Author Archives: Reid Mukai

The New Abnormal: Authoritarian Control Freaks Want to Micromanage Our Lives

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By By John & Nisha Whitehead

Source: The Rutherford Institute

“Man is born free but everywhere is in chains.”—Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Authoritarian control freaks out to micromanage our lives have become the new normal or, to be more accurate, the new abnormal when it comes to how the government relates to the citizenry.

This overbearing despotism, which pre-dates the COVID-19 hysteria, is the very definition of a Nanny State, where government representatives (those elected and appointed to work for us) adopt the authoritarian notion that the government knows best and therefore must control, regulate and dictate almost everything about the citizenry’s public, private and professional lives.

Indeed, it’s a dangerous time for anyone who still clings to the idea that freedom means the right to think for yourself and act responsibly according to your best judgment.

This tug-of-war for control and sovereignty over our selves impacts almost every aspect of our lives, whether you’re talking about decisions relating to our health, our homes, how we raise our children, what we consume, what we drive, what we wear, how we spend our money, how we protect ourselves and our loved ones, and even who we associate with and what we think.

As Liz Wolfe writes for Reason, “Little things that make people’s lives better, tastier, and less tedious are being cracked down on by big government types in federal and state governments.”

You can’t even buy a stove, a dishwasher, a showerhead, a leaf blower, or a lightbulb anymore without running afoul of the Nanny State.

In this way, under the guise of pseudo-benevolence, the government has meted out this bureaucratic tyranny in such a way as to nullify the inalienable rights of the individual and limit our choices to those few that the government deems safe enough.

Yet limited choice is no choice at all. Likewise, regulated freedom is no freedom at all.

Indeed, as a study by the Cato Institute concludes, for the average American, freedom has declined generally over the past 20 years. As researchers William Ruger and Jason Sorens explain, “We ground our conception of freedom on an individual rights framework. In our view, individuals should be allowed to dispose of their lives, liberties, and property as they see fit, so long as they do not infringe on the rights of others.”

The overt signs of the despotism exercised by the increasingly authoritarian regime that passes itself off as the United States government (and its corporate partners in crime) are all around us: censorship, criminalizing, shadow banning and de-platforming of individuals who express ideas that are politically incorrect or unpopular; warrantless surveillance of Americans’ movements and communications; SWAT team raids of Americans’ homes; shootings of unarmed citizens by police; harsh punishments meted out to schoolchildren in the name of zero tolerance; community-wide lockdowns and health mandates that strip Americans of their freedom of movement and bodily integrity; armed drones taking to the skies domestically; endless wars; out-of-control spending; militarized police; roadside strip searches; privatized prisons with a profit incentive for jailing Americans; fusion centers that spy on, collect and disseminate data on Americans’ private transactions; and militarized agencies with stockpiles of ammunition, to name some of the most appalling.

Yet as egregious as these incursions on our rights may be, it’s the endless, petty tyrannies—the heavy-handed, punitive-laden dictates inflicted by a self-righteous, Big-Brother-Knows-Best bureaucracy on an overtaxed, overregulated, and underrepresented populace—that illustrate so clearly the degree to which “we the people” are viewed as incapable of common sense, moral judgment, fairness, and intelligence, not to mention lacking a basic understanding of how to stay alive, raise a family, or be part of a functioning community.

When the dictates of petty bureaucrats carry greater weight than the individual rights of the citizenry, we’re in trouble, folks.

Federal and state governments have used the law as a bludgeon to litigate, legislate and micromanage our lives through overregulation and overcriminalization.

This is what happens when bureaucrats run the show, and the rule of law becomes little more than a cattle prod for forcing the citizenry to march in lockstep with the government.

Overregulation is just the other side of the coin to overcriminalization, that phenomenon in which everything is rendered illegal, and everyone becomes a lawbreaker.

You don’t have to look far to find abundant examples of Nanny State laws that infantilize individuals and strip them of their ability to decide things for themselves. Back in 2012, then-New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg infamously proposed a ban on the sale of sodas and large sugary drinks in order to guard against obesity. Other localities enacted bans on texting while jaywalking, wearing saggy pants, having too much mud on your car, smoking outdoors, storing trash in your car, improperly sorting your trash, cursing within earshot of others, or screeching your tires.

Yet while there are endless ways for the Nanny State to micromanage our lives, things become truly ominous when the government adopts mechanisms enabling it to monitor us for violations in order to enforce its many laws.

Nanny State, meet the all-seeing, all-knowing Surveillance State and its sidekick, the muscle-flexing Police State.

You see, in an age of overcriminalization—when the law is wielded like a hammer to force compliance to the government’s dictates whatever they might be—you don’t have to do anything “wrong” to be fined, arrested or subjected to raids and seizures and surveillance.

You just have to refuse to march in lockstep with the government.

As policy analyst Michael Van Beek warns, the problem with overcriminalization is that there are so many laws at the federal, state and local levels—that we can’t possibly know them all.

“It’s also impossible to enforce all these laws. Instead, law enforcement officials must choose which ones are important and which are not. The result is that they pick the laws Americans really must follow, because they’re the ones deciding which laws really matter,” concludes Van Beek. “Federal, state and local regulations — rules created by unelected government bureaucrats — carry the same force of law and can turn you into a criminal if you violate any one of them… if we violate these rules, we could be prosecuted as criminals. No matter how antiquated or ridiculous, they still carry the full force of the law. By letting so many of these sit around, just waiting to be used against us, we increase the power of law enforcement, which has lots of options to charge people with legal and regulatory violations.”

This is the police state’s superpower: empowered by the Nanny State, it has been vested with the authority to make our lives a bureaucratic hell.

Indeed, if you were unnerved by the rapid deterioration of privacy under the Surveillance State, prepare to be terrified by the surveillance matrix that will be ushered in by the Nanny State working in tandem with the Police State.

The government’s response to COVID-19 saddled us with a Nanny State inclined to use its draconian pandemic powers to protect us from ourselves.

The groundwork laid with COVID-19 is a prologue to what will become the police state’s conquest of a new, relatively uncharted, frontier: inner space, specifically, the inner workings (genetic, biological, biometric, mental, emotional) of the human race.

Consider how many more ways the government could “protect us” from ourselves under the guise of public health and safety.

For instance, under the guise of public health and safety, the government could use mental health care as a pretext for targeting and locking up dissidents, activists and anyone unfortunate enough to be placed on a government watch list.

When combined with advances in mass surveillance technologies, artificial intelligence-powered programs that can track people by their biometrics and behavior, mental health sensor data (tracked by wearable data and monitored by government agencies such as HARPA), threat assessments, behavioral sensing warnings, precrime initiatives, red flag gun laws, and mental health first-aid programs aimed at training gatekeepers to identify who might pose a threat to public safety, these preemptive mental health programs could well signal a tipping point in the government’s efforts to penalize those engaging in so-called “thought crimes.”

This is how it begins.

On a daily basis, Americans are already relinquishing (in many cases, voluntarily) the most intimate details of who we are—their biological makeup, our genetic blueprints, and our biometrics (facial characteristics and structure, fingerprints, iris scans, etc.)—in order to navigate an increasingly technologically-enabled world.

Having conditioned the population to the idea that being part of society is a privilege and not a right, such access could easily be predicated on social credit scores, the worthiness of one’s political views, or the extent to which one is willing to comply with the government’s dictates, no matter what they might be.

COVID-19 with its talk of mass testing, screening checkpoints, contact tracing, immunity passports, and snitch tip lines for reporting “rule breakers” to the authorities was a preview of what’s to come.

We should all be leery and afraid.

At a time when the government has a growing list—shared with fusion centers and law enforcement agencies—of ideologies, behaviors, affiliations and other characteristics that could flag someone as suspicious and result in their being labeled potential enemies of the state, it won’t take much for any of us to be considered outlaws or terrorists.

After all, the government likes to use the words “anti-government,” “extremist” and “terrorist” interchangeably. The Department of Homeland Security broadly defines extremists as individuals “that are mainly antigovernment, rejecting federal authority in favor of state or local authority, or rejecting government authority entirely.”

At some point, being an individualist will be considered as dangerous as being a terrorist.

When anything goes when it’s done in the name of national security, crime fighting and terrorism, “we the people” have little to no protection against SWAT team raids, domestic surveillance, police shootings of unarmed citizens, indefinite detentions, and the like, whether or  not you’ve done anything wrong.

In an age of overcriminalization, you’re already a criminal.

All the government needs is proof of your law-breaking. They’ll get it, too.

Whether it’s through the use of surveillance software such as ShadowDragon that allows police to watch people’s social media activity, or technology that uses a home’s WiFi router and smart appliances to allow those on the outside to “see” throughout your home, it’s just a matter of time.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, it’s no longer a question of whether the government will lock up Americans for defying one of its numerous mandates but when.

Saturday Matinee: White God

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WHITE GOD (2014): DOGS FIGHT BACK

By Dawn Keetley

Source: Horror Homeroom

Summary of White God: Thirteen-year old Lili (Zsófia Psotta) moves in with her father who proves unwilling to pay the fees incumbent on the owners of mongrel dogs. He thus forces Lili to abandon her beloved Hagen on the streets of Budapest. The film follows the dual paths of Lili and Hagen as they, finally, find their way back to each other.

I loved White God (I’ll get that out up front), which premiered at the 2014 Cannes Film Festival and recently become widely available in the US. White God is a particularly interesting intervention in the horror genre in that it is the only film I can think of in which the animal (Hagen) becomes the protagonist rather than the antagonist. In all the other natural horror films I’ve seen recently, animals (wolves, sharks, crocodiles, bears) threaten more-or-less sympathetic humans. White God stands alone in showing how profoundly humans threaten animals.

White God is about two-hours long and I’ll warn you up front that it doesn’t become a horror film until about 30 minutes from the end. Only then does the beautifully shape-shifting form of the film end up as a revenge narrative (I couldn’t help comparing it to I Spit on Your Grave [1978]). And while both its human protagonist, Lili, and its dog protagonist, Hagen, are both, in their different ways, abandoned, it’s Hagen who suffers most and who ends up getting his justified revenge.

Up to that point, though, the director brilliantly weaves together resonances of childhood stories like Anna Sewall’s Black Beauty (1877), Sheila Burnford’s The Incredible Journey (1961), filmed in 1963 and again, as Homeward Bound, in 1993, and William H. Armstrong’s Sounder (1969), along with direct references to Jack London’s fiction, notably White Fang (1906).

In fact, White God‘s title is undoubtedly taken from White Fang, as Hagen’s adventures among the uniformly despicable humans that populate Budapest resemble almost exactly a portion of White Fang’s life with a man London pointedly calls the “mad god.” White Fang’s first encounters with humans are with Native Americans—and while they are certainly not positive, their barbarity pales in comparison to the brutality of his first encounters with white men, whom White Fang calls “white gods.” As London writes: “White Fang did not reason it out, did not in his mind make the sharp generalization that the white gods were more powerful.”[i] But so they are—and most of them do not use their power well. The mad “white god” that serves as the clear progenitor to a character Hagen has the misfortune to meet in White God takes White Fang and subjects him to an abusive training program designed to make him a vicious fighter. The training works well, and White Fang goes on to defeat every dog in the Yukon, as well as sundry wolves and a lynx.

Unlike White Fang, Hagen defies his training at a crucial moment, though. At first he goes along with it, acceding to his master’s desire. But then, at the end of his first fight, Hagen looks at his dead rival and has a realization that White Fang does not. Dogs aren’t the enemy.[ii]

From that moment, looking at the bloodied body of the dog he fleetingly thought was his rival, Hagen knows exactly who the enemy really is. He then rounds up all the stray dogs in Budapest, urging them into revolt.

While White God works as a powerful parable of the uprising of animals against their domination and brutalization by humans, it can also be read as an allegory for human oppression. The title, White God, along with the racial hierarchies (of Native Americans and whites) that it imports from White Fang, suggest that the dogs are also stand-ins for those humans who are cast aside because they are not “white,” because they are “mutts” and “half-breeds.” The current crisis in Europe over immigrants, mostly from Syria, and Hungary’s contentious role in that crisis, only intensifies this allegory, as the film has already begun to accrue meanings beyond its moment of inception.

As the dogs stream through Budapest’s streets, exhilarated by their collective power, the film unequivocally becomes a horror film, and the dogs invoke the zombies that streamed through London and Paris in 28 Days Later (Danny Boyle, 2002) and 28 Weeks Later (Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, 2007).

While it is indeed exhilarating to see them, the dogs’ resemblance to zombies infuses these scenes with sadness and dread. Does this resemblance foreshadow their eventual doom? What can dogs do, in the end, in the face of determined human opposition? Do they really have any choice but to submit to their role of our “best friends” as their best means of survival? Despite how bad so many of us are at being their “friend.”

The ending of White God, after Hagen’s glorious and bloody revenge, is ambiguous. Hagen meets Lili again but she’s changed: we’ve seen her shift much more of her allegiance toward humans during the course of her journey (which I found much less gripping than Hagen’s). There’s a scene, which we see right at the opening of the film and then near the end, in which dogs run furiously as Lili pedals her bike. Are they chasing Lili? Is she leading them? Are they both on separate journeys, the dogs indifferent to her? The answer becomes only a bit clearer in the second reiteration of the scene.

The ending presents us with an image that is on all the posters for the film—and its meaning is ambiguous too.

Clearly Lili figures as some kind of “god” figure here, for Hagen and the other dogs: she has become the “white god” of the title. But will she use her power to save the dogs? Or will she merely appease them until others come to destroy them. You can make up your own mind. Me? I’m not hopeful.

R   |   121 mins.   |   Kornél Mundruczó   |   Hungary   |   2014

Grade: A

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Watch White God on Kanopy here: https://www.kanopy.com/en/product/2332130

Slouching Towards the Final Solution

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By Pepe Escobar

Source: The Unz Review

You have stolen the orchards of my ancestors
And the land that I cultivated
And you left nothing for us
Except for these rocks…
If I become hungry
The usurper’s flesh will be my food.

– Palestinian national poet Mahmoud Darwish

It’s by now confirmed that Egyptian intel warned their Israeli counterparts only 3 days before Al-Aqsa Flood that something “big” was coming from Hamas. Tel Aviv, its multi-billion dollar security apparatus and the IDF, “the strongest army in the world”, chose to ignore it.

That configures two key vectors.

1) Tel Aviv get its “Pearl Harbor” pretext to implement a remixed “war on terror” plus a sort of Final Solution to the “Gaza problem” (already in effect).

2) The Hegemon abruptly changes the narrative away from the incoming, inevitable, cosmic joint humiliation of the White House and NATO in the steppes of Novorossiya – a strategic defeat that configures the previous humiliation in Afghanistan as a masked ball in Disneyland.

The total blockade of “human animals” (copyright Israeli Defense Ministry) in Gaza, in fact a civilian population of 2.3 million, has been imposed this past Monday. No food, no water, no fuel, no essential commodities.

That’s a war crime and a crime against humanity, thrashing the four basic principles of the

Law of Armed Conflict (LOAC) – everything duly applauded or at best completely ignored by NATOstan and its assorted oligarch-controlled mainstream media.

Christians, Muslims, Jews and other ethnic groups lived peacefully in Palestine for centuries until the imposition of the racist Zionist Project – complete with all the Divide and Rule attributes of settler colonialism.

The Nakba is an old memory of 75 years ago. We are now way beyond apartheid – and entering total exclusion and expulsion of Palestinians from their homeland.

In January 2023, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu himself stressed, “the Jewish people have an exclusive and unquestionable right to all areas of the Land of Israel.”

Now, the IDF sent no less than an order to the UN to completely evacuate all residents of northern Gaza – 1.1 million people – to southern Gaza, close to Rafah, the only border crossing with Egypt.

This forced mass deportation of civilians would be the prelude to raze all of northern Gaza to the ground, coupled with expulsion and confiscation of ancestral Palestinian land – edging closer to a Zionist Final Solution.

Welcome to Sociopaths United

Netanyahu, a sociopath with a proven track record, can only get away with serial war crimes because of total support by the White House, the “Biden” combo and the State Department – not to mention inconsequential EU vassals.

We just witnessed a U.S. Secretary of State – a low-IQ functionary out of his depth on every single issue – going to Israel to support collective punishment “as a Jew as well”.

He said his grandfather “fled pogroms in Russia” (that was in 1904). Then came the direct – Nazi – connection to “my stepfather survived Auschwitz, Dachau and Majdanek”. Impressive, that’s three concentration camps in a row. The secretary is obviously oblivious to the fact that the USSR liberated all three.

Then came the connection Russia-Nazis-Hamas. At least it’s all clear.

Internally, Netanyahu is only able to stay as Prime Minister because of especially two rabid ultra-Zionist, racist, supremacist coalition partners. He named Itamar Ben-Gvir as National Security Minister and Bezalel Smotrich as Finance Minister – both de facto in charge of proliferating settlements all across the West Bank in industrial scale.

Smotrich has been on the record saying that “there is no such thing as Palestinians because there is no such thing as a Palestinian people”.

Ben-Gvir and Smotrich, in record time, are on their way to double the settler population in the cantons across the West Bank from 500,000 to one million. Palestinians – de facto non-citizens – number 3.7 million. lllegal settlements – not formally approved by Tel Aviv – are popping up all across the spectrum.

In Gaza – where poverty hovers at 60% and youth unemployment is massive – UN agencies desperately warn of an impending humanitarian catastrophe.

Over 1 million people in Gaza, mostly women and children, depend on UN food assistance. Tens of thousands of kids go to UNRWA schools (UNRWA is the agency for Palestinian refugees).

Tel Aviv is now killing them – softly. At least 11 UNRWA workers have been killed this past week (including teachers, a doctor and an engineer), at least 30 kids, plus 5 members of the International Red Cross and Red Crescent.

To top it all up, there’s the Pipelineistan angle – as in stealing Gaza gas.

At least 60% of the vast gas reserves discovered in 2000 along the Gaza-Israel coastline legally belong to Palestine.

A key consequence of the Final Solution applied to Gaza translates as sovereignty over the gas fields switched to Israel – in yet another massive trampling of international law.

The Global Majority is Palestine

Amid the horrifying prospect of Israel depopulating the entire northern half of Gaza, live on TV and cheered on by hordes of NATOstan zombies, it’s not far-fetched to consider the possibility of Turkiye, Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Iran, Lebanon, Yemen and the Gulf monarchies joining together, at various levels, to create overwhelming pressure against the implementation of the Zionist Final Solution.

Virtually the whole Global South/Global Majority is with Palestine.

Turkiye, problematically, is not an Arab nation and has been too ideologically close to Hamas in the recent past. Assuming the current Netanyahu gang would engage in diplomacy, the possible best mediation team would be formed by Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Egyptian diplomacy.

India has just stabbed itself in the head as a leader of the Global Majority: their leadership does seem to get a hard on when facing Israel.

Then there are the Big Sovereigns: the Russia-China strategic partnership.

Russia-Iran are themselves connected by a strategic partnership – including at all state of the art military levels. The Iran-Saudi rapprochement mediated and clinched by China has led, this week, to Mohammad bin Salman and Ebrahim Raisi on the phone, for the first time ever, coordinating their unwavering support to the legitimate rights of the Palestinian people. Syria’s Bashar al-Assad has just visited China, received with full honors.

China’s trademark diplomatic sophistication – way beyond Al-Aqsa Flood – amounts to supporting legitimate Palestinian rights. The whole Arab world and the lands of Islam clearly feel it – while Israel and NATOstan are impervious to nuance.

With Russia we reach heavy metal territory. Earlier this week, Israel’s ambassador to Russia, Alexander Ben Zvi, was finally received, after several attempts by Deputy Foreign Minister Mikhail Bogdanov. It was Israel who practically begged for a meeting.

Bogdanov cut to the chase, bluntly: Ben Zvi was warned that the IDF plan to literally destroy Gaza, expel the indigenous population and practice the ethnic cleansing of those “human animals” was “fraught with the most devastating consequences for the humanitarian situation in the region.”

That advances a quite possible scenario – whose consequences can be equally devastating: Moscow – in collaboration with Ankara – launching a Global South-supported blockade-busting operation against Israel.

It’s no secret – apart from the modus operandi – that Putin and Erdogan have discussed a possible Turkish humanitarian naval convoy to Gaza, which would be protected from an Israeli attack by the Russian Navy out of its Tartous base in Syria and the Russian air Force out of Hmeimim. That would raise the stakes to unforeseen levels.

What’s clear already is that the Hegemon proxy war against Russia in Ukraine and the Israeli “war on terror” remixed in Gaza are just parallel fronts of a single, horrifyingly evolving, global war.

“Humanitarian Imperialism Created the Libyan Nightmare.”

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NATO’s military intervention in Libya in 2011, which overthrew the regime of Muammar Gaddafi, resulted in a chaotic and murderous failed state. Libyans pay a horrific price for this catastrophe.

Business is Booming – by Mr. Fish

By Chris Hedges

Source: The Chris Hedges Report

“We came, we saw, he died,” Hillary Clinton famously quipped when Muammar Gaddafi, after seven months of U.S. and NATO bombing, was overthrown in 2011 and killed by a mob who sodomized him with a bayonet. But Gaddafi would not be the only one to die.  Libya, once the most prosperous and one of the most stable countries in Africa, a country with free healthcare and education, the right for all citizens to a home, subsidized electricity, water and gasoline, along with the lowest infant mortality rate and highest life expectancy on the continent, along with one of the highest literacy rates, swiftly fragmented into warring factions. There are currently two rival regimes battling for control in Libya, along with an array of rogue militias. 

The chaos that followed Western intervention saw weapons from the country’s arsenals flood the black market, with many snatched up by groups such as the Islamic State. Civil society ceased to function. Journalists captured images of migrants from Nigeria, Senegal and Eritrea being beaten and sold as slaves to work in fields or on construction sites. Libya’s infrastructure, including its electrical grids, aquifers, oil fields and dams, fell into disrepair. And when the torrential rains from Storm Daniel —  the climate crisis being another gift to Africa from the industrialized world — overwhelmed two decrepit dams, walls of water 20 feet high raced down to flood the port of Derna and Benghazi, leaving up to 20,000 dead according to Abdulmenam Al-Gaiti, Mayor of Derna, and some 10,000 missing. 

“The fragmentation of the country’s disaster management and disaster response mechanisms, as well as deteriorating infrastructure, exacerbated the enormity of the challenges. The political situation is a driver of risk,” said Professor Petteri Taalas, Secretary General of the World Meteorological Organization.

Taalas told reporters last Thursday that “most of the human casualties” would have been avoided if there had been a “normally operating meteorological service” which “would have issued the [necessary] warnings and also the emergency management of this would have been able to carry out evacuations of the people.”

Western regime-change, carried out in the name of human rights under the doctrine of R2P (Responsibility to Protect), destroyed Libya – as it did Iraq – as a unified and stable nation. The flood victims are part of the tens of thousands of Libyan dead resulting from our “humanitarian intervention,” which rendered disaster relief non-existent. We bear responsibility for Libya’s prolonged suffering. But once we wreak havoc on a country in the name of saving its persecuted — regardless of whether they are being persecuted or not — we forget they exist. 

Karl Popper in “The Open Society and Its Enemies” warned against utopian engineering, massive social transformations, almost always implanted by force, and led by those who believe they are endowed with a revealed truth. These utopian engineers carry out the wholesale destruction of systems, institutions and social and cultural structures in a vain effort to achieve their vision. In the process, they dismantle the self-correcting mechanisms of incremental and piecemeal reform that are impediments to that grand vision. History is replete with murderous utopian social engineering — the Jacobins, the communists, the fascists and now, in our own age, the globalists, or neoliberal imperialists.

Libya, like Iraq and Afghanistan, fell victim to the self-delusions peddled by humanitarian interventionists — Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Ben Rhodes, Samantha Power and Susan Rice. The Obama administration armed and backed an insurgent force that they believed would do the bidding of the U.S.  Obama in a recent post urged people to support aid agencies to alleviate the suffering of the people of Libya, a plea that ignited an understandable backlash on social media.

There is no official tally of the casualties in Libya that have resulted directly and indirectly from the violence in Libya over the last 12 years. This is exacerbated by the fact that NATO failed to investigate casualties resulting from its seven month bombardment of the country in 2011. But the total figure of those killed and injured is likely in the tens of thousands. Action on Armed Violence recorded “8,518 deaths and injuries from explosive violence in Libya” from 2011 to 2020,  6,027 of which were civilian casualties.

In 2020, a statement published by seven U.N. agencies reported that “Close to 400,000 Libyans have been displaced since the start of the conflict nine years ago — around half of them within the past year, since the attack on the capital, Tripoli, [by Field Marshal Khalifa Belqasim Haftar’s forces] started.”

“The Libyan economy has been battered by the [civil war], the COVID-19 pandemic, and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine,” the World Bank reported in April of this year. “The country’s fragility is having far-reaching economic and social impact. GDP per capita declined by 50 percent between 2011 and 2020 while it could have increased by 68 percent if the economy had followed its pre-conflict trend,” the report says. “This suggests that Libya’s income per capita could have been 118 percent higher without the conflict. Economic growth in 2022 remained low and volatile due to conflict-related disruptions in oil production.”

Amnesty International’s 2022 Libya report also makes for grim reading. “Militias, armed groups and security forces continued to arbitrarily detain thousands of people,” it says. “Scores of protesters, lawyers, journalists, critics and activists were rounded up and subjected to torture and other ill-treatment, enforced disappearances and forced ‘confessions’ on camera.” Amnesty describes a country where militias operate with impunity, human rights abuses, including kidnappings and sexual violence, are widespread. It adds that “EU-backed Libyan coastguards and the Stability Support Authority militia intercepted thousands of refugees and migrants at sea and forcibly returned them to detention in Libya. Detained migrants and refugees were subjected to torture, unlawful killings, sexual violence and forced labour.”

Reports by the U.N. Support Mission to Libya (UNSMIL) are no less dire.

Stockpiles of weapons and ammunition — estimated to be between 150,000 and 200,000 tons — were looted from Libya with many being trafficked to neighboring states. In Mali, weapons from Libya fuelled a dormant insurgency by the Tuareg, destabilizing the country. It ultimately led to a military coup and a jihadist insurgency which supplanted the Tuareg, as well as a protracted war between the Malian government and jihadists.  This triggered another French military intervention and led to 400,000 people being displaced. Weapons and ammunition from Libya also made their way into other parts of the Sahel including Chad, Niger, Nigeria and Burkina Faso. 

The misery and carnage, which rippled out from a dismembered Libya, was unleashed in the name of democratization, nation-building, promoting the rule of law and human rights. 

The pretext for the assault was that Gaddafi was about to launch a military operation to massacre civilians in Benghazi where rebellious forces had seized power. It had as much substance as the charge that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, another example of utopian social engineering that left over a million Iraqi dead and millions more driven from their homes. 

Gaddafi — who I interviewed for two hours in April 1995 near the gutted remains of his home that was bombed by U.S. warplanes in 1986 — and Hussein were targeted not because of what they did to their own people, although both could be brutal. They were targeted because their nations had large oil reserves and were independent of Western control. They renegotiated more favorable contracts for their nations with Western oil producers and awarded oil contracts to China and Russia. Gaddafi also gave the Russian fleet access to the port of Benghazi.

Hillary Clinton’s emails, obtained via a freedom of information request and published by WikiLeaks, also expose France’s concerns about Gaddafi’s efforts to “provide Francophone African Countries with an alternative to the French Fran (CFA).” Sidney Blumenthal, a longtime adviser to Clinton, reported on his conversations with French intelligence officers about the motivations of French President Nicholas Sarkozy, the chief architect of the attack on Libya. Blumenthal writes that the French president seeks “a greater share of Libyan oil”, increased French influence in the region, an improvement in his domestic political standing, a reassertion of French military power and an end to Gaddafi’s attempts to supplant French influence in “Francophone Africa.”

Sarkozy, who has been convicted on two separate cases of corruption and breach of campaign finance laws, faces a historic trial in 2025 for allegedly receiving millions of euros in secret illegal campaign contributions from Gadaffi, to assist with his successful 2007 presidential bid.            

These were the real “crimes” in Libya. But the real crimes always remain hidden, papered over by florid rhetoric about democracy and human rights. 

The American experiment, built on slavery, began with a genocidal campaign against Native Americans that was exported to the Philippines and, later, nations such as Vietnam. The narratives we tell ourselves about World War II, largely to justify our right to intervene around the globe, are a lie. It was the Soviet Union that destroyed the German army long before we landed at Normandy. We firebombed cities in Germany and Japan killing hundreds of thousands of civilians.  The war in the South Pacific, where one of my uncles fought, was bestial, characterized by rabid racism, mutilation, torture and the routine execution of prisoners. The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were egregious war crimes. The U.S. routinely destroys democracies that nationalize U.S. and European corporations as in Chile, Iran and Guatemala, replacing them with repressive military regimes. Washington supported the genocides in Guatemala and East Timor. It embraces the crime of preemptive war. There is little in our history to justify the claim of unique American virtues. 

The nightmares we orchestrated in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya are minimized or ignored by the press while the benefits are exaggerated or fabricated. And since the U.S. does not recognize the International Criminal Court, there is no chance of any American leader being held accountable for their crimes.

Human rights advocates have become a vital cog in the imperial project. The extension of U.S. power, they argue, is a force for good. This is the thesis of Samantha Power’s book “A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide.” They champion the R2P doctrine, unanimously adopted in 2005 at the U.N. World Summit. Under this doctrine, states are required to respect the human rights of their citizens. When these rights are violated, then sovereignty is nullified. Outside forces are permitted to intervene. Miguel d’Escoto Brockmann, the former president of the U.N. General Assembly, warned in 2009 that R2P could be misused “to justify arbitrary and selective interventions against the weakest states.” 

“Since the end of the Cold War, the idea of human rights has been made into a justification for intervention by the world’s leading economic and military powers, above all, the United States, in countries that are vulnerable to their attacks,” writes Jean Bricmont in “Humanitarian Imperialism: Using Human Rights to Sell War.”  “Until the U.S. invasion of Iraq, [a] large part of the left was often complicit in this ideology of intervention, discovering new ‘Hitlers’ as the need arose, and denouncing antiwar arguments as appeasement on the model of Munich in 1938.” 

The creed of humanitarian intervention is selective. Compassion is extended to “worthy” victims while “unworthy” victims are ignored. Military intervention is good for Iraqis, Afghans or Libyans, but not for Palestinians or Yeminis. Human rights are supposedly sacrosanct when discussing Cuba, Venezuela and Iran, but irrelevant in our offshore penal colonies, the world’s largest open air prison in Gaza or our drone-infested war zones. The persecution of dissidents and journalists is a crime in China or Russia, but not when the targets are Julian Assange and Edward Snowden.

Utopian social engineering is always catastrophic. It creates power vacuums that augment the suffering of those the utopianists claim to protect. The moral bankruptcy of the liberal class, which I chronicle in “Death of the Liberal Class,” is complete. Liberals have prostituted their supposed values to the Empire. Incapable of taking responsibility for the carnage they inflict, they clamor for more destruction and death to save the world.

What the media forgets to tell you about Israel and Gaza

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Ignore the fake news. Israel isn’t defending itself. It’s enforcing its right to continue ethnically cleansing Palestinians

By Jonathan Cook

Source: Jonathan Cook Blog

The missing context for what’s happening in Gaza is that Israel has been working night and day to ethnically cleanse the Palestinian people from their homeland since even before Israel become a state – when it was known as the Zionist movement.

Israel didn’t just cleanse Palestinians in 1948, when it was founded as a Western colonial project, and again under cover of a regional war in 1967. It also worked to ethnically cleanse Palestinians every day between those dates and afterwards. The aim was to move them off their historic lands, and either expel them beyond Israel’s new, expanded borders or concentrate them into small ghettoes inside those borders – as a holding measure until they could be expelled outside the borders.

The ‘settler’ project, as we call it, is a misnomer. It’s really Israel’s ethnic cleansing programme. Israel even has a special word for it in Hebrew: ‘Judaisation’, or making the land Jewish. It is official government policy.

Gaza was the largest of the Palestinian reservations created by Israel’s ethnic cleansing programme, and the most overcrowded. To stop the inhabitants spilling out, Israel built a fence-barrier in the early 1990s to pen them in. Then when policing became too hard from within the prison, Israel pulled back in 2005 to the outer perimeter barrier.

New technology allowed Israel to besiege Gaza remotely by land, sea and air in 2007, limiting the entry of food and vital items like medicine and cement for construction. Automated gun towers shot anyone who came near the fence. The navy patrolled the sea, stopping boats straying more than a kilometre or two off shore. And drones watched 24 hours a day from the sky.

The people of Gaza were sealed in and largely forgotten, except when they lobbed a few rockets over the fence – to international indignation. If they fired too many rockets, Israel bombed them mercilessly and occasionally launched a ground invasion. The rocket threat was increasingly neutralised by a rocket interception system, paid for by the US, called Iron Dome.

Palestinians tried to be more inventive in finding ways to break out of their prison. They built tunnels. But Israel found ways to identify those that ran close to the fence and destroyed them.

Palestinians tried to get attention by protesting en masse at the fence. Israeli snipers were ordered to shoot them in the legs, leading to thousands of amputees.

The ‘deterrence’ seemed to work. Israel could once again sit back and let the Palestinians rot in Gaza. ‘Quiet’ had been restored.

Until, that is, last weekend when Hamas broke out briefly and ran amok, killing civilians and soldiers alike.

So Israel now needs a new policy. It looks like the ethnic cleansing programme is being applied to Gaza anew. The half of the population in the enclave’s north is being herded south, where there are not the resources to cope with them. And even if there were, Israel has cut off food, water and power to everyone in Gaza.

The enclave is quickly becoming a pressure cooker. The pressure is meant to build on Egypt to allow the Palestinians entry into Sinai on ‘humanitarian’ grounds.

Whatever the media are telling you, the ‘conflict’ – that is, Israel’s ethnic cleansing programme – started long before Hamas appeared on the scene. In fact, Hamas emerged very late, as the predictable response to Israel’s violent colonisation project.

And no turning point was reached a week ago. This has all been playing out in slow motion for more than 100 years.

Ignore the fake news. Israel isn’t defending itself. It’s enforcing its right to continue ethnically cleansing Palestinians.

Ukraine Fatigue Is Worrying NATO Elites – and So They Should Be

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On both sides of the Atlantic, there is now discernible fatigue and anger among citizens over NATO’s proxy war in Ukraine against Russia.

By Finian Cunningham

Source:Information Clearing House

On both sides of the Atlantic, there is now discernible fatigue and anger among citizens over the bottomless money pit that is NATO’s proxy war in Ukraine against Russia.

The only wonder is that it has taken so long for the Western public to get wise to the scam.

The disgraceful adulation of a Nazi war criminal by the whole Canadian parliament in a perverse show of solidarity with Ukraine against Russia has helped focus public attention on the obscenity of the NATO proxy war.

All told, since the NATO-induced conflict blew up in February last year, the American and European establishments have thrown up to €200 billion into Ukraine to prop up an odious Nazi-infested regime.

All that largesse that is billed to U.S. and European taxpayers has resulted in a slaughter in Europe not seen since the Second World War – and a failed Ukrainian state. And of course huge profits for the NATO military-industrial complex that bankrolls the elite politicians.

Times are changing though. In the United States, the financially conservative Republicans have had enough of the blank checks to the Kiev regime. The U.S. Congress finally showed a modicum of sanity to prevent a government financial shutdown – by dropping military aid to Ukraine. That shows how twisted Washington’s priorities have become when national self-interest has to wrestle with funding for a Nazi regime.

And then following the Congressional vote to temporarily end funding for Ukraine, the Kiev regime’s foreign minister Dmytro Kuleba dared to reprimand American lawmakers: “We are now working with both sides of Congress to make sure that it does not (get) repeated under any circumstances.”

Meanwhile in Europe, Slovakian citizens have voted for a new government to end the military fueling of war in Ukraine. The Smer-SD party led by Robert Fico won the parliamentary elections primarily on the vow to shut off any further weapons supply to the Kiev regime.

This week also saw massive protests in Germany against Olaf Scholz’s coalition government over the latter’s abject pro-war policies in Ukraine. German Unity Day on October 3 prompted a mass rally in Berlin denouncing the NATO proxy war in Ukraine and calling for peace negotiations to end the conflict.

There were also unprecedented protests across Poland in Warsaw, Lodz and other cities against the PiS government’s slavish implementation of the U.S.-led NATO proxy war in Ukraine. Faced with millions of Ukrainian refugees and neglect of social needs for Poles, the PiS ruling party has recently threatened to end weapons supply to Kiev – a move less about principle and more about trying to buy votes in the forthcoming election on October 15. Nevertheless, the belated move by the Polish government illustrates the concern among European leaders about growing public disdain over the seemingly endless financial aid allocated to Ukraine.

Josep Borrell, the European Union’s top diplomat, says it is a “worrying” sign that Washington for the first time closed the coffers for Ukraine.

The EU foreign ministers held a summit in Kiev on Monday. It was the first time that their summit was convened in a non-EU country. The agenda was a little too self-conscious, slated as a show of “solidarity” with Ukraine.

Borrell and the other EU diplomats said the summit was a warning to Russia to not count on “weariness” among Europeans over support for Ukraine. Who is he trying to convince? Russia or Europeans?

The unelected European elites described the war in Ukraine as an “existential crisis” which requires never-ending support for the Nazi regime against Russia.

Such melodrama needs serious qualification. The conflict is only “existential” for certain people: the NATO ideologues, the elitist leaders, the military-industrial complex, and the corrupt Nazi regime in Kiev. But it’s not existential for most other people who want to end this insane slaughter, grotesque wasting of public finances, and perilous flirting with nuclear war.

Significantly, the contrived EU summit in Kiev was not attended by Hungary’s foreign minister Peter Szijjarto. In highly critical comments on the EU’s misplaced priorities, he said that other countries do not understand why Europe “has made this conflict global” and why people living in Asia, Africa and Latin America have to pay for it due to growing inflation, energy prices and unstable food supplies.

The Hungarian diplomat slammed the EU leaders for their double standards and hypocrisy, adding: “I can say that the world outside Europe is already really looking forward to the end of this war because they do not understand many things. They do not understand, for example, how it can be that when a war is not in Europe, the European Union, looking down with fantastic moral superiority, calls on the parties to peace, advocates negotiations and an immediate end to violence. However, when there is a war in Europe, the European Union incites the conflict and supplies weapons, and anyone who talks about peace is immediately stigmatized.”

At least two members of the EU and the NATO alliance – Hungary and Slovakia’s new government – are opposed to the absurd military and financial support fueling the war in Ukraine. Both countries want peace negotiations with Russia to be prioritized. There is an unavoidable sense that this common sense dissent will grow into a domino effect because it is the truth and has an unassailable moral force.

What the conflict in Ukraine has demonstrated clearly to the Western public is just how morally bankrupt their governments and media have become. American and European elitist leaders may kid themselves a little longer by pretending there is no weariness and fatigue over their proxy war against Russia. The more they pretend the greater the eventual crash and downfall from public anger.

US Stretched Thin as Ukraine Offensive Fails, Israelis Threaten Large-Scale Conflict

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By Brian Berletic

Source: New Eastern Outlook

As Ukraine’s “spring counteroffensive” nears five months of intense fighting and equally intense losses achieving only negligible gains, Kiev’s sponsors in Washington, London, and Brussels find their military stockpiles nearing depletion and their military industrial base stretched far beyond capacity. This single conflict has tested the limits of US military power, diplomatic reach, and economic influence, exposing significant and growing weakness.

At the same time cracks begin to emerge militarily, diplomatically, and economically in the US and among its European allies, the rest of the globe continues its pivot away from the previous US-dominated global order, toward a broader balance of power under multipolarism, further undermining US foreign policy objectives.

Rather than reflect on this paradigm shift and find a rational place for the collective West in this emerging global order, the US and its allies are doubling down in an attempt to reassert their slipping international system and specifically through the use of proxy conflicts.

Just as the US-led collective West is using Ukraine as a focal point to confront, encircle, and contain Russia, the US has maintained Israel as a foothold in the Middle East for decades vis-à-vis Iran and its allies.

In East Asia, the US maintains a presence of tens of thousands of American troops in South Korea and Japan, while expanding its military presence in its former colony of The Philippines. It also has heavily invested in separatist elements on the Chinese island province of Taiwan, setting up the same sort of dynamics seen in Ukraine and Israel that have led to violent conflict in Eastern Europe and the Middle East.

It stands to reason that if Washington’s proxy war with Russia in Ukraine is unsustainable and a losing proposition, compounding the strain on US military, diplomatic, and economic power by investing in one or more additional proxy wars around the globe will only accelerate the collapse of US primacy around the globe and the rise of multipolarism.

Ukraine: A Failing Proxy War 

A recent New York Times article titled, “Has Support for Ukraine Peaked? Some Fear So,” highlights growing concern over Washington’s stretched global ambitions. It notes that with growing hostilities in the Middle East and US military aid now being divided between two US proxies, Ukraine and Israel, there is a growing realization that difficult decisions will be necessary.

The article also admits that even before conflict erupted in the Middle East between Israel and Hamas, expanding into a broader and large-scale Israeli military operation against the Palestinians, both support for and interest in Ukraine was already waning.

Beyond political will, the New York Times admits to technical limitations of Western support for its proxies globally.

The article admits:

European vows to supply one million artillery shells to Ukraine by March are falling short, with countries supplying only 250,000 shells from stocks — a little more than one month of Ukraine’s current rate of fire — and factories still gearing up for more production. 

Adm. Rob Bauer, who is the chairman of the NATO Military Committee, said in Warsaw that Europe’s military industry had geared up too slowly and still needed to pick up the pace.

It should be noted that a previous New York Times article revealed that Russia is currently producing as many artillery shells annually as the combined output of the US and Europe if production is expanded by 2025 at the earliest.

Even if the West could rally both political and public support for not only Ukraine, but also Israel, the limitations of the West’s combined military industrial base simply cannot deliver the material support needed to match it.

Israeli Military Gears Up For War, Diverts Military Support for Ukraine 

Following the October 7, 2023 Hamas raids into Israeli-held territory, the Israeli military has begun carrying out large-scale military operations against the inhabitants of Gaza as well as strikes on southern Lebanon and airports in Syria. A military incursion into Gaza alone will require huge amounts of artillery and aerial munitions, as well as small arms ammuniton.

While the US government claims it is capable of supplying both Israel and Ukraine, it is clear that if support was already falling far short of requirements in Ukraine, dividing it among Ukraine and now Israel means US military support will be stretched even thinner still.

In a Politico article titled, “Planes have already taken off’: U.S. sends Israel air defense, munitions after Hamas attack,” admits:

The needs of the Israelis and Ukrainians are different in some key respects. Israel will rely heavily on precision air-to-ground munitions fired from F-16 and F-35 fighter jets and Apache helicopters, none of which is in the Ukrainian arsenal. The issue of 155mm artillery shells, which both countries rely on heavily, will likely loom large, however.

The US has already transferred 300,000 rounds of 155mm artillery ammunition from stockpiles maintained in Israel for both US and Israeli use, to Ukraine. Now 155mm rounds will be flowing back into Israel.

It should be pointed out that Israel also operates M270 multiple launch rocket systems, which fire the same GPS-guided rockets as the HIMARS vehicles the US transferred to Ukraine. There has so far been no discussion of transferring such rockets to Israel and if this will impact shipments of this ammunition to Ukraine, but as CNN pointed out in a May 2023 article, Ukraine’s daily rate of fire was already a meager 18 rockets.

In 2006, Israel’s failed ground incursion into southern Lebanon was accompanied by an intense nation-wide aerial bombardment of Lebanon using a variety of aerial munitions including guided bombs. In less than a month of intense military operations, Israel’s stockpiles were depleted, and as the New York Times reported at the time, additional munitions were rushed from US stockpiles to Israel.

Protracted Israeli military operations will broaden the drain on US military stockpiles and military industrial output across even more weapons and munitions than Ukraine has.

And Taiwan Too… 

It cannot be forgotten that the third focal point of Washington’s Russia-China containment policy, Taiwan, also requires large amounts of munitions to prepare for a conflict the US is openly attempting to provoke with the rest of China.

Even as the US intensifies its pressure on China over Taiwan, America’s stretched military industrial base is struggling to meet even previously agreed upon arms sales.

Bloomberg in its September 2023 article, “Taiwan Arms Supply Is Hobbled by Slow Contractors, US Official Says,” admitted:

Delays in US delivery of promised weapons to Taiwan stem more from defense industry shortcomings than government inefficiency, according to a State Department official handling foreign arms sales. 

“We need to work together to encourage our partners in industry to take more risks, be more flexible, diversify their supply chains and act with deliberate speed to expand production capacity,” Mira Resnick, deputy assistant secretary in the Bureau of Political Military Affairs, said in prepared remarks for a hearing Tuesday by the House Armed Services Committee. 

Expanding physical production facilities, channeling larger amounts of raw materials and basic components into these facilities, and manning them with sufficient human resources depend on other prerequisite investments to be made, such as in construction, mining, upstream manufacturing, and education.

Thus, despite the ease with which US officials demand military industrial production be expanded, doing so is a resource and time-intensive process that will take years if and only if both the US government and Western arms manufacturers agree to significantly expand production. This takes place at the same time both Russia and China continue expanding their own industrial bases, including the production of military equipment, weapons, and ammunition.

For US, proxy wars to have succeeded, Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan would have needed US military industrial production expanded years ago.

It is clear US geostrategic planning attempted to produce a strategy that achieved its objectives with what it had on hand. This strategy was swallowed up in Ukraine, with the remnants being divided between a depleted Ukrainian military and a nascent Israeli military operation that could escalate out of control.

This leaves US policymakers with two options; increasingly extreme and dangerous options including direct interventions in Ukraine, the Middle East, and against China in what could escalate into nuclear war or a pivot away from achieving global primacy and finding a proportional role for the US to play among, rather than above, all other nations.

The future of the United States will take the shape of either an overextended empire involuntarily retreating into irrelevance and destitution, or a powerful member of the multipolar world prioritizing the rebuilding of its industrial base, infrastructure, and its education system to trade with and contribute alongside the rest of the world. The longer the US invests in the former option, the longer and more difficult the transition will be to the latter.