Category Archives: CIA

On the Edge of a Nuclear Abyss

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By Edward Curtin

Source: Behind the Curtain

Two days after Russia attacked Ukraine and the day before Vladimir Putin put Russia on nuclear alert, I wrote a little article whose first sentence was: “Not wanting to sound hyperbolic, but I am starting to conclude that the nuclear madmen running the U.S./NATO New Cold War they started decades ago are itching to start a nuclear war with Russia.”

It was an intuition based on my knowledge of U.S./Russia history, including the U.S engineered coup in Ukraine in 2014, and a reading of current events.  I refer to it as intuition, yet it is based on a lifetime’s study and teaching of political sociology and writing against war.  I am not a Russian scholar, simply a writer with a sociological, historical, and artistic imagination, although my first graduate academic study in the late 1960s was a thesis on nuclear weapons and why they might be someday used again.

It no longer sounds hyperbolic to me that madmen in the declining U.S. Empire might resort, like rats in a sinking ship, to first strike use of nuclear weapons, which is official U.S. policy.  My stomach is churning at the thought, despite what most experts say: that the chances of a nuclear war are slight.  And despite what others say about the Ukraine war: that it is an intentional diversion from the Covid propaganda and the Great Reset (although I agree it achieves that goal).

My gut tells me no; it is very real, sui generis, and very, very dangerous now.

The eminent scholar Michel Chossudovsky of Global Research agrees that we are very close to the unthinkable.  In a recent historical analysis of U.S.-Russia relations and nuclear weapons, he writes the following before quoting Vladimir Putin’s recent statement on the matter. “Vladimir Putin’s statement on February 21st, 2022 was a response to U.S. threats to use nuclear weapons on a preemptive basis against Russia, despite Joe Biden’s “reassurance” that the U.S. would not be resorting to ‘A first strike’ nuclear attack against an enemy of America”:

Let me [Putin] explain that U.S. strategic planning documents contain the possibility of a so-called preemptive strike against enemy missile systems. And who is the main enemy for the U.S. and NATO? We know that too. It’s Russia. In NATO documents, our country is officially and directly declared the main threat to North Atlantic security. And Ukraine will serve as a forward springboard for the strike.” (Putin Speech, February 21, 2022, emphasis added)

Putin is absolutely correct.  It is why he put Russia’s nuclear forces on full alert.   Only those ignorant of history, which sadly includes most U.S. Americans, don’t know this.

I believe that today we are in the greatest danger of a nuclear war since the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962, something I vividly remember as a teenager.  The same feelings return.  Dread.  Anxiety.  Breathlessness.  I do not think these feelings are misplaced nor they are simply an emotional response. I try to continue writing on other projects that I have started but feel stymied.  The possibility of nuclear war, whether intentional or accidental, obsesses me.

In order to grasp this stomach-churning possibility within the context of Ukraine, we need to put aside all talk of morality, rights, international law, and think in terms of great power politics, as John Mearsheimer has so clearly articulated.  As he says, when a great power feels its existence is threatened, might makes right. You simply can’t understand world politics without thinking at this level.  Doing so does not mean justifying the use of might; it is a means of clarifying the causes of wars, which start long before the first shots are fired.

In the present crisis over Ukraine, Russia clearly feels existentially threatened by U.S./NATO military moves in Ukraine and in eastern Europe where they have positioned missiles that can be very quickly converted to nuclear and are within a few minutes range of Russia. (And of course there are U.S./NATO nuclear missiles throughout western and southern Europe.)  Vladimir Putin has been talking about this for many years and is factually correct.  He has reiterated that this is unacceptable to Russia and must stop. He has pushed for negotiations to end this situation.

The United States, despite its own Monroe Doctrine that prohibits another great power from putting weapons or military forces close to its borders, has blocked its ears and kept upping the ante, provoking Russian fears. This fact is not in dispute but is shrugged off by U.S./NATO as of little consequence.  Such an attitude is pure provocation as anyone with a smidgeon of historical awareness knows.

The world was very lucky sixty years ago this October when JFK and Nikita Khrushchev negotiated the end of the Cuban Missile Crisis before the world was incinerated.  Kennedy, of course, was intensely pressured by the military and CIA to bomb Cuba, but he resisted.  He also rejected the insane military desire to nuke the Soviet Union, calling such people crazy; at a National Security Council meeting on September 12, 1963, when the Joint Chiefs of Staff presented a report about a nuclear first strike against the Soviet Union which they wanted for that fall, he said, “Preemption is not possible for us.”

Such leadership, together with the nuclear test ban treaty he negotiated with the USSR that month, inter alia (such treaties have now been abrogated by the U.S. government), assured his assassination organized by the CIA.  These days, the U.S. is led by deluded men who espouse a nuclear first strike policy, which tells one all one needs to know about the danger the world is in. The U.S. has been very sick with Russia hatred for a long time.

After the terror of the Cuban Missile Crisis, many more people took the threat of nuclear war seriously.  Today very few do.  It has receded into the ”unimaginable.” In 1962, however, as James W. Douglass writes in JFK and the Unspeakable:

Kennedy saw that, at least outside Washington, D.C., people were living with a deeper awareness of the ultimate choice they faced.  Nuclear weapons were real.  So, too, was the prospect of peace.  Shocked by the Cuban Missile Crisis into recognizing a real choice, people preferred peace to annihilation.

Today the reality of nuclear annihilation has receded into unconsciousness. This despite the recent statements by U.S. generals and the U.S. Ukrainian puppet Zelensky about nuclear weapons and their use that have extremely inflamed Russia’s fears, which clearly is intentional. The game is to have some officials say it and then deny it while having a policy that contradicts your denial.  Keep pushing the envelope is U.S. policy.  Obama-Biden reigned over the U.S. 2014 coup in Ukraine, Trump increased weapon sales to Ukraine in 2017, and Biden has picked up the baton from his partner (not his enemy) in this most deadly game.  It is a bi-partisan Cold War 2, getting very hot.  And it is the reason why Russia, its back to the wall, attacked Ukraine.  It is obvious that this is exactly what the U.S. wanted or it would have acted very differently in the leadup to this tragedy.  All the current ringing of hands is pure hypocrisy, the nihilism of a nuclear power never for one moment threatened but whose designs were calculated to threaten Russia at its borders.

The media propaganda against Russia and Putin is the most extreme and extensive propaganda in my lifetime.  Patrick Lawrence has astutely examined this in a recent essay, where he writes the same is true for him:

Many people of many different ages have remarked in recent days that they cannot recall in their lifetimes a more pervasive, suffocating barrage of propaganda than what has engulfed us since the months that preceded Russia’s intervention. In my case it has come to supersede the worst of what I remember from the Cold War decades.

Engulfed is an appropriate word.  Lawrence rightly points to this propaganda as cognitive warfare directed at the U.S. population (and the rest of the world) and notes its connection to the January 2021 final draft of a “diabolic” NATO study called “Cognitive Warfare.”  He quotes it thus: “The brain will be the battlefield of the 21st century,” . . . “Humans are the contested domain. Cognitive warfare’s objective is to make everyone a weapon.”

This cognitive warfare, however, has a longer history in cutting edge science.  For each successive decade beginning with the 1990s and a declaration from President (and ex-Director of the CIA) George H. W. Bush that the 1990s would be the Decade of Brain Research, presidents have announced additional decades long projects involving the brain, with 2000-2010 being the Decade of Behavior Project, followed by mapping of the brain, artificial intelligence, etc. all organized and funded through the Office of Science and Technology Project (OSTP) and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).  This medical, military, and scientific research has been part of a long range plan to extend MK-Ultra’s mind control to the population at large under the cover of medical science, and it has been simultaneously connected to the development and funding of the pharmaceutical industries research and development of new brain-altering drugs.  RFK, Jr. has documented the CIA’s extensive connection to germ and mind research and promotion in his book, The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health.  It is why his book is banned from the mainstream media, who do the prime work of cognitive warfare for the government.  To put it clearly: these media are the CIA.  And the issue of U.S. bio-weapons research and development is central to these many matters, including in Ukraine.

In other words, the cognitive warfare we are now being subjected to has many tentacles connected to much more than today’s fanatical anti-Russian propaganda over Ukraine.  All the U.S. wars of aggression have been promoted under its aegis, as have the lies about the attacks of September 11, 2001, the economic warfare by the elites, the COVID crisis, etc.  It’s one piece.

Take, for example, a book written in 2010 by David Ray Griffin, a renown theologian who has written more than a dozen books about 9/11.  The book is Cognitive Infiltration: An Obama Appointee’s Plan to Undermine the 9/11 Conspiracy Theory.  It is a critique of law professor Cass Sunstein, appointed by Obama to be the Administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs.  Sunstein had written an article with a plan for the government to prevent the spread of anti-government “conspiracy theories” in which he promoted the use of anonymous government agents to use secret “cognitive infiltration” of these groups in order to break them up; to use media plants to disparage their arguments.  He was particularly referring to those who questioned the official 9/11 narrative but his point obviously extended much further.  He was working in the tradition of the great propagandists.  Griffin took a scalpel to this call for cognitive warfare and was of course a victim of it as well.  Sunstein has since worked for the World Health Organization (WHO) on COVID psychological responses and other COVID committees.  It’s all one piece.

Sunstein’s wife is Samantha Power, Obama’s Ambassador to the United Nations and war hawk extraordinaire.  She gleefully promoted the U.S. destruction of Libya under the appellation of the “responsibility to protect,”  a “humane” cover for imperialism.  Now she is Biden’s Administrator of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), an arm of the CIA throughout the world.  It’s all one piece.

The merry-go-round goes round and round.

I have gone off on this slight tangent to emphasize how vast and interconnected are the players and groups on Team Cognitive Warfare.  They have been leading the league for quite some time and are hoping their game plan against Team Russia will keep them there.  So far they are winning, as Patrick Lawrence says:

Look at what has become of us. Most Americans seem to approve of these things, or at least are unstirred to object. We have lost all sense of decency, of ordinary morality, of proportion. Can anyone listen to the din of the past couple of weeks without wondering if we have made of ourselves a nation of grotesques?

It is common to observe that in war the enemy is always dehumanized. We are now face to face with another reality: Those who dehumanize others dehumanize themselves more profoundly.

Perhaps people are too ignorant to see through the propaganda. To have some group to hate is always “uplifting.” But we are all responsible for the consequences of our actions, even when those actions are just buying the propaganda and hating those one is told to hate. It is very hard to accept that the leaders of your own country commit and contemplate unspeakable evil deeds and that they wish to control your mind. To contemplate that they might once again use nuclear weapons is unspeakable but necessary if we are to prevent it.

I hope my fears are unfounded.  I agree with Gilbert Doctorow that the Ukraine-Russia war separates the sheep from the goats, that there is no middle ground.  This is not to celebrate war and the death of innocent people, but it does demand placing the blame squarely where it belongs and not trying to have it both ways.  People like him, John Mearsheimer, the late badly missed Stephen Cohen, Ray McGovern, Scott Ritter, Pepe Escobar, Patrick Lawrence, Jack Matlock, Ted Postol, et al. are all cutting through the propaganda and delivering truth in opposition to all the lies.  They go gentile with fears of nuclear war, however, as if it is somewhat possible but highly unlikely, as if their deepest thoughts are unspeakable, for to utter them would be an act of despondency.

The consensus of the experts tends to be that the U.S. wishes to draw the Russians into a long protracted guerrilla war along the lines of its secret use of mujahideen in Afghanistan in 1979 and after. There is evidence that this is already happening. But I think the U.S. strategists know that the Russians are too smart for that; that they have learned their lesson; and that they will withdraw once they feel they have accomplished their goals. Therefore, from the U.S./NATO perspective, time is reasonably short and they must act quickly, perhaps by doing a false flag operation that will justify a drastic response, or upping the tempo in some other way that would seem to justify the use of nuclear weapons, perhaps tactical at first.

I appreciate the input of the Russia experts I mentioned above.  Their expertise dwarfs mine, but I disagree. Perhaps I am an excitable sort; perhaps I am one of those Patrick Lawrence refers to, quoting Carl Jung, as too emotional and therefore incapable of clear thinking. (I will leave the issue of this long held but erroneous western philosophical belief in the division of emotions and thoughts for another day.)  Perhaps I can’t see the obvious that a nuclear war will profit no one  and therefore it cannot happen. Yet Ted Postol, MIT professor of technology and international security, while perhaps agreeing that an intentional nuclear war is very unlikely, has been warning of an accidental one for many years.  He is surely right on that score and well worth listening to.

But either way, I am sorry to say, perhaps because my perspective is that of a generalist, not an expert, and my thinking is informed by art as much as social science and history, my antennae pick up a very disturbing message. A voice tells me that the danger is very, very real today.  It says:

Beware, we are on the edge of a nuclear abyss.

Waltzing to Armageddon

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The Dr. Strangeloves, like zombies rising from the mass graves they created around the globe, are once again stoking new campaigns of industrial mass slaughter.

By Chris Hedges

Source: Information Clearing House

The Cold War, from 1945 to 1989, was a wild Bacchanalia for arms manufacturers, the Pentagon, the C.I.A., the diplomats who played one country off another on the world’s chess board, and the global corporations able to loot and pillage by equating predatory capitalism with freedom. In the name of national security, the Cold Warriors, many of them self-identified liberals, demonized labor, independent media, human rights organizations, and those who opposed the permanent war economy and the militarization of American society as soft on communism. 

That is why they have resurrected it.

The decision to spurn the possibility of peaceful coexistence with Russia at the end of the Cold War is one of the most egregious crimes of the late 20th century. The danger of provoking Russia was universally understood with the collapse of the Soviet Union, including by political elites as diverse as Henry Kissinger and George F. Kennan, who called the expansion of NATO into Central Europe “the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-Cold War era.” 

This provocation, a violation of a promise not to expand NATO beyond the borders of a unified Germany, has seen Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Albania, Croatia, Montenegro and North Macedonia inducted into the Western military alliance.

This betrayal was compounded by a decision to station NATO troops, including thousands of U.S. troops, in Eastern Europe, another violation of an agreement made by Washington with Moscow. The Russian invasion of Ukraine, perhaps a cynical goal of the Western alliance, has now solidified an expanding and resurgent NATO and a rampant, uncontrollable militarism. The masters of war may be ecstatic, but the potential consequences, including a global conflagration, are terrifying. 

Peace has been sacrificed for U.S. global hegemony. It has been sacrificed for the billions in profits made by the arms industry. Peace could have seen state resources invested in people rather than systems of control. It could have allowed us to address the climate emergency. But we cry peace, peace, and there is no peace. Nations frantically rearm, threatening nuclear war. They prepare for the worst, ensuring that the worst will happen. 

So, what if the Amazon is reaching its final tipping point where trees will soon begin to die off en masse? So what if land ice and ice shelves are melting from below at a much faster rate than predicted? So what if temperatures soar, monster hurricanes, floods, droughts, and wildfires devastate the earth? In the face of the gravest existential crisis to beset the human species, and most other species, the ruling elites stoke a conflict that is driving up the price of oil and turbocharging the fossil fuel extraction industry. It is collective madness.

The march towards protracted conflict with Russia and China will backfire. The desperate effort to counter the steady loss of economic dominance by the U.S. will not be offset by military dominance. If Russia and China can create an alternative global financial system, one that does not use the U.S. dollar as the world’s reserve currency, it will signal the collapse of the American empire. The dollar will plummet in value. Treasury bonds, used to fund America’s massive debt, will become largely worthless. The financial sanctions used to cripple Russia will be, I expect, the mechanism that slays Americans, if not immolation in thermonuclear war.

Washington plans to turn Ukraine into Chechnya or the old Afghanistan, when the Carter administration, under the influence of the Svengali-like National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, equipped and armed the radical jihadists that would morph into the Taliban and al Qaeda in the fight against the Soviets. It will not be good for Russia. It will not be good for the United States. It will not be good for Ukraine, as making Russia bleed will require rivers of Ukrainian blood.

Pandora’s Box of Evils

The decision to destroy the Russian economy, to turn the Ukrainian war into a quagmire for Russia and topple the regime of Vladimir Putin will open a Pandora’s box of evils. Massive social engineering — look at Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya or Vietnam — has its own centrifugal force. It destroys those who play God.

The Ukrainian war has silenced the last vestiges of the Left. Nearly everyone has giddily signed on for the great crusade against the latest embodiment of evil, Vladimir Putin, who, like all our enemies, has become the new Hitler.

The United States will give $13.6 billion in military and humanitarian assistance to Ukraine, with the Biden administration authorizing an additional $200 million in military assistance. The 5,000-strong EU rapid deployment force, the recruitment of all Eastern Europe, including Ukraine, into NATO, the reconfiguration of former Soviet bloc militaries to NATO weapons and technology have all been fast tracked.

Germany, for the first time since World War II, is massively rearming. It has lifted its ban on exporting weapons. Its new military budget is twice the amount of the old budget, with promises to raise the budget to more than 2 percent of GDP, which would move its military from the seventh largest in the world to the third, behind China and the United States.

NATO battlegroups are being doubled in size in the Baltic states to more than 6,000 troops. Battlegroups will be sent to Romania and Slovakia. Washington will double the number of U.S. troops stationed in Poland to 9,000. Sweden and Finland are considering dropping their neutral status to integrate with NATO.

This is a recipe for global war. History, as well as all the conflicts I covered as a war correspondent, have demonstrated that when military posturing begins, it often takes little to set the funeral pyre alight. One mistake. One overreach. One military gamble too many. One too many provocations. One act of desperation.

Russia’s threat to attack weapons convoys to Ukraine from the West; its air strike on a military base in western Ukraine, 12 miles from the Polish border, which is a staging area for foreign mercenaries; the statement by Polish President Andrzej Duda that the use of weapons of mass destruction, such as chemical weapons, by Russia against Ukraine, would be a “game-changer” that could force NATO to rethink its decision to refrain from direct military intervention — all are ominous developments pushing the alliance closer to open warfare with Russia.

Once military forces are deployed, even if they are supposedly in a defensive posture, the bear trap is set. It takes very little to trigger the spring. The vast military bureaucracy, bound to alliances and international commitments, along with detailed plans and timetables, when it starts to roll forward, becomes unstoppable. It is propelled not by logic but by action and reaction, as Europe learned in two world wars.

Staggering Hypocrisy

The moral hypocrisy of the United States is staggering. The crimes Russia is carrying out in Ukraine are more than matched by the crimes committed by Washington in the Middle East over the last two decades, including the act of preemptive war, which under post-Nuremberg laws is a criminal act of aggression. Only rarely is this hypocrisy exposed as when U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Linda Thomas-Greenfield told the body:

“We’ve seen videos of Russian forces moving exceptionally lethal weaponry into Ukraine, which has no place on the battlefield. That includes cluster munitions and vacuum bombs which are banned under the Geneva Convention.”

Hours later, the official transcript of her remark was amended to tack on the words “if they are directed against civilians.” This is because the U.S., which like Russia never ratified the Convention on Cluster Munitions treaty, regularly uses cluster munitions. It used them in Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, and Iraq. It has provided them to Saudi Arabia for use in Yemen. Russia has yet to come close to the tally of civilian deaths from cluster munitions delivered by the U.S. military.

The Dr. Strangeloves, like zombies rising from the mass graves they created around the globe, are once again stoking new campaigns of industrial mass slaughter. No diplomacy. No attempt to address the legitimate grievances of our adversaries. No check on rampant militarism. No capacity to see the world from another perspective. No ability to comprehend reality outside the confines of the binary rubric of good and evil. No understanding of the debacles they orchestrated for decades. No capacity for pity or remorse.

Elliott Abrams worked in the Reagan administration when I was reporting from Central America. He covered up atrocities and massacres committed by the military regimes in El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and by the U.S.-backed Contra forces fighting the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. He viciously attacked reporters and human rights groups as communists or fifth columnists, calling us “un-American” and “unpatriotic.” He was convicted for lying to Congress about his role in the Iran-Contra affair. During the administration of George W. Bush, he lobbied for the invasion of Iraq and tried to orchestrate a U.S. coup in Venezuela to overthrow Hugo Chávez.
“There will be no substitute for military strength, and we do not have enough,” writes Abrams for the Council on Foreign Relations, where he is a senior fellow:

“It should be crystal clear now that a larger percentage of GDP will need to be spent on defense. We will need more conventional strength in ships and planes. We will need to match the Chinese in advanced military technology, but at the other end of the spectrum, we may need many more tanks if we have to station thousands in Europe, as we did during the Cold War. (The total number of American tanks permanently stationed in Europe today is zero.) Persistent efforts to diminish even further the size of our nuclear arsenal or prevent its modernization were always bad ideas, but now, as China and Russia are modernizing their nuclear weaponry and appear to have no interest in negotiating new limits, such restraints should be completely abandoned. Our nuclear arsenal will need to be modernized and expanded so that we will never face the kinds of threats Putin is now making from a position of real nuclear inferiority.”

Putin played into the hands of the war industry. He gave the warmongers what they wanted. He fulfilled their wildest fantasies. There will be no impediments now on the march to Armageddon. Military budgets will soar. The oil will gush from the ground. The climate crisis will accelerate.

China and Russia will form the new axis of evil. The poor will be abandoned. The roads across the earth will be clogged with desperate refugees. All dissent will be treason. The young will be sacrificed for the tired tropes of glory, honor and country. The vulnerable will suffer and die.

The only true patriots will be generals, war profiteers, opportunists, courtiers in the media and demagogues braying for more and more blood. The merchants of death rule like Olympian gods. And we, cowed by fear, intoxicated by war, swept up in the collective hysteria, clamor for our own annihilation.

Oceania Has Always Been At War With Russia

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By Doug “Uncola” Lynn

Source: The Burning Platform

We’ll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false.

– William J. Casey, 1913-1987, Director, CIA (Republican), Statement at his first CIA staff meeting, 1981

And ye shall hear of wars and rumours of wars…

– King James Bible, Matthew 24:6

In the years prior to the new millennium, most readers of George Orwell’s novel “1984” would have considered the book to be a stark warning to mankind. However, in light of world events over the last 22 years it appears Orwell’s book was, instead, an instruction manual for the world’s financial elite.

The setting of 1984 took place in a futuristic, post-apocalyptic Great Britain which was a part of “Oceania”, a world super-state alternately engaged in never-ending warfare with two other global powers: Eurasia and Eastasia.

The INSOC Party was a totalitarian regime led by a figurehead known only as “Big Brother” and the “Ministry of Truth” promoted war hysteria to unite the citizens of Oceania by continuously broadcasting propaganda that simultaneously subverted autonomous thought and action.

Today, it appears the U.S. Military Industrial Complex of which President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned in his 1961 farewell address, has assumed the role of Orwell’s Oceania; along with the other English-speaking nations that comprise the “Five Eyes” global surveillance network: Great Britain, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada.  In endless propaganda purveyed to rile and unify the masses, this Anglo intelligence apparatus ostensibly wages war against Islamic terror, Russia, China, and Covid-19, alternately, contingent upon which puppet politicians are appointed to rule at any given time.

What began as Operation Mockingbird during the Cold War, has been perfected in modern media as news agencies, like the Associated Press and Reuters, continually broadcast state-sponsored narratives which are, in turn, repeated by online “fact-checkers”.

Currently, 90% of the modern mainstream media is owned by six corporations doing big business with Big Business: Time-Warner, Comcast, News Corp, Sony, Viacom, and Disney.

Of course, the World Economic Forum (WEF) is near the top-of-the-pyramid where Big Brother, Big Government, and Big Business all merge into the modern-day INGSOC Party also known as the New World Order (NWO).

Orwell considered war as the means by which a collectivist oligarchy could maintain a hierarchical society by purging the excess production of material goods from the economy; thus, keeping the masses impoverished and ignorant:

The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labour. War is a way of shattering to pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere, or sinking in the depths of the sea, materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable, and hence, in the long run, too intelligent.

— Orwell, George. ”1984”: part 2, chapter 9

That meant, as Orwell claimed, wars around the world are not to be won, per se, but, rather, to be continuous in order to keep the masses forever alarmed, confused, deceived, misinformed, and poor.

With this in mind, I wrote the following in the commentary of a blog post on August 20, 2021:

The Afghanistan debacle marks the official end of U.S Global Hegemony. As the globalists are sifting the nations into the NWO, they now want China to absorb Taiwan and Russia to invade Ukraine. The Fall of Afghanistan® paves the way. Dissolve & coagulate. Of course, it will look like World War III, but it’s all part of the plan because Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia but not Eastasia; except the times it has fought against Eastasia but not Eurasia.

Just like Orwell’s Oceania, we know the global ship of state (i.e. military-industrial complex) is fueled by these manifestations:

1.) War
2.) Propaganda
3.) Tyranny

Furthermore, the War on Covid-19, like the War on Terror, like Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq, et al, all demonstrate how these materializations are actualized through false justification and plausible deniability.

For example, most recently, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau utilized false justification and plausible deniability (i.e. the War on Covid) to violently push back against the Freedom Convoy in Ottawa (tyranny) as Trudeau and the Orwellian Media labeled the truckers as racists, white nationalists, and a “fringe minority”. (propaganda).

Why? Because Oceania has always been at war against its citizens.

Indeed, Orwell’s vision has become an ideal lens by which to interpret current world events and circumstances.

The Truck Drivers Demonstrated the Dangers of Thoughtcrime

The Canadian Freedom Convoy cornered the globalists between a rock and a hard place:  They could not lose the battle of Ottawa without sacrificing vaccine passports which are crucial to establishing a global control grid built upon comprehensive digital identification.

Yet, at the same time, the Ottawa protest demonstrated to the entire world the modus operandi of the authoritarians as follows:

1.) First, the tyrants smeared and slandered

2.) They spouted false narratives that were, in turn, propagated by the Orwellian Media

3.) They threatened the enforcement of “laws” citing justification under the guise of a faux morality

4.) As the first three steps above progressed, the totalitarians continued gathering on-the-ground intelligence on those protesting for liberty (i.e. the opposition)

5.) The sources of funding were attacked

6.) The tyrants attempted to remove, or diminish, on-the-ground support and logistics (i.e. stolen fuel)

7.) A false flag was implemented so the Orwellian Media could propagate and, seemingly, “prove” previous and current false narratives thus further justifying an aggressive response (i.e. truckload of firearms and ammo). The false flag also confused, deceived, and discouraged the non-violent protesters.

8.) While steps 1-7 above were commencing, the tyrants strategized enforcement and mustered stormtroopers who were willing to follow orders

9.) An aggressive offensive was launched against non-violent protesters by means of the stormtroopers following orders. Leaders were arrested at the start of the offensive in order to decapitate the protest. (Paradoxically, the stormtroopers were paid by tax monies collected from the very citizens who were violently removed.)

10.) The Orwellian Media propagandized the aggressive offensive against non-violent protesters as having been necessary and morally justified

Surely, these revelations did not benefit Big Brother as the eyes of the proles watched from around the world.

And look what the Canadian truckers accomplished:

– Trudeau ran and hid like a little girl then said he had Covid (in spite of his three shots) for the entire world to see.

– Multiple Canadian provinces dropped Covid mandates

– GoFundMe and the Orwellian Media were completely exposed

– More people around the globe were awakened to the tyranny we all now face

– Canadian premiers, and various political pundits, and national organizations, criticized Trudeau’s actions.  A U.S. congresswoman from New Mexico even proposed the Canadian Truckers be offered political asylum.

– Frozen bank accounts generated a loss of faith in the corrupt banking system and revealed to the world the genuine dangers of a digital financial system.

– The American People’s Convoy began in California and steered toward Washington D.C. which caused corrupt D.C. party leaders to weaponize the national guard against blue-collar working-class Americans in the nation’s capitol city.

However, in spite of the world peeking behind Big Brother’s curtain in Canada, vaccine passports remain the World Economic Forum’s line in the sand. This is because digital identity and tracking are crucial to transitioning the entire globe into a cashless financial system and social credit scores.

Additionally, vaccine passports corral the compliant, identify and isolate “the resistance”, and seemingly facilitate a global depopulation agenda.

Even so, the globalists have another big problem: The truth about vaccine injuries and deaths are getting out and, thus, threatening the mainstream narrative – especially the propaganda claiming Covid vaccines are “safe and effective”.

After all, dictators like Trudeau have weaponized a faux morality (i.e. false justification and plausible deniability) by claiming vaccine mandates protect people. But what is occurring now in the bodies of the vaccinated has the potential of tipping Big Brother’s narrative upside-down.

Ignorance is Strength, Sickness is Health, Fauci is Wise, and Covid Vaccines are Safe and Effective

In late 2021, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s book “The Real Anthony Fauci, Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health” was published in time to land under living room pine trees at Christmas. Robert Kennedy is former president John F. Kennedy’s nephew; he is politically liberal, an environmental activist, a children’s advocate, and his book contains 2,194 well-documented citations – all of which are extremely difficult, if not impossible, for Big Brother’s Ministry of Truth to dispute.

Furthermore, on January 6, 2022 U.S. District Judge Mark T. Pittman ruled against the FDA to suppress data on Covid vaccine adverse events for 75 years.  The recently released documents have revealed “1,291 different adverse events following vaccination”, according to “data Pfizer submitted to FDA from its clinical trials in support of a COVID-19 vaccine license”.

Pursuant to a January 24, 2022 roundtable discussion on Covid vaccine “efficacy and safety”, Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson wrote a letter to Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin regarding data from the Department of Defense Medical Epidemiology Database (DMED) provided by three military whistleblowers and showing a “significant increase in registered diagnoses on DMED for miscarriages, cancer, and many other medical conditions in 2021 compared to a five-year average from 2016-2020.”

In response, the military and online “fact-checkers” claimed the DMED data was not correct for the years 2016 through 2020. But how could data glitches have been addressed in 2021 that weren’t made known until this year?

Additionally, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) was criticized in February for withholding data on hospitalizations for Covid-19 and the effectiveness of booster shots, for fear the information might be “misinterpreted” and “lead people to question the vaccines’ effectiveness”.

Moreover, funeral directors, embalmers, and life insurance executives, are expressing alarm over strange blood clots discovered in Covid-vaccinated individuals as well as double-digit excess mortality rates which are not attributed to Covid-19.

Even the Ministry of Truth’s online purveyor, Microsoft News Network (MSN), had turned against Oceania’s chief Covid advisor, and National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) Director, Anthony Fauci.

Obviously, Big Brother needed to change the channel from Covid to something else.

But, to what exactly?

After all, Covid had been a center of focus for the entire world for two years.  What could possibly transition away from such a massively successful propaganda campaign?

How about World War III?

Consider the timing: The official departure date of the People’s Convoy from California was Wednesday, February 23, 2022. That same day Canadian PM Trudeau, seemingly under duress, revoked his self-assigned emergency powers. Then, the very next day, on February 24, 2022, Vlad Putin changed the world headlines to World War III.

Big Brother Said: “Change the Channel! Change the Channel!”

It was too late. The tin-pot tyrant Trudeau could never walk back his previous slander, and aggressive action, against the Ottawa protesters.

Certainly, the dreamweavers within the modern-day Ministry of Truth own the media so they can create reality by spinning narratives; and, for us proles, it is like watching a movie but with real consequences. We witnessed the Orwellian Media’s power to deceive with Trump’s Russiagate, impeachment hearings, the 2020 Presidential Election heist, and the January 6th “insurrection”.

Trudeau’s hard-line approach, and non-compromising, action against the Ottawa protesters was surely gamed out some time ago. He merely read from a pre-written script and the Orwellian Media took it into production.

But, by late February, much damage had been done.

The propaganda channel had to be changed.

Putin in Russia, like Trudeau in Canada, like Macron in France, and like other political and economic leaders throughout the Orwellian West and elsewhere are all Klaus Schwab hand-picked selections from the WEF young leaders program.  In fact, until recently, Putin had his own page on the WEF website.

Of course, the first causality of war is truth.

As Putin took military action in Ukraine, plausible deniability was afforded to Big Brother and false justification was used to change the narrative on COVID, diminish and vilify the American People’s Convoy (because we are at WAR, dammit!), legitimize inflationary economic collapse, and… eventually…. shut down the internet and blame Putin for responding to economic sanctions and/or military retaliation with… wait for it…. cyberattacks..

Even “conservative” pundits like Hannity, O’Reilly, Levin, and others, immediately jumped upon the jingoistic war train and with expectations for a red wave in the mid-term elections; peace through strength, and all that jazz.

The point is this: The channel was changed to Russia and Ukraine, all the time, for both Democrat and Republican politicos and pundits alike.

Now, many reading this may believe current world events are naturally occurring, and, perhaps they are happening spontaneously. Or, on the other hand, it remains possible that those peering out from behind the eye of the pyramid, or rather, the most elite of the elite puppetmasters, are, indeed, pulling all the strings from behind the watchful eye of Big Brother.

Since Trump’s election in 2016, consider how the propaganda channels have transitioned so smoothly from one media narrative to another: Russiagate, Ukrainegate, impeachment, Covid, trade wars with Eastasia, and, now, actual war with Eurasia.

Although the geopolitical dynamics prior to Putin’s invasion, the actual warfare, and the ensuing consequences are all genuine – I believe Russia versus Ukraine is, ultimately, comparable to Coke versus Pepsi and Republicans against Democrats: endless ad campaigns saturating our televisions as the Blackrock, Vanguard, and State Street investment firms rule them all from behind the cameras.

Think about it this way:  Communist Russia is fighting the neo-Nazis in Ukraine that does the dirty work of the U.S. Deep State that is in bed with communist China.

Ukraine had about as much of a chance of joining NATO as Donald J. Trump being invited to join John Kerry’s, Al Gore’s, and Mitt Romney’s acapella serenade at Greta Thunberg’s birthday party. But any consolation for Vlad in that regard was just a bridge too far, even under the potential of an early nuclear winter.

It doesn’t compute.

Thus, the considerations then become a matter of ideological proximity: For the pundits on the field it looks as though the diplomacy game was lost by means of poor judgment manifesting into a comedy of errors.

But, from out here in the cheap seats, it becomes a matter of considering the timing of events and calculating the odds of specific outcomes occurring in the exact right wrong sequences – and all paired to cui bono.

At this point, any number of plausible scenarios could lead to Russian energy blockages in Europe and, ultimately, to Red Dawn the Reality Show in America.

Ironically, “Red Dawn”, a movie about Russia invading America, was released in 1984.

But I digress.

Hopefully, WWIII will not go thermonuclear, but it would be a mistake to put anything past Big Brother. Because, it seems, the globalists always have a plan.

In fact, if the Covid plandemic has shown us anything, it’s that Klaus & the Build Back Betters still have a few obstacles to their New World Order:

A.) The U.S Constitution.

B.) Red States

C.) More than 400 million guns in civilian possession.

Even now, world citizens in many places are required to show proof of vaccination or a negative Covid test before crossing certain local, regional, and national borders.  Given what we have seen with the rise of the Freedom and People’s Convoys, as well as daily revelations on vaccine injuries and deaths, how long will vaccine passports be tolerated by peaceful protesters?

Soon, the Covid War could go hot and when that happens during WWIII, Big Brother’s Ministry of Truth will surely label the resistance as Russian-backed nationalists waging a domestic terror campaign.

Again, as history has revealed: The one-way road to hell has two lanes: false justification and plausible deniability.

World War III has allowed for further dissolution and coagulation on a global scale; and, paradoxically, brought to us by the same Big Brother who still seems quite concerned about us proles catching the flu.

So, whether as a temporary distraction or an event generating genuine, ever-expanding, negative long-term global consequences, it appears WWIII, started as a diversion and, seemingly, for purposes of propaganda and tyranny.

In a real war, Putin would not have kept Ukraine’s internet intact so Zelensky could become an international hero bravely fighting against the tyrannical Russian Bear.

The propaganda sells itself. And, last week, I overheard 4th graders talking amongst themselves and cheering on Ukraine like WWIII was a football game.

2 + 2 = 5: Hegelian Wars Benefit Big Brother & the Globalists

A puppet government may be installed in Ukraine, or it could be Russia becomes bogged down for the war to remain continuous, or, the worst-case scenario, mushroom clouds sprouting into skies all over the world.

In any of these scenarios, however, Putin’s aggression validates the global order.

It’s that simple.

Order out of chaos.

What do communists and Covidists have in common? Both weaponize the collective against the natural rights of individuals who wish to live peacefully, prosperously, and free.

Therefore, all communists and Covidists are puppets in one way or another.

Nationalists like Putin and Trump are not stupid. They fully understand what is going on behind the scenes. And, if they truly loved their countries, they would have defended their nation’s citizens from medical tyranny. Instead, however, both have facilitated, and continue to expedite, the global Great Reset by pretending to be nationalists.

In other words, controlled opposition acts as a quickening agent in the dissolution and coagulation alchemy that is transitioning traditional globalism into the New World Order.

The circles are closing and Big Brother cannot rule without permission from the plebes. Hence the deceptive narrative wars that are not meant to be won, per se, but to remain continuous.

Consider what this latest Ministry of Truth “channel change” has done to infinitely malleable minds: Ukraine has demonstrated how the Political Left is genuinely concerned about defending borders, arming citizens, and shielding neo-nazis from communists.

2 + 2 = 5

Doublethink, much?

Furthermore, as these words are typed, Canada’s Justin Trudeau is in Europe and meeting with allies “about the intensifying situation in Ukraine.”  Boom.  Vladimir Putin has turned an embarrassingly desperate tin-pot tyrant into an international statesman during a time of war. Just like that.

World War Three has made the Political Left heroes once again, valiantly fighting against Vlad the Bad, in ways that make Orwell’s “Two-Minutes of Hate” look like afternoon tea at Buckingham Palace. At the same time, Trump supporters, the Freedom Convoy, and the People’s Convoy are now labeled as Russian-backed terrorists and war criminals, according to Oceania’s Ministry of Truth (i.e. the mainstream media).

This is because Big Brother has identified the real enemy:  The truth, those who tell it, and the spirit of free people who refuse to yield their natural rights.

Division is Unity! Stronger Together!

Vlad Putin starting WWIII has allowed political bootlickers like Mitt Romney to excoriate disgusting pro-Putin republicans as “almost Treasonous” while the Ministry of Truth has scolded the true Emmanuel Goldstein of our time, Donald J. Trump, for praising the Ukrainian president he once “tried to extort”:

Donald Trump praised the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, as a “brave man” for his handling of the Russian invasion – nearly three years after he tried to extort him for political dirt on Joe Biden.

The revelation that the then-president was secretly linking military aid to opening an investigation into Joe and Hunter Biden, his son, led to Mr Trump’s first impeachment by the House of Representatives.

The Republican Senator from South Carolina, Lindsey Graham, has called for Vladimir Putin’s assassination as Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell, and Democrats, Nancy Pelsoi and Adam Schiff, cheer in unison.

But, amidst all of the war propaganda, jingoistic patriotism, and political infighting, always remember the original timing of events:

The official departure date of the People’s Convoy was Wednesday, February 23, 2022. The very same day Canadian PM Trudeau revoked his self-assigned emergency powers and then, the next day, on February 24, 2022, Vlad Putin invaded Ukraine.

Also on February 24, 2002 Forbes published an article entitled: “A National Vaccine Pass Has Quietly Rolled Out – And Red States Are Getting On Board”:

Even as the omicron variant loosens its grip on the world, destinations continue to require travelers to show proof of vaccination. And, increasingly, a paper CDC vaccination card is not cutting it.

While the United States government has not issued a federal digital vaccine pass, a national standard has nevertheless emerged. To date, 21 states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico offer accessibility to the SMART Health Card, a verifiable digital proof of vaccination developed through the Vaccination Credential Initiative (VCI), a global coalition of public and private stakeholders including Microsoft, Salesforce, Oracle, the Mayo Clinic and other health and tech heavyweights.

And very soon, at least four more states will be rolling out access to SMART Health Cards. “We’ve seen a notable uptick in states that have officially launched public portals where individuals can get verifiable vaccination credentials in the form of SMART Health Cards with a QR code,” says Dr. Brian Anderson, co-founder of the VCI and chief digital health physician at MITRE.

If Covid vaccines don’t prevent infection or transmission of the virus, then how do vaccine passports make sense?  In truth, they don’t.  But, to Big Brother, Covid mandates were never about health anyway.

On March 3, 2022 the Council of the European Union, in coordination with the World Health Organization (WHO), began negotiations on an “international pandemic treaty” that would be “legally binding under international law” and “enable countries around the globe to strengthen national, regional and global capacities and resilience to future pandemics.”

According to the European Council, the “10 incentives and benefits of an international treaty on pandemics” are as follows:

1.) Faster and better information for signatory countries about pandemic threats

2.) Greater certainty for citizens regarding equitable access to pandemic countermeasures (e.g. diagnostics, medicines, vaccines)

3.) Cost-effective solutions, based on regional and global planning, for stockpiling and production of pandemic supplies in, or near, a given country

4.) A guaranteed “seat at the table” for national leaders at all treaty for a where decisions on pandemic preparedness and response will be taken

5.) More secure global supply chains and sufficient healthcare workers during pandemics

6.) Clarity about each country’s core capacities

7.) Insight and research and development on pandemic solutions, and better sharing of R&D solutions

8.) Great confidence that all partners are doing their part, through fair accountability systems

9.) Integration of the ‘one health’ approach into the global health architecture, thereby improving prevention by connecting the health of humans, animals, and the planet

10.) Partnership and networking with national counterparts in overcoming the threat of future pandemics, and with all other relevant actors (international organisations, civil society, private sector)

What could go wrong? For citizens of once-free nations… everything; because once the circles close on digital identity and vaccine passports in a cashless system, liberty will have been just a mere memory.

In summary, as Big Brother was creating order out of chaos, truck drivers spontaneously threatened to turn the Great Reset narrative upside down. Hence the TV remote was given to Vladimir Putin so he could change the global news channel to WWIII.

False flags have been utilized to start previous wars throughout history and, at the very least, we must always consider the impeccable timing of events in correlation with specific outcomes.

The war in Ukraine now serves as cover for the final stages of a global control grid constructed both in plain sight and behind the scenes as WWIII was initiated to coagulate the new world order in the same Hegelian way WWI delivered the League of Nations and WWII produced the United Nations.

Now, if the reader refuses to accept such massive conspiracy theories on a global scale, then, at least, consider the following:

On February 26, 2022 the New York Times published an ad hominem hit piece on Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in an effort to disparage Kennedy’s aforementioned book, “The Real Anthony Fauci”.

But if the War on Covid is over, as the Ministry of Truth now reports, then why the need to disparage Kennedy and his book – especially just two days after WWIII appeared to begin as Russian forces invaded Ukraine?

Perhaps because the War on Covid remains continuous. It is not over by a long shot (pun intended).

And the warfare is being waged against the formerly free societies around the world; even as WWIII begins in Ukraine.

CONCLUSION

At the end, we must understand the real war is between truth versus deception, good versus evil, and free will versus totalitarianism. Political dissident and author Alexander Solzhenitsyn said the battle line between good and evil runs through the heart of every man. Author and theologian C.S. Lewis claimed evil comes by the abuse of free will and, for me, this raises specific questions:

Can one stop a monster without becoming a monster too? And, if not, can Big Brother be defeated by peaceful protests?

Food for thought.

C.S. Lewis, furthermore, asserted that a good person understands both good and evil but a bad person understands neither – mainly because good people have experience fighting evil but bad people do not.

As Orwell wrote in his “1984” instruction manual:

…. no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.

 – Orwell, George. ”1984”: part 3, chapter 3,

Certainly, there are decent citizens in Ukraine now suffering. And their pain is real. But they are mere pawns in the revolution.

The war is meant to be continuous and Eurasia has always been at war with Ukraine.

Here, in Oceania, if a political puppet of the Inner Party willingly claimed victory in a fraudulent presidential election and later attempted to coerce citizens to choose between their livelihoods or experimental medical procedures, and was later overruled by the Supreme Court, then, surely, the puppet forfeited even the constitutional authority he knows he never had.

The proles must awaken before Big Brother’s economic, political, and societal control circles are fully closed and the real lockdowns begin.

Federal elections were surrendered under Trump and, as Covid has demonstrated, local and state are the new battle lines against Trump’s Operation Warpspeed and Klaus Schwab’s Great Reset. This is why U.S. states with GOP governors and legislatures are passing laws to secure future elections as Oceania’s Inner Party has recently attempted to pass federal election legislation – complete with an Orwellian name: The  “Freedom to Vote Act”.

The actions and mandates of public health organizations, Democrats, and Blue State authoritarians are a matter of historical public record.  What must occur now is for true freedom fighters to continue revealing Covid vaccine injuries, ailments, and deaths, so the vaccine passport agenda can be stopped before it’s too late.

Those who would resist tyranny must not focus upon distant wars.  Instead, local parallel structures must be established, and then networked, beyond the reach of an unjust dystopia. This can be accomplished by communities centered upon common values. And, certainly, this sort of engagement is far more advantageous than blindly succumbing to the divide and conquer propaganda spewed by Big Brother’s Ministry of Truth.

An 8-year-old child in my area recently died as a result of unknown reasons. Yes, unknown reasons.  Was the child vaxxed? I don’t know.  But if hospital personnel, military whistleblower, insurance mortality rates and funeral industry revelations continue, people just might start asking the right questions.

And, if the right questions are asked and answered, Big Brother will be exposed.

In other words, 2 + 2 must be made to equal 4 again.

Duplicitous Biden Regime Mission to Venezuela

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By Stephen Lendman

Source: StephenLendman.org

Last weekend, a Biden regime delegation met with 

Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and other Bolivarian officials in Caracas.

The aim of the first diplomatic contact between both nations since the Trump regime closed the US Caracas embassy in 2019, officially broke with Venezuela’s legitimate government, and illegally designed Juan Guido as president flopped.

More on this below.

Hegemon USA has been a mortal enemy of Bolivarian social democracy since Hugo Chavez took office as president in February 1999, following his December 1998 election — a near-generation ago.

Count the ways.

1. The aborted two-day April 2002 attempt to oust Chavez. Failure to get Venezuelan military support and popular resistance foiled it.

2. The 2002 – 03 general strike and oil management lockout, causing severe economic disruption and billions of dollars in losses.

3. The August 2004 national recall referendum, Hugo Chavez winning overwhelmingly with a 59% majority, thwarting the US-orchestrated attempt to remove him.

4. US sanctions war on Venezuela, begun by the Bush/Cheney regime in 2006 — for so-called non-cooperation in combatting international terrorism that hegemon USA fosters. 

War on the Bolivarian Republic by other means continued under the Obama/Biden regime.

Greatly escalated by Trump regime hardliners, high-level Venezuelan officials and the country’s enterprises were targeted.

US policy tried to block Venezuelan access to financial markets, as well as maximally reduce its oil exports.

Annually since 2006, the State Department falsely accused Venezuela of not “cooperating fully with US anti-terrorism efforts” – pursuant to Section 40A of the Arms Export Control Act (22 USC 2781).

5. In 2005, the Bush/Cheney regime falsely accused the Bolivarian Republic of non-cooperation against narco-trafficking that the US actively supports worldwide, notably the CIA.

Annually since then, Washington falsely claimed Venezuela hadn’t fulfilled its obligations under international narcotics agreements. 

6. In 2008, the Bush/Cheney regime imposed asset freezes and prohibitions on financial transactions, targeting designated Venezuelan nationals and enterprises.

7. The Obama/Biden regime killed Hugo Chavez.

US dark forces poisoned or infected him with deadly cancer causing substances, a coup by other means, eliminating him — while Chavismo has remained resilient.

8. The Obama/Biden regime’s March 2015 executive order falsely declared Venezuela to be an “unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the US.” 

At the time, a fake ‘national emergency’ was declared to “confront” a nonexistent threat.

9. Violent made-in-the-USA street protests staged to destabilize the country with regime change in mind were responsible for scores of deaths and hundreds of injuries.

10. The August 2017 CIA-orchestrated terrorist attack on Fort Paramacay in Carabobo state was another foiled coup attempt.

11. The August 2018 attack on Maduro by drones armed with C-4 explosives attempted to kill him.

12. Trump regime hardliners waged war on Venezuela by other means, including propaganda, economic, financial, and electricity war, along with other attacks on the country’s infrastructure.

The aim was to inflict maximum harm on ordinary Venezuelans, falsely believing they’d blame Maduro for US criminal actions.

Chavez knew that the US marked him for elimination. Fidel Castro warned him to be wary and careful. 

Maduro is targeted in similar fashion. He and other senior Venezuelan officials remain vulnerable to removal by coup d’etat or assassination.

It’s just a matter of time before another regime change attempt occurs — to replace Venezuelan social democracy with US-controlled fascist tyranny. 

Biden regime officials showing up in Caracas last weekend made unacceptable demands.

Reportedly they unacceptably called for a new presidential election.

There’s none scheduled until 2024 for a six-year term beginning on January 10, 2025.

In 2018, Maduro won another six-year term overwhelmingly by a two-thirds majority.

His main adversary, Chavista turncoat Henri Falcon, fared much poorer than predicted with around 21% of the vote. 

Other unacceptable Biden regime demands reportedly included the following:

Greater US/Western foreign private investment in Venezuela — mainly for maximum control of the country’s vast oil reserves, the world’s largest, including its heavy oil.

Maduro splitting from Russia by siding with the US-dominated West against Vladimir Putin’s demilitarization and deNazification of Ukraine.

In return, Biden regime official offered hollow promises to be breached at hegemon USA’s discretion.

Maduro and Vice President Delcy Rodriguez demanded sanctions relief and return of confiscated Venezuelan assets, mainly oil related.

For most of the past 23 years, US regimes waged war on Venezuela by other means — because of its independence and democratic governance the way it should be.

Venezuelans have the real thing — in stark contrast to fantasy versions throughout the West.

Russia is a valued Venezuelan ally.

According to Russia’s Foreign Ministry, Vladimir Putin and Maduro spoke by phone last week.

Venezuela’s leader expressed “firm support” for the Russian Federation.

Condemning US-dominated NATO’s destabilization activities, Maduro stressed his intention to maintain political and economic relations with Russia.

AS WAR DRUMS BEAT FOR UKRAINE, REMEMBER, LIES AND PROPAGANDA STARTED NEARLY EVERY WAR IN US HISTORY

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By Don Via Jr,

Source: Waking Times

War is one of the most primitive and senseless manifestations of the human experience, so naturally, most sane people with families, ambitions and kind hearts want nothing to do with such things. Unfortunately, as we are seeing with the Ukraine / Russia escalation, governments thrive on war, as it gives them a pressing excuse to grab more power and take extrajudicial measures—both at home and abroad.

To get around the obstacle of public opinion, governments have an extensive history of lying their way into war. This is hard to believe for people who think that government has their best interest in mind, but it is something that rulers have been doing since the beginning of time. In the modern United States, people are led to believe that the establishment accidentally flounders its way into war with the good intentions of protecting the country from harm or liberating an ally in distress.

This strategy of deception was illustrated by the Nazi propagandist Herman Goering, who famously said:

“Of course the people don’t want war. Why should some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally, the common people don’t want war neither in Russia, nor in England, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.”

Of course, the Nazi regime is notorious for their brutality and deceit, so this admission is not as stunning as it would be from an American general, but make no mistake that these are the types of thoughts that American generals and politicians have—they are just not brazen enough to say it out loud.

Believe it or not, using deceptive tactics to sway public opinion in favor of war is actually an official part of the US military’s playbook. According to Wikileaks, the U.S. Army’s publication “Special Forces Foreign Internal Defense Tactics Techniques and Procedures for Special Forces” recommends funding terrorists for regime change operations and using false flag attacks to destabilize regimes that were unfriendly to western interests.

This is nothing new though, this is a part of American history, as nearly every war that the U.S. has ever been involved in was built upon lies. Below are some of the most well-documented examples of wars that were started because of lies and government propaganda.

Spanish-American War – 1898

In January 1898, President William McKinley ordered the USS Maine to port in Havana, Cuba, despite years of conflict between Cuban rebels and the Spanish government. The move was intended to be a show of force against the Spanish government, in line with the Monroe doctrine, to establish U.S. dominance in the Western hemisphere.

At 9:40 p.m., on February 15, 1898, The USS Maine exploded with a crew of 354 men on board, killing 266. While the Spanish government insisted the explosion was caused by a fire in a coal bunker that ignited the forward magazines, politicians in the U.S. were quick to blame Spain because they wanted an excuse to wage a war of conquest for territory in Mexico, the Caribbean, and the Pacific.

Although President McKinley had previously voiced his opposition to a military conflict, on April 25, the U.S. declared war on Spain.

The “Ten-Week War” resulted in not only the defeat of the last remnants of the Spanish empire but in a new era of U.S. “expansionism” as the United States took control of Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippine islands.

In 1976, a team of naval explosive experts examined the evidence and corroborated Spanish claims that the USS Maine’s sinking was caused by an internal explosion from ammunition being stored on board.

World War 1 – 1915

The first world war was opposed by most Americans from the start, as they rightly saw it as a power struggle between European aristocrats that they had no business in. This was a problem for the British military, led by Winston Churchill, as they were desperate to get the United States behind them in the war.

The U.S. did finally enter the war in 1915, when a U.S. ship called the Lusitania was sent through hostile waters as bait, filled with more than a thousand civilians and an unusually large amount of ammunition. The ship was hit by a German torpedo and exploded instantly due to all of the ammunition onboard, killing more than half of the passengers and crew.

A week before the sinking of Lusitania, Churchill wrote to Walter Runciman, the President of the Board of Trade, stating that it is “most important to attract neutral shipping to our shores, in the hope especially of embroiling the United States with Germany.”

After investigating the tragedy, former British naval intelligence officer Patrick Beesly said, “unless and until fresh information comes to light, I am reluctantly driven to the conclusion that there was a conspiracy deliberately to put Lusitania at risk in the hope that even an abortive attack on her would bring the United States into the war. Such a conspiracy could not have been put into effect without Winston Churchill’s express permission and approval.”

In addition to this treacherous military maneuver, there was a relentless campaign in the U.S. to dehumanize Germans and to paint them as monsters. In some propaganda that was peddled to U.S. citizens, German soldiers were depicted killing babies and sometimes eating them. There were even false reports of crucifixions.

World War 2 – 1941

The history books suggest that Pearl Harbor was an unprovoked attack, killing thousands of Americans and “forcing” the government to enter a war that was extremely unpopular at the time. However, the U.S. government was enacting strict sanctions on both Japan and Germany, hoping that either country would make the first move and give them an excuse to enter the war. Not only was the attack provoked, but President Roosevelt and the U.S. military knew the attack was coming and moved their most expensive aircraft to other locations while leaving thousands of people as sacrificial pawns.

The history books also sell the war against the Nazis as a humanitarian war to save people from the Holocaust, but the U.S. denied safe passage to Jewish refugees, and UK intelligence even planned to blow up refugee ships, in a plot called Operation Embarrass.

Many American businesses and politicians worked very closely with the Nazis even after the two countries were at war with each other. The Holocaust had already claimed the lives of millions of German people by that point, and a police state had long since been established, so whoever was doing business with the Nazis knew exactly who they were getting involved with.

Prior to the Americans getting involved in the war, there were corners of the political arena that were actually big supporters of the Nazi party—both for business purposes and common interests such as eugenics.

The most prominent American politician to work with the Nazis was actually George W. Bush’s grandfather, Prescott Bush. There is no doubt that he was funding and working with the Nazis because his company’s assets were seized in 1942 by the United States government under the “trading with the enemy” act. He worked at the head of a financial firm called Brown Brothers Harriman, which acted as a U.S. base for the Nazi business interests.

Brown Brothers Harriman was one of the biggest international investment firms in the 1930s and they sent millions of dollars in gold overseas to rebuild the German army and fund the Nazi party. This racket was finally exposed on July 30, 1942, when the New York Herald Tribune posted an article titled, “Hitler’s Angel Has three million dollars in US Bank.” This article raised suspicion about the bank being a “secret nest” for Nazi elites and eventually sparked the investigation that took down the operation.

Korean War – 1950

The propaganda of war has led many to believe that the North Korean government launched an unprovoked attack on South Korea, on behalf of the larger communist powers of Russia and China. Yet, once again, this was another case where the U.S. was propping up one dictator to fight another, in an attempt to gain control of an entire continent—all the while, lying to the people back home about the true motivations for war.

As historian Mark E. Caprio, professor of history at Rikkyo University in Tokyo points out:

“On February 8, 1949, the South Korean president met with Ambassador John Muccio and Secretary of the Army Kenneth C. Royall in Seoul. Here the Korean president listed the following as justifications for initiating a war with the North: the South Korean military could easily be increased by 100,000 if it drew from the 150,000 to 200,000 Koreans who had recently fought with the Japanese or the Nationalist Chinese. Moreover, the morale of the South Korean military was greater than that of the North Koreans. If war broke out he expected mass defections from the enemy. Finally, the United Nations’ recognition of South Korea legitimized its rule over the entire peninsula (as stipulated in its constitution). Thus, he concluded, there was “nothing [to be] gained by waiting.”

Vietnam War – 1964

Information released in 2005 by the National Security Agency showed that the Gulf of Tonkin incident on August 1964 was deliberately falsified to make it appear that North Vietnamese gunboats attacked an American destroyer patrolling in international waters when in reality, they did not. This was the event that the U.S. military used as an excuse to go to war in Vietnam and it was surrounded by mystery and controversy until decades later when the official facts were released.

It has now been 49 years since the U.S. withdrew the last of its combat troops from Vietnam and the last prisoners of war that were held in North Vietnam returned to U.S. soil. According to estimates, more than 2 million civilians, 1.1 million North Vietnamese and Viet Cong fighters, 250,000 South Vietnamese fighters, and nearly 58,000 U.S. military members were killed in Vietnam during the war—all because of lies that were used to create propaganda that made American fear for their safety.

Libya – 1984 (then 2015)

Former Mossad agent Victor Ostrovsky admitted that the Mossad planted a radio transmitter in Libyan Prime Minister Muammar Gaddafi’s compound in Tripoli, which broadcast fake terrorist transmissions that were recorded by Mossad and used to frame Gaddafi as a terrorist supporter. President Reagan bombed Libya immediately after the false reports, but this was not the first or last time the U.S. would involve itself in Libya.

As The Free Thought Project has reported, 3,000 emails from former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton released by the State Department contained damning evidence of Western nations using NATO as a tool to overthrow Gaddafi.

The NATO overthrow was not for the protection of the people, but instead, it was to thwart Gaddafi’s attempt to create a gold-backed African currency to compete with the Western central banking monopoly. As per usual, the U.S. and its Western counterparts left the country to its own devices after slashing the once-thriving nation to the ground.

“Today there is no government of Libya. It’s simply mobs that patrol the streets and kill one another,” Virginia State Senator Richard Black told RT of the mess left behind.

Despite certain issues in Libya before the coup, “Libyans had an incredibly high standard of living, the highest in Africa,” international lawyer Francis Boyle told RT. “When I first went to Libya in 1986, I was amazed by the empowerment of women. What I saw in Libya was that women could do anything they wanted to do.”

Iraq – 1990

At the onset of Operation Desert Storm in 1990, a public relations firm by the name of Hill and Knowlton spent millions of dollars on the U.S. government’s behalf, constructing news pieces that would sell the war to the American public. One of the most moving hoaxes to come from this push to war was the testimony of a 15-year-old Kuwaiti girl, known only by her first name of Nayirah.

In a videotaped testimony that was later distributed to the media, she claimed that Iraqi soldiers killed babies in incubators at a hospital.

“I volunteered at the al-Addan hospital, While I was there, I saw the Iraqi soldiers come into the hospital with guns, and go into the room where… babies were in incubators,” Nayirah said. “They took the babies out of the incubators, took the incubators, and left the babies on the cold floor to die.”

Sounds horrible, right? Well, luckily it never happened. This was a fabricated event designed to dehumanize the Iraqi people in the eyes of the American public. The whole thing was exposed when journalists discovered that the witness, Nayirah was actually the daughter of a U.S. ambassador, who was being coaxed by military psychological operations specialists.

In addition to this false testimony, the U.S. government also showed Saudi Arabia fake satellite images that depicted Iraqi troops massing on their border.

Iraq – 2003-Present

Emails that were declassified in 2015 paint a much different picture of the Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq than they led the public to believe. A memo drafted by the U.S. embassy in London revealed how the Bush administration used “spies” in the British Labor Party to help shape British public opinion in favor of the war, prior to U.S. invasion.

In the weeks leading up to the invasion of Iraq, the Bush administration inundated American airwaves with assertions ranging from Saddam Hussein’s connections to Al-Qaeda, to Colin Powell’s ‘badly flawed’ claims that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.

After invading a sovereign foreign nation, President George W. Bush blatantly lied to the American public and when news came to light that there were, in fact, no weapons of mass destruction, he simply accused anyone who criticized him of attempting to “revise history.” 

During his presidency, while giving a speech about that very issue, Bush said, “This nation acted to a threat from the dictator of Iraq. Now there are some who would like to rewrite history—revisionist historians is what I like to call them.”

War on Terror – 2001-Present

Now the United States military and its allies are exporting their wars of terror across the globe, in the name of fighting terrorism, and most of these wars are also justified with propaganda and lies.

In the early days of the “War on Terror,” the Macedonian government was caught staging a fake terror attack in an attempt to get funding from western forces. Six innocent Pakistani immigrants were accused of being terrorists and killed in the incident.

In 2001, U.S. media spent weeks circulating the idea that anthrax attacks were being carried out by Arabs connected with Afghanistan, when in reality it was a government scientist behind the attacks.

In 2005, former Department of Justice lawyer John Yoo suggested that the U.S. should create a false terrorist organization to give the military an excuse to attack places where they believed real terrorists might be hiding:

“Our intelligence agencies create a false terrorist organization,” Yoo said. “It could have its own websites, recruitment centers, training camps, and fundraising operations. It could launch fake terrorist operations and claim credit for real terrorist strikes, helping to sow confusion within al-Qaeda’s ranks, causing operatives to doubt others’ identities and to question the validity of communications.”

In 2005, Israeli soldiers admitted to throwing stones at other Israeli soldiers so they could blame it on Palestinians to justify using violent force against protesters. Israel also has a deep history of using lies and false attacks to justify military action.

In an incident that came to be known as The Lavon Affair in 1954, undercover Israeli agents set off bombs against U.S. and Brittish targets, hoping that the attack would be blamed on local rebels. Luckily, they were caught and the plot was exposed.

This long track record of deception is important to consider as the U.S. military is beating the war drum again, this time in Iran, where there has also been a long list of false attacks at the hands of western powers.

Starting all the way back in 1957, politicians in the U.S. and UK developed a plot to train Islamic extremists to carry out false flag attacks to push for regime change in Iran. Now, decades later, history is repeating itself in the same part of the world, as regime change in Iran is back on the agenda, and the western powers are following the same playbook.

Current Push For A Proxy War Against Russia In Ukraine — 2022

As this report has demonstrated, the use of falsified evidence, propaganda, disinformation, and even outright false flag attacks, has been common practice within the military industrial complex handbook of expanding US imperialism and the neo-liberal world order.

This latest push to essentially turn the Ukraine into Syria 2.0, a convoluted dirty war among proxy States/ groups to maintain American hegemony — and potentially bring the world to the brink of annihilation in the process — is no different.

While it is of course pertinent to recognize that the reality for the Ukrainian people on the ground is a complex one rooted in nearly a century of culture and history weaving its own tensions among the local populations;  A number of facts clearly demonstrate the reality of the driving forces behind today’s conflict.

In 2010, diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks show correspondence between American and French officials that paint plainly the intentions of Western policymakers to absorb Ukraine into NATO. Being in direct violation of the agreements made between the United States and former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in 1990.

Fast forward four years and we see the beginning stages US/ NATO’s aggressive expansionism eastward come to fruition.

Following Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych’s rejection of joining NATO, small anti-corruption protests that had already been ongoing were co-opted by Western agent provocateurs and shifted into a regime change color revolution.

What was touted in the western media as an organic people’s uprising to overthrow their communist leader, was really a carefully crafted coup d’état.

We know this due to a leaked phone call from then US Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland. In it, she can be heard discussing with U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt the key figures which should be installed in a post-Yanukovych government.

Showing that not only were the protests not organic, but the US was directly involved in the government overthrow.

In 2022, Victoria Nuland is now acting as the Under Secretary of State. The call also acknowledged the cooperation of then-and-current National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, and Vice President at the time now President Joe Biden. It’s no wonder things are developing the way they are when these figures have been maneuvered into such crucial positions.

But to make matters worse, in 2014 as the coup was in full swing, the United States took to facilitating the most repugnant of individuals to install their new puppet regime. Providing armaments, funding, and training to openly admitted Neo-Nazi paramilitary forces.

Years later, it seems maintaining a fascist state in Ukraine has essentially become an openly accepted part of America’s policy in the region. In December of 2021, the United Nations brought forth its annual resolution to condemn Nazism, urging nations to work together to prevent the spread of ultra-nationalist and racist ideologies. It should have been a common sense resolution for everyone to agree on.

Yet out of all members of the United Nations, the United States and Ukraine were the only two to vote against it. Sadly, this has become tradition. Both Nations have regularly voted against the resolution since 2014.

In line with this, Western media is still permeated with propaganda distorting the facts driving the conflict. As elaborated in this brilliant piece by Mintpress News’ Alan Macleod, the US has spent upwards of 22 million dollars sowing the seeds of discontent to favor an anti-russian, pro-US and NATO expansionist agenda.

No one here is claiming that Vladimir Putin or Russia is a saint. As is the case with all governments they are surely just as vile and corrupt in their own ways. But the facts contradict the narrative. The idea that Russia is acting as the aggressor “threatening freedom and democracy” and “endangering the innocent” is a farce.

Even on international corporate media, the true attitudes and intentions for the crisis are openly admitted.

On the February 20th, 2022, episode of Al jazeera’s Inside Story hosting a panel of three experts regarding the Minsk agreements; Ukrainian Associate Professor of Sociology, National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, Mychailo Wynnyckyj, while first claiming that Ukrainians are interested in de-escalation, closed the segment by stating brazenly —

“Looking at peaceful solutions, of course. But at the end of the day I think Ukrainians understand today that the existential threat that Russia presents to Ukraine is long-term, and we will have to deal with that long-term. It’s not something that’s going to go away tomorrow, or as long as the Putin regime remains in the Kremlin.“

Openly admitting the desire for regime change. This is the prevailing attitude of elitist powers. And as mentioned earlier while it may also in part be fostered by generations of uneasy ongoings, it is also certainly augmented and exacerbated by the west’s geostrategic activities.

If the Russians were to have an organization similar to NATO, aligning themselves with China, North Korea, Iran, Venezuela, and any of the other nations America considers its adversaries; and proceeded to push its military up to our borders of Canada and Mexico. Bullying, threatening, and cajoling other nations into compliance. Openly demanding a chamge in our government. You can be damn certain we wouldn’t stand for it.

Why should any less be expected when the shoe is on the other foot, and the globalist power that is the American Empire and its allies — having a demonstrable history of flagrant war crimes and abuse — saunter its way up to Russian borders after expressing it’s desire for regime-change?

Saturday Matinee: Ukraine on Fire – The Real Story

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[Originally posted on 2/24/18]

https://vimeo.com/332524840

A Documentary You’ll Likely Never See

By James DiEugenio

Source: Consortium News

It is not very often that a documentary film can set a new paradigm about a recent event, let alone, one that is still in progress. But the new film Ukraine on Fire has the potential to do so – assuming that many people get to see it.

Usually, documentaries — even good ones — repackage familiar information in a different aesthetic form. If that form is skillfully done, then the information can move us in a different way than just reading about it.

A good example of this would be Peter Davis’s powerful documentary about U.S. involvement in Vietnam, Hearts and Minds. By 1974, most Americans understood just how bad the Vietnam War was, but through the combination of sounds and images, which could only have been done through film, that documentary created a sensation, which removed the last obstacles to America leaving Indochina.

Ukraine on Fire has the same potential and could make a contribution that even goes beyond what the Davis film did because there was very little new information in Hearts and Minds. Especially for American and Western European audiences, Ukraine on Fire could be revelatory in that it offers a historical explanation for the deep divisions within Ukraine and presents information about the current crisis that challenges the mainstream media’s paradigm, which blames the conflict almost exclusively on Russia.

Key people in the film’s production are director Igor Lopatonok, editor Alex Chavez, and writer Vanessa Dean, whose screenplay contains a large amount of historical as well as current material exploring how Ukraine became such a cauldron of violence and hate. Oliver Stone served as executive producer and conducted some high-profile interviews with Russian President Vladimir Putin and ousted Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych.

The film begins with gripping images of the violence that ripped through the capital city of Kiev during both the 2004 Orange Revolution and the 2014 removal of Yanukovich. It then travels back in time to provide a perspective that has been missing from mainstream versions of these events and even in many alternative media renditions.

A Longtime Pawn

Historically, Ukraine has been treated as a pawn since the late Seventeenth Century. In 1918, Ukraine was made a German protectorate by the Treaty of Brest Litovsk. Ukraine was also a part of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of 1939 signed between Germany and Russia, but violated by Adolf Hitler when the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941.

The reaction of many in Ukraine to Hitler’s aggression was not the same as it was in the rest of the Soviet Union. Some Ukrainians welcomed the Nazis. The most significant Ukrainian nationalist group, Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), had been established in 1929. Many of its members cooperated with the Nazis, some even enlisted in the Waffen SS and Ukrainian nationalists participated in the massacre of more than 33,000 Jews at Babi Yar ravine in Kiev in September 1941. According to scholar Pers Anders Rudling, the number of Ukrainian nationalists involved in the slaughter outnumbered the Germans by a factor of 4 to 1.

But it wasn’t just the Jews that the Ukrainian nationalists slaughtered. They also participated in massacres of Poles in the western Ukrainian region of Galicia from March 1943 until the end of 1944. Again, the main perpetrators were not Germans, but Ukrainians.

According to author Ryazard Szawlowksi, the Ukrainian nationalists first lulled the Poles into thinking they were their friends, then turned on them with a barbarity and ferocity that not even the Nazis could match, torturing their victims with saws and axes. The documentary places the number of dead at 36,750, but Szawlowski estimates it may be two or three times higher.

OUN members participated in these slaughters for the purpose of ethnic cleansing, wanting Ukraine to be preserved for what OUN regarded as native Ukrainians. They also expected Ukraine to be independent by the end of the war, free from both German and Russian domination. The two main leaders in OUN who participated in the Nazi collaboration were Stepan Bandera and Mykola Lebed. Bandera was a virulent anti-Semite, and Lebed was rabidly against the Poles, participating in their slaughter.

After the war, both Bandera and Lebed were protected by American intelligence, which spared them from the Nuremburg tribunals. The immediate antecedent of the CIA, Central Intelligence Group, wanted to use both men for information gathering and operations against the Soviet Union. England’s MI6 used Bandera even more than the CIA did, but the KGB eventually hunted down Bandera and assassinated him in Munich in 1959. Lebed was brought to America and addressed anti-communist Ukrainian organizations in the U.S. and Canada. The CIA protected him from immigration authorities who might otherwise have deported him as a war criminal.

The history of the Cold War was never too far in the background of Ukrainian politics, including within the diaspora that fled to the West after the Red Army defeated the Nazis and many of their Ukrainian collaborators emigrated to the United States and Canada. In the West, they formed a fierce anti-communist lobby that gained greater influence after Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980.

Important History

This history is an important part of Dean’s prologue to the main body of Ukraine on Fire and is essential for anyone trying to understand what has happened there since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. For instance, the U.S.-backed candidate for president of Ukraine in 2004 — Viktor Yushchenko — decreed both Bandera and his military assistant Roman Shukhevych, who was also involved in atrocitites, were both named national heroes by Yushchenko.

Bandera, in particular, has become an icon for post-World War II Ukrainian nationalists. One of his followers was Dmytro Dontsov, who called for the birth of a “new man” who would mercilessly destroy Ukraine’s ethnic enemies.

Bandera’s movement was also kept alive by Yaroslav Stetsko, Bandera’s premier in exile. Stetsko fully endorsed Bandera’s anti-Semitism and also the Nazi attempt to exterminate the Jews of Europe. Stetsko, too, was used by the CIA during the Cold War and was honored by Yushchenko, who placed a plaque in his honor at the home where he died in Munich in 1986. Stetsko’s wife, Slava, returned to Ukraine in 1991 and ran for parliament in 2002 on the slate of Yushchenko’s Our Ukraine party.

Stetsko’s book, entitled Two Revolutions, has become the ideological cornerstone for the modern Ukrainian political party Svoboda, founded by Oleh Tyahnybok, who is pictured in the film calling Jews “kikes” in public, which is one reason the Simon Wiesenthal Center has ranked him as one of the most dangerous anti-Semites in the world.

Another follower of Bandera is Dymytro Yarosh, who reputedly leads the paramilitary arm of an even more powerful political organization in Ukraine called Right Sektor. Yarosh once said he controls a paramilitary force of about 7,000 men who were reportedly used in both the overthrow of Yanukovych in Kiev in February 2014 and the suppression of the rebellion in Odessa a few months later, which are both fully depicted in the film.

This historical prelude and its merging with the current civil war is eye-opening background that has been largely hidden by the mainstream Western media, which has downplayed or ignored the troubling links between these racist Ukrainian nationalists and the U.S.-backed political forces that vied for power after Ukraine became independent in 1991.

The Rise of a Violent Right

That same year, Tyahnybok formed Svoboda. Three years later, Yarosh founded Trident, an offshoot of Svoboda that eventually evolved into Right Sektor. In other words, the followers of Bandera and Lebed began organizing themselves immediately after the Soviet collapse.

In this time period, Ukraine had two Russian-oriented leaders who were elected in 1991 and 1994, Leonid Kravchuk, and Leonid Kuchma. But the hasty transition to a “free-market” economy didn’t go well for most Ukrainians or Russians as well-connected oligarchs seized much of the wealth and came to dominate the political process through massive corruption and purchase of news media outlets. However, for average citizens, living standards went down drastically, opening the door for the far-right parties and for foreign meddling.

In 2004, Viktor Yanukovych, whose political base was strongest among ethnic Russians in the east and south, won the presidential election by three percentage points over the U.S.-favored Viktor Yushchenko, whose base was asmostly in the country’s west where the Ukrainian nationalists are strongest.

Immediately, Yushchenko’s backers claimed fraud citing exit polls that had been organized by a group of eight Western nations and four non-governmental organizations or NGOs, including the Renaissance Foundation founded by billionaire financial speculator George Soros. Dick Morris, former President Bill Clinton’s political adviser, clandestinely met with Yushchenko’s team and advised them that the exit polls would not just help in accusations of fraud, but would bring protesters out into the streets. (Cambridge Review of International Affairs, Vol. 19, Number 1, p. 26)

Freedom House, another prominent NGO that receives substantial financing from the U.S.-government-funded National Endowment for Democracy (NED), provided training to young activists who then rallied protesters in what became known as the Orange Revolution, one of the so-called “color revolutions” that the West’s mainstream media fell in love with. It forced an election rerun that Yushchenko won.

But Yushchenko’s presidency failed to do much to improve the lot of the Ukrainian people and he grew increasingly unpopular. In 2010, Yushchenko failed to make it out of the first round of balloting and his rival Yanukovych was elected president in balloting that outside observers judged free and fair.

Big-Power Games

If this all had occurred due to indigenous factors within Ukraine, it could have been glossed over as a young nation going through some painful growing pains. But as the film points out, this was not the case. Ukraine continued to be a pawn in big-power games with many Western officials hoping to draw the country away from Russian influence and into the orbit of NATO and the European Union.

In one of the interviews in Ukraine on Fire, journalist and author Robert Parry explains how the National Endowment for Democracy and many subsidized political NGOs emerged in the 1980s to replace or supplement what the CIA had traditionally done in terms of influencing the direction of targeted countries.

During the investigations of the Church Committee in the 1970s, the CIA’s “political action” apparatus for removing foreign leaders was exposed. So, to disguise these efforts, CIA Director William Casey, Reagan’s White House and allies in Congress created the NED to finance an array of political and media NGOs.

As Parry noted in the documentary, many traditional NGOs do valuable work in helping impoverished and developing countries, but this activist/propaganda breed of NGOs promoted U.S. geopolitical objectives abroad – and NED funded scores of such projects inside Ukraine in the run-up to the 2014 crisis.

Ukraine on Fire goes into high gear when it chronicles the events that occurred in 2014, resulting in the violent overthrow of President Yanukovych and sparking the civil war that still rages. In the 2010 election, when Yushchenko couldn’t even tally in the double-digits, Yanukovych faced off against and defeated Yulia Tymoshenko, a wealthy oligarch who had served as Yushchenko’s prime minister.

After his election, Yanukovych repealed Bandera’s title as a national hero. However, because of festering economic problems, the new president began to search for an economic partner who could provide a large loan. He first negotiated with the European Union, but these negotiations bogged down due to the usual draconian demands made by the International Monetary Fund.

So, in November 2013, Yanukovych began to negotiate with Russian President Putin who offered more generous terms. But Yanukovych’s decision to delay the association agreement with the E.U. provoked street protests in Kiev especially from the people of western Ukraine.

As Ukraine on Fire points out, other unusual occurrences also occurred, including the emergence of three new TV channels – Spilno TV, Espreso TV, and Hromadske TV – going on the air between Nov. 21 and 24, with partial funding from the U.S. Embassy and George Soros.

Pro-E.U. protests in the Maidan square in central Kiev also grew more violent as ultra-nationalist street fighters from Lviv and other western areas began to pour in and engage in provocations, many of which were sponsored by Yarosh’s Right Sektor. The attacks escalated from torch marches similar to Nazi days to hurling Molotov cocktails at police to driving large tractors into police lines – all visually depicted in the film. As Yanukovich tells Stone, when this escalation happened, it made it impossible for him to negotiate with the Maidan crowd.

One of the film’s most interesting interviews is with Vitaliy Zakharchenko, who was Minister of the Interior at the time responsible for law enforcement and the conduct of the police. He traces the escalation of the attacks from Nov. 24 to 30, culminating with a clash between police and protesters over the transport of a giant Christmas tree into the Maidan. Zakharchenko said he now believes this confrontation was secretly approved by Serhiy Lyovochkin, a close friend of U.S. Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt, as a pretext to escalate the violence.

At this point, the film addresses the direct involvement of U.S. politicians and diplomats. Throughout the crisis, American politicians visited Maidan, as both Republicans and Democrats, such as Senators John McCain, R-Arizona, and Chris Murphy, D-Connecticut. stirred up the crowds. Yanukovych also said he was in phone contact with Vice President Joe Biden, who he claims was misleading him about how to handle the crisis.

The film points out that the real center of American influence in the Kiev demonstrations was with Ambassador Pyatt and Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Victoria Nuland. As Parry points out, although Nuland was serving under President Obama, her allegiances were really with the neoconservative movement, most associated with the Republican Party.

Her husband is Robert Kagan, who worked as a State Department propagandist on the Central American wars in the 1980s and was the co-founder of the Project for the New American Century in the 1990s, the group that organized political and media pressure for the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003. Kagan also was McCain’s foreign policy adviser in the 2008 presidential election (although he threw his support behind Hillary Clinton in the 2016 race).

Adept Manipulators

As Parry explained, the neoconservatives have become quite adept at disguising their true aims and have powerful allies in the mainstream press. This combination has allowed them to push the foreign policy debate to such extremes that, when anyone objects, they can be branded a Putin or Yanukovych “apologist.”

Thus, Pyatt’s frequent meetings with the demonstrators in the embassy and Nuland’s handing out cookies to protesters in the Maidan were not criticized as American interference in a sovereign state, but were praised as “promoting democracy” abroad. However, as the Maidan crisis escalated, Ukrainian ultra-nationalists moved to the front, intensifying their attacks on police. Many of these extremists were disciples of Bandera and Lebed. By February 2014, they were armed with shotguns and rapid-fire handguns.

On Feb. 20, 2014, a mysterious sniper, apparently firing from a building controlled by the Right Sektor, shot both police and protesters, touching off a day of violence that left about 14 police and some 70 protesters dead.

With Kiev slipping out of control, Yanukovich was forced to negotiate with representatives from France, Poland and Germany. On Feb. 21, he agreed to schedule early elections and to accept reduced powers. At the urging of Vice President Biden, Yanukovych also pulled back the police.

But the agreement – though guaranteed by the European nations – was quickly negated by renewed attacks from the Right Sektor and its street fighters who seized government buildings. Russian intelligence services got word that an assassination plot was in the works against Yanukovych, who fled for his life.

On Feb. 24, Yanukovych asked permission to enter Russia for his safety and the Ukrainian parliament (or Rada), effectively under the control of the armed extremists, voted to remove Yanukovych from office in an unconstitutional manner because the courts were not involved and the vote to impeach him did not reach the mandatory threshold. Despite these irregularities, the U.S. and its European allies quickly recognized the new government as “legitimate.”

Calling a Coup a Coup

But the ouster of Yanukovych had all the earmarks of a coup. An intercepted phone call, apparently in early February, between Nuland and Pyatt revealed that they were directly involved in displacing Yanukovych and choosing his successor. The pair reviewed the field of candidates with Nuland favoring Arseniy Yatsenyuk, declaring “Yats is the guy” and discussing with Pyatt how to “glue this thing.” Pyatt wondered about how to “midwife this thing.” They sounded like Gilded Age millionaires in New York deciding who should become the next U.S. president. On Feb. 27, Yatsenyuk became Prime Minister of Ukraine.

Not everyone in Ukraine agreed with the new regime, however. Crimea, which had voted heavily for Yanukovych, decided to hold a referendum on whether to split from Ukraine and become a part of Russia. The results of the referendum were overwhelming. Some 96 percent of Crimeans voted to unite with Russia. Russian troops – previously stationed in Crimea under the Sevastopol naval base agreement – provided security against Right Sektor and other Ukrainian forces moving against the Crimean secession, but there was no evidence of Russian troops intimidating voters or controlling the elections. The Russian government then accepted the reunification with Crimea, which had historically been part of Russia dating back hundreds of years.

Two eastern provinces, Donetsk and Lugansk, also wanted to split off from Ukraine and also conducted a referendum in support of that move. But Putin would not agree to the request from the two provinces, which instead declared their own independence, a move that the new government in Kiev denounced as illegal. The Kiev regime also deemed the insurgents “terrorists” and launched an “anti-terrorism operation” to crush the resistance. Ultra-nationalist and even neo-Nazi militias, such as the Azov Battalion, took the lead in the bloody fighting.

Anti-coup demonstrations also broke out in the city of Odessa to the south. Ukrainian nationalist leader Andrei Parubiy went to Odessa, and two days later, on May 2, 2014, his street fighters attacked the demonstrators, driving them into the Trade Union building, which was then set on fire. Forty-two people were killed, some of whom jumped to their deaths.

‘Other Side of the Story’

If the film just got across this “other side of the story,” it would provide a valuable contribution since most of this information has been ignored or distorted by the West’s mainstream media, which simply blames the Ukraine crisis on Vladimir Putin. But in addition to the fine work by scenarist Vanessa Dean, the direction by Igor Lopatonok and the editing by Alexis Chavez are extraordinarily skillful and supple.

The 15-minute prologue, where the information about the Nazi collaboration by Bandera and Lebed is introduced, is an exceptional piece of filmmaking. It moves at a quick pace, utilizing rapid cutting and also split screens to depict photographs and statistics simultaneously. Lopatonok also uses interactive graphics throughout to transmit information in a visual and demonstrative manner.

Stone’s interviews with Putin and Yanukovych are also quite newsworthy, presenting a side of these demonized foreign leaders that has been absent in the propagandistic Western media.

Though about two hours long, the picture has a headlong tempo to it. If anything, it needed to slow down at points since such a large amount of information is being communicated. On the other hand, it’s a pleasure to watch a documentary that is so intelligently written, and yet so remarkably well made.

When the film ends, the enduring message is similar to those posed by the American interventions in Vietnam and Iraq. How could the State Department know so little about what it was about to unleash, given Ukraine’s deep historical divisions and the risk of an escalating conflict with nuclear-armed Russia?

In Vietnam, Americans knew little about the country’s decades-long struggle of the peasantry to be free from French and Japanese colonialism. Somehow, America was going to win their hearts and minds and create a Western-style “democracy” when many Vietnamese simply saw the extension of foreign imperialism.

In Iraq, President George W. Bush and his coterie of neocons was going to oust Saddam Hussein and create a Western-style democracy in the Middle East, except that Bush didn’t know the difference between Sunni and Shiite Moslems and how Iraq was likely to split over sectarian rivalries and screw up his expectations.

Similarly, the message of Ukraine on Fire is that short-sighted, ambitious and ideological officials – unchecked by their superiors – created something even worse than what existed. While high-level corruption persists today in Ukraine and may be even worse than before, the conditions of average Ukrainians have deteriorated.

And, the Ukraine conflict has reignited the Cold War by moving Western geopolitical forces onto Russia’s most sensitive frontier, which, as scholar Joshua Shifrinson has noted, violates a pledge made by Secretary of State James Baker in February 1990 as the Soviet Union peacefully accepted the collapse of its military influence in East Germany and eastern Europe. (Los Angeles Times, 5/30/ 2016)

This film also reminds us that what happened in Ukraine was a bipartisan effort. It was begun under George W. Bush and completed under Barack Obama. As Oliver Stone noted in the discussion that followed the film’s premiere in Los Angeles, the U.S. painfully needs some new leadership reminiscent of Franklin Roosevelt and John Kennedy, people who understand how America’s geopolitical ambitions must be tempered by on-the-ground realities and the broader needs of humanity to be freed from the dangers of all-out war.

James DiEugenio is a researcher and writer on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and other mysteries of that era. His most recent book is Reclaiming Parkland.

Perpetual Tyranny: Endless Wars Are the Enemy of Freedom

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By John W. Whitehead & Nisha Whitehead

Source: The Rutherford Institute

“Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes… known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few.… No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.” — James Madison

War is the enemy of freedom.

As long as America’s politicians continue to involve us in wars that bankrupt the nation, jeopardize our servicemen and women, increase the chances of terrorism and blowback domestically, and push the nation that much closer to eventual collapse, “we the people” will find ourselves in a perpetual state of tyranny.

It’s time for the U.S. government to stop policing the globe.

This latest crisis—America’s part in the showdown between Russia and the Ukraine—has conveniently followed on the heels of a long line of other crises, manufactured or otherwise, which have occurred like clockwork in order to keep Americans distracted, deluded, amused, and insulated from the government’s steady encroachments on our freedoms.

And so it continues in its Orwellian fashion.

Two years after COVID-19 shifted the world into a state of global authoritarianism, just as the people’s tolerance for heavy-handed mandates seems to have finally worn thin, we are being prepped for the next distraction and the next drain on our economy.

Yet policing the globe and waging endless wars abroad isn’t making America—or the rest of the world—any safer, it’s certainly not making America great again, and it’s undeniably digging the U.S. deeper into debt.

Indeed, even if we were to put an end to all of the government’s military meddling and bring all of the troops home today, it would take decades to pay down the price of these wars and get the government’s creditors off our backs.

War has become a huge money-making venture, and the U.S. government, with its vast military empire, is one of its best buyers and sellers.

What most Americans—brainwashed into believing that patriotism means supporting the war machine—fail to recognize is that these ongoing wars have little to do with keeping the country safe and everything to do with propping up a military industrial complex that continues to dominate, dictate and shape almost every aspect of our lives.

Consider: We are a military culture engaged in continuous warfare. We have been a nation at war for most of our existence. We are a nation that makes a living from killing through defense contracts, weapons manufacturing and endless wars.

We are also being fed a steady diet of violence through our entertainment, news and politics.

All of the military equipment featured in blockbuster movies is provided—at taxpayer expense—in exchange for carefully placed promotional spots.

Back when I was a boy growing up in the 1950s, almost every classic sci fi movie ended with the heroic American military saving the day, whether it was battle tanks in Invaders from Mars (1953) or military roadblocks in Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956).

What I didn’t know then as a schoolboy was the extent to which the Pentagon was paying to be cast as America’s savior. By the time my own kids were growing up, it was Jerry Bruckheimer’s blockbuster film Top Gun—created with Pentagon assistance and equipment—that boosted civic pride in the military.

Now it’s my grandkids’ turn to be awed and overwhelmed by child-focused military propaganda. Don’t even get me started on the war propaganda churned out by the toymakers. Even reality TV shows have gotten in on the gig, with the Pentagon’s entertainment office helping to sell war to the American public.

It’s estimated that U.S. military intelligence agencies (including the NSA) have influenced over 1,800 movies and TV shows.

And then there are the growing number of video games, a number of which are engineered by or created for the military, which have accustomed players to interactive war play through military simulations and first-person shooter scenarios.

This is how you acclimate a population to war.

This is how you cultivate loyalty to a war machine.

This is how, to borrow from the subtitle to the 1964 film Dr. Strangelove, you teach a nation to “stop worrying and love the bomb.”

As journalist David Sirota writes for Salon, “[C]ollusion between the military and Hollywood – including allowing Pentagon officials to line edit scripts—is once again on the rise, with new television programs and movies slated to celebrate the Navy SEALs….major Hollywood directors remain more than happy to ideologically slant their films in precisely the pro-war, pro-militarist direction that the Pentagon demands in exchange for taxpayer-subsidized access to military hardware.”

Why is the Pentagon (and the CIA and the government at large) so focused on using Hollywood as a propaganda machine?

To those who profit from war, it is—as Sirota recognizes—“a ‘product’ to be sold via pop culture products that sanitize war and, in the process, boost recruitment numbers….At a time when more and more Americans are questioning the fundamental tenets of militarism (i.e., budget-busting defense expenditures, never-ending wars/occupations, etc.), military officials are desperate to turn the public opinion tide back in a pro-militarist direction — and they know pop culture is the most effective tool to achieve that goal.”

The media, eager to score higher ratings, has been equally complicit in making (real) war more palatable to the public by packaging it as TV friendly.

This is what professor Roger Stahl refers to as the representation of a “clean war”: a war “without victims, without bodies, and without suffering”:

“‘Dehumanize destruction’ by extracting all human imagery from target areas … The language used to describe the clean war is as antiseptic as the pictures. Bombings are ‘air strikes.’ A future bombsite is a ‘target of opportunity.’ Unarmed areas are ‘soft targets.’ Civilians are ‘collateral damage.’ Destruction is always ‘surgical.’ By and large, the clean war wiped the humanity of civilians from the screen … Create conditions by which war appears short, abstract, sanitized and even aesthetically beautiful. Minimize any sense of death: of soldiers or civilians.”

This is how you sell war to a populace that may have grown weary of endless wars: sanitize the war coverage of anything graphic or discomfiting (present a clean war), gloss over the actual numbers of soldiers and civilians killed (human cost), cast the business of killing humans in a more abstract, palatable fashion (such as a hunt), demonize one’s opponents, and make the weapons of war a source of wonder and delight.

“This obsession with weapons of war has a name: technofetishism,” explains Stahl. “Weapons appear to take on a magical aura. They become centerpieces in a cult of worship.”

“Apart from gazing at the majesty of these bombs, we were also invited to step inside these high-tech machines and take them for a spin,” said Stahl. “Or if we have the means, we can purchase one of the military vehicles on the consumer market. Not only are we invited to fantasize about being in the driver’s seat, we are routinely invited to peer through the crosshairs too. These repeated modes of imaging war cultivate new modes of perception, new relationships to the tools of state violence. In other words, we become accustomed to ‘seeing’ through the machines of war.”

In order to sell war, you have to feed the public’s appetite for entertainment.

Not satisfied with peddling its war propaganda through Hollywood, reality TV shows and embedded journalists whose reports came across as glorified promotional ads for the military, the Pentagon has also turned to sports to further advance its agenda, “tying the symbols of sports with the symbols of war.”

The military has been firmly entrenched in the nation’s sports spectacles ever since, having co-opted football, basketball, even NASCAR.

This is how you sustain the nation’s appetite for war.

No wonder entertainment violence is the hottest selling ticket at the box office. As professor Henry Giroux points out, “Popular culture not only trades in violence as entertainment, but also it delivers violence to a society addicted to a pleasure principle steeped in graphic and extreme images of human suffering, mayhem and torture.”

No wonder the government continues to whet the nation’s appetite for violence and war through paid propaganda programs (seeded throughout sports entertainment, Hollywood blockbusters and video games)—what Stahl refers to as “militainment“—that glorify the military and serve as recruiting tools for America’s expanding military empire.

No wonder Americans from a very young age are being groomed to enlist as foot soldiers—even virtual ones—in America’s Army (coincidentally, that’s also the name of a first person shooter video game produced by the military). Explorer Scouts, for example, are one of the most popular recruiting tools for the military and its civilian counterparts (law enforcement, Border Patrol, and the FBI).

No wonder the United States is the number one consumer, exporter and perpetrator of violence and violent weapons in the world. Seriously, America spends more money on war than the combined military budgets of China, Russia, the United Kingdom, Japan, France, Saudi Arabia, India, Germany, Italy and Brazil. America polices the globe, with 800 military bases and troops stationed in 160 countries. Moreover, the war hawks have turned the American homeland into a quasi-battlefield with military gear, weapons and tactics. In turn, domestic police forces have become roving extensions of the military—a standing army.

We are dealing with a sophisticated, far-reaching war machine that has woven itself into the very fabric of this nation.

Clearly, our national priorities are in desperate need of an overhaul.

Eventually, all military empires fall and fail by spreading themselves too thin and spending themselves to death.

It happened in Rome: at the height of its power, even the mighty Roman Empire could not stare down a collapsing economy and a burgeoning military. Prolonged periods of war and false economic prosperity largely led to its demise.

It’s happening again.

The American Empire—with its endless wars waged by U.S. military servicepeople who have been reduced to little more than guns for hire: outsourced, stretched too thin, and deployed to far-flung places to police the globe—is approaching a breaking point.

The government is destabilizing the economy, destroying the national infrastructure through neglect and a lack of resources, and turning taxpayer dollars into blood money with its endless wars, drone strikes and mounting death tolls.

This is exactly the scenario President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned against when he cautioned the citizenry not to let the profit-driven war machine endanger our liberties or democratic processes. Eisenhower, who served as Supreme Commander of the Allied forces in Europe during World War II, was alarmed by the rise of the profit-driven war machine that, in order to perpetuate itself, would have to keep waging war.

Yet as Eisenhower recognized, the consequences of allowing the military-industrial complex to wage war, exhaust our resources and dictate our national priorities are beyond grave:

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some 50 miles of concrete highway. We pay for a single fighter with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. This, I repeat, is the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking. This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.

We failed to heed Eisenhower’s warning.

The illicit merger of the armaments industry and the government that Eisenhower warned against has come to represent perhaps the greatest threat to the nation today.

What we have is a confluence of factors and influences that go beyond mere comparisons to Rome. It is a union of Orwell’s 1984 with its shadowy, totalitarian government—i.e., fascism, the union of government and corporate powers—and a total surveillance state with a military empire extended throughout the world.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, this is how tyranny rises and freedom falls.

The growth of and reliance on militarism as the solution for our problems both domestically and abroad bodes ill for the constitutional principles which form the basis of the American experiment in freedom.

As author Aldous Huxley warned: “Liberty cannot flourish in a country that is permanently on a war footing, or even a near-war footing. Permanent crisis justifies permanent control of everybody and everything by the agencies of the central government.”

WAR IN EUROPE AND THE RISE OF RAW PROPAGANDA

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By John Pilger

Source: JohnPilger.com

Marshall McLuhan’s prophecy that “the successor to politics will be propaganda” has happened.  Raw propaganda is now the rule in Western democracies, especially the US and Britain

On matters of war and peace, ministerial deceit is reported as news. Inconvenient facts are censored, demons are nurtured. The model is corporate spin, the currency of the age. In 1964, McLuhan famously declared, “The medium is the message.” The lie is the message now.

But is this new? It is more than a century since Edward Bernays, the father of spin, invented “public relations” as a cover for war propaganda. What is new is the virtual elimination of dissent in the mainstream.

The great editor David Bowman, author of The Captive Press, called this “a defenestration of all who refuse to follow a line and to swallow the unpalatable and are brave”. He was referring to independent journalists and whistle blowers, the honest mavericks to whom media organisations once gave space, often with pride. The space has been abolished.

The war hysteria that has rolled in like a tidal wave in recent weeks and months is the most striking example. Known by its jargon, “shaping the narrative”, much if not most of it is pure propaganda.

The Russians are coming. Russia is worse than bad. Putin is evil, “a Nazi like Hitler”, salivated the Labour MP Chris Bryant. Ukraine is about to be invaded by Russia – tonight, this week, next week. The sources include an ex CIA propagandist who now speaks for the US State Department and offers no evidence of his claims about Russian actions because “it comes from the US Government”.

The no-evidence rule also applies in London. The British Foreign Secretary, Liz Truss, who spent £500,000 of public money flying to Australia in a private plane to warn the Canberra government that both Russia and China were about to pounce,  offered no evidence. Antipodean heads nodded; the “narrative” is unchallenged there. One rare exception, former prime minister Paul Keating, called Truss’s warmongering “demented”.

Truss has blithely confused the countries of the Baltic and Black Sea. In Moscow, she told the Russian foreign minister that Britain would never accept Russian sovereignty over Rostov and Voronezh – until it was pointed out to her that these places were not part of Ukraine but in Russia. Read the Russian press about the buffoonery of this pretender to 10 Downing Street and cringe.

This entire farce, recently starring Boris Johnson in Moscow playing a clownish version of his hero, Churchill, might be enjoyed as satire were it not for its wilful abuse of facts and historical understanding and the real danger of war.

Vladimir Putin refers to the “genocide” in the eastern Donbas region of Ukraine. Following the coup in Ukraine in 2014 – orchestrated by Barack Obama’s “point person” in Kyiv, Victoria Nuland – the coup regime, infested with neo-Nazis, launched a campaign of terror against Russian-speaking Donbas, which accounts for a third of Ukraine’s population.

Overseen by CIA director John Brennan in Kyiv, “special security units” coordinated savage attacks on the people of Donbas, who opposed the coup. Video and eyewitness reports show bussed fascist thugs burning the trade union headquarters in the city of Odessa, killing 41 people trapped inside. The police are standing by. Obama congratulated the “duly elected” coup regime for its “remarkable restraint”.

In the US media the Odessa atrocity was played down as “murky” and a “tragedy” in which “nationalists” (neo-Nazis) attacked “separatists” (people collecting signatures for a referendum on a federal Ukraine). Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal damned the victims – “Deadly Ukraine Fire Likely Sparked by Rebels, Government Says”.

Professor Stephen Cohen, acclaimed as America’s leading authority on Russia, wrote, “The pogrom-like burning to death of ethnic Russians and others in Odessa reawakened memories of Nazi extermination squads in Ukraine during world war two. [Today] storm-like assaults on gays, Jews, elderly ethnic Russians, and other ‘impure’ citizens are widespread throughout Kyiv-ruled Ukraine, along with torchlight marches reminiscent of those that eventually inflamed Germany in the late 1920s and 1930s…

“The police and official legal authorities do virtually nothing to prevent these neo-fascist acts or to prosecute them. On the contrary, Kyiv has officially encouraged them by systematically rehabilitating and even memorialising Ukrainian collaborators with Nazi German extermination pogroms, renaming streets in their honour, building monuments to them, rewriting history to glorify them, and more.”

Today, neo-Nazi Ukraine is seldom mentioned. That the British are training the Ukrainian National Guard, which includes neo-Nazis, is not news. (See Matt Kennard’s Declassified report in Consortium 15 February). The return  of violent, endorsed fascism to 21st-century Europe, to quote Harold Pinter, “never happened … even while it was happening”.

On 16 December, the United Nations tabled a resolution that called for “combating glorification of Nazism, neo-Nazism and other practices that contribute to fuelling contemporary forms of racism”. The only nations to vote against it were the United States and Ukraine.

Almost every Russian knows that it was across the plains of Ukraine’s “borderland” that Hitler’s divisions swept from the west in 1941, bolstered by Ukraine’s Nazi cultists and collaborators. The result was more than 20 million Russian dead.

Setting aside the manoeuvres and cynicism of geopolitics, whomever the players, this historical memory is the driving force behind Russia’s respect-seeking, self-protective security proposals, which were published in Moscow in the week the UN voted 130-2 to outlaw Nazism. They are:

– NATO guarantees that it will not deploy missiles in nations bordering Russia. (They are already in place from Slovenia to Romania, with Poland to follow)
– NATO to stop military and naval exercises in nations and seas bordering Russia.
– Ukraine will not become a member of NATO.
– the West and Russia to sign a binding East-West security pact.
– the landmark treaty between the US and Russia covering intermediate-range nuclear weapons to be restored. (The US abandoned it in 2019)

These amount to a comprehensive draft of a peace plan for all of post-war Europe and ought to be welcomed in the West. But who understands their significance in Britain? What they are told is that Putin is a pariah and a threat to Christendom.

Russian-speaking Ukrainians, under economic blockade by Kyiv for seven years, are fighting for their survival. The “massing” army we seldom hear about are the thirteen Ukrainian army brigades laying siege to Donbas: an estimated 150,000 troops. If they attack, the provocation to Russia will almost certainly mean war.

In 2015, brokered by the Germans and French, the presidents of Russia, Ukraine, Germany and France met in Minsk and signed an interim peace deal. Ukraine agreed to offer autonomy to Donbas, now the self declared republics of Donetsk and Luhansk.

The Minsk agreement has never been given a chance. In Britain, the line,  amplified by Boris Johnson, is that Ukraine is being “dictated to” by world leaders. For its part, Britain is arming Ukraine and training its army.

Since the first Cold War, NATO has effectively marched right up to Russia’s most sensitive border having demonstrated its bloody aggression in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and broken solemn promises to pull back.  Having dragged European “allies” into American wars that do not concern them, the great unspoken is that NATO itself is the real threat to European security.

In Britain, a state and media xenophobia is triggered at the very mention of “Russia”. Mark the knee-jerk hostility with which the BBC reports Russia. Why? Is it because the restoration of imperial mythology demands, above all, a permanent enemy? Certainly, we deserve better.