israel denounced the Polish law.

Feldman invokes the Holocaust as a cover for Israeli atrocities. But his defense of Israel’s genocidal war, with the support of the US, is a desecration of the memory of the six million Jewish victims of Nazism and the universal significance of the Holocaust.

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Information Liberation

The Washington Post ran a column from Noah Feldman on Tuesday telling progressive Jews to get with the program and back Israel’s genocide campaign in Gaza or face excommunication.

After paragraph upon paragraph aimed at building rapport with the progressive Jews Feldman is targeting, he finally got to the point at the end of his column.

From The Washington Post, “To be a Jew today: The aftermath of Oct. 7” (Archive):

[Young progressive Jews] believe in the teachings of social justice that compel them to social action. But they also find that they cannot avoid what they see as the broken reality of Israel.

[…] Their solution — their Jewish, progressive, sincerely felt solution — is to express their belief in social justice by criticizing or condemning Israel for its failures of equality, liberty, dignity and human rights.

[…] As today’s college students become adults and gradually assume leadership of their movements, progressive Judaism will have to work out its long-term attitude toward Israel. One possibility is for progressive Jews to tack away from the focus on Israel, to engage their Jewishness in other ways — familial, spiritual and personal. This would entail real theological change.

But so would embracing simultaneously a God of loving social justice and a state that rejects liberal democracy. Israel will not change just because progressive American Jews want it to. They will have to find their own answers to the looming crisis facing them — and soon, before a new generation finds itself alienated from a Jewishness whose inner contradictions it cannot reconcile.

At the individual level, Jews who want to think less about Israel also face serious challenges because Jewishness is a collective identity. If most Jews self-define in relation to Israel, positively or negatively, it is hard for any Jews to choose not to do so.

Yet a turn to a Jewishness that is more personal, familial and spiritual and less national-political may be the inevitable result, even if no formal movement within Jewish life consciously adopts such a policy. If this happens, Jews will have to draw more than ever on their rich traditions of faith, doubt, struggle and love — and do so as families, rather than as a nation.

Translation: get with the program and back Israel’s genocide campaign or face excommunication. Israel’s not going to change anything — and you will never be given any national-political power — so you need to change yourself to get in line with Israel (or become a hermit and stay the hell out of our way).

ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt said similar in the wake of October 7, stating that “every Jewish person is a Zionist” and labeling anti-Zionist Jews (whom he stripped of their Jewishness) as a “hate group.”

Noah Feldman, who is a professor at Harvard Law School, is the same writer who had the cover story in Time Magazine last week on “The New Anti-Semitism” which argued that the entire world was antisemitic for opposing Israel’s genocide of women and children in Gaza.

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Global South Youth Flocks to ‘Isolated’ Russia – by Pepe Escobar – 5 March 2024

 • 800 WORDS • 

By any metric, the World Youth Festival running in the Sirius federal territory (Sochi, southern Russia) on March 1-7 is a stunning achievement: a sort of Special Cultural Operation (SCO) encompassing the young Global South.

It starts with the incomparable setting – the 2014 Olympics park of science and art, nested between snowy mountains and the Black Sea – all the way to the stars of the show: over 20,000 young leaders from over 180 nations, Russians and mostly Asians, Africans and Latin Americans, as well as assorted dissidents from the sanctions-obsessed Western “garden”.

Among them are scores of educators, PhDs, public sector or culture activists, charity volunteers, athletes, young entrepreneurs, scientists, citizen journalists, as well as teenagers from 14 to 17, for the first time the focus of a special program, “Together into the Future”. These are the generations that will be building our common future.

President Putin is once again quite sharp: he emphasized how a clear distinction applies between citizens of the world – including the Global North – and the intolerant, extremely aggressive Western plutocracy. Russia, a multinational, multicultural civilization-state, by principle welcomes all citizens of the world.

The World Youth Festival 2024, taking place seven years after the last one, renews a tradition that harks back to the 1957 World Festival of Youth and Students when the USSR welcomed everyone on both sides of the Iron Curtain during the Cold War.

The idea of an open platform for young, committed, very organized people attracted by Russian conservative/family values permeates the whole festival – in sharp contrast to the artificial, cancel culture-obsessed “open society” P.R. incessantly sold by the usual hegemonic foundations.

Each day at the festival is dedicated to a main theme. For instance, March 2 was on “responsibility for the fate of the world”; March 3 was for “unity and cooperation among nations”; March 4 was for “a world of opportunities for everyone”.

No less than 300,000 youngsters from around the world applied to come to the festival. So obviously to select a little over 20,000 was quite a feat. After the festival, 2,000 foreign participants will travel to 30 Russian cities for cultural exchange. Exactly what comrade Xi Jinping defines as “people to people’s exchanges”.

It’s no wonder the festival organizers, Rosmolodezh, the Russian federal agency for youth affairs, call it “the largest youth event in the world”. Director Ksenia Razuvaeva noted, “we are destroying the myth that Russia is isolated.”

The Pitfalls of “Asynchronous Multipolarity”

The festival is all about networking among youth groups, intercultural/business ties ranging from the sustainable community level to the larger geopolitical level.

I had the huge honor and responsibility to address a truly multi-Global South audience at the Belgorod oblast pavilion, invited by the Russia Knowledge Foundation, alongside a consultant from Hyderabad, India.

The Q&A session was terrific: ultra-sharp questions from Iran to Serbia, from Brazil to India, from Palestine to Donbass. A true microcosm of the multicultural Young Global South, eager to know everything about the current geopolitical Great Game as well as how national governments can facilitate international cultural and scientific cooperation among young people.

The Valdai Club is running a particularly attractive daily program at the forum, The World in 2040.

A workshop on Sunday, for instance, focused on “The Future of a Multipolar World”, anchored by the excellent Andrey Sushentsov, dean of the School of International Relations at MGIMO, arguably the best international relations school on the planet.

The discussion on “asynchronous multipolarity” was particularly useful to the audience (a solid Chinese presence, mostly PhDs), and elicited ultra-sharp questions by researchers from Serbia, South Ossetia, Transnistria and of course China.

Srikanth Kondapalli, a professor of China studies at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, elaborated on the key concept of “Asian multipolarity” – the many Asias within Asia, something that totally baffles simplistic Western categorizations. After the session we had an excellent exchange about it.

Yet nothing at the forum compares to going from room to packed room, getting a glimpse of the in-depth discussions and then wandering the pavilions in total networking mode. I was approached by everyone from Sudan to Ecuador, from New Guinea to a group of Brazilians, from Indonesians to an official of the Communist Party of the United States.

And then there’s the special prize: the stands of the several Russian republics. That’s when you get the chance to be immersed in a Yamal tea ritual; to receive first-hand information on the Nenets Autonomous Region; or to discuss the procedure to embark on a trip in a nuclear icebreaker in the Northern Sea Route – or Arctic Silk Road: the connectivity channel of the future. Once again: multipolar Russia in effect.

Now compare this peaceful, pan-global gathering focused on all forms of sustainable community programs, drenched in hopes and dreams, to NATO launching a two-week, massive warmongering exercise dubbed “Nordic Response 2024”, carried out by Finland, Norway and newcomer Sweden less than 500 km away from the Russian borders.

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(Republished from Sputnik International)

“They Don’t Really Care About Us!” – Uncensored – Michael Jackson In Brazil (4:42 min)

Crisis of Culture in the US – by Dom Shannon (DailyWorker) 2 March 2024

“George Bush doesn’t care about Black people.” These were the words of famed rapper Kanye West during the 2005 nationally televised telethon benefit for victims of Hurricane Katrina. In this notorious quote, Kanye expressed a popular conception of the Bush administration for a whole generation of people. How is it then, that less than 15 years later the same Kanye West — son of a Black Panther who had previously made commentary on racism in the U.S. — would go on a national tour professing his love for Hitler? Even more recently, beloved star in the Black community, Nicki Minaj, cozied up to Ben Shapiro after rapper Megan Thee Stallion blasted her for misogynoir. Both of these instances illustrate the right’s newfound investment in popular culture in response to young people, people of color and the LGBTQ community’s increasing acceptance of socialism.

Outside of exploiting the fissures in Black popular culture, the right has become increasingly interested in permeating their ideas through internet culture. Popular streamers/podcasters like Sneako and Andrew Tate diffuse ideas of misogyny, queerphobia, and racism to a young and impressionable audience, ensuring they have “first dibs” on shaping their worldview as they enter into adolescence and young adulthood. These instances don’t solely remain within the realm of various -isms or phobias. Right wing media personality Tucker Carlson has been featured on the podcast Full Send promoting a new tobacco product Zyn, for reasons that can only be seen as a promotional money making scheme for the company and its owners.

The right’s new interest in popular culture could be understood as a response to the leftward shift in the U.S. socio-political landscape that occurred between 2016–2020. When the Black Lives Matter movement came to a head after the murder of George Floyd and COVID shut down the economy, capitalist antagonisms were incredibly sharp and noticeable. This was in part because of the horrendous Trump presidency, but also in part because a new socialist movement was set into motion by the Bernie Sanders campaign of 2016. This latest utopian socialist moment brought many people into new political life: previously apolitical or demobilized, as well as young people who were experiencing political life for the very first time. This spawned the movements’ very own streamers and podcasters, such as the Red Scare Podcast, the Chapo Trap House Podcast and streamers like Hasan Piker. They sought to speak to, and for, this newly mobilized political base of young workers and students. But as the movement’s energy dwindled, their viewership and popularity declined. At the same time, some of these podcasters and streamers became advocates of “post-left” nihilistic politics, which was due to a concerted effort, perhaps even the first “attack,” by rightwing billionaire Peter Thiel who funds their projects with an endless stream of money. Simultaneously, but not coincidentally, right wing billionaire Elon Musk bought the social media platform Twitter, now known as X. This move was less so aimed at creating a new revenue stream but more so aimed at creating and controlling popular narratives on the internet.

The left has yet to respond to or recover from the right’s new method of disseminating their ideas. The current crisis in capitalism has pushed seemingly unimportant cultural commentary to the wayside for a myriad of reasons, including racist and patriarchal chauvinism, which can’t be discounted.

Where exactly does this leave us? The right wing has become the main agitators of a “culture war” they claim to want no part in, and many socialists have taken them at their word. We’ve seemingly given up on or have no interest in what is not overtly political, economic or legislative. While non-socialist progressives make commentary on culture/cultural events and even give solutions — which may not make adequate considerations to class implications — socialists remain silent, making us look fringe, out of touch and even non-existent. This is especially damning when you take into account the rate in which access to news is being put behind a paywall. Working people are being increasingly priced out of being informed on the world around them and increasingly rely on the media we do consume, which cannot be assumed to be factual.

There are hundreds, if not millions, of people currently in “political limbo.” Some of them are the utopian socialists who were invigorated during the 2016–2020 time period. Many of these people have yet to find a political home or adopt a coherent political agenda and may fall victim to “post-left” nihilistic politics propagated by the aforementioned streamers and podcasters. However, there are many, maybe even more, people who have never or scarcely been mobilized for overt political action, but have political opinions nonetheless. To some socialists, their politics may seem crude or rudimentary, because they are not derived explicitly from political analysis, rather from cultural events that nevertheless do have political implications. Indeed, those who care greatly about and pay attention to popular/celebrity culture are far from vapid or unintelligent. Instead, is it us who’ve failed to recognize their value?

Gramsci’s theory of capitalist cultural hegemony, particularly in the era of a rising fascist movement, is vindicated by the events of today. As the fascist right takes an “all-in” approach to reify its social and cultural dominance, socialists remain glued to “pure” politics. If it is our aim to become a mass party, then we cannot afford to concede the realm of cultural commentary to the far right. Nor should we concede to non-socialist progressives who often fail to center the working class in their approach. A concerted effort on the party’s behalf must be made to confront the current crisis of culture happening in the United States, with a body dedicated to understanding popular culture and the underlying politics. I believe this will breathe political life into those in “limbo” who have yet to be reached or heard.

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The Church of Logic, Sin, and Love (6:35 min) Audio Mp3

US Presidential Primary – Tens of Thousands of Massachusetts Voters ‘No Preference’ for ‘Genocide Joe’ – by Lila Hempel-Edgers – 5 March 2024

Massachusetts voters who picked ‘no preference’ hope to send a message to “Genocide Joe” Biden – by Lila Hempel-Edgers

Supporters of the Vote No Preference campaign gathered at Andala Coffee House, a Middle Eastern restaurant, to watch the numbers roll in on Super Tuesday in hopes that enough “no preference” ballots were cast to send a message to President Biden.

Garnering 83 percent of the vote, Biden won a decisive victory in Massachusetts over author Marianne Williamson and Minnesota Congressman Dean Phillips, who were also on the Democratic ballot. As results continued to come in Tuesday, “no preference” was winning an even bigger slice of the vote than either Williamson or Phillips, in an indication of dissatisfaction with the president among liberal voters.
Around 9:30 p.m., the crowd cheered for over 11,000 ballots cast for no preference. “Not bad for a five day turnaround,” said Sara Halawa, one of the campaign’s organizers. By 10:45 p.m., the group had garnered over 27,000 votes, and they felt the momentum.

“It looks like it’s going to be something like 50,000 or 60,000 [votes] based on how things are going,” Nathan Foster, 27, of Medford, said at around 10:30 p.m., long after Biden was declared the winner. “This is so many votes for no preference, I’m really happy and satisfied with it.”

Omar Siddiqi, a 41-year old resident of Brighton, said the numbers exceeded his expectations.

“We had no clue that we were going to do this, even a week ago,” said Siddiqi. “So I think, given the speed with which this came together, this is exceeding expectations. We would have been happy with 10,000 votes.”

Aly Madan, a 32-year-old from Roxbury, who started the Vote No Preference instagram page for Massachusetts last Wednesday, was also pleased.

“At first I thought ‘I’ll get like 100 of my friends to do this, maybe a thousand.’ Now, we have hundreds of volunteers and thousands of phone calls and texts being made,” said Madan. “I’m just so excited that people are engaged and are aligned and are doing what they can.”

The Massachusetts Vote No Preference effort mirrored a similar movement in Michigan, the Uncommitted Campaign, that amassed over 101,000 “uncommitted” votes during the state’s Democratic Primary last Tuesday, according to the Associated Press.

Many Democratic voters are angry at Biden’s support for Israel in its ongoing war with Hamas that has led to the deaths of 30,000 Palestinians living in Gaza since October.

“When we saw what happened in Michigan last Tuesday, we realized we absolutely have to mobilize here in Massachusetts on Super Tuesday,” said Halawa. “And in the days that followed, we reached out to all of the different people we knew that cared about this, and a coalition came together.”

Over 300 volunteers spent the past three days advising thousands of Massachusetts voters, through phone calls, protests, and over 220,000 text messages, to vote “no preference.” The group gathered in front of several major polling sites across the state on Tuesday morning to suggest people cast their vote in protest of President Biden on their Democratic ballots.

“Over the last four days, we’ve had hundreds of volunteers working with us,” said Cicia Lee, a 31-year-old resident of Jamaica Plain who helped mobilize the coalition.

Some attendees at Tuesday night’s watch party were hopeful that their campaign might motivate Biden to call for a ceasefire in Gaza. Merrie Najimy, a Watertown resident and a former president of the Massachusetts Teachers Association, said that ending the genocide is completely within the the president’s control.

“In the 80s, Ronald Reagan picked up the phone and called Menachem Begin, who was then the prime minister of Israel, and told him to stop the bombing of Southern Lebanon. In 20 minutes, it was over,” said Najimi. “If Biden is saying he doesn’t have that power, then why would we elect him?”

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Israeli tanks have deliberately run over dozens of Palestinian civilians alive (Euro-Med Monitor) 4 March 2024

Palestinian territory– The Israeli army’s repeated killings of Palestinian civilians by deliberately running them over alive with military vehicles was vehemently denounced by Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor on Sunday, as was the widespread destruction of civilian property. These crimes are part of Israel’s genocide against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, the rights group said, ongoing since 7 October 2023.

Euro-Med Monitor documented the Israeli army’s killing of a Palestinian man who was deliberately run over in Gaza City’s Al-Zaytoun neighbourhood on 29 February after he was arrested. The man was subjected to harsh interrogation by members of the Israeli army, who bound his hands with plastic zip-tie handcuffs before running him over with a military vehicle from the bottom to the top of his body.

The incident occurred on the main Salah al-Din Street in the Zaytoun neighbourhood, according to eyewitnesses who spoke to the Euro-Med Monitor team. Israeli soldiers restrained the victim’s hands before they crushed him, and tramped on his body from the legs up, confirming that he was alive during the incident. To guarantee thorough and complete crushing, the victim was placed on asphalt rather than in an adjacent sandy area.

The victim’s mutilated body and the surrounding area bear obvious signs that a military bulldozer or tank was present. It appears that the victim was purposefully stripped of his clothes, as he was seen wearing only his underpants at the time of his death.

The ramming operation occurred before the Israeli army withdrew to the outskirts of the Zaytoun neighbourhood two days ago, as evidenced by the condition of the entrails and other body parts, which had not yet decomposed when the case was documented.

Another documented incident took place on 23 January, when an Israeli tank ran over members of the Ghannam family while they were sleeping in a shelter caravan in the Taiba Towers area of Khan Younis. As a result, a man and his eldest daughter were killed, and his remaining three children and wife were injured. Amina, his 13-year-old daughter, confirmed that her father and older sister were killed when an Israeli tank unexpectedly and repeatedly ran over the caravan, where the family had been sleeping. While her mother and two other siblings survived the attack, Amina experienced extreme pressure in her eyes, nearly losing her sight.

Euro-Med Monitor also documented Israeli tanks and bulldozers running over and crushing displaced people inside their tents in Beit Lahia’s Kamal Adwan Hospital courtyard on 16 December 2023. Several people were killed during the incident, including individuals who were initially injured and did not ultimately survive. The corpses of those who had been previously buried in the courtyard were also crushed in the 16 December incident, stated the rights group.

More recently, a Palestinian family survived a 20 February running attack after Israeli tracks ran over their tent on the shore of the Khan Yunis Sea. A female civilian said that she was shocked by the tank suddenly running over her tent.

In addition, Euro-Med Monitor has documented numerous incidents of Israeli army tanks destroying civilian property, particularly cars, during Israel’s ground incursions into different parts of the Gaza Strip. Most of these tank attacks have targeted vehicles parked in the streets without any military affiliation, indicating the Israeli army’s deliberate and systematic destruction of Palestinian property.

Euro-Med Monitor affirmed that all of these violations are part of a larger Israeli effort to dehumanise every Palestinian in the Gaza Strip, in order to justifiy and normalise the crimes being committed against them. Crushing civilians with tanks is just one of the many cruel ways the Israeli army murders Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, disregarding their humanity, suffering, and dignity. These practices reflect the desire of Israel’s government and military to collectively punish the Palestinian people, with the aim of eliminating, intimidating, and/or harming them physically and psychologically. These crimes come alongside a public incitement campaign by Israeli officials, media figures, and settlers calling for the annihilation of Palestinians in Gaza, and are also a result of the total impunity enjoyed by the perpetrators—evident by the absence of any meaningful action being taken to hold them accountable by any party or at any level.

The human rights organisation warned that the Israeli army has escalated its premeditated murders, extrajudicial executions, and judicial killings against Palestinian civilians since 7 October through direct targeting with snipers, drones, and running operations in various regions of the Gaza Strip. According to Euro-Med Monitor, these actions amount to war crimes and crimes against humanity under the Rome Statute Basic Law of the International Criminal Court (ICC).

There is no justification for the Israeli army to commit these serious crimes, Euro-Med Monitor confirmed. Even its claim that some of the aforementioned acts were directed towards Palestinian fighters does not release Israel from criminal responsibility, seeing as international law protects both civilians and fighters who have given up or lost all means of defense, with the Rome Statute classifying their killing or wounding as war crimes. The Israeli army’s deliberate and widespread destruction of Palestinian property, carried out in an irresponsible manner and without military necessity, also qualifies as a war crime under the Rome Statute.

In parallel to taking all necessary steps to ensure Israel’s accountability for the crimes it commits against the Palestinian people, Euro-Med Monitor reiterated its call for the international community to immediately implement its international obligations to stop the genocide that Israel has been committing against all Palestinians in the Gaza Strip for roughly five months now.

In light of the fact that the ICC has not yet taken any action or filed any charges in relation to the investigations it is supposed to be carrying out into the situation in the Gaza Strip, Euro-Med Monitor expressed deep concern about the ICC Prosecutor’s performance regarding the genocide taking place there. Genocide is one of the most serious international crimes, with catastrophic consequences for civilians. The Court has not said anything about the crimes committed by Israel in the Gaza Strip, even in the face of a plethora of evidence presented by Israeli officials and soldiers themselves, as well as warnings and documentary reports from international organisations, the United Nations and its experts, and the governments of many other nations. The ICC’s last update on the situation in Palestine was posted on 17 November 17 on its official website. This raises serious questions and concerns about its independence and integrity, as well as the extent to which it can perform its duties without becoming politicised or impacted by standards of duality and selective justice.

Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor called for the formation of an independent international investigation committee specialising in Israel’s ongoing military attack on the Gaza Strip. It also urged the international community to enable the work of a separate independent international investigation committee concerned with the Occupied Palestinian Territory, formed in 2021, to carry out its work by ensuring its access to the Strip and opening the necessary investigations into all crimes and violations committed against Palestinians there, including the deliberate killing and extrajudicial execution of civilians.

The rights group also demanded that the Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary, or arbitrary executions visit the Gaza Strip as soon as feasible to look into the illegal killings that fall under the purview of his substantive mandate.

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Source

Joe Biden knowingly and purposely blew up the US southern border in 2021 — don’t believe his blame game now – by Rich Lowry (NYPost)

Opinion by Rich Lowry

President Biden was inaugurated Jan. 20, 2021.

Weeks later, Feb. 2, he issued the executive order that began the unraveling at the border in earnest. 

The border crisis isn’t something that happened to Biden.

It’s not a product of circumstances or understandable policy mistakes made under duress.

No, he sought it and created it, on principle and as a matter of urgency. 

It wasn’t a second-year priority or even a second-quarter-of-the-first-year priority.

The new president set out in his initial days and weeks in office to destroy what President Donald Trump had built, most consequentially in the Feb. 2 executive order. 

By then, mind you, there had already been significant action to loosen up on the border, including on his first day in office. 

The Feb. 2 order emphasized an effort to “enhance lawful pathways for migration to this country” and revoked a slew of Trump rules, executive orders, proclamations and memoranda.

The sense of it was that there’s nothing we can or should do on our own to control illegal immigration; rather, we had to fix deep-seated social, economic and political problems in Central America instead.

It called for getting more refugees into the United States, using parole to let more migrants join family members here, enhancing access to visa programs and reviewing whether the United States is doing enough for migrants fleeing domestic or gang violence, among other things. 

No, he sought it and created it, on principle and as a matter of urgency. 

It wasn’t a second-year priority or even a second-quarter-of-the-first-year priority.

The new president set out in his initial days and weeks in office to destroy what President Donald Trump had built, most consequentially in the Feb. 2 executive order. 

By then, mind you, there had already been significant action to loosen up on the border, including on his first day in office. 

The Feb. 2 order emphasized an effort to “enhance lawful pathways for migration to this country” and revoked a slew of Trump rules, executive orders, proclamations and memoranda.

The sense of it was that there’s nothing we can or should do on our own to control illegal immigration; rather, we had to fix deep-seated social, economic and political problems in Central America instead.

It called for getting more refugees into the United States, using parole to let more migrants join family members here, enhancing access to visa programs and reviewing whether the United States is doing enough for migrants fleeing domestic or gang violence, among other things. 

And it put on the chopping block numerous Trump policies that had helped establish order at the border, from Trump’s expansion of expedited removal, to his termination of a parole program for Central American minors, to his memorandum urging the relevant departments to work toward ending “catch and release.”

Most important, it targeted two of the pillars of Trump’s success at the border: the Migrant Protection Protocols, better known as Remain in Mexico, and the safe-third-country agreements with the Northern Triangle countries that allowed us to divert asylum-seekers to Central American countries other than their own to make asylum claims. 

Joe Biden: The most unfit incumbent president up for re-election since FDR

After a few fits and starts thanks to legal challenges, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas indeed ended Remain in Mexico.

Although he’s now attempting to portray himself to sympathetic journalists as an innocent bystander to Biden’s border policy, he killed the policy knowing exactly what he was doing. 

“After carefully considering the arguments, evidence and perspectives presented by those who support re-implementation of MPP, those who support terminating the program and those who have argued for continuing MPP in a modified form, I have determined that MPP should be terminated,” he said in an Oct. 2021 memo.

He acknowledged, by the way, the policy “likely contributed to reduced migratory flows.” 

For his part, Secretary of State Antony Blinken moved expeditiously.

On Feb. 6, 2021, he announced the end of the asylum agreements. 

And just like that, the carefully crafted suite of Trump polices that had given us control of the border were demolished. 

It didn’t require esoteric knowledge of border policy to realize how this would play out.

During the transition, Trump officials warned of a catastrophe if Biden followed through on his promises, and in April 2021, The Washington Post ran a piece headlined “At the border, a widely predicted crisis that caught Biden off guard.”

Now the Feb. 2 memo feels almost like an artifact from another era, as the open-borders orthodoxy begins to show cracks.

The White House sent Biden to visit the border and is considering measures to curtail illegal immigration and calling on sanctuary cities to cooperate with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, while Mayor Eric Adams criticizes aspects of his city’s sanctuary regime. 

The executive order, though, is a stark reminder the current chaos is the product of deliberate policy.

It’s all there in black and white, a prelude to a disaster that has roiled the country and could well play an outsize role in Biden losing the presidency.

Twitter: @RichLowry

Down the Memory Hole – ‘Workers Vanguard’ New Management Hides Past Articles – 3 March 2024

Down the Memory Hole – ‘Workers Vanguard’ New Management (7:34 min) Audio Mp3

………………….

To the recycle bin, or Marxist Archive, or…. oblivion.

One might ask why the people who took over ‘Workers Vanguard’ wanted to join the Spartacists in the first place. From the outside, it looks like a hostile takeover. Did these people voice opposition to everything the Spartacists had written in ‘Workers Vanguard’ as they joined?

Does this mean that this blog’s ‘Workers Vanguard’ posts about the French Revolution, The Paris Commune, The Russian Revolution, The Founding of the Zionist State, The Kronstad Anarchist Revolt, and others, are most easily accessed on this blog and not the official ‘Workers Vanguard’ site?

After copying and watching and listening to the Neo-Spartacist versus Internationalist Group debate a number of times an impression comes through to me. The Neo-Spartacist leader is an academic. I have no knowledge of this man’s name even, or personal history. I am making this judgement from his speaking style and evident thinking style. He is used to speaking with a condescending self satisfied smirk of someone who is speaking at a podium with an audience that must listen and be graded.

The Internationalist Group speaker seemed like someone who was used to speaking in many different situations, some calling for short declarative sentences, a joke or bit of humor, and a firm voice when emphasizing and important point. Selling ‘Workers Vanguard’ on the street or at a factory gate may teach one to speak in many different ways to convince people. The Internationalist Group speaker gave example after example of actual workers in the audience who had been on picket lines, in labor unions, at universities during demonstrations.

“All you do is call us names,” was the bizarre response from the Neo-Spartacist speaker.

Simply not used to classical debating techniques. Of the levels of argument, name calling is the lowest form. But, saying that the Neo-Spartacists are following the ideas of Michael Pablo and the tired tiny Trotskyists parties faced with the Stalinist victories of the 1940’s is not ‘name calling.’ Saying that the Neo-Spartacists want to join the ‘mass movements’ is not name calling. True or false, the description is about political activity and writing.

The stunning collapse of the Spartacist in the spring of 2020 was simply dismissed by the Neo-Spartacist speaker. “So you put out a few leaflets,” he said dismissively.

So, what were the Neo-Spartacists doing while the biggest demonstrations in decades were happening across the US after the killing of George Floyd?

At the time, with the media full of death from COVID stories, I wondered if key Spartacists had gotten sick, or died.

Now, I wonder if this was the “Night of the Long Knaves” elimination of the Old Guard Spartacists to complete the take-over and then renunciation of the last thirty years of the Spartacist League. The online meeting format works for some things, but limits all kinds of contact people might have in a political setting where all kinds of incidental meetings and communication may take place. Every crisis is an opportunity apparently.

The Internationalist Group speaker noted that the founders of the Internationalist Group were kicked out of the Spartacist League in 1996 and that was to be the Decline and Fall of the Classic Spartacist League.

Bizarrely the Neo-Spartacist speaker admits, in a hurry, that the expulsion was wrong, but won’t say why. What went wrong? The answer is “that was almost thirty years ago, who cares?” The words of someone who is in charge, but not because of the power to persuade people. The technique works in closed organizations. In the rough and tumble real world, not so much.

The thinking seems the same style of academic glibness that throws out a number of points sounding intelligent enough, questioned on a point immediately transitions to a related, or unrelated topic. Assumes that because they are officially “smart” and degreed they must be right. A pedant…

I noted the multicolor ‘Workers Vanguard’ issued 22 Dec 2024. Color print is more expensive than black ink on newsprint paper. Printing photos is expensive. All this could be on a website at less cost. But, the price is still fifty cents. The articles are more general, essay type pieces so that the issue may be sold many months after print date. Okay.

But what happened to the bi-weekly print schedule? When I first subscribed ‘Workers Vanguard’ had just gone from bi-monthly to once a week. But, the output was hard to maintain for a small revolutionary organization. Now, what is it, twice a year. Are all the articles written by Comrade X?

Curiouser, and curiouser….

I don’t see how this organization can thrive in the US at this time. Listening to Comrade X I feel like I’m back in the 1970’s with the constant talk about “The Movement.” Last summer when there was a UAW strike the Neo-Spartacist called for a General Strike to shut down Detroit. The general strike did not happen. Why not just call for a Detroit Soviet, that’s not going to happen either.

The summer when Lenin was fifteen years old he read the populist novel “What is to Be Done?” In some ways that fictional narrative of a workers cooperative and people who wanted to create a new society is the Foundational Myth of the Soviet Union. One commenter noted that religions and social movements are not based on lists of rules or dry documents… some kind of simple narrative is usually at the heart of the idea. Christians were around for decades before anyone dreamed up the Jesus was born and walked the Earth story.

So, narratives matter.

The Neo-Spartacists narrative is “that was a long time ago.” As the Internationalist speaker said “You are all about the Now.”

Again, back to the 1970’s, it seems.

On the Ukraine Russia War the Internationalist group first adopted the classic ‘both sides are capitalists, workers don’t have a side’ and then reassessed and said this is US Imperialism and the European satellites trying to defeat Russia and then go on to China. So, militant workers should militarily defend the Russians against Western Imperialism. The Neo-Spartacists say that workers labor unions in Ukraine and Russia should oppose their own rulers. I must read and hear three or four solid hours of news about the Ukraine War each day. I have never seen one reference to Ukrainian labor unions. What political power or presence in political life do Ukrainian labor unions have? Do Russian labor unions have any political power or projection. I do not know. I never hear of any. The Communist Party of Russia looks like almost every leader is over 70 and they sound like National Stalinists, not organized workers.

The Neo-Spartacist did protest at Columbia University when the college bosses said there was a ban on pro-Palestinian protests. The Neo-Spartacist did mount a protest against the monarchy in the UK that I would have attended if in the area. So, it is not all negative.

Neo-Spartacist Comrade X complained that the Internationalist Group would not join the Neo-Spartacists in a demonstration they had called. A few months ago the Neo-Spartacist were calling on the Internationalist Group to join them and asked for private meetings. Perhaps Comrade X thought he could use his organizational magic to charm the Internationalist Group into joining his project. The Internationalist Group asked for a public debate instead.

……………

Afterthought…

Comrade X from the Spartacist claimed that “Hundreds of thousands” of black people have been killed by the US police? What? The US police kill about 1,000 people a year over the last half decade that people have been keeping a relatively accurate tally. About 400 of the people shot dead or killed by other methods by police are black. Four hundred a year is a lot, but are there 40,000,000 black people in the US. The police claim that only twenty of the black people killed were unarmed. Do the police lie. Yes. But Comrade X is engaged in hyperbole.

What is the claim “Open Police Archives” supposed to prove. Is it supposed to imply that the police are conducting massive campaigns of repression an violence across the US that is only a vague rumor to the public? 100,000 black people are killed, and no one took note? But, we can expose the Liberals by opening the police archives and see the secret reports of mass systematic repression and thousands and thousands of unknown killings by the state. Hyperbole.

In the Spring of 2020 when the COVID lockdowns and hysteria reigned the Spartacist League…. disappeared. Despite having a functioning website, nothing new was posted. Why? Some have noted in the past that Workers Vanguard articles are edited and checked by numerous people because they are not just a columnist or a person’s opinion but a group statement of matters of public and working class import. Couldn’t that be done online? Or, was something else going on? I don’t know.

The excuse for collapse and other problems that “so did everybody else on the Left” from Comrade X is mind boggling after dealing and listening and reading Spartacist and Leninist and Trotskyist ideas for decades. Having presented Workers Vanguard to workers at factory gates in the morning or on college campuses at noon, the appeal was never “We’re like everybody else on the Left.”

I don’t remember an appeal to build some amorphous outpouring of justified rage like the “Palestinian Justice Movement” as something that militants should seek to build. The outpouring of street protests and anger can and has arrived and then disappeared leaving little of any “Movement.”

So, perhaps the Neo-Spartacist League will latch on to the “Palestine Justice Movement” and become the best builders of the Movement the way the Socialist Workers Party became the best builders the anti-war “Movement” in the 1960’s and 1970’s and then became a cult with the copyrights to a lot of Trotsky’s works that they did not read. The copyrights to those works are close to expiring, and the Socialist Workers Party has a couple of dozen members and they are all over seventy years of age.

https://xenagoguevicene.wordpress.com/2021/12/16/us-socialist-workers-party-how-an-organization-became-a-cult-2013/

I remember in the 1980’s running into American Communist Party members who were outrage that the Spartacists had the gaul to claim to defend the Soviet Union while opposing Stalinist leaders while the CP/USA defended Democrats and held victory parties when Democrats won control of the US Congress. I felt like I was in a play. The old Communist Stalinists were laughable crypto-Democrat Radical Liberals.

And… now the Spartacists are…. crypto-Democrat Liberals looking for Communist allies in the Democratic Socialist USA. Curiouser and curiouser…. I’m still in a play.

…………………..

What you see… is what you get.

Social Media Freedom – Andrew Torba And The Grift Of Gab – by Providence – 15 March 2023

BY PROVIDENCE ON MARCH 15, 2023

https://archive.ph/o8x2T

Long Article Archived

…… Founded just months before the 2016 Presidential Election by self-described Silicon Valley conservative Andrew Torba, Gab touted itself as a censorship-free alternative to Twitter and was heavily promoted by the media before becoming associated with far-right extremism and hate after the 2018 Pittsburgh synagogue shooting. As of 2022, Gab has adopted a militant Christian nationalist bent and boasts of having an excess of one million “cumulative registered accounts”¹ as well as having a value of $10 million, despite indisputable evidence to the contrary. 

Since Gab’s inception, Torba has shapeshifted and rebranded himself many times in order to attract any group that would promote Gab and give him money. Over the course of Gab’s history, Torba has pandered to nearly every fringe online community on the right-wing spectrum; ranging from 4chan lolicon connoisseurs and edgelords to the QAnon and MAGA cults and beyond. If one looks past Torba’s conservative christian veneer they will find an affinity grifter who says and does everything in his power to keep the façade of Gab being a viable alternative to Twitter going and keep the money flowing. Torba relied on making misleading claims about the user base and utility of Gab in order to rip off millions of dollars from investors, many of whom he swindled using his conservative christian affinity grift.  …..

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https://archive.ph/o8x2T

 BUSINESS, CULTURE, LIBERTY, TECH and US

The Jewish War – First It Was Corbyn. Now the Whole British Public Is Being Smeared Over Gaza – by Jonathan Cook – 1 March 2024

 • 2,700 WORDS • 

Under cover of fear for MPs’ safety, Labour leader Keir Starmer has helped the ruling Tories paint as villains anyone opposed to Israel’s slaughter of children

For the best part of a decade now, the British establishment has been weaponising antisemitism against critics of Israel, claiming as its biggest scalp the former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn.

He lost the 2019 general election – and stepped down as leader – amid a barrage of smears that he had indulged, if not stoked, antisemitism in the party’s wider ranks.

Corbyn is the only major British party leader to have prioritised the rights of Palestinians over Israel’s oppression of them. He was finally drummed out of the parliamentary party by his successor, Keir Starmer, in 2020 for pointing out that antisemitism in Labour had been “dramatically overstated for political reasons”.

Last week, that same establishment campaign plumbed new depths. Now it is not just the left wing of the Labour Party – traditionally critical of Israel for its decades of oppressing Palestinians – facing demonisation. Large parts of the British public are finding themselves being smeared too – and for the same reason.

The inciting cause is a parliamentary crisis precipitated last week by Starmer’s refusal to identify Israel’s slaughter and starvation of the 2.3 million people of Gaza as “collective punishment” – a war crime.

The House of Commons speaker, who is supposed to be strictly neutral, defied convention to allow Starmer to water down a ceasefire motion on Gaza promoted by the Scottish Nationalists, all so he could avert a rebellion in his party’s ranks.

But while a bitter row ensued between Labour and the ruling Tories over the abuse of parliamentary protocol, it also brought the two sides together on a separate matter.

For different reasons, they exploited the crisis over the ceasefire vote to imply, without a shred of evidence, that demonstrations against Israel’s flagrant, months-long atrocities in Gaza constituted not just antisemitic behaviour but a threat to the democratic order and the safety of MPs.

As a result, the consensus of the English political and media establishment has swiftly shifted onto even more dangerous, and anti-democratic, terrain than the earlier antisemitism smears.

Wilfully deaf

According to a recent survey, two-thirds of Britons support a ceasefire in Gaza – with many of them blaming Israel for killing and maiming at least 100,000 Palestinians in Gaza and imposing an aid blockade that is gradually starving the rest of the population.

Only 13 percent of the public share the two main parties’ view that Israel is justified in continuing to take military action.

For months, many hundreds of thousands of protesters have taken to the streets of London each week to demand that the UK stop its complicity in what the World Court ruled recently is plausibly a genocide being committed by Israel.

Britain is supplying Israel with arms, giving it diplomatic cover at the United Nations, and has effectively joined Israel in its aid blockade. The UK has frozen funds to the UN’s main aid agency, Unrwa, a last lifeline to the enclave.

But those demanding that international law be upheld – and castigating the political class for failing to do the same – are now finding themselves demonised as potential terrorists.

Already, the talk on both sides of the Commons – and in the media – is of the need for new police powers, curbs on the right of the public to protest, and further security measures to keep politicians shielded from the people they are supposed to represent.

This week, a committee of MPs used pressures placed on the police to manage regular mass marches in London against the slaughter in Gaza as grounds for introducing tighter limits on the right to protest.

Prime Minister Rishi Sunak took up the refrain, calling for greater police powers against what he described as “mob rule” that was supposedly “replacing democratic rule”.

Separately, he insinuated that this so-called “mob” – those troubled by the killing of at least 30,000 Palestinians in Gaza over the past five months – may not “belong here“, in Britain. Notably, he made these remarks during an address to the Community Security Trust, which was at the forefront of promoting the smearing of Corbyn and his supporters as antisemites.

But the fearmongering is far from restricted to the ruling Tories.

Labour’s shadow international development secretary, Lisa Nandy, publicly complained at the weekend about members of the public shouting “genocide” at her, linking it to the greater security measures she has been taking.

Opposition to Israel’s behaviour is a majority view among the public, but neither major party is prepared to listen or respond. Both are wilfully deaf to public concern that Britain needs to stop actively enabling one of the greatest crimes in living memory.

As Labour MP Diane Abbott, a Corbyn ally and long-time target of death threats, noted, Britain is taking “the first step towards a police state“.

Israel’s slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza is tearing the mask off Westminster. By the day, Britain is looking more overtly like an oligarchy.

Israel partisans

The full import of last week’s events – when the Commons Speaker Lindsay Hoyle did a grubby backroom deal with Starmer, effectively sabotaging the Scottish National Party’s ceasefire motion – has been obscured by subsequent politicking and point-scoring.

The real story is to be found in the aftermath.

The pair proferred a dangerous cover story to justify Starmer’s determined efforts to avoid naming Israel’s egregious violations of international law as “collective punishment”.

Hoyle apologised for breaking with long-established convention and allowing Starmer’s watered-down amendment. But he justified his move on the grounds that Labour MPs would have been put in danger if they had been forced to reject the SNP ceasefire motion on their leader’s orders.

He declared: “I don’t ever want to go through the situation of picking up a phone to find that a friend, of whatever side, has been murdered by terrorists.”

The speaker produced no evidence to support this unprecedented claim, one that sounded like it was intended to bring to mind the scenes of the Capitol building being invaded by Trump supporters in the wake of the 2020 presidential election.

Notably, both Starmer and Hoyle are among the many MPs on each side of the aisle who have consistently and proudly demonstrated partisanship towards Israel.

Large numbers of MPs continue to belong to their parties’ Friends of Israel groups, including Starmer, even as the international human rights community has reached a consensus that Israel is an apartheid state – and now that it is committing mass slaughter and starving Gaza’s population.

Hoyle even took time out in November to head off to Israel – now on trial for genocide at the world’s highest court – to be briefed by the very army doing that genocide. He was accompanied by Israel’s ambassador to the UK, Tzipi Hotovely, who has repeatedly sought to justify the slaughter.

Starmer himself trumpeted the fact that, before drafting his amendment to the SNP motion, he had called Israel’s president, Isaac Herzog, for advice. That is the same Herzog who had earlier argued that Gaza’s entire population, including its children, were legitimate targets for Israel’s military attacks on the enclave.

Moral panic

During the Corbyn years, opposition to Israel’s oppression of Palestinians was denounced as antisemitism.

And in just the same way, reality is being turned on its head once again. Now, the call for an end to Israel’s slaughter of children is being variously denounced as extremism, an attack on democracy, and the stifling of free speech.

Last week, as the Tories dogpiled Hoyle for tearing up the parliamentary rulebook, Sunak warned that the lesson was “we should never let extremists intimidate us into changing the way in which parliament works”.

What could he possibly mean? That the right to protest could not be tolerated within a parliamentary democracy? That free speech was now equivalent to “intimidation”?

Starmer has opened the floodgates to a moral panic in which the people of Gaza are forgotten, except as bit players in a smear campaign to silence those calling for an end to Israel’s genocidal bombing and starvation policies.

In the current climate, it was largely unremarkable that Paul Sweeney, a Labour member of the Scottish parliament, made headlines accusing Gaza protesters of “storming” his offices and “terrifying” his staff – until Scottish police investigated and found no evidence for his claims.

The police described the demonstration as “peaceful”, an assessment confirmed by a reporter for the Scotsman newspaper who was present.

Senior journalists are sticking their oars in too.

The BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg claimed the dangers extended beyond politicians to journalists like herself. The current crisis, she suggested, could be traced back to Corbyn’s supporters, who were wont to “boo and jeer” as she and the rest of the media promoted evidence-free claims that Labour was beset by antisemitism.

True charlatans

Sudden concern about the dangers caused by public protest against the slaughter of Palestinians should be ridiculed as the self-serving nonsense it is.

The political and media establishment now whipping up fears for the safety of MPs – so they can continue ignoring Israel’s genocide – is the same establishment that endlessly vilified Corbyn for highlighting Israel’s ugly rule over the Palestinians.

For many years, Corbyn had warned that Israel was brutalising the Palestinian people and stealing their land to prevent the emergence of a Palestinian state. His 2019 manifesto promised to end the UK’s arms sales to Israel and recognise a Palestinian state.

History has now proven his stance as warranted, while also demonstrating that the political and media class – and most of all Starmer, a human rights lawyer – are the real charlatans.

But more to the point, no one expressed concern for the safety of Corbyn, Labour’s elected leader, or his supporters when they were being subjected to a years-long campaign of vilification. He was variously painted as an antisemite, a Soviet-era spy, and a traitor.

When the Daily Mail presented Corbyn as Dracula above the headline “Labour must kill vampire Jezza”, everyone chuckled. As they did when Newsnight transposed his face onto the Dark Lord Voldemort from the Harry Potter franchise.

Tweet

When British soldiers were shown using Corbyn’s face as target practice, it made fleeting headlines before being forgotten.

There were no demands for soul searching then, as there are now. There was no panic about the stoking of a dangerous public mood. There was no concern about the threat to democracy or the safety of Corbyn and other MPs who spoke out against Israel.

Why? The question hardly needs answering. Because it was the establishment political and media class doing the smearing and inciting. It was the same people whining now about their safety who were actively endangering elected representatives like Corbyn.

‘Barrage of racist abuse’

This is not just about history, of course.

The establishment campaign that claimed to be outing antisemitism – and that maliciously conflated opposition to Israel’s military oppression of Palestinians (anti-Zionism) with antisemitism – has simply metamorphosed into something even uglier.

Now it seeks to tar those it smeared as antisemites as worse: as a supposed menace not just to Jews but to MPs and democracy. Those trying to stop the slaughter of children are potential terrorists.

One of Corbyn’s few surviving allies – not yet purged by Starmer from the parliamentary party – is the Labour Muslim MP Zarah Sultana.

A tweet of hers that went viral at the weekend read: “Whenever I speak up for the rights of the Palestinian people, I am subjected to a barrage of racist abuse, threats and hate. Things have been particularly bad in recent months.”

As she noted, the prime minister used an Islamophobic trope against her last month, as did another Tory MP, when she urged a ceasefire. Neither apologised. Once again, these incidents barely made ripples, let alone elicited an outpouring of concern.

Though Sultana was careful not to allude to Starmer’s role, she warned that this cynical moral panic must not be allowed to become “a pretext to demonise the Palestine solidarity movement specifically or attack our democratic rights more broadly”.

But the truth is, that boat sailed some time ago.

Plot on parliament?

From the start, Palestine solidarity demonstrations were demonised as “hate marches” by the then-home secretary, Suella Braverman.

Plumbing new levels of disingenuousness, she and other politicians – backed by the media – pretended a longtime leftwing Palestinian solidarity slogan chanted at marches that demands equality for Jews and Palestinians “between the river and the sea” was a call for genocide against Jews.

At the weekend, the Times newspaper turned the flame higher. A front-page article headlined “Plot to target parliament” was meant to evoke in the public’s mind Guy Fawkes’ infamous gunpowder plot in the 17th century to blow up the Houses of Parliament.

But all the stories described were entirely legitimate efforts by the Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC) to lobby parliament to uphold international law and press for a ceasefire.

The Times insinuated that Ben Jamal, leader of the PSC, was behaving in a sinister fashion by calling on the public to “ramp up pressure” on MPs – that is, exercise the most basic of democratic rights.

Meanwhile, Braverman’s successor as home secretary, James Cleverly, insisted that MPs must not be subjected to “undue pressure” – as though it was threatening behaviour for members of the public to give their elected representatives vocal warning that they would refuse to vote for them based on actions such as refusing to oppose a genocide.

Two nasty parties

There is little doubt where this is all designed to lead.

Weaponised antisemitism was always about silencing those protesting against British foreign policy – a foreign policy that prioritises Israel’s pivotal role in promoting western control over the oil-rich Middle East above ending Israel’s oppression of the Palestinian people.

Previously, that chiefly meant smearing Corbyn and the anti-imperialist, anti-war Labour left.

But with public outrage growing at Israel’s genocide, the stakes have risen dramatically. Now the political and media establishments are desperate to shift attention away both from Israel and their complicity in the slaughter of children.

Their preferred method has been pretending that it is only Muslims and leftwing, antisemitic extremists opposed to the genocide. Normal people, apparently, should be invested exclusively in the impossible task Israel claims to have set itself: of “eliminating Hamas”, however many Palestinian children die in the process.

Evoking King Canute trying to hold back the tide, Nandy denounced Tory MP Lee Anderson – and the wider Conservative party – for Islamophobia after he claimed “Islamists” were in control of London and its mayor, Sadiq Khan.

In the Daily Telegraph last week, Braverman advanced similar racist paranoia, arguing that Britain was becoming a country where “Sharia law, the Islamist mob, and anti-Semites take over communities”.

Giving Starmer a taste of Corbyn’s medicine – and illustrating the way career-minded politicians are kept in line – she accused the Labour leader of being “in hock to extremists” and that the party was “still rotten to the core”.

Two nasty parties, each complicit in a genocide of the Palestinian people, are now competing to stoke Islamophobia – one explicitly, the other implicitly.

With no place to hide for his political cowardice, Starmer has opened the gates to the bipartisan vilification of Muslims, not just in Gaza but at home too. Will he get away with it?

He may find it tougher going than he expects. With the slaughter in Gaza playing out on TV screens and social media accounts, many millions of Britons are incensed. Whatever the political class claims, it is not just Muslims and the anti-war left angry at the complicity of British politicians in genocide.

The smearing of Corbyn over his criticisms of Israel’s oppression of Palestinians largely worked. But gaslighting much of the public as a dangerous “mob” for opposing even more egregious Israeli crimes may yet backfire.

……………………..

(Republished from Middle East Eye)

Why ‘Oppenheimer’ Got A World Wide Audience – 2 March 2024

Cillian Murphy as Oppenheimer

Oppenheimer, the film biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer, physicist and “father of the atomic bomb,” written, directed and co-produced by Christopher Nolan, has struck an obvious chord with audiences around the world.

The film has met with widespread critical honors, having received some 377 nominations for prizes worldwide. Most recently, at the Screen Actors Guild awards ceremony in Los Angeles on February 24, Oppenheimer earned four major awards (the event only considers acting performances). Nolan’s film is nominated for 13 Academy Awards, and is expected to win in a number of categories at the upcoming event March 10.

The notice the film has received is genuinely deserved. Oppenheimer is a work that bears re-viewing, and the second or third viewing brings out elements that one has previously missed. It has a powerful, multi-layered performance by Cillian Murphy as Oppenheimer, an extremely complicated personality, and important performances by Robert Downey, Jr., Florence Pugh, David Krumholtz, Tom Conti, Benny Safdie, Gary Oldman, Kenneth Branagh and others, several of them in small roles.

The drama has various fascinating and pertinent elements. Oppenheimer manages to examine a wide range of issues—the development of the nuclear bomb, various debates in theoretical physics, the Cold War and McCarthyism, and more. It presents Albert Einstein (Conti) not merely as a brilliant scientist but as a profound social thinker, Edward Teller (Safdie) as an unpleasant, ambitious opportunist, and Harry Truman (Oldman) as the wretched, criminal figure he was.

Oppenheimer depicts the manner in which the American establishment persuaded or cajoled leading scientists, many of them Jewish and left-wing and often politically naïve, to work on the atomic bomb on the basis of their deep hatred of Hitler and fear that the Nazis would develop the terrible weapon first. Here the Stalinized Communist Party, falsifying the nature of the second imperialist world war and the Roosevelt-Truman administration, played such a devastating role, disorienting the physicists along with many others, leaving them utterly unprepared for the witch-hunts and repression to come.

Even then, numerous figures refused to join the Manhattan Project or criticized it. Nolan’s film offers a relatively nuanced picture of the numerous conflicts and contradictions. In his efforts to convince one scientist to participate, Oppenheimer asserts, “So you’re a fellow traveler [of the Communist Party], so what? This is a national emergency. I’ve got some skeletons, and they’ve put me in charge. They need us.” And the other replies prophetically, “Until they don’t.” Confronted with Oppenheimer in full military regalia, fellow physicist Isidor Rabi (a Nobel Prize winner in 1944, played by Krumholtz) tells him, “Take off that ridiculous uniform—you’re a scientist.”

Oppenheimer deals meaningfully with these remarkable people, many of them torn by conflicting impulses, its lead character in particular. Following the August 6, 1945 bombing of Hiroshima, Oppenheimer addresses a cheering crowd of scientists in these words: “The world will remember this day. It’s too early to determine what the results of the bombing are … But I’m sure the Japanese didn’t like it.” Murphy is able to communicate Oppenheimer’s own awareness of the horrifying callousness of his comment, as the screenplay continues (written in the first person), “I see FLESH RIPPED FROM THE SMILING YOUNG FACES… I see PLASMA ROILING and the DEVIL’S CLAW reach into the night sky… I see piles of ASHES where the young crowd was cheering.”

The story should be an object lesson today for those choosing to believe the lies about America’s “democratic” intentions in regard to Ukraine or Gaza. Oppenheimer and the others fell obediently into line, convincing themselves of the official story. American imperialism manipulated them and subsequently, in many cases, disposed of them, often harshly. As the military packs up the bomb for use in Hiroshima and Oppenheimer offers practical advice, an Air Force officer, speaking, in effect, for the entire ruling elite, informs him, “With respect, Dr. Oppenheimer. We’ll take it from here.” Indeed…

Nolan and his colleagues treat their audience sincerely, arranging issues and arguments in an accessible manner, without pandering or vulgarizing, and people have responded with interest and support.

Tom Conti and Cillian Murphy in Oppenheimer

Oppenheimer has taken in some $960,000,000 at the international box office. It is possible, with an opening in Japan scheduled for March—a controversial event—the film may surpass the one-billion-dollar mark.

How many people have seen Oppenheimer? It is difficult to arrive at a precise figure. The American film industry in particular is only interested in “gross revenue.” With $330,000,000 taken in US ticket sales, and an average movie ticket price of $10, one comes up with the very rough estimate of 30-40 million audience members.

Globally, ticket prices average $5 or so, but they vary so widely that the figure is not very helpful (with a much higher cost in Western Europe and Japan). About certain countries one can be more precise. In France, for example, figures released by the National Cinema Center at the beginning of the new year showed that Oppenheimer was the fifth-most successful film in the country, with 4.39 million individual admissions. The Federal Film Board (FFA) reports that the film was the fourth most popular in Germany last year, with 4.1 million tickets sold.

In the UK, the film’s gross revenue was $74,872,624 and ticket prices averaged US$10.04 last year, for an attendance of approximately 7.45 million people. In Italy, Oppenheimer “secured over 70 percent of market share” during its first five days in cinemas, “and recorded the highest-ever opening weekend in the territory for IMAX screenings.” (Collider) More than two million Australians have watched the film, a figure apparently matched in South Korea. According to the Korea Times in August, “Oppenheimer topped the local box office for five consecutive days, selling over 1.5 million tickets.” If this writer’s calculations are accurate, some five million spectators have attended showings of Oppenheimer in Mexico.

The number of Chinese viewers has probably surpassed 10 million, and perhaps far surpassed that figure. The Hollywood Reporter noted in September that “Despite its long runtime and weighty historical subject matter—which many analysts expected would be a drag in China—Oppenheimer has been boosted by a rave local reception. On the influential fan platform Douban, it has received nearly half a million reviews averaging 8.8, one of the highest scores of any Hollywood film of recent memory. On Maoyan and Alibaba’s Tao Piao Piao ticket services, it averages 9.4 and 9.6, respectively.” Large numbers have also watched Oppenheimer in India, Brazil, Spain, the Netherlands, Saudi Arabia, Poland and Sweden.

In addition, given present-day realities, millions of people internationally have likely seen the film in “pirated” versions, and millions more now through streaming platforms.

Making use of the most conservative estimates, well over 100 million people have seen Nolan’s film, an intense and compressed work dealing with world-historical events, in half a year.

Robert Downey Jr. in Oppenheimer

The reference above, about the response to the film in China having confounded the “expectations” of analysts, holds good everywhere. In the US, above all, empty-headed commentators continue to express astonishment. The Associated Press reported, no doubt accurately if crudely, that “no one in the industry expected that a long, talky, R-rated drama released at the height of the summer movie season would earn over $900 million at the box office.” Variety, for its part, observed that the film’s “numbers” were “more or less unheard of for an incredibly dense, three-hour, R-rated historical drama.”

The Motion Picture Association in the US, revealing all we need to know about its outlook, described Oppenheimer’s box office “haul” as “staggering” for a film “about such a complicated figure that includes no superheroes.” Unable to suppress its surprise, the Association went on to remark that a “long, oft-technical, complicated movie about a historic figure many people knew little about is not supposed to be the type of movie that enchants audiences all over the globe.”

Oppenheimer is now, according to Box Office Mojo, at number 62 on the list of “top lifetime grosses” worldwide. To be blunt, it is the only substantial film for adults among the first 100 films ranked, the others all being either comic book adaptations, children’s movies, James Cameron’s miserable efforts (Titanic, Avatar, etc.) and the like. Indeed, one has to dive deep into the list to find, for example, Rain Man at 428, Schindler’s List at 494, Green Book at 496, Lincoln at 599, The Truman Show at 631. Rising ticket prices over time cloud the picture somewhat, but Oppenheimer’s accomplishment remains significant.

Why has Nolan’s film resonated so strongly with so many people regardless of geography?

A second viewing confirms that Oppenheimer stands out, first of all, for its complexity and challenging character, and its appeal to the viewer’s mental powers, under conditions where film production has become increasingly dominated by noisy, empty blockbusters that insult or benumb the intelligence. Its success demonstrates once again there is a genuine, abiding, growing hunger for more substantial film work.

Nolan’s film treats political life in a convincing and objective manner, both through its scathing portrait of figures such as Truman, Lewis Strauss (Downey) and a collection of military and governmental McCarthyite thugs worthy of an authoritarian dictatorship, and its sympathetic gaze at left-wing intellectual life in the US in the 1930s. Some of the most compelling, intimate scenes take place there. Alex Wellerstein, a science historian specializing in the history of nuclear weapons at the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey, pointed out to Time magazine that every person in Oppenheimer’s “close circle is or was at one point either a member of the Communist Party or very close, and he was probably very close himself.” Or, as one character in the film observes, Oppenheimer’s security file revealed the existence of “his Communist brother, sister-in-law, fiancée, best friend, wife.” 

Florence Pugh as Jean Tatlock

It never occurs to any of the pundits that the arguments offered for Oppenheimer’s anticipated lack of broad success—for example, according to one startled critic, “it’s a biopic about a scientist, a morality tale about the creation of the atom bomb, and a red scare courtroom drama” (AV Club)—are precisely what has attracted a wide audience: above all, in other words, the seriousness of the film’s themes and historical setting, and the seriousness of its presentation.

As argued in an initial review last July, Oppenheimer is an “appropriately disturbing film about nuclear weapons and nuclear war. It is intended to leave viewers shaken, and it succeeds in that.” At a time when—with criminal recklessness—the “Biden administration and its NATO allies continue to blithely insist they will not be ‘deterred’ by the threat of nuclear conflict” with Russia in particular, that Nolan’s film “has gained a wide audience speaks to a different sentiment in the general population, one deeply appalled by the possibility of the use of atomic bombs.”

In interviews, Nolan (born 1970) has disclosed that such concerns have been with him for decades. He grew up in Britain in the 1980s, “a time of great fear of nuclear weapons,” he told Deadline in an interview. “It was like growing up in the ’60s, with the Cuban missile crisis.” Nolan went on. “The ’80s were a very similar thing. There were protests, and there was a lot in the pop culture about nuclear weapons. But it was Sting’s song ‘Russians’ [1985] where I first heard Oppenheimer’s name, and there was this very palpable fear of nuclear Armageddon.”

In an intriguing conversation with John Mecklin, editor-in-chief of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, prior to the film’s release, Nolan was quite specific, insisting that “our intention with the film—whatever world it was coming out into—absolutely part of the intention of the film is to reiterate the unique and extraordinary danger of nuclear weapons. That’s something we should all be thinking about all the time and care about very, very deeply. But obviously, it’s extraordinarily troubling that the geopolitical situation would have deteriorated once again to the extent that it’s being talked about in the news.”

The writer-director decried a situation in which government and military officials “start to see them [nuclear weapons] as more ordinary armaments … You’re normalizing killing tens of thousands of people. You’re creating moral equivalences, false equivalences with other types of conflict, et cetera, et cetera.” He referred to army spokesmen who “start talking about tactical nukes—that’s the conversation that I now am most afraid of, because I hear that from both sides of the political spectrum, not just from [Russian president Vladimir] Putin. I feel we’re in a world now where people are starting to once again talk about those things as some kind of acceptable possibility for our world.”

Nolan suggested nuclear Armageddon was unlikely to occur through “some Dr. Strangelove-type scenario with bombers getting the wrong signal.” It was far more probable, he said, “to be the normalizing of atomic weapons at the beginning, the use of tactical nukes leading to larger- and larger-scale conflict that will ultimately destroy the planet.” He came away from making Oppenheimer, the filmmaker asserted, “with a different understanding, a different set of fears that ultimately are founded on the same ultimate fear, which is that the world is going to be destroyed by these things.”

Time, in its piece on Nolan, remarked that “Oppenheimer’s little Hiroshima bomb had an explosive power of 15 kilotons—or 15 thousand tons of TNT. A single, modern-day U.S. Trident II missile can carry up to 12 nuclear warheads, packing 475 kilotons of punch each.” In other words, each such missile (of which there are hundreds in existence) contains more than 380 times the destructive power of the bomb that demolished a major city and killed some 100,000 people.

Cillian Murphy and David Krumholtz in Oppenheimer

The filmmaker has taken his pressing concerns, ones that affect humanity as a whole, and acted on them conscientiously and rigorously. A major film is one of the most elaborate, involved artistic undertakings imaginable, with a tremendous number of moving parts. The writer-director has concentrated his attention on this particular theme, and coordinated the efforts and skills of hundreds of collaborators in the same direction, bringing to bear a host of technologies, in such a fashion that the viewer relives or reworks this same problem, this complex of moods and ideas about historical events and about the present. Nolan’s film effectively communicates a sense of urgency because the filmmakers have found a means of materializing their own urgency in the form of a patient, carefully constructed artistic work.

Oppenheimer sets about addressing historical questions for which vast numbers of people, whether they are fully aware of it or not, urgently need answers: How has humanity arrived at its present dangerous, threatening condition? What’s to be done about it? Moreover, it does so not as a lecture or tract, but as an absorbingly human, many-sided drama. Even disagreement with Nolan’s too apologetic, accepting view of Robert Oppenheimer’s role and legacy (“he was definitely a hero” and the scientists on the Manhattan Project “had to do what they had to do”) does nothing to take away from Murphy’s subtle, extraordinarily sincere performance and, as noted, the performances of many of the others.

The repulsive nature of contemporary bourgeois politics, the vast moral and intellectual void it represents, also helps produce an atmosphere receptive to a work like Oppenheimer. The leading political figures in country after country are an assortment of corrupt corporate shills, fascist thugs and warmongers, the dominant parties are generally despised, the authorized sources of information become seen to be as little more than lying extensions of the state. It is unsurprising that millions will look in another direction, perhaps naively and even credulously, to artists for an honest appraisal of life. “Art,” Trotsky wrote in Culture and Socialism, “is one of the forms through which man finds an orientation in the world.” When so little rational orientation is forthcoming from official sources, the filmmaker may take on an outsized importance.

Beyond that, however, one might also argue that Oppenheimer has drawn forth a strong response not simply because of the immediate conjuncture. There is something here of an cumulative effect, which bursts forth “unexpectedly” and “astonishingly” only in the mind of the philistine. Masses of people have undergone traumatic experiences in recent decades, or witnessed them. War has been a constant. Upheaval, disruptions, instigated directly or indirectly by the great powers, have occurred in every corner of the globe. Rough estimates place the number of forcibly displaced and stateless persons at 130 million in 2024, in 133 countries and territories and more than 500 locations.

Nearly everyone on the planet becomes involved. Imperialism is agitating, politicizing and radicalizing great numbers of people, forcing them to think about very basic questions. These are not isolated episodes, small clouds in an otherwise sunny sky, but persistent, recurring, increasingly violent. Decades of conflict and disequilibrium, and now the emergence of a third world war, lead to shifts in popular thinking. People begin to connect up the experiences, to draw conclusions, to search for deeper causes, not the ones offered in the capitalist media. Parochialism, nationalism, “exceptionalism” tend to break down. These are more and more shared, collective global experiences. No wonder there is a hunger for more serious artistic material!

Moreover, in the wake of the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the enormous historical issues brought to the fore by that trauma, cheap, demagogic radicalism will appear inadequate to a growing number. In the aftermath of the restoration of capitalism in the former “socialist” countries, only the most penetrating arguments and analyses are called for. How was this “failure” possible? Denunciations and sloganeering will not do. Precise and sober examinations once more begin to “catch on.” Even if many matters are not yet understood, there is a growing intuition that difficult, demanding problems have to be tackled, that much hard, taxing work needs to be done.

The potential once again emerges for human beings to consider their own lives as historically and socially shaped, for them to see the life-and-death importance of understanding and mastering crucial historical and social developments. It is not accidental that filmmaking, as a mass, large-scale, industrial-style activity, which tends to function at its best under conditions of popular mobility and seething unrest, begins to pick up on this process. And Nolan himself admits to being “drawn to working at a large scale” and feeling “the responsibility” to use those resources “in the most productive and interesting way.”

Cillian Murphy

Oppenheimer of course is not the only art work that reflects some of these developments, nor has this artistic process just begun. We have pointed to other works, films and television series that have conveyed unease, dissatisfaction, even disgust with the existing state of affairs. But Oppenheimer’s enormous, international prominence represents something of a nodal point.

None of this is meant to suggest that the film is without weaknesses and blind spots. As we noted last July, the problems with Oppenheimer “are not so much the failings of the individual writer-director. They reveal more general problems bound up with understanding the Second World War and mid-20th century political realities.” One might even say that “absolving” Oppenheimer, as it were, becomes obligatory when one works backward, as the filmmakers do, from a defense of World War II as the great battle for democracy and the Roosevelt administration as a social reformist utopia. The weakest portion of the film, when it temporarily turns into something of a formulaic “procedural,” occurs during the organization of Los Alamos as a secret military facility and the preparations for the first atomic bomb test.

As we argued last year, “The working class cannot adopt Oppenheimer as one of its heroes. Although he held sincerely left-wing views in the late 1930s, Oppenheimer became a significant figure in the American military-intelligence apparatus. That the ‘left’ in America by and large, including prominently the Communist Party, cheered on the incineration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and that Oppenheimer could more or less seamlessly pass from pro-Roosevelt Popular Frontism to direct participation in the war machine, none of that excuses his role.”

The character of the 1917 October Revolution, which still held such a power for figures like Oppenheimer and his generation, the emergence of Stalinism in the USSR and the betrayal of the revolution, the filthy role of the Communist Party in the US, these are gigantic questions that hover unresolved over Nolan’s Oppenheimer.

In his interview with the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists last year, Nolan made suggestive reference to some of the issues. Speaking of “the revolutionary nature of quantum physics in the 1920s,” he added, “You’re dealing with people who were engaged in a revolutionary reappraisal of the laws of the universe, just as Picasso and other artists were engaged in a revolutionary reappraisal of aesthetic art, of visual representation, just as Stravinsky, you know, was there writing all his music, and indeed, Marx, the communists—that is to say, moving on from Marx, the communist 1920s, the Russian Revolution.”

He continued: “It’s kind of an amazing time. And then, of course, as you start to research and look at the drama of his [Oppenheimer’s] story and where it then went, where this revolutionary fervor actually wound up—that’s when so many revolutions wound up in a pretty awful place.”

This is a critical point, although Nolan does not proceed any farther in his comments or perhaps his thinking. There is indeed a profound connection between the “awful place” that the October Revolution “wound up,” as a result of the perfidy and treachery of Stalinism, and the terrible historical dilemma in which vast portions of humanity, including scientists and intellectuals, found themselves in the late 1930s, and in the ensuing slaughterhouse of the world war and the Holocaust. This too is surely a matter to be investigated in a serious artistic film (or films), which would also, we are convinced, gain the interest of millions and millions.

……………………

The Global South Converges to Multipolar Moscow – by Pepe Escobar – 1 March 2024

 • 1,000 WORDS • 

Here’s the key takeaway of these frantic days in Moscow: Normal-o-philes of the world, unite.

These have been frantic multipolar days at the capital of the multipolar world. I had the honor to personally tell Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov that virtually the whole Global South seemed to be represented in an auditorium of the Lomonosov innovation cluster on a Monday afternoon – a sort of informal UN and in several aspects way more effective when it comes to respecting the UN charter. His eyes gleamed. Lavrov, more than most, understands the true power of the Global Majority.

Moscow hosted a back-to-back multipolar conference plus the second meeting of the International Russophiles Movement (MIR, in its French acronym, which means “world” in Russian). Taken together, the discussions and networking have offered auspicious hints on the building of a truly representative international order – away from the agenda-imposed doom and gloom of single unipolar culture and Forever Wars.

The opening plenary session in the first day fell under the star power of Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova – whose main message was crystal clear: “There can’t be freedom without free will”, which could easily become the new collective Global South motto. “Civilization-states” set the tone of the overall discussion – as they are meticulously designing the blueprints of economic, technological and cultural development in the post-Western hegemonic world.

Professor of International Relations Zhang Weiwei at Fudan University’s China Institute in Shanghai summarized the four crucial points when it comes to Beijing propelling its role as a “new independent pole.” That reads like a concise marker of where we are now:

1. Under the unipolar order, everything from dollars to computer chips can be weaponized. Wars and color revolutions are the norm.
2. China has become the largest economy in the world by PPP; the largest trade and industrial economy; and it is currently at the forefront of the Fourth Industrial Revolution.
3. China proposes a model of “Unite and Prosper” instead of a Western model of “Divide and Rule”.
4. The West tried to isolate Russia, but the Global Majority sympathizes with Russia. Thus, the Collective West has been isolated by the Global Rest.

Fighting the “theo-political war”

“Global Rest”, incidentally, is a misnomer: Global Majority is the name of the game. The same applies to “golden billion”; those that profit from the unipolar moment, mostly across the collective West and as comprador elites in the satraps, are at best 200 million or so.

Monday afternoon in Moscow featured three parallel sessions: on China and the multipolar world, where the star was Professor Weiwei; on the post-hegemony West, under the title “Is it possible to save the European civilization?” – attended by several dissident Europeans, academics, think tankers, activists; and the main treat – featuring the frontline actors of multipolarity.

I had the honor to moderate the awesome Global South session, which ran for over three hours – it could have been the whole day, actually – and featured several stunning presentations by a stellar cast of Africans, Latin Americans and Asians, from Palestine to Venezuela, including Nelson Mandela’s grandson, Mandla.

That was the multipolar Global South in full flight – as my imperative was to open the floor to as many people as possible. Were the organizers to release a Greatest Hits of the presentations, that could easily become a global hit.

Mandla Mandela emphasized how it’s about time to move away from the unipolar system dominated by the Hegemon, “which continues to support Israel”.

That complemented Benin’s charismatic activist Kemi Seba – who brilliantly personifies the African leadership of the future. In the plenary session, Seba introduced a key concept – which begs to be developed around the world: we are living under a “theo-political war”.

That neatly summarizes the Western simultaneous Hybrid War on Islam, Shi’ism, Christian Orthodoxy, in fact every religion, apart from the Woke Cult.

The next day, the second congress of the International Russophiles movement offered three debate sessions: the most relevant was on – what else – “Informational and Hybrid Warfare”.

I had the honor to share the stage with Maria Zakharova – and after my free jazz-style presentation, focused on over 40 years of practicing journalism across the planet and watching first-hand the utter degradation of the industry, we carried a hopefully useful dialogue on media and soft power.

My suggestion not only to the Russian Foreign Ministry but to everyone all across the Global South was straightforward: forget about oligarchy-controlled legacy/mainstream media, it is already dead. They have nothing relevant to say. The present and the future rely on social media; “alternative” – which is not alternative anymore, on the contrary; and citizen media, to all of which, of course, the highest standards of journalism should be applied.

In the evening, before everyone got down to party hard, a few of us were invited for an open, frank and enlightening working dinner with Foreign Minister Lavrov in one of the magnificent frescoed rooms of the Metropol Hotel, one the grand hotels of Europe since 1905.

A legend with a wicked sense of humor

Lavrov was relaxed, among friends; after an initial, stunning diplomatic tour de force which covered quite a few highlights of the recent decades all the way to the current gloom and doom, he opened the table to our questions, taking notes and answering each one of them in detail.

What’s so striking when you are face to face with the most legendary diplomat in the world for quite some time, in a relaxed setting, is his genuine sadness when faced with the rage, intolerance and total absence of critical thought exhibited especially by the Europeans. That was much more relevant throughout our conversation than the fact that U.S.-Russia relations are at an all-time low.

Lavrov though remains highly driven because of the Global South/Global Majority – and the Russian presidency of the BRICS this year. He hugely praised Indian FM Jaishankar, and the comprehensive relations with China. He suggested the Russophiles Movement should take a global role, playfully suggesting we should all be part of a “Normal-o-philes” movement.

Well, Lavrov The Legend is also known for his wicked sense of humor. And humor is most effective when it is deadly serious. So here’s the key takeaway of these frantic days in Moscow: Normal-o-philes of the world, unite.

………………………….

(Republished from Strategic Culture Foundation)

The CIA in Ukraine — the NY Times Gets a Guided Tour – by Patrick Lawrence – 29 Feb 2024

• 2,800 WORDS • 

Credit: Scheerpost/Wikimedia Commons

If you have paid attention to what various polls and officials in the U.S. and elsewhere in the West have been doing and saying about Ukraine lately, you know the look and sound of desperation. You would be desperate, too, if you were making a case for a war Ukrainians are on the brink of losing and will never, brink or back-from-the-brink, have any chance of winning. Atop this, you want people who know better, including 70 percent of Americans according to a recent poll, to keep investing extravagant sums in this ruinous folly.

And here is what seems to me the true source of angst among these desperados: Having painted this war as a cosmic confrontation between the world’s democrats and the world’s authoritarians, the people who started it and want to prolong it have painted themselves into a corner. They cannot lose it. They cannot afford to lose a war they cannot win: This is what you see and hear from all those good-money-after-bad people still trying to persuade you that a bad war is a good war and that it is right that more lives and money should be pointlessly lost to it.

Everyone must act for the cause in these dire times. You have Chuck Schumer in Kyiv last week trying to show House Republicans that they should truly, really authorize the Biden regime to spend an additional $61 billion on its proxy war with Russia. “Everyone we saw, from Zelensky on down made this very point clear,” the Democratic senator from New York asserted in an interview with The New York Times. “If Ukraine gets the aid, they will win the war and beat Russia.”

Even at this late hour people still have the nerve to say such things.

You have European leaders gathering in Paris Monday to reassure one another of their unity behind the Kyiv regime—and where Emmanuel Macron refused to rule out sending NATO ground troops to the Ukrainian front. “Russia cannot and must not win this war,” the French president declared to his guests at the Elysée Palace.

Except that it can and, barring an act of God, it will.

Then you have Jens Stoltenberg, NATO’s war-mongering sec-gen, telling Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty last week that it will be fine if Kyiv uses F–16s to attack Russian cities once they are operational this summer. The U.S.–made fighter jets, the munitions, the money—all of it is essential “to ensure Russia doesn’t make further gains.” Stephen Bryen, formerly a deputy undersecretary at the Defense Department, offered an excellent response to this over the weekend in his Weapons and Strategy newsletter: “Fire Jens Stoltenberg before it is too late.”

Good thought, but Stoltenberg, Washington’s longtime water-carrier in Brussels, is merely doing his job as assigned: Keep up the illusions as to Kyiv’s potency and along with it the Russophobia, the more primitive the better. You do not get fired for irresponsible rhetoric that risks something that might look a lot like World War III.

What would a propaganda blitz of this breadth and stupidity be without an entry from The New York Times? Given the extent to which The Times has abandoned all professional principle in the service of the power it is supposed to report upon, you just knew it would have to get in on this one.

The Times has published very numerous pieces in recent weeks on the necessity of keeping the war going and the urgency of a House vote authorizing that $61 billion Biden’s national security people want to send Ukraine. But never mind all those daily stories. Last Sunday it came out with its big banana. “The Spy War: How the C.I.A. Secretly Helps Ukraine Fight Putin” sprawls—lengthy text, numerous photographs. The latter show the usual wreckage—cars, apartment buildings, farmhouses, a snowy dirt road lined with landmines. But the story that goes with it is other than usual.

Somewhere in Washington, someone appears to have decided it was time to let the Central Intelligence Agency’s presence and programs in Ukraine be known. And someone in Langley, the CIA’s headquarters, seems to have decided this will be O.K., a useful thing to do. When I say the agency’s presence and programs, I mean some: We get a very partial picture of the CIA’s doings in Ukraine, as the lies of omission—not to mention the lies of commission—are numerous in this piece. But what The Times published last weekend, all 5,500 words of it, tells us more than had been previously made public.

Let us consider this unusually long takeout carefully for what it is and how it came to make page one of last Sunday’s editions.

In a recent commentary I reflected on the mess The Times landed in when it published a thoroughly discredited p.o.s.—and I leave readers to understand this newsroom expression—on the sexual violence Hamas militias allegedly committed last Oct. 7. I described a corrupt but routinized relationship between the organs of official power and the journalists charged with reporting on official power, likening it to a foie gras farmer feeding his geese: The Times’s journalists opened wide and swallowed. For appearances’ sake, they then set about dressing up what they ingested as independently reported work. This is the routine.

It is the same, yet more obviously, with this extended piece on the CIA’s activities in Ukraine. Adam Entous and Michael Schwirtz tell the story of—this the subhead—“a secret intelligence partnership with Ukraine that is now critical for both countries in countering Russia.” They set the scene in a below-ground monitoring and communications center the CIA showed Ukrainian intel how to build beneath the wreckage of an army outpost destroyed in a Russian missile attack. They report on the archipelago of such places the agency paid for, designed, equipped, and now helps operate. Twelve of these, please note, are along Ukraine’s border with Russia.

Entous and Schwirtz, it is time to mention, are not based in Ukraine. They operate from Washington and New York respectively. This indicates clearly enough the genesis of “The Spy War.” There was no breaking down of doors involved here, no intrepid correspondents digging, no tramping around in Ukraine’s mud and cold, unguided. The CIA handed these two material according to what it wanted and did not want disclosed, and various officials associated with it made themselves available as “sources”—none of the American sources named, per usual.

Are we supposed to think these reporters found the underground bunker and all the other such installations by dint of their “investigation”—a term they have the gall to use as they describe what they did? And then they developed some kind of grand exposé of all the agency wanted to keep hidden? Is this it?

Sheer pretense, nothing more. Entous and Schwirtz opened wide and got fed. There appears to be nothing in what they wrote that was not effectively authorized, and we can probably do without “effectively.”

There is also the question of sources. Entous and Schwirtz say they conducted 200 interviews to get this piece done. If they did, and I will stay with my “if,” they do not seem to have been very good interviews to go by the published piece. And however many interviews they did, this must still be counted a one-source story, given that everyone quoted in it reflects the same perspective and so reinforces, more or less, what everyone else quoted has to say. The sources appear to have been handed to Entous and Schwirtz as was access to the underground bunker.

The narrative thread woven through the piece is interesting. It is all about the two-way, can’t-do-without-it cooperation between the CIA and Ukraine’s main intel services—the SBU (the domestic spy agency) and military intelligence, which goes by HUR. In this the piece reads like a difficult courtship that leads to a happy-at-last consummation. It took a long time for the Americans to trust the Ukrainians, we read, as they, the Americans, assumed the SBU was thick with Russian double agents. But the Ukrainian spooks enticed them with stacks and stacks of intelligence that seems to have astonished the CIA people on the ground and back in Langley.

So, a tale with two moving parts: The Americans helped the Ukrainians get their technology, methods, and all-around spookery up to snuff, and the Ukrainians made themselves indispensable to the Americans by providing wads of raw intel. Entous and Schwirtz describe this symbiosis as “one of Washington’s most important intelligence partners against the Kremlin today.” Here is how a former American official put it, as The Times quotes him or her:

The relationships only got stronger and stronger because both sides saw value in it, and the U.S. Embassy in Kyiv—our station there, the operation out of Ukraine—became the best source of information, signals and everything else, on Russia. We couldn’t get enough of it.

As to omissions and commissions, there are things left out in this piece, events that are blurred, assertions that are simply untrue and proven to be so. What amazes me is how far back Entous and Schwirtz reach to dredge up all this stuff—even to the point they make fools of themselves and remind us of the Times’s dramatic loss of credibility since the current round of Russophobia took hold a decade ago.

Entous and Schwirtz begin their account of the CIA–SBU/HUR alliance in 2014, when the U.S. cultivated the coup in Kyiv that brought the present regime to power and ultimately led to Russia’s military intervention. But no mention of the U.S. role in it. They write, “The CIA’s partnership in Ukraine can be traced back to two phone calls on the night of Feb. 24, 2014, eight years to the day before Russia’s full-scale invasion.” Neat, granular, but absolutely false. The coup began three days earlier, on Feb. 21, and as Vladimir Putin reminded Tucker Carlson during the latter’s Feb. 6 interview with the Russian president, it was the CIA that did the groundwork.

I confess a special affection for this one: “The Ukrainians also helped the Americans go after the Russian operatives who meddled in the 2016 U.S. presidential election,” Entous and Schwirtz write. And later in the piece, this:

In one joint operation, a[n] HUR team duped an officer from Russia’s military intelligence service into providing information that allowed the C.I.A. to connect Russia’s government to the so-called Fancy Bear hacking group, which had been linked to election interference efforts in a number of countries.

Wonderful. Extravagantly nostalgic for that twilight interim that began eight years ago, when nothing had to be true so long as it explained why Hillary Clinton lost to Donald Trump, and why Donald Trump is No. 1 among America’s “deplorables.”

I have never seen evidence of Russian government interference in another nation’s elections, including America’s in 2016, and I will say with confidence you haven’t, either. All that came to be associated with the Russiagate fable, starting with the never-happened hack of the Democratic Party’s mail, was long ago revealed to be concocted junk. As to “Fancy Bear,” and its cousin “Cozy Bear”—monikers almost certainly cooked up over a long, fun lunch in Langley—for the umpteenth time these are not groups of hackers or any other sort of human being: They are sets of digital tools available to anyone who wants to use them.

Sloppy, tiresome. But to a purpose. Why, then? What is The Times’s purpose in publishing this piece?

We can start, logically enough, with that desperation evident among those dedicated to prolonging the war. The outcome of the war, in my read and in the view of various military analysts, does not depend on the $61 billion in aid that now hangs in the balance. But the Biden regime seems to think it does, or pretends to think it does. The Times’s most immediate intent, so far as one can make out from the piece, is to add what degree of urgency it can to this question.

Entous and Schwirtz report that the people running Ukrainian intelligence are nervous that without a House vote releasing new funds “the CIA will abandon them.” Good enough that it boosts the case to cite nervous Ukrainians, but we should recognize that this is a misapprehension. The CIA has a very large budget entirely independent of what Congress votes one way or another. William Burns, the CIA director, traveled to Kyiv two weeks ago to reassure his counterparts that “the U.S. commitment will continue,” as Entous and Schwirtz quote him saying. This is perfectly true, assuming Burns referred to the agency’s commitment.

More broadly, The Times piece appears amid flagging enthusiasm for the Ukraine project. And it is in this circumstance that Entous and Schwirtz went long on the benefits accruing to the CIA in consequence of its presence on the ground in Ukraine. But read these two reporters carefully: They, or whoever put their piece in its final shape, make it clear that the agency’s operations on Ukrainian soil count first and most as a contribution to Washington’s long campaign to undermine the Russian Federation. This is not about Ukrainian democracy, that figment of neoliberal propagandists. It is about Cold War II, plain and simple. It is time to reinvigorate the old Russophobia, thus—and hence all the baloney about Russians corrupting elections and so on. It is all there for a reason.

To gather these thoughts and summarize, This piece is not journalism and should not be read as such. Neither do Entous and Schwirtz serve as journalists. They are clerks of the governing class pretending to be journalists while they post notices on a bulletin board that pretends to be a newspaper.

■

Let’s dolly out to put this piece in its historical context and consider the implications of its appearance in the once-but-fallen newspaper of record. Let’s think about the early 1970s, when it first began to emerge that the CIA had compromised the American media and broadcasters.

Jack Anderson, the admirably iconoclastic columnist, lifted the lid on the agency’s infiltration of the media by way of a passing mention of a corrupted correspondent in 1973. A year later a former Los Angeles Times correspondent named Stuart Loory published the first extensive exploration of relations between the CIA and the media in the Columbia Journalism Review. Then, in 1976, the Church Committee opened its famous hearings in the Senate. It took up all sorts of agency malfeasance—assassinations, coups, illegal covert ops. Its intent was also to disrupt the agency’s misuse of American media and restore the latter to their independence and integrity.

The Church Committee is still widely remembered for getting its job done. But it never did. A year after Church produced its six-volume report, Rolling Stone published “The CIA and the Media,” Carl Bernstein’s well-known piece. Bernstein went considerably beyond the Church Committee, demonstrating that it pulled its punches rather than pull the plug on the CIA’s intrusions in the media. Faced with the prospect of forcing the CIA to sever all covert ties with the media, a senator Bernstein did not name remarked, “We just weren’t ready to take that step.”

We should read The Times’s piece on the righteousness of the CIA’s activities in Ukraine—bearing in mind the self-evident cooperation between the agency and the newspaper—with this history in mind.

America was just emerging from the disgraces of the McCarthyist period when Stuart Loory opened the door on this question, the Church Committee convened, and Carl Bernstein filled in the blanks. In and out of the profession there was disgust at the covert relationship between media and the spooks. Now look. What was then viewed as top-to-bottom objectionable is now routinized. It is “as usual.” In my read this is one consequence among many of the Russiagate years: They again plunged Americans and their mainstream media into the same paranoia that produced the corruptions of the 1950s and 1960s.

Alas, the scars of the swoon we call Russiagate are many and run deep.

……………………

Patrick Lawrence, a correspondent abroad for many years, chiefly for the International Herald Tribune , is a media critic, essayist, author and lecturer. His new book, Journalists and Their Shadows , is out now from Clarity Press. His website is Patrick Lawrence. Support his work via his Patreon site.

(Republished from Scheerpost)