Living in Dark Times: I Revolt, Therefore I Am!

Posted on January 17, 2021 by Reid Mukai

By Dr. Rudolf Hänsel

“Really, I live in dark times! The guileless word is foolish. (…) The laughing man has only not yet received the terrible news.” This is how Bertolt Brecht‘s poem “An die Nachgeborenen” (To those born later) begins; published in June 1939.

It is one of the most important texts in German exile literature. Three generations later, we are again living in dark times.

Most citizens instinctively feel that “Something is Rotten in the State of Denmark” and “Time is Out of Joint” (Shakespeare). However, a sense of authority and a mental obedience reflex prevent them from distrusting the brazen lies of politicians, scientists and the mass media and from saying no. With this behaviour they stabilise the totalitarian system.

Science has the task of leading people to knowledge. Depth psychology, for example, has found out what prevents people from using their common sense instead of handing over power to politicians. The clear-sighted free citizen will no longer obey: he will rebel against the unconstitutional Corona measures of governments as an outgrowth of the New World Order and will embrace the spirit of revolt. His highest goal is the realisation of freedom for all people. In this act of outrage, he finds himself: I revolt, therefore I am!

Science has to lead man to knowledge

The human community rightly expects science to alleviate the plight of people and to serve the protection of life. But there are hardly any independent scientists left, only academics (with university or college education) who kowtow. More and more scientists are hawking their knowledge and skills, and often their souls, to the military-industrial-media complex and Big Money. They even move so far away from their humanity that they help perfect the means for the general destruction of humanity.

This is also true of psychologists, psychotherapists and psychiatrists who could greatly enrich people’s lives. The fact that the science of psychology is still very much underestimated in our latitudes is largely due to the fact that many German psychologists of Jewish faith had to go into exile in the USA during the period of fascism. However, psychology is also eyed with suspicion because many of its representatives, while striving to help individuals, are in favour of preserving the system. They want the person seeking advice to find his way in society, to be a good and well-behaved citizen.

In war, the state hires psychologists so that the soldier stays in line and does not run away. And if the soldier’s mind falls ill on the battlefield, he is picked up by the psychologist on home leave and prepared again so that he continues to defend the fatherland at the risk of his life. Nowadays, psychologists give dubious advice to young and old alike on how to get through their anxieties, depressions and fits of despair due to the politically imposed Corona measures in reasonably good health. The betrayal of one’s own professional ethics is pushing humanity into misery. (1)

What joy, on the other hand, when one learns that a judge in Germany has already filed a 190-page constitutional complaint with the supreme court in December 2020 because of the drastic Corona measures imposed by the federal and state governments, because it is high time to “stabilise our liberal-democratic legal order again”. (2) Or that a professor from Tübingen is leaving the German Academy of Sciences and Literature Mainz, a sister organisation of the National Academy of Sciences “Leopoldina”, which advises the German government. His reason for leaving reads:

“I want to serve a science that is committed to fact-based honesty, balanced transparency and comprehensive humanity.” (3)

First comes the feeling, then the action!

It is very difficult to get a person to move directly for a humane, peaceful and free society. Unconscious fears and inner psychological blocks prevent him from thinking rationally. When he becomes aware of this with the help of an experienced and compassionate psychologist or psychotherapist, he can begin to “have the mind free and cast off all timidity” (Rabelais).

This person can listen to the other person when he is given new information and one draws his attention. He can then also think his own thoughts and begin to change, to take action. For this to happen, however, his deep soul feeling, his emotional life, must be addressed. The insight of scientific depth psychology is: First comes the feeling, then the action!

For this reason, it is counterproductive and hurtful to discriminate against fearful and obedient fellow citizens as “complete idiots” or “ducking mice”. Such an assessment shows that one does not know their deeper motives. Therefore, all conceivable motivations for obedience and fearful silence must be explored – especially authoritarian and religious upbringing in the parental home and school as well as the influence of society. (4)

Often it is the very personal accounts of those affected that speak to people deep down, stir them up and make them think. A positive example is the heartbreaking story of colleague Peter König, which was published on 27 December 2020 in the Canadian online platform “Global Research” (www.globalresearch.ca): “Death by Ventilator – A Personal Story – for the World to Know.” (5)

I revolt, therefore I am!

The clear-sighted human being who has become conscious of himself, who knows himself to be the master of his destiny, can really do nothing else but rebel against the conditions of the present social order, to commit himself to the spirit of revolt. The form of life that corresponds to this is that of permanent indignation.

In 1952, the French writer, philosopher, critic of religion and winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature Albert Camus (1913-1960) published the book “L’homme révolté” (Man in Revolt). Camus’ thinking culminates in the call to revolt in the sense of an incessant struggle for a higher degree of freedom. To take note of the absurdity of the world is to revolt against it. In this act of revolt, man would find himself – in a variation of Descartes‘ formula: “I revolt, therefore I am!

This person wants neither earthly promises nor reassurances about the hereafter. The announcement of a future kingdom of God on earth or in heaven is indifferent to him. In both cases one had to wait, and during this time the innocent did not stop dying. The working masses, tired of suffering and dying, would be people without God. Man’s place in the revolt would be at their side.

For free man and his revolt in the name of human right and human dignity, there would be no higher goal than the realisation of freedom for all – and that immediately and not via the “diversions” of a dictatorship, as the revolutionary demanded.

Notes:

(1) http://www.nrhz.de/flyer/beitrag.php?id=27182&css; https://www.globalresearch.ca/cook-sweetens-meal-arsenic-charched-attempt-murder/5732124

(2) https://de.rt.com/inland/111310-richter-erhebt-verfassungsbeschwerde-gegen-corona/

(3) https://de.rt.com/inland/111305-aus-protest-gegen-lockdown-politik-tuebinger-professor-verlaesst-akademie-der-wissenschaften/

(4) https://www.globalresearch.ca/dispel-the-magic-belief-in-author…-power-and-violence-strengthen-community-feelings/5729560; http://www.nrhz.de/flyer/beitrag.php?id=27120&css

(5) https://www.globalresearch.ca/covid-death-by-ventlator-a-personal-storyfor-the-world-to-know/5733068

Bill Gates’ Global Agenda and How We Can Resist His War on Life

Posted on November 1, 2020 by Reid Mukai

By Vandana Shiva

Source: resilience

The following excerpt is from Vandana Shiva’s new book Oneness vs. the 1% (Chelsea Green Publishing, August 31, 2020) and is reprinted with permission from the publisher.

In March 2015, Bill Gates showed an image of the coronavirus during a TED Talk and told the audience that it was what the greatest catastrophe of our time would look like. The real threat to life, he said, is ‘not missiles, but microbes.’ When the coronavirus pandemic swept over the earth like a tsunami five years later, he revived the war language, describing the pandemic as ‘a world war’.

‘The coronavirus pandemic pits all of humanity against the virus,’ he said.

In fact, the pandemic is not a war. The pandemic is a consequence of war. A war against life. The mechanical mind connected to the money machine of extraction has created the illusion of humans as separate from nature, and nature as dead, inert raw material to be exploited. But, in fact, we are part of the biome. And we are part of the virome. The biome and the virome are us. When we wage war on the biodiversity of our forests, our farms, and in our guts, we wage war on ourselves.

The health emergency of the coronavirus is inseparable from the health emergency of extinction, the health emergency of biodiversity loss, and the health emergency of the climate crisis. All of these emergencies are rooted in a mechanistic, militaristic, anthropocentric worldview that considers humans separate from—and superior to—other beings. Beings we can own, manipulate, and control. All of these emergencies are rooted in an economic model based on the illusion of limitless growth and limitless greed, which violate planetary boundaries, and destroy the integrity of ecosystems and individual species.

New diseases arise because a globalized, industrialized, inefficient agriculture invades habitats, destroys ecosystems, and manipulates animals, plants, and other organisms with no respect for their integrity or their health. We are linked worldwide through the spread of diseases like the coronavirus because we have invaded the homes of other species, manipulated plants and animals for commercial profits and greed, and cultivated monocultures. As we clear-cut forests, as we turn farms into industrial monocultures that produce toxic, nutritionally empty commodities, as our diets become degraded through industrial processing with synthetic chemicals and genetic engineering, and as we perpetuate the illusion that earth and life are raw materials to be exploited for profits, we are indeed connecting. But instead of connecting on a continuum of health by protecting biodiversity, integrity, and self-organization of all living beings, including humans, we are connected through disease.

According to the International Labour Organization, ‘1.6 billion informal economy workers (representing the most vulnerable in the labour market), out of a worldwide total of two billion and a global workforce of 3.3 billion, have suffered massive damage to their capacity to earn a living. This is due to lockdown measures and/or because they work in the hardest-hit sectors.’ According to the World Food Programme, a quarter of a billion additional people will be pushed to hunger and 300,000 could die every day. These, too, are pandemics that are killing people. Killing cannot be a prescription for saving lives.

Health is about life and living systems. There is no ‘life’ in the paradigm of health that Bill Gates and his ilk are promoting and imposing on the entire world. Gates has created global alliances to impose top-down analysis and prescriptions for health problems. He gives money to define the problems, and then he uses his influence and money to impose the solutions. And in the process, he gets richer. His ‘funding’ results in an erasure of democracy and biodiversity, of nature and culture. His ‘philanthropy’ is not just philanthrocapitalism. It is philanthroimperialism.

The coronavirus pandemic and lockdown have revealed even more clearly how we are being reduced to objects to be controlled, with our bodies and minds as the new colonies to be invaded. Empires create colonies, colonies enclose the commons of the indigenous living communities and turn them into sources of raw material to be extracted for profits. This linear, extractive logic is unable to see the intimate relations that sustain life in the natural world. It is blind to diversity, cycles of renewal, values of giving and sharing, and the power and potential of self-organising and mutuality. It is blind to the waste it creates and to the violence it unleashes. The extended coronavirus lockdown has been a lab experiment for a future without humanity.

On March 26, 2020, at a peak of the coronavirus pandemic and in the midst of the lockdown, Microsoft was granted a patent by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). Patent WO 060606 declares that ‘Human Body Activity associated with a task provided to a user may be used in a mining process of a cryptocurrency system….’

The ‘body activity’ that Microsoft wants to mine includes radiation emitted from the human body, brain activities, body fluid flow, blood flow, organ activity, body movement such as eye movement, facial movement, and muscle movement, as well as any other activities that can be sensed and represented by images, waves, signals, texts, numbers, degrees, or any other information or data.

The patent is an intellectual property claim over our bodies and minds. In colonialism, colonisers assign themselves the right to take the land and resources of indigenous people, extinguish their cultures and sovereignty, and in extreme cases exterminate them. Patent WO 060606 is a declaration by Microsoft that our bodies and minds are its new colonies. We are mines of ‘raw material’—the data extracted from our bodies. Rather than sovereign, spiritual, conscious, intelligent beings making decisions and choices with wisdom and ethical values about the impacts of our actions on the natural and social world of which we are a part, and to which we are inextricably related, we are ‘users.’ A ‘user’ is a consumer without choice in the digital empire.

But that’s not the totality of Gates’ vision. In fact, it is even more sinister—to colonise the minds, bodies, and spirits of our children before they even have the opportunity to understand what freedom and sovereignty look and feel like, beginning with the most vulnerable.

In May 2020, Governor Andrew Cuomo of New York announced a partnership with the Gates Foundation to ‘reinvent education.’ Cuomo called Gates a visionary and argued that the pandemic has created ‘a moment in history when we can actually incorporate and advance [Gates’] ideas…all these buildings, all these physical classrooms—why with all the technology you have?’

In fact, Gates has been trying to dismantle the public education system of the United States for two decades. For him students are mines for data. That is why the indicators he promotes are attendance, college enrollment, and scores on a math and reading test, because these can be easily quantified and mined. In reimagining education, children will be monitored through surveillance systems to check if they are attentive while they are forced to take classes remotely, alone at home. The dystopia is one where children never return to schools, do not have a chance to play, do not have friends. It is a world without society, without relationships, without love and friendship.

As I look to the future in a world of Gates and Tech Barons, I see a humanity that is further polarized into large numbers of ‘throw away’ people who have no place in the new Empire. Those who are included in the new Empire will be little more than digital slaves.

Or, we can resist. We can seed another future, deepen our democracies, reclaim our commons, regenerate the earth as living members of a One Earth Family, rich in our diversity and freedom, one in our unity and interconnectedness. It is a healthier future. It is one we must fight for. It is one we must claim.

We stand at a precipice of extinction. Will we allow our humanity as living, conscious, intelligent, autonomous beings to be extinguished by a greed machine that does not know limits and is unable to put a break on its colonisation and destruction? Or will we stop the machine and defend our humanity, freedom, and autonomy to protect life on earth?

Working to End Human Violence in the Time of Covid-19

Posted on October 23, 2020 by Reid Mukai

By Robert J. Burrowes

At what is arguably the most important time in human history, with Homo Sapiens confronted by an enormous range of violent challenges that threaten our very survival, the only question of any genuine importance is this:

Can we craft and implement a strategy to end the violence, particularly in each and all of its extinction-threatening dimensions, to ensure that humanity has a chance to thrive on planet Earth indefinitely into the future?

But few are asking that question.

And, unfortunately, if one candidly considers the evidence in several critical domains – notably the threat of nuclear war, the deployment of 5G technology, the collapse of biodiversity and the climate catastrophe – there is little genuine room for optimism. This, of course, is not a reflection on the efforts of those committed to the attempt but it is a measure of the enormity of the task given the almost endless violence perpetrated by so many human inhabitants of Earth.

Moreover, of course, for most of 2020, the ongoing efforts by those committed to working to end violence in one context or another have not only been substantially impeded by the official response – including lockdowns, curfews, social distancing and mask-wearing – to the supposed Covid-19 pandemic, they have also witnessed an explosion of additional violence of many types and in many contexts – see ‘The Elite’s COVID-19 Coup against a Terrified Humanity: Resisting Powerfully’ – that have exacerbated the violence dramatically.

In addition, the combined impacts of the official response have (presumably inadvertently) accelerated the four primary paths to human extinction. See ‘The Elite’s COVID-19 Coup to Destroy Humanity that is also Fast-Tracking Four Paths to Human Extinction’.

Despite the unusual level of impediments, many people have remained steadfast in their efforts to raise awareness of what is at stake, to mobilize an effective response and/or to take action themselves to end the violence in one context or another. This includes individuals and organizations that have committed themselves to this effort by signing the online pledge of ‘The People’s Charter to Create a Nonviolent World’ which has signatories in 105 countries around the world and organizational endorsements in 39 countries.

These committed individuals and organizations include those few briefly discussed below, with some of them particularly focused on averting one of the paths to imminent human extinction.

Jennifer Wood is an architect and writer who developed near fatal toxic shock from the antibiotic Ciprofloxin and over-exposure to 2G wireless radiation when cell tower services were switched from analog to digital technology in 1996-1997. At this time, cell phone sales skyrocketed globally as did radiation and many public health problems according to epidemiologists. Although Jennifer had never used cell phones, she had spent long hours on a computer (surrounded by unnoticed cell towers) writing for the film director, Oliver Stone who had taken an interest in her novel. She has nearly died at a weight of 77 pounds from microwave radiation poisoning three times since that time. Each torturous period has coincided with exposure to upgrades in wireless technologies. During her third bout with death in 2010-2011, she moved to a radio quiet zone near a radio astronomy observatory that bans cell phone towers. Here Jennifer built by hand, without help, a tiny non-electric cabin without running water in the woods where she lived alone, with minimal suffering, for four years, gaining weight and becoming semi-functional.

Since 2011, she has been reviewing thousands of science studies on the health effects of human-generated electromagnetic radiation (EMR) while doing advocacy work. Prior to her illness, Jennifer lived and worked as an architect in Nepal for many years in the 1980s where she married and had two children. Her condition has forced her to live far away from most of her family much of the time since 1996. You can watch Jennifer in this film ‘Wi-Fi Refugees: Nowhere to run: Electrosensitive people try to escape wireless technology’, read about her struggle and see a photo of her cabin in ‘Search for a Golden Cage’, read about a success in having Wifi technology banned in schools in Israel in ‘Israel Wi-Fi Breakthroughs: TV Documentary, School Ban’ and watch videos of a protest rally at the US Supreme Court she co-organized: ‘The Public Has a Right To Know About the Health Risks of 5G Wireless, Cell Phones and the Internet of Things (IoT)’.

Prominent environmental journalist Robert Hunziker, noted for his capacity to track and report truthfully on the ecological health of planet Earth, recently wrote a sobering article highlighting key elements of the recent Living Planet Report 2020 which records ‘an average 68% decrease in population sizes of mammals, birds, amphibians, reptiles and fish between 1970 and 2016 [with a] 94% decline… for the tropical subregions of the Americas.’ With its ‘eye-popping description of the forces of humanity versus life in nature’, Robert noted ‘the report should really be entitled the Dying Planet Report 2020 because that’s what’s happening in the real world. Not much remains alive.’ For some of the detail of this disastrous state of affairs, read ‘The Dying Planet Report 2020’. For another of Robert’s reports on planetary ill-health, see ‘Boundless Dying Trees’. But if you are not horrified already, you should read Robert’s article ‘10C Above Baseline’ to get a clearer sense of where Earth’s climate is headed with extinction for humans at 4C above baseline.

Starting in February 2020, Joana Aboagyewaa of the Splendors of Dawn Poetry Foundation in Ghana reports making valuable contributions to schools in the eastern region through their work as poets and educators under the Foundation’s ‘SUN Project’. This educational project was undertaken in Abirem, Achiase, St Roses Senior High (Akwatia) and Akim Swedru Secondary Schools where teachers taught poetry and art, ‘that is deeply human to secondary school students’, for positive change. ‘In April, The Splendors Performance Team held their National Poetry Month activities to celebrate the importance of poets and poetry in our society and culture.’ Splendors’ ‘Poetry Exchange Day’, with poems wrapped as gifts and mailed to classmates and friends, was held in basic schools in the Greater Accra Region. In addition, Splendors’ ‘Poets in Schools’ project ‘was a huge success because we enrolled a high number of poets in secondary schools, through the poetry awareness campaign, to encourage students to write and read.’ The Covid-19 pandemic ‘has necessitated our coming up with the Splendors of Dawn online “Poets Read out” series. Splendors of Dawn Poetry Foundation, Ghana believes that we can change the world and contribute our quota for its development through poetry.’

The indefatigable Steve Varatharajan, the Vice President but, more importantly, for many years the heart and driving force behind the International Association of Educators for World Peace (IAEWP), headquartered in Malaysia, has recently announced that, at year’s end, he will ‘be stepping down from all my positions in IAEWP as I am having [serious health] problems… [related to] the aggressive 5G telecommunications network building.’ For those who don’t know Steve, it is unlikely that many people have served any global network with the talent, commitment and productivity that Steve has demonstrated within the IAEWP.

Steve has also recently announced the appointment of Dr. Alfredo Sfeir Younis – the Chilean economist, spiritual leader and healer who had a 29-year career at the World Bank including as its first environmental economist – as Executive Vice President of the IAEWP. In that capacity, Alfredo has already proposed a visionary program to advance IAEWP aims. Separately from this, Dr. Priyaranjan Trivedi, the IAEWP Senior Vice President for Continental Asia and IAEWP Director General of Education, advises that their continental association has just launched a free online buffet of 31 courses. For details, see ‘Online Peace Education, Reconstruction, Accord, Non-Violence and Disarmament Initiative’. These courses are available online for India and the rest of the world.

Liz McAlister and Martha Hennessy are two of seven Catholic nuclear disarmament activists known as the Kings Bay Plowshares 7. The plowshares activists entered Kings Bay Naval Submarine Base in St. Mary’s, Georgia, USA on 4 April 2018, the 50th anniversary of the assassination of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Carrying hammers and baby bottles of their own blood, the seven attempted to convert weapons of mass destruction to make real the prophet Isaiah’s command to ‘beat swords into plowshares’. Apart from impeding the ever-heightening threat of nuclear armageddon as the world’s international legal infrastructure against nuclear war rapidly unravels, they also hoped to call attention to the ways in which nuclear weapons kill every day by their mere existence and maintenance.

The nonviolent activists were subsequently ‘found guilty of trespass, conspiracy and destruction of federal property’ in October 2019. After spending time in prison, on 8 June 2020 Liz – the widow of Phil Berrigan – was sentenced to ‘time served, three years supervised release and for a portion of the restitution for the seven of just over $30,000’. Martha – a granddaugher of Dorothy Day – is due to be sentenced in November. You can read a detailed account of their action, an inspiring biography of each activist and follow the court outcome for Martha and the others at the website above. You can also see an evocative interview of Martha at ‘Martha Hennessy Interview’.

Professor Bishnu Pathak in Nepal continues his substantial research output on a variety of subjects, most notably in the past month on subjects related to the fundamental question of whether international law can be used as an instrument to achieve peace. For insightful commentary on two issues in this field, see ‘Can Former Child Soldiers File a Complaint at the International Court against Nepal’s Maoist Leaders?’ and ‘Nuremberg Tribunal: A Precedent for Victor’s Justice’.

What Can You Do?

If you would like to join those individuals and organizations in 105 countries who have made the commitment to work to end human violence, you can do so by signing the online pledge of ‘The People’s Charter to Create a Nonviolent World’.

If you understand the critical importance of reducing human consumption as the core element of any strategy to preserve a habitable biosphere – encapsulated in Gandhi’s observation that ‘Earth provides enough to satisfy every person’s need, but not every person’s greed’ – then you might consider participating in ‘The Flame Tree Project to Save Life on Earth’ which he inspired as well.

If you would like to nurture children to become Self-aware individuals who are capable of responding powerfully to the challenges in life while reducing violence in the process, consider making ‘My Promise to Children’. For a deeper understanding of the cause and pervasiveness of human violence, see ‘Why Violence?’ and ‘Fearless Psychology and Fearful Psychology: Principles and Practice’.

And if you wish to use nonviolent strategy, as Gandhi developed and employed it, for your campaign or liberation struggle, you will be given clear guidance on how to do so on these websites that draw heavily on his work: Nonviolent Campaign Strategy and Nonviolent Defense/Liberation Strategy.

More simply, if you like, you might consider committing to:

The Earth Pledge

Out of love for the Earth and all of its creatures, and my respect for their needs, from this day onwards I pledge that:

I will listen deeply to children. See ‘Nisteling: The Art of Deep Listening’.
I will not travel by plane
I will not travel by car
I will not eat meat and fish
I will only eat organically/biodynamically grown food
I will minimize the amount of fresh water I use, including by minimizing my ownership and use of electronic devices
I will not own or use a mobile (cell) phone
I will not buy rainforest timber
I will not buy or use single-use plastic, such as bags, bottles, containers, cups and straws
I will not use banks, superannuation (pension) funds or insurance companies that provide any service to corporations involved in fossil fuels, nuclear power and/or weapons
I will not accept employment from, or invest in, any organization that supports or participates in the exploitation of fellow human beings or profits from killing and/or destruction of the biosphere
I will not get news from the corporate media (mainstream newspapers, television, radio, Google, Facebook, Twitter…)
I will make the effort to learn a skill, such as food gardening or sewing, that makes me more self-reliant
I will gently encourage my family and friends to consider signing this pledge.

Conclusion

While most human inhabitants of Earth remain oblivious to the pervasive violence that is destroying us and our world, including the advanced nature of the four primary threats to human existence, there is nevertheless a worldwide network of people deeply aware of this situation who are acting to address these threats.

‘Doomed to fail’, you might believe. ‘Impossible’ even. And perhaps you are right. In fact, there is considerable evidence to support these beliefs.

But as Gandhi noted: ‘Hesitating to act because the whole vision might not be achieved, or because others do not yet share it, is an attitude that only hinders progress.’

Given that some of us, including the people above, are already working to end human violence, the main question remaining is ‘What about you?’

Biodata: Robert J. Burrowes has a lifetime commitment to understanding and ending human violence. He has done extensive research since 1966 in an effort to understand why human beings are violent and has been a nonviolent activist since 1981. He is the author of ‘Why Violence?’ His email address is flametree@riseup.net and his website is here.

The Death of Andre Vltchek, A Passionate Warrior for Truth

Posted on September 28, 2020 by Reid Mukai

By Edward Curtin

Source: Behind the Curtin

“If the world is upside down the way it is now, wouldn’t we have to turn it over to get it to stand up straight?” – Eduardo Galeano, Upside Down, 1998

For decades, Andre Vltchek, an old-school journalist and artist (but a young man) who traveled the world in search of truth and who always stood up straight, tried to revolve the world and encourage people to revolt against injustice. In this age of arm-chair reporters, he stood out for his boldness and indefatigable courage. He told it straight. This irritated certain people and some pseudo-left publications, who sensed in him a no bullshit fierceness and nose for hypocrisy that frightened them, so they stopped publishing his writing. He went where so many others feared to tread, and he talked to people in places that were often the victims of Western imperialistic violence. He defended the defenseless and encouraged their defense.

Now he is dead. He died in the back seat of a chauffeur driven rental car on an overnight drive to Istanbul, Turkey. He was sleeping, and when his wife attempted to wake him upon arrival at their hotel, she couldn’t. He was 57-years-old.

Let him sleep in peace, but let his words ring out, his passionate cries for justice and peace in a world of violent predators.

Those who knew him and his work feel a great, great loss. His friend and colleague Peter Koenig wrote this touching goodbye.

As Koenig says, Vltchek was always defending those around the world who are considered disposable non-people, the Others, the non- whites, victims of Western wars, both military and economic, in places such as West Papua, Iraq, Syria, Africa, etc. He had a chip on his shoulder, a well justified chip, against the one-sided Western media and its elites that were always lecturing the rest of the world about their realities.

He was recently in the United States, and here is what he wrote:

But notice one thing: it is them, telling us, again, telling the world what it is and what it is not! You would never hear such statements in Africa, the Middle East, or Asia. There, people know perfectly well what it really is all about, whether it is about race or not!

I have just spent two weeks in the United States, analyzing the profound crises of U.S. society. I visited Washington, D.C., Minneapolis, New York, and Boston. I spoke to many people in all those places. What I witnessed was confusion and total ignorance about the rest of the world. The United States, a country which has been brutalizing our Planet for decades, is absolutely unable to see itself in the context of the entire world. People, including those from the media, are outrageously ignorant and provincial.

And they are selfish.

I asked many times: “Do black lives matter all over the world? Do they matter in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and do they matter in West Papua?” I swear, I received no coherent answer.

Somebody has to tell them… Somebody has to force them to open their eyes.

A few years ago, I was invited to Southern California to show my documentary work from Africa (my feature documentary film Rwanda Gambit, about West-triggered genocides in both Rwanda and later in the Democratic Republic of Congo), where millions of black people are dying, in order for the vast majority of the U.S. whites to live in piggish opulence.

But before I was allowed to present, I was warned: ‘Remember, people here are sensitive. Do not show too much of brutal reality, as it could disturb them.’

Hearing that, I almost left the event. Only my respect for the organizer made me stay.

Now I am convinced: it is time to force them to watch; to see rivers of blood, which their laziness, selfishness, and greed have triggered. It is time to force them to hear shouts of the agony of the others.

But as everyone knows, it is nearly impossible to force people to open their eyes and ears when they are dead set against doing so. Andre tried so hard to do that, and his frustration grew apace with those efforts that seemed to fall on deaf ears.

He was a relentless fighter, but he was a lover, too. His love for the people and cultures of the world was profound. Like Albert Camus, he tried to serve both beauty and suffering, the noblest of vocations. A lover of literature and culture, the best art and beauty ever produced, he was appalled at the way so many in the West had fallen into the pit of ignorance, illiteracy, and the grip of propaganda so tight that “what is missing is life. Euphoria, warmth, poetry and yes – love – are all in extremely short supply there.”

He sensed, and said it, that nihilism rules in the United States beneath the compulsive consumerism and the denial of the violence that the U.S. inflicts on people across the world. It was selfishness run amok. Me me me. It was, he felt, soul death, the opposite of all the ostensible religiousness that is a cover story for despair. He wrote:

It has to be stopped. I say it because I do love this life, the life, which still exists outside the Western realm; I’m intoxicated with it, obsessed with it. I live it to the fullest, with great delight, enjoying every moment of it.

Poetry, music, great literature, these he loved as he fought on the barricades for peace.

I urge you to read his article, Love, Western Nihilism and Revolutionary Optimism.

He was a rare and courageous man. Let us ring bells in his honor.

Here’s a Kenneth Rexroth poem for Andre, the fighter with the poet’s heart:

No Word

The trees hang silent

In the heat….

Undo your heart

Tell me your thoughts

What you were

And what you are….

Like the bells no one

Has ever rung

37 Tips For Navigating A Society That Is Full Of Propaganda And Manipulation

Posted on September 27, 2020 by Reid Mukai

By Caitlin Johnstone

Source: Axis of Logic

For as long as there has been human language, humans have been using it to manipulate one another. The fact that it is possible to skillfully weave a collection of symbolic mouth noises together in such a way as to extract favors, concessions, votes and consent from other humans has made manipulation so common that it now pervades our society from top to bottom, from personal relationships between two people to international relationships between government agencies and the public.

This has made it very difficult to figure out what’s going on, both in our lives and in the world. Here are some tips for navigating this complex manipulation-laden landscape, whether that be the manipulations you may encounter in your small-scale personal interactions or the large-scale manipulations which impact the entire world:

1 — Understand the fact that humans are storytelling animals, and that whoever controls the stories controls the humans. Mental narrative dominates human consciousness; thought is essentially one continuous, churning monologue about the self and what it reckons is going on in its world, and that monologue is composed entirely of mental stories. These stories can and will be manipulated, on an individual scale by people we encounter and on a mass scale by skillful propagandists. We base our actions on our mental assessments of what’s going on in the world, and those mental assessments can be manipulated by narrative control.

2 — Be humble and open enough to know that you can be fooled. Your cognitive wiring is susceptible to the same hacks as everyone else, and manipulators of all sorts are always looking to exploit those vulnerabilities. It’s not shameful to be deceived, it’s shameful to deceive people. Don’t let shame and cognitive dissonance keep you compartmentalized away from considering the possibility that you’ve been duped in some way.

3 — Watch people’s behavior and ignore the stories they tell about their behavior. This applies to people in your life, to politicians, and to governments. Narratives can be easily manipulated and distorted in many different ways, while behavior itself, when examined with as much objectivity as possible, cannot be. Pay attention to behavior in this way and eventually you’ll start noticing a large gap between what some people’s actions say and what their words say. Those people are the manipulators. Distrust them.

4 — Be suspicious of people who keep telling you what they are and how they are, because they’re trying to manipulate your narrative about them. Be doubly suspicious of people who keep telling you what you are and how you are, because they’re trying to manipulate your narrative about you.

5 — Learn to see how trust and sympathy are used by manipulators to trick people into subscribing to their narratives about what’s going on. Every manipulator uses trust and/or sympathy as a primer for their manipulations, because if you don’t have trust or sympathy for them, you’re not going to mentally subscribe to their stories. This is true of mass media outlets, it’s true of State Department press releases which implore you to have sympathy for the people of Nation X, and it’s true of family members and coworkers. Once you’ve spotted a manipulator, your task is to kill off all of your sympathy for them and your trust in them, no matter how hard they start playing the victim to suck you back in.

6 — Be suspicious of anyone who refuses to articulate themselves clearly. Word salading is a tactic notoriously used by abusive narcissists, because it keeps the victim confused and unable to figure out what’s going on. If they can’t get a clear handle on what the manipulative abuser is saying, they can’t form their own solid position in relation to it, and the abuser knows this. Insist on lucid communication, and if it’s refused to you, remove trust and sympathy. Apply this to people in your life, to government officials, and to 8chan propaganda constructs.

7 — Familiarize yourself with cognitive biases, the glitches in human cognition which cause us to perceive things in a way that is not rational. Pay special attention to confirmation bias, the backfire effect, and the illusory truth effect. Humans have an annoying tendency to seek out cognitive ease in their information-gathering and avoid cognitive dissonance, rather than seeking out what’s true regardless of whether it brings us cognitive ease or dissonance. This means we tend to choose what we believe based on whether believing it is psychologically comfortable, rather than whether it’s solidly backed by facts and evidence. This is a weakness in our cognitive wiring, and manipulators can and do exploit it constantly. And, again, be humble enough to know that this means you.

8 — Trust your own understanding above anyone else’s. It might not be perfect, but it’s a damn sight better than letting your understanding be controlled by narrative managers and dopey partisan groupthink, or by literally anyone else in a narrative landscape that is saturated with propaganda and manipulation. You won’t get everything right, but betting on your own understanding is the very safest bet on the table. It can be intimidating to stand alone and sort out the true from the false by yourself on an instance-by-instance basis, but the alternative is giving someone else authority over your understanding of the world. Abdicating your responsibility to come to a clear understanding of what’s going on in your world is a shameful, cowardly thing to do. Be brave enough to insist that you are right until such time as you yourself come to your own understanding that you were wrong.

9 — Understand that propaganda is the single most overlooked and under-appreciated aspect of our society. Everyone’s constantly talking about what’s wrong with the world, but hardly any of those discussions are centered around the fact that the public been manipulated into supporting the creation and continuation of those problems by mass media propaganda. The fact that powerful people are constantly manipulating the way we think, act and vote should be at the forefront of everyone’s awareness, not relegated to occasional discussions in fringe circles.

10 — Respect the fact that the science of modern propaganda has been in research and development for over a century. Think of all the military advancements that have been made in the last century to get an idea of how sophisticated this science must now be. They are far, far ahead of us in terms of research and understanding of the methods of manipulating the human psyche toward ends which benefit the powerful. If you ever doubt that the narrative managers could be advanced and cunning enough to pull off a given manipulation, you can lay that particular doubt to rest. Don’t underestimate them.

11 — Understand that western mass media propaganda rarely consists of full, outright lies. At most, such outlets will credulously publish the things that are told to them by government agencies which lie all the time. More often, the deception comes in the form of distortions, half-truths, and omissions. Pay more attention to discrepancies in things that are covered versus things that aren’t, and to what they’re not saying.

12 — Put effort into developing a good news-sense, a sense for what’s newsworthy and what’s not. This takes time and practice, but it lets you see which newsworthy stories are going unreported by the mass media and which non-stories are being overblown to shape an establishment-friendly narrative. When you’ve got that nailed down, you’ll notice “Why are they acting like this is a news story?” and “Why is nobody reporting this??” stories all the time.

13 — Be patient and compassionate with yourself when it comes to developing your narrative navigating skills. Like literally any skill set, you’ll suck at it for a while. If you learn you’ve been wrong about something, just take in the new information, adjust appropriately, and keep plugging away. Don’t expect to have mastered this thing before you’ve had time to master it. Like anything else, if you put in the hours you’ll get good at it.

14 — Find reliable news reporters who have a good sense for navigating the narrative matrix, and keep track of them to orient yourself and stay on top of what’s going on. Use individual reporters, not outlets; no outlet is 100 percent solid, but some reporters are pretty close on some specific subjects. Click this hyperlink for an article on one way to do build a customized and reliable news stream. Click this hyperlink for a list of all my favorite news reporters on Twitter right now.

15 — Don’t let paranoia be your primary or only tool for navigating the narrative matrix. Some people’s only means of understanding the world is to become intensely suspicious of everything and everyone, which is about as useful as a compass which tells you that every direction is north. Spend time in conspiracy and media criticism circles and you’ll run into many such people. Rejecting everything as false leaves you with nothing as true. Find positive tools for learning what’s true.

16 — Hold your worldview loosely enough that you can change it at any time in the light of new information, but not so loosely that it can be slapped out of your head by someone telling you what to think in a confident, authoritative tone. As Carl Sagan once said, “It pays to keep an open mind, but not so open your brains fall out.”

17 — Speaking of confident, authoritative tones, be suspicious of confident, authoritative tones. It’s amazing how much traction people can get with a narrative just by posturing as though they know that what they’re saying is true, whether they’re an MSNBC pundit or a popular conspiracy Youtuber. So many people are just plain faking it, because it works. You run into this all the time in debates on online political forums; people come at you with a supremely confident posture, but if you push them to present their knowledge on the subject and the strength of their arguments, there’s not actually anything there. They’re just accustomed to people assuming they know what they’re talking about and leaving their claims unchallenged, and it completely throws them off when someone doesn’t buy their feigned confidence shtick.

18 — Be aware that sociopaths exist. There are people who, to varying degrees, do not care what happens to others, and these are the types of people who will use manipulation to get their way whenever it serves them. If you don’t care about truth or other people beyond the extent to which you can use them, then there’s no disincentive to manipulating.

19 — Be aware of projection, and be aware of the fact that it cuts both ways: unhealthy people tend to project their wickedness onto others, while healthy people tend to project their goodness. Don’t let your goodness trick you into thinking there aren’t monsters who will deceive and manipulate you, and don’t let sociopaths project their own sinister motives onto you by telling you how rotten you are. This mixes a lot of good people up, especially in their personal lives. Not everyone is good, and not everyone is truthful. See this clearly.

20 — Be suspicious of those who excessively advocate civility, rules and politeness. Manipulators thrive on rules and civility, because they know how to manipulate them. Someone who’s willing to color outside the lines and get angry at someone noxious even when they’re acting within the rules makes a manipulator very uncomfortable. Often times those telling you to calm down and behave yourself when you are rightfully upset are manipulators who have a vested interest in getting you to adhere to the rules set they’ve learned to operate within.

21 — Meditation, mindfulness, self-inquiry and other practices are powerful tools which can help you understand your own inner processes, which in turn helps you understand how manipulators can manipulate you, and how they manipulate others. Just be sure that you are using them for this purpose, not for escapism as most “spiritual” types do. You’re trying to become fully aware of what makes you tick mentally, emotionally and energetically; you’re not trying to become some vapid spiritual bliss bunny. The goal isn’t to feel better, the goal is to get better at feeling. Better at consciously experiencing your own inner world.

22 — Be relentlessly honest with yourself about your own inner narratives and the various ways you engage in manipulation. You can’t navigate your way through the narrative control matrix if you aren’t clear on your own role in it. Look inside and consciously take an inventory.

23 — Understand that truth doesn’t generally move in a way that is pleasing to the ego, i.e. in a way Hollywood scripts are written to appeal to. Any narrative that points to a Hollywood ending where the bad guy gets karate kicked into lava and the hero gets the girl is manufactured. Russiagate and QAnon are both perfect examples of an egoically pleasing narrative with the promise of a Hollywood ending, either by Trump and his cohorts being dragged off in chains or by the “white hats” overcoming the Deep State and throwing all the Democrats and Never-Trumpers in prison for pedophilia. Ain’t gonna happen, folks.

24 — Try to view the world with fresh eyes rather than with your tired old grown-up eyes which have taught you to see all this as normal. Hold an image in your mind of what a perfectly healthy and harmonious world would look like; the sharp contrast between this image and the world we have now allows you see through the campaign of the propagandists to normalize things like war, poverty, ecocide, and impotent electoral systems which keep seeing the same government behavior regardless of who people vote for. None of this is normal.

25 — Know that the truth has no political party, and neither do the social engineers. All political parties are used to manipulate the masses in various ways, and nuggets of truth can and do emerge from any of them. Thinking along partisan lines is guaranteed to give you a distorted view. Ignore the imaginary lines between the parties. You may be certain that your rulers do.

26 — Remain always aware of this simple dynamic: the people who become billionaires are generally the ones who are sociopathic enough to do whatever it takes to get ahead. This class has been able to buy up near-total narrative control via media ownership/influence, corporate lobbying, think tank funding, and campaign finance, and are thus able to manipulate the public into consenting to agendas which benefit nobody but plutocrats and their lackeys. This explains pretty much every major problem that we are facing right now.

27 — Understand that nations are pure narrative constructs; they only exist to the extent that people agree to pretend that they do. The narrative managers know this, and they exploit the fact that most of us don’t. Take Julian Assange, perfect example: he was pried out of the embassy and imprisoned by an extremely obvious collaboration between the US, UK, Sweden, Ecuador, and Australia, yet they each pretended that they were acting as separate, sovereign nations completely independently of one another. Sweden pretended it was deeply concerned about rape allegations, the UK pretended it was deeply concerned about a bail violation, Ecuador pretended it was deeply concerned about skateboarding and embassy cat hygiene, the US pretended it was deeply concerned about the particulars of the way Assange helped Chelsea Manning cover her tracks, Australia pretended it was too deeply concerned about honoring the sovereign affairs of these other countries to intervene on behalf of its citizen, and it all converged in a way that just so happened to look exactly the same as imprisoning a journalist for publishing facts. You see this same dynamic constantly, whether it’s with military interventions, trade deals, or narrative-shaping campaigns against non-aligned governments.

28 — Understand that war is the glue which holds the US-centralized empire together. Without the carrot of military/economic alliance and the stick of military/economic violence, the US-centralized empire would cease to exist. This is why war propaganda is constant and sometimes so forced that glaring plot holes become exposed; it’s so important that they need to force it through, even if they can’t get the narrative matrix around it constructed just right. If they ceased manufacturing consent for the empire’s relentless warmongering, people would lose all trust in government and media institutions, and those institutions would lose the ability to propagandize the public effectively. Without the ability to propagandize the public effectively, our rulers cannot rule.

29 — Remember that when it comes to foreign policy, the neocons are always wrong. They’ve been so remarkably consistent in this for so long that whenever there’s a question about any narrative involving hostilities between the US-centralized power alliance and any other nation, you can just look at what Bill Kristol, Max Boot and John Bolton are saying about it and believe the exact opposite. They’re actually a very helpful navigation tool in this way.

30 — Notice how the manipulators like to split the population in two and then get them arguing over how they should serve the establishment. Arguing over whether it’s better to vote Democrat or Republican, arguing over whether it’s better to increase hostilities with Iran and Venezuela or with Syria and Russia, over whether you should support the US president or the FBI, arguing over how internet censorship should happen and whom should be censored rather than if censorship should happen in the first place. The longer they can keep us arguing over the best way to lick the imperial boot, the longer they keep us from talking about whether we want to lick it at all.

31 — Watch out for appeals to emotion. It’s much easier to manipulate someone by appealing to their feely bits rather than their capacity for rational analysis, which is why any time they want to manufacture support for military interventionism you see pictures of dead children on news screens everywhere rather than a logical argument for the advantages of using military violence based on a thorough presentation of facts and evidence. You see the same strategy used in the guilt trips they lay on third-party voters; it’s all emotional hyperbole that crumbles under any fact-based analysis, but they use it because it works. They go after your heart strings to
circumvent your head.

32 — Pay attention to how much propaganda goes into maintaining the propaganda machine itself. This is done this because propaganda is just that central to the maintenance of dominant power structures. Much effort is spent building trust in establishment narrative management outlets while sowing distrust in sources of dissent. You’ll see entire propaganda campaigns built around accomplishing solely this.

33 — Make a practice of asking “Who benefits from this narrative I’m being sold?” and “Who benefits from this belief I have?” Who benefits from your hating China or the Latest Official Bad Guy? Who benefits from the belief that the status quo is acceptable? Keep asking this about the narratives coming to you, and about the beliefs you already hold in your head.

34 — Learn the art of perceiving life without the perceptual filter of narrative. Mentally “mute” the narrative soundtrack and watch where all the resources are going, where the weapons are moving to and coming from, who’s being killed and imprisoned etc, to get a clear picture of what’s going on in the world.

35 — Whenever the mass media begin declaring that some dastardly deed has been committed which requires immediate military action, your default assumption should be that they’re lying, because they’ve got an extensively documented history of doing so. After lying so consistently about such things so many times, the burden of proof is always on the western power structures who are making the claim, and that burden requires mountains of independently verifiable evidence to be met.

36 — Dismiss all Latest Official Bad Guy narratives. The only ones who benefit from you hating a foreign government are the powerful people who are targeting that government and seeking to manufacture support for future actions against it. Don’t be a pro bono CIA propagandist.

37 — Be acutely aware that the only reason the status quo is accepted as “normal”, and its defenders regarded as “moderate”, is because vast fortunes are poured into making it seem that way. If we could see the status quo of this world with fresh eyes, we’d scream in horror.

One real but ‘polemic’ way to defeat COVID-19

Posted on September 23, 2020 by Reid Mukai

By Andre Vltchek (1962-9/22/2020)

Source: New Eastern Outlook

COVID-19 is not just a disease; it is also a state of mind, a psychosis, a fear. It is an event that, all over the world, unleashed irrational behaviour by the governments, individuals, and media. It triggered speculations, bizarre analyses, and selective ‘cut-and-paste science.’

Result: while there are, undeniably, few optimistic success stories, including the Russian vaccine, China’s and Vietnam’s ability to contain the pandemic without ruining economy and livelihood of the citizens, the great majority of the world is undoubtfully in disarray. Hundreds of millions of people are literally tossed into a gutter. Other billions, all over Asia, Latin America, the Middle East, Africa, and to some extent, the United States and the UK are locked in, unable to travel abroad, and unwilling to accept visitors from other countries.

All this is pure insanity. Families are divided, broken apart. People are locked out of their homes in other countries. Lovers are told they cannot see each other, perhaps for years.

Extreme right-wing governments that are ripe to fall, like those in Thailand or Chile, are hiding behind the COVID-19, not allowing anyone to enter and face their downfall.

International life patterns of billions of people are ruined which leads to suicides, deep depressions, violence, as well as COVID-19 unrelated but lockdowns-related health issues.

In brief: The world is screwed! Most likely, billions of human lives are.

Apart from my work in several parts of the United States after the murder of George Floyd, and then in Aruba, from where the NATO is threatening Venezuela, I spent almost five months in a brutal lockdown in Chile. Truly brutal, because I arrived there after covering several conflict zones in Asia, with the COVID-19 at my heels. One airport after another was closing behind me, after my departure. A journey took eight days: Hong Kong to Bangkok, then Seoul, Amsterdam, Suriname, Brazilian Belem, Brasilia, Rio de Janeiro, Lima, and finally, Santiago.

At the conflict zones, including when I was filming in devastated Borneo, my guts and eyes got attacked by some vicious parasites (or was it COVID-19, after all?), and something happened to my feet; I could hardly walk. Well, once in a while, I have this tendency to run myself to the ground, after the excessive doses of Afghanistan, Syria, Indonesia, Iraq, DR Congo, Kashmir, Gaza… I never stop until it is too late, or more precisely, until I fall on my face.

But then, after I do, after I find myself flattened on the ground, I know precisely what to do. Which is: a few months of rest, rigorous exercises, foot massages, sea, diet, sun. Until I can move again, and return to performing duties, I have towards humanity.

But this time it was different. With a single digit of popularity, Chilean Pinochet-style regime utilised COVID-19 in order to stay in power, to crack on the opposition and to rob indigenous people of that little they still had left. Result: bizarre, total lockdowns with tanks on the streets, with the meaningless curfews, with even a small park at the back of my building out of reach to the tenants.

My only ‘walks’ were inside the apartment. I needed to get to my place in Bangkok; small, but with a gym and pool and with a garden. But Thailand’s rulers made sure to keep the foreigners out, too. Clearly, for political reasons.

And so, I was forced to spend the longest time in my life in one place. The longest since I was 15 years old if I remember correctly.

And instead of improving, my health deteriorated in that monstrous lockdown, where I was facing bare, depressing winter Andes, and the 160-average pollution levels (US AQI). When I was finally departing, I could hardly walk and had to use a cane.

***

I RAN away on one of the first re-introduced non-stop Iberia flights to Madrid. I was lucky that I could, as one of my passports was that of the EU.

It had to be Madrid or Italy. I would also happily run to Russia, but in August, it was still closed.

When I was very young, I used to escape to Madrid, in order to be as far away as possible from New York. I despised my life in the United States. I couldn’t write there. In Italy and Madrid, I could easily. For months I would be saving, and then disappear from the United States, for 5–6 weeks. My plan was to travel all over Spain, but Madrid was so absorbing, so fascinating that in the end, I lost all my desire to leave it. Cafes on Plaza de Olavide were where I used to write my fiction.

And now, beaten, hardly able to move, I returned. Before my interviews in Turkey and Serbia, and before at least some parts of Asia would be re-opening, Madrid became my logical destination.

***

I ANTICIPATED what would be waiting for me here. And all of my expectations came through.

In Madrid, life didn’t stop. It slowed down, to some extent, yes. Some visible and invisible barriers were erected. Many precautions have been taken. But there was no ‘full stop.’ Unlike in New York and Santiago, colours were everywhere, and so were beauty, elegance, and harsh Castellan sense of humour.

First of all, Madrid was clearly demonstrating that life is much stronger then death, but only if life is pitched against death, and lived with unwavering strength and passion.

In Prado Museum, I rediscovered one of the greatest and most frightening artworks of all times: Pieter Bruegel’s the Elder: ‘The Triumph of Death.’ I searched for it, and I found it in one of the main halls.

Here, in this surreal, powerful, and highly perverse artwork, it was depicted all. Yes, Death is frightening. Yes, it has tremendous strength, and it has its own ‘army of skeletons.’ And yes, in the end, it always wins.

But you look out, through the windows of Prado, and you see the ancient, green, and beautiful trees, you see the splendid architecture, and lovers holding hands. Death may have the last word for all human beings, but life goes on, too. It never gets defeated, and it never surrenders. There is time to live and time to die.

Bruegel, who painted his macabre masterpiece c. 1562, wanted us to live in constant fear of death.

Today’s Madrid, with its passion, wants us to forget about death, at least for that short but brilliant moment, which is called life.

This new and hopefully short-lived era of COVID-19 terror is throwing us, human beings, back to the middle ages, where continuous anxieties and images of horrors were masterfully manufactured, even mass-produced, in order to poison our existence and strip us of dreams, of power, and joy.

Throughout the middle ages, at least in Europe, suffering and fear were habitually glorified. Joy and desires were suppressed, often chastised.

In the middle ages, Christianity reached perfection in scaring humans to death, in stripping life of almost all delights, and in administering brutal, grotesque punishments. And this is when the Muslim armies arrived, liberating a large part of Spain from the religious fundamentalism. Glorious caliphate of Cordoba was erected, synonymous with the golden age of Islam; caliphate admired for knowledge, poetry, playfulness, the quest for freedom and beauty.

There, Muslims, Christians, and Jews lived together; they freely mingled together, building one mighty, tolerant, and creative society. It was a society without fear, society full of hope.

Caliphate of Cordoba also defeated death, at least from one’s birth till demise. Great Pakistani thinker, Tariq Ali, wrote beautifully about that era, many years before COVID-19 appeared on the horizon.

I took Talgo, high-speed train, to Cordoba. I had to revisit the old mosque, where the fight for tolerance began. All this was now relevant. It was not just the medicine, not just the science, which had to be mobilised.

The battle against COVID-19 has to be also fought by thinkers, by artists, by all those who can make life meaningful, or at least bearable.

***

SPAIN and its capital Madrid can easily ‘go either way.’ The city can be oppressive and harsh when it goes through the ‘bad wave.’ It can ruin millions of lives, as it did when it embarked on the horrid colonialist expeditions, religious fundamentalism, or fascist dictatorship.

But Madrid can also be highly enlightened, creative, and forward-looking. It can be light and reasonable, embracing life.

In the age of COVID-19, Madrid decisively refused to lock up millions of people in the proverbial cages. Few weeks of confusion and enough! The government tried, half-heartedly, but failed to impose full oppressive order.

By the middle of August 2020, the number of Covid-19 cases was higher in Spain, then in many other EU countries. Madrid made it to the ‘red list’ in such countries as Germany and the UK.

But walk through the streets of the city, sit in its cafes, look at children playing in the elegant parks, and then compare all this with terrible stress in those societies full of rules and regulations, such as Germany or Macron’s France.

Brueghel’s skeletons are clearly depicting destruction and death. Scenes are full of nihilism. They fit perfectly well into the devastated landscapes of the excessively locked down, terrified cities.

Some cities with a relatively small number of infections, like Bangkok, already died. How come? They lost, they handed victory to death. They threw up their hands without the battle. They surrendered, offering to death precisely what she has been demanding: voluntarily, they stopped living.

In the United States or such places like Southeast Asia, Facebook, Amazon, Apple have been making fortunes. Bookstores, museums, theatres all surrendered; they closed down.

***

MADRID introduced social distancing, imposed masks regulations, a limited number of visitors, but rapidly reopened cinemas, gardens, galleries. Cafes are functioning, too, and so are the restaurants. Soon, after the summer holidays end, the city’s theatres and concert halls will reopen.

It is not because the city is reckless. Not at all. Disinfectants are everywhere and when walking or in public places, people are wearing masks. The streets of Madrid are meticulously clean. Various safety regulations are imposed. But life goes on. Airplanes are taking off towards many parts of the world. Madrid is an open city. Not yet to all, but at least to many.

And as a reward, there are smiles. There are politeness and kindness. People do not look suicidal. They do not explode at the slightest conflict. No honking, no shouting. No animalistic, all-consuming fear.

Madrid understands that there is a certain degree of danger. But it deals with this state of siege with admirable dignity and courage.

After the panic and ugly behavioural patterns that I observed in the United States and Chile, Madrid impressed me enormously. The COVID-19 pandemic brought economic and social hardship to some, but there was no national agony so clearly noticeable in New York, Washington DC, or Santiago.

Even if they struggled, people made sure to put on their best, to behave with dignity, and confront danger with both strength and heart.

When my still weak feet let go on the third day, when I stumbled and fell on an ancient sidewalk, several people immediately ran to my rescue. They fought for me. In my own way, I came here in order to fight for them, too.

Madrid is not a perfect city. Actually, I keep repeating it again and again: there are no ‘perfect cities’ in this world.

And Madrid’s way is not the only example of how to fight and defeat the latest deadly pandemic.

But perhaps it is the most agreeable one: full of smiles, support from friends and families, with the exposure to the sun, to excellent food, nature, culture, and arts.

It is the Latin spirit, joie de vivre, which is put to work here, in order to overpower Brueghel and his army of skeletons, together with the excessive religious asceticism of El Greco.

We still don’t know how to defeat COVID-19, scientifically, but in such places as Madrid, we are learning how to prevent it from defeating us.

Nine days in Madrid did not fully ‘cure me,’ but it gave back the optimism to my scarred soul. It gave me the strength to fight again. As well as the desire to walk forward!

Originally published 8/20/20

THE SEVEN REASONS WE OBEY AUTHORITY

Posted on September 20, 2020 by Reid Mukai

By Phillip Schneider

Source: Waking Times

Rebels are a very important part of society, but they rarely get the recognition they deserve. They help us break through old norms and keep us from falling into groupthink. However, human nature urges most of us to remain in our comfort zone even when it means less freedom or more difficult problems down the road.

Why is it the case that so many people ignore the outside world or pass it off as somebody else’s problem until it reaches their own doorstep? In a recent video, Brittany Sellner (Brittany Pettibone before she married) describes the seven reasons men obey authority, even when it is against their best interest.

#1 Habit

“As everybody knows, habits are extremely difficult to break and even if we have gripes about the state of things, accepting our imperfect reality seems better to us than taking on the daunting prospect of change. Conversely… habit ceases to be a reason for obedience in times of political crisis; kind of similar to what we are experiencing now as a consequence of Covid. Despite many of us not wanting to alter our habits, our habits were forcibly altered for us.”

#2 Moral Obligation

“The second reason for obedience is moral obligation which is obviously a motive that is very often found in religion, but politically speaking… some see it as a moral obligation to ‘1) obey for the good of society,’ 2) ‘due to the ruler having superhuman factors such as being a supernatural being or a deity,’ which isn’t something that I think applies to too many Americans… 3) People see it as a moral obligation to obey because they ‘perceive the command as being legitimate, owing to its source an issuer’. For example, a mayor or a police officer [would be considered under this reason], and 4) People see it as a moral obligation to obey due to ‘conformity of commands to accepted norms.’ For example, most people believe that a command such as not committing murder is a moral command and therefore, they obey it.”

#3 Self-Interest

“The third reason for obedience is self-interest and this is perhaps one of the more common motives nowadays. For example, most big corporations are immoral and seek to piggy-back off of current social and political trends in order to gain money, status, and approval. Just look at all the corporations that suddenly became ‘champions of social justice’ after the death of George Floyd; none of them gave a crap about police brutality and Black Lives Matter until it became in their interest to care.

This self-interest can of course also extend to individuals. Famous and non-famous people have a lot to gain by falling in line, or… there is also a negative self-interest wherein the person doesn’t obey simply because they’re going to gain something but so they won’t lose everything: their reputations, jobs, social standing and future career prospects.”

#4 Psychological Identification with the Ruler

“The fourth reason for obedience is psychological identification with the ruler, meaning that people have a close emotional connection with the ruler, regime, or the system. I imagine you would have encountered a lot of this in, for example, Communist Russia or Nazi Germany.”

#5 Zones of Indifference

“The fifth reason for obedience is an extremely common one today and that is ‘zones of indifference,’ meaning that even if people are not fully satisfied with the state of things, they have a margin of indifference or a margin of tolerance for the negative aspects of their society and government.”

#6 Fear of Sanctions

“The sixth reason for obedience is the most obvious reason… and that is ‘fear of sanctions,’ which generally involve the threat or the use of some form of physical violence against the disobedient subject and induce obedience by power merely coercive, a power really operating on people simply through their fears.”

#7 Absence of Self Confidence

“Lastly, the seventh and final reason for obedience is the absence of self confidence among subjects, meaning that many people simply don’t have sufficient confidence in themselves, their judgement, and their capacities to make themselves capable of disobedience and resistance.

Thanks to the internet, I observe this motive quite often. Thousands of people decry on the daily that they’re miserable with the state of things and yet they do nothing because they have no confidence in their personal ability to lead, to organize a peaceful protest, to start a movement and so on.”

Although authority can be legitimate and meaningful, resistance to unnecessary acts of violence or draconian government injustice is often better for the individual and his society and shows greater character than inaction. Although this is certainly not a comprehensive list, perhaps it will help you to better understand your own role in life and greater society.

Watch Brittany Sellner’s analysis on BitChute

How Corporate Tyranny Works

Posted on September 4, 2020 by Reid Mukai

By Chris Hedges

Source: OpEdNews.com

Those, like environmental lawyer Steven Donziger, who fight the corporate control of our society on behalf of the vulnerable find the institutions of power unite to crucify them.

The persecution of the attorney Steven Donziger is a grim illustration of what happens when we confront the real centers of power, masked and unacknowledged by the divisive cant from the Trump White House or the sentimental drivel of the Democratic Party. Those, like Donziger, who name and fight the corporate control of our society on behalf of the vulnerable see the judiciary, the press and the institutions of government unite to crucify them.

“It’s been a long battle, 27 years,” Donziger said when I reached him by phone in his apartment in Manhattan.

Donziger, who has been fighting polluting American oil companies for nearly three decades on behalf of indigenous communities and peasant farmers in Ecuador, has been under house arrest in Manhattan for a year. He will go to trial in federal court in New York on September 9 on contempt of court charges, which could see him jailed for six months. Ever since he won a multibillion-dollar judgment in 2011 against the oil giant Chevron, the multinational has come after him personally through litigation that threatens to destroy him economically, professionally and personally.

“Our L-T [long-term] strategy is to demonize Donziger,” Chevron wrote in an internal memo in 2009, as reviewed by Courthouse News.

It started when Texaco went into Ecuador in the Amazon in the 1960s and cut a sweetheart deal with the military government then ruling Ecuador,” Donziger told me. “Over the next 25 years, Texaco was the exclusive operator of a very large area of the Amazon that had several oil fields within this area, 1500 square miles. They drilled hundreds of wells. They created thousands of open-air, unlined toxic waste pits where they dumped the heavy metals and toxins that came up from the ground when they drilled. They ran pipes from the pits into rivers and streams that local people relied on for their drinking water, their fishing and their sustenance. They poisoned this pristine ecosystem, in which lived five indigenous peoples, as well as a lot of other non-indigenous rural communities. There was a mass industrial poisoning.”

“By the time I went down there in the early 1990s, many people had died, cancer rates were skyrocketing according to several independent health evaluations, people were really hurting. There was zero regard for the lives of the local people by Texaco. I was a very young lawyer back in 1993 when I first went to Ecuador. It was like looking at an apocalyptic scene. There was oil on the roads. People were living in abject poverty. They had no shoes. They would get oil on their feet when they walked along the roads. The oil pollution had permeated every aspect of daily life. It was in the food supply. It was in the water supply. It was in the air. The average person there would get exposed multiple times a day to very harmful, cancer-causing toxins, with foreseeable results.”

“I, with other lawyers, filed a lawsuit in New York against Texaco. The reason we filed in New York was because Texaco’s headquarters were in New York in 1993. The decisions to pollute in Ecuador, to play God to the people of Ecuador, were made in New York. We sued in New York. Texaco tried to get the case back to Ecuador where they had never been held accountable, where they knew the indigenous peoples had no money or resources to find lawyers.”

“They thought it would just go away,” said Donziger. “Over a 10-year period, we battled to get a jury trial in the United States. Ultimately, they won that part of the battle. It went down to Ecuador.”

“We started working with a team of Ecuadoran lawyers in the early 2000s. We went forward with the lawsuit. We produced voluminous scientific and testimonial evidence, showing that they caused probably the world’s worst oil pollution. It was called the ‘Amazon Chernobyl’ by locals and experts. They dumped 16 billion gallons of toxic waste. They did it deliberately to save money. This was unlike the BP spill in the Gulf of Mexico, which was a terrible accident, even though it was a product of horrendous negligence by BP. This was done by design to pollute, knowing that people would die, and that indigenous groups would be decimated, and that this beautiful part of the Amazon would be destroyed.”

The refusal to abide by even minimal environmental regulations saved Texaco an estimated $3 on every barrel of oil produced over 26 years (1964-1992), according to Amazon Watch, or an estimated extra $5 billion in revenue. The hundreds of waste pits the company eventually abandoned in Ecuador, on average, contain 200 times the contamination allowed by typical global standards.

“They tried to grind us down using classic corporate defense tactics,” Donziger said of the legal war. “They filed thousands of motions. We stood strong. We had a great legal team of Ecuadorian lawyers.”

In the end, they won a stunning victory, a rare moment of accountability for first-world conglomerates who rape the environment of developing nations by exploiting weak, corrupt governments.

“The verdict came down, about $18 billion in favor of the affected communities, which is what it would take at a minimum to clean up the actual damage and compensate the people for some of their injuries. That eventually got reduced on appeal in Ecuador to $9.5 billion, but it was affirmed by three appellate courts, including the highest court of Ecuador. It was affirmed by the Canadian Supreme Court, where the Ecuadorians went to enforce their judgment in a unanimous opinion in 2015.”

Chevron, as the evidence mounted against it, sold their assets in Ecuador and left the country. The corporation threatened the plaintiffs with a “lifetime of litigation” if they attempted to collect, and, according to internal Chevron memos, launched a legal and media campaign that has cost an estimated $2 billion to prevent payment of the settlement and to demonize and destroy Donziger.

Donziger came to his epic battle against Chevron through journalism. “I was a journalist on my college newspaper,” he said of his time as a history major at American University. “My first job out of college was as a journalist with [United Press International]. I worked for UPI in Washington. They were strong in Latin America. I traveled to Managua in 1983 or 1984, I don’t remember exactly, and found work in the UPI bureau. I was 23 years old. I worked in the UPI bureau in Managua during the Sandinista era.”

He left UPI after a year in Managua but stayed on in Nicaragua to work as a freelance journalist for newspapers such as The Fort Lauderdale News, The Toronto Star and The Atlanta Constitution. He spent about three years as a reporter before going to Harvard Law School. When he graduated from Harvard Law School in 1991, he worked as a public defender in Washington, D.C. He documented Iraqi civilian casualties in Iraq following the first Gulf War that became a report adopted by the United Nations.

A classmate at law school was from Ecuador. His classmate’s father organized a trip in April 1993 for lawyers and medical professionals to look at the contamination caused by the oil extraction in the Amazon. That trip, which Donziger joined, spawned the suit against Texaco. He would make more than 250 trips to Ecuador over the next two decades.

“Journalism significantly shaped my views and skill set,” he said. “It was vital to allowing my work to be successful. From the beginning this was a unique litigation, for many reasons, but one of the reasons was we, as a team, decided to work across multiple platforms. If we only saw this case as a lawsuit we would never win.”

“Chevron controlled the legal system in Ecuador with their influence. We needed to operate across different platforms, including engaging with the media and carrying out significant public education. Most Ecuadorians, other than those who lived in the region, knew nothing about the pollution that had been happening in their country. We carried out zealous advocacy in the public arena. We realized that the indigenous people would never get a fair trial in Ecuador if they did not illuminate what had happened to them and get public support.”

“The fact that I am detained shows how far we’ve come and how much risk Chevron feels. It’s not a sign we lost. It’s the opposite.”

Steven Donziger

Both the judge who oversaw its lawsuit against Donziger for “racketeering” and Chevron itself “claim that this type of activity is wrong,” he said. “The irony is that what we were doing is what the big oil companies have always done. They always operate in the public relations domain, lobbying Congress to pass legislation to extinguish various legal claims, meeting political leaders behind the scenes. They operate across every platform they can find to exercise their power. We were smart enough to meet them toe-to-toe wherever they were operating and neutralize their ability to undermine the fairness of the trial. That’s how they operate. They try to control court systems.”

“My journalism [experience] sensitized me to injustice. It allowed me to understand the media. I knew how to write press releases, which matters when you do a public case like this. I knew how to work across different platforms to mobilize positive energy around the case. Human rights work involves, first and foremost, justice for victims. But equally important is accountability for the perpetrators. The fact that I am detained shows how far we’ve come and how much risk Chevron feels. It’s not a sign we lost. It’s the opposite.”

Chevron, which had left Ecuador, went back to the New York court, where Donziger had originally filed the lawsuit before Chevron got a change of venue to Ecuador, and sued him, using a civil courts portion of the federal law famous for breaking the New York Mafia in the 1970s, the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act.

In effect, “They sued me as a civil racketeer, under a civil RICO statute for $60 billion,” he said. “That was the largest amount of money an American individual ever had been sued for. This began a 10-year campaign to demonize me by Chevron and by its judicial allies.”

Chevron, which has more than $260 billion in assets, has hired an estimated 2,000 lawyers from 60 law firms to carry out its campaign, according to court documents. The oil giant dropped its demand for financial damages weeks before the RICO trial, which would have necessitated a jury trial. Judge Lewis A. Kaplan, a former lawyer for the tobacco industry who had undisclosed investments in funds with Chevron holdings, according to his public financial disclosure statement, decided the RICO case alone. He found credible a witness named Alberto Guerra, relocated to the US by Chevron at a cost of some $2 million, who claimed the verdict in Ecuador was the product of a bribe. Kaplan used Guerra’s testimony as primary evidence for the racketeering charge, although Guerra, a former judge, later admitted to an international tribunal that he had falsified his testimony.

“[Kaplan] wouldn’t allow me to bring in any environmental evidence that the Ecuadorian courts had used to find Chevron liable,” Donziger said. “He wouldn’t let me testify on my own behalf on direct. He allowed Chevron to use secret witnesses whose identities he wouldn’t reveal to me. He tried to treat it like a national-security kind of case to try to demonize me. Because Chevron’s whole strategy is to demonize [me] as a way to distract attention from its environmental crimes in Ecuador. And Judge Kaplan, who knows all the tricks in the books because he used to work for [tobacco company] Brown & Williamson, when he was [an attorney with the law firm of] Paul, Weiss. He knows the tobacco industry playbook that they used for years and years and continue to use. And he worked with the Chevron lawyers at Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher to implement them against me without a jury. And there was nothing I could do about it.”

(Paul, Weiss is a large law firm that currently advises Chevron on its $13 billion purchase of another energy company.)

John Keker, one of Donziger’s lawyers on that case, said he was up against 160 lawyers for Chevron and during the trial he felt “like a goat tethered to a stake.” He called the court proceedings under Kaplan “a Dickensian farce” and a “show trial.” In the end, Kaplan ruled that the judgment in the Ecuadorean court against Chevron was the result of fraud.

He also ordered Donziger to turn over decades of all client communication to Chevron, in effect eradicating attorney-client privilege, a backbone of the Anglo-American legal system with roots dating to ancient Rome. Donziger appealed what was, according to legal experts following the case, an unprecedented and illegal order. While Donziger’s appeal was pending, Kaplan charged him with criminal contempt for this principled stance, as well as his refusal to turn over his passport, his personal electronics and to refrain from seeking the collection of the original award against Chevron.

When his criminal contempt charges against the environmental lawyer were ignored by the U.S. attorney’s office for over five years, Judge Kaplan, using an exceedingly rare judicial maneuver, appointed the private law firm of Seward & Kissel, to act in the name of the government to prosecute Donziger. Neither the judge nor the law firm disclosed that Chevron has been a client of Seward & Kissel.

Kaplan also violated the established random case assignment protocol to personally assign Loretta Preska, a member of the right-wing Federalist Society, to hear the case. Chevron is a major donor to the Federalist Society. Preska, in a show of bias, already has said the charges against Donziger appear to be “very strong,” according to Courthouse News. In May, she disallowed him from having his charges heard by a jury.

“The last thing any of them wants is for a group of ordinary citizens to see what has happened to Steven Donziger,” Rick Friedman, one of Donziger’s attorneys, said of Chevron.

“The last thing any of them wants is for a group of ordinary citizens to see what has happened to Steven Donziger.”

Rick Friedman, attorney

Preska’s fealty to corporate power was previously on public display in 2013 when she imposed a 10-year sentence, the maximum allowed under a plea deal, on Jeremy Hammond, the activist who hacked into Stratfor, a private security firm. Hammond made public a barrage of damning internal emails and exposed the email address and password of an account used for business by Preska’s husband, Thomas Kavaler, a partner at the law firm Cahill Gordon & Reindel. Preska, despite the conflict of interest, refused to recuse herself. The 10-year sentence was one of the longest in U.S. history for hacking.

Kaplan had Preska demand Donziger post an $800,000 bond on a misdemeanor charge. Preska placed him under house arrest and confiscated his passport which he has used to meet with attorneys around the world attempting to enforce the judgment against Chevron. Kaplan managed to have Donziger disbarred. He allowed Chevron to freeze Donziger’s bank accounts, slapped Donziger with millions in fines without allowing him a jury, forced him to wear an ankle monitor 24 hours a day and effectively shut down his ability to earn a living. Kaplan allowed Chevron to impose a lien on Donziger’s apartment in Manhattan where he lives with his wife and teenage son.

Donziger is scheduled to go to trial without a jury on September 9 in New York City for contempt. Preska will preside over the trial. There has not been a criminal trial in Manhattan federal court since March because of the pandemic. Donziger’s trial would be the first, although hundreds of other defendants facing far more serious felony charges are waiting in jails, infested with COVID-19, for a trial date. Donziger’s four pro bono lawyers said they do not want to risk their lives by traveling to New York during the pandemic for what is a misdemeanor offense.

“The judgment against Chevron Corporation in Ecuador was the product of fraud, bribery and corruption,” Sean Comey, Senior Advisor – External Affairs Chevron Corporation said when I asked the corporation to comment on the case. “Steven Donziger is a proven liar and an adjudicated racketeer. He committed criminal acts in the U.S. and abroad in pursuit of his extortion scheme in the Ecuadorian courts. Donziger’s continuing lawlessness is now a matter for prosecutors and the U.S. courts to decide. Chevron is not involved in Donziger’s criminal prosecution.”

The flagrant corruption and misuse of the legal system to abjectly serve corporate interests in the Donziger case illustrates the deep decay within our judiciary and democratic institutions, one that was abetted by Democratic administrations that stacked the courts with corporate lawyers — Kaplan was appointed by Bill Clinton — and Donald Trump, who has elevated ideologues selected by the Federalist Society to the federal bench. Ruling after ruling in Donziger’s case has ignored or grossly distorted the law on behalf of Chevron to ensure that Donziger will be prosecuted, sent to prison and remain in debt for life — all while the $9.5 billion settlement is never paid to aid the people harmed in Ecuador.

The International Association of Democratic Lawyers and the international committee of the National Lawyers Guild issued a letter signed by more than 70 organizations calling the persecution of Donziger an “attack on the rule of law.” The letter said his house arrest was “unprecedented” and charged that he was being targeted for what it called “one of the most important corporate accountability and human rights cases of our time.” The letter accused Kaplan of “violating basic notions of fairness in the judicial process that lie at the core of the rule of law.”

“We cannot allow the rule of law to be upended by corporate interests and a highly biased federal judge seeking to destroy the willpower of one lawyer who has already withstood decades of brutal litigation and scathing personal and professional attacks,” the letter read.

Chevron has also used its clout and advertising dollars to keep the story from being reported in numerous media outlets.

“Based on where this story is trending, we have launched a full offensive to kill it or redirect it,” an August 10, 2010 internal memo from Chevron reads concerning a potential report — on the case being done by the Fox News bureau in Miami.

“In addition to working through the Miami bureau, we have reached out to more senior news folks at Fox News, both in NY (through Dana) and in WDC (through Greg Mueller). So, we are trying to attack this story on multiple fronts. To this end, Kent is set to talk to John Stack and Sean Smith who both reside at Fox News in NY at 1:30 today. Finally, if need be, I think we may need to pull the JSW card with Roger Ailes. We have checked John’s availability to place a call to Roger, but his first availability is tomorrow afternoon.”

From 2010 to 2018, John S. Watson was the CEO and chairman of the Chevron Corporation.

The story was killed.

Another internal memo lays out the steps, also ultimately successful, to prevent a similar story from appearing in GQ magazine. The memo suggests that Chevron work …with the Columbia Journalism Review (that ran the rebuke of 60 minutes) and the Media Research Center to expose any degree of bias by GQ and raise alerts about the reporting techniques prior to the story’s publication.”

The memo recommends letting the magazine know that it will face legal action if the story runs and calls on Chevron investigators to “conduct further due diligence on reporter.” Chevron has also hired reporters to produce fake pieces of journalism that peddle the corporation’s propaganda on fake news sites it runs.

The New York Times magazine earlier this year considered a story about Donziger and then dropped it. The newspaper runs its own ad agency called T Brand Studio. Chevron is a major client, meaning The New York Times, through T Brand Studio, produces ads for Chevron.

Jake Silverstein, editor of the magazine, when asked to comment said by email: “It was one of several stories William [Langewiesche] considered writing for us in the past year, one that ultimately we decided not to assign. Many factors go into our decisions about what to assign, and none of them ever include who is or is not a client of T Brand Studio or any other part of the paper’s advertising business.”

Dean Baquet, the newspaper’s executive editor, said, when I reached him by email, that the idea that the magazine piece on Donziger was killed because Chevron is a major advertiser is “a ridiculous claim.” He added, “I didn’t even know Chevron worked with T Brand [Studio].”

But that Chevron has invested tremendous resources to kill stories about this case is indisputable given the detailed campaigns to block coverage outlined in its own internal memos.

“I’ve experienced this multiple times with media over the past 10 to 15 years,” Donziger said. “An entity will start writing the story, spend a lot of time on it, then the reporter disappears. The story doesn’t run.”

While The Nation, The Intercept and Courthouse News Service have reported on Donziger’s current legal battle, no major mainstream publication has touched it.

“Corporate influence over our federal judiciary has increased dramatically in recent years,” Donziger said. “This firm [Chevron] has captured an element of power from the government and deployed it against a human rights activist.”

Front Line Defenders issued a report in 2019 that found that 300 human rights activists had been murdered in 31 countries, more than two-thirds in Latin America. Of those killed, 40 percent fought for land rights, indigenous peoples and environmental justice.

“What’s shocking to a lot of people is that this is now happening in the United States,” Donziger said. “I don’t mean murder, but death by a thousand cuts. Chevron does not want me to be a lawyer anymore, at a minimum. They don’t want me advocating even as a non-lawyer. They want to silence me. They want to kill every story they can. They’d rather have no story about this case than even a positive story about their side. They don’t want people to know about it. They want to erase it from people’s thought process.

“I cannot get a fair trial with a judge appointed by Judge Kaplan rather than through the random assignment process,” he lamented. “I cannot get a fair trial with a prosecutor whose law firm [has worked] for Chevron. These are egregious conflicts of interest. Its misconduct on a grand scale. I’ve been locked up four times as long as the longest sentence ever imposed on a lawyer for criminal contempt in New York. Anyone who cares about the rule of law should be appalled.”

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